Jonathan Haidt, whom I have great respect for, argues that parents are too protective of children in the real world and not protective enough online. He and Greg Lukianoff are the researchers/authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, (2018) which attributes the increase in anxiety and depression in teenagers to their increasing dependence on online/social media interactions, which are inherently less stable and have fewer checks and balances than the real-life encounters we have been refining for a million years.
In my forthcoming book I argue that parents have been overprotective about experience in the real world and not protective enough online.He goes on to give examples of children exposed to online porn, which is an enormous percentage of them these days. His next book is The Anxious Generation. We have discussed this here, and the topic is big on the sites on my sidebar as well.
It came up because my daughter in law, a children's librarian like my wife, related this to libraries allowing adults to access porn on library computers, which increases access for the underaged. But this isn't what draws parental complaints. For that you have to go with what books can be taken out of the library and the sexual themes young adult books have now. Local parents form committees in protest and want to have meetings attended by the press. Those problems can nearly always be solved by just moving the book to a different spot - from children's to young adult, from middle school to high school.
It is classic straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel*. The books in the school or public library, or on the possibles of the summer reading list at the highschool are 1% of the problem or less. Online access is where the action is. But with a library or a school you can get a real human being to yell at. You can't yell at publishers, or the owners of porn sites. You get to say "our tax dollars" a lot, too. As opposed to your personal dollars that you spend on internet plans that your children use.
*I used this image in an online discussion a few years ago and a person complimented me on it, telling me I had a gift for expression. I knew from earlier context that this was an educated person. Biblical knowledge is increasingly less general.
WRT Biblical knowledge--in talking to a docent at the rainforest room in Olbrich Gardens, I asked how he'd would up doing the job. He said he felt he should "give back". I answered "From him to whom much is given, much is required." He liked the phrase, and asked me if it was original.
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