In 2008, I was in the 7th grade with a cell phone. It was limited in text messages, minutes, data. There was only so much I could do with it so it stayed off more than it was on and I'd even leave it at home more than anything.
The best part of it all is that my most embarrassing moments stayed between my sister, my best friend, and me. They may still tease me about it to this day, but it's not out there for the world to see.
If you haven't read Benjamin Conlon's blog post in the campaign to get parents to "Wait until 8th," you're in for an eye-opener because it shows the difference between middle school in 2008 and 2018.
We think "poor Brian" but when we were in middle school this was just a nightmare we worried about. For the Brians today, this is the nightmare they are actually living!
We live in a world full of digital addicts desiring validation in each post that has been scientifically proven to grant us dopamine. When we don't get the validation we think we deserve, we experience dopamine depletion and wonder why we're dealing with so much anxiety and depression.
Note, I do realize that not all cases of anxiety and depression are linked to technology and I am not claiming that technology is the source of all those problems. I'm only trying to get us to realize that we are dealing with a great big issue here as this isn't just one individual dependency problem.
It's a societal addiction.
Conlon's post attempts to persuade us to wait until at least 8th grade. Wait at least one more year before exposing them to the exact same thing that awaits them in high school in the midst of the digital age.
How about wait until 9th?
Wait until 10th.
Wait until college.
Wait until this child or teenager understands the repercussions of having a smartphone and access to the world at their fingertips.
But then, we run into another problem. By withholding the smartphone, we're just isolating that child from their peers who already have one because we can be sure that most if not all of their friends will have one. They might experience the shame in not having one. They might experience dopamine depletion from the inability to access their friendships 24/7.
Society has come so far into the digital world that we're addicted before we've even begun. And that's the scariest part in all this.
Parents wouldn't have thought twice about it when they first became popular. Parents used to say with such readiness, "Well, so-and-so is not my kid" or "If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you?"
Parents today grew up in the booming age of the digital age so they're forced to think about it. They rationalize the convenience of the smartphone or their own addiction to it because they know what it's like now.
This is a scary world that we live in.
The 7th graders of 2008 are in their early 20s in 2018. They've known what it was like to talk on the landline and get yelled at because Mom or Dad have been waiting on a call. They know what it's like to be cyberbullied or to cyberbully someone else. They've experienced a high on dopamine and the depletion that ALWAYS follows.
They know both worlds and one day we'll be parents of middle schoolers. Are we really going to hand them a smartphone and not think twice about it?
Pledging to "Wait until 8th" is a wake-up call for society to think about what the world will be for the 2028 generation.
