“Gen Z! Gen Z! What is Gen Z gonna do when they grow up? What’s gonna happen to Gen Z??” While we appreciate your concern, what you really need to look out for is Gen Alpha. Adults, if you thought Gen Z was a handful, I give you a sincere warning. You’re going to have your work cut out for you with these new kids in town.
I see all sorts of people come through The Cheesecake Factory where I work, people in suits and ties, people dressed in pizza costumes, people who clearly saved up everything for that once a month visit. The common denominator? Every child has their face in a tablet.
Me? I didn’t get a phone with internet access until I was thirteen. If I wanted to go on the internet, I needed to sit at the noisy thirty pound monolith that was the family PC. So why on earth are children getting more internet access when they’re even younger?
Why would they look around at their surroundings, make friends and get dirt under their nails when they have 24/7 access to “Skibidi Toilet”? For those unfamiliar, you don’t need to concern yourself with such troubling–toilet-y things.
When us Gen-Zers were growing up with access to the internet, I don’t think anyone really knew how harmful it was. Because of the profit-driven nature of social media platforms, extreme, upsetting and polarizing content naturally floats to the top.
YouTube Kids is a bizarre place. Back in 2017 there was Elsagate. This odd brand of content on YouTube Kids included fictional children’s characters (such as Spiderman and Elsa) being portrayed in bizarre, depraved and sometimes violent situations. It slipped right through YouTube Kids’ protective filters and straight to kids’ screens because of its seemingly innocent nature.
While the Spiderman and Elsa debacle is old news, the root problem has not gone away. With the advent of short-form video apps like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, the problem is only going to get worse.
According to Mercer Professor of Television and Digital Film Dr. Steve Voorhees, “The platform wants the user to stay on it as long as possible. With short-form, it’s really about inundating the user, always giving them something new to look at. If there’s a video that doesn’t capture their attention, they know there’s something right beneath it.”
Dr. Voorhees says an excess of social media has been linked to various mental health issues including depression and anxiety.
“What are [users] seeing? What are they learning? What are they getting from this? And a lot of it is a double-edged sword, when you’re on it you’re being overwhelmed. When you’re not on it, you feel like you’re missing out,” says Voorhees.
Some children don’t even want to watch television anymore, instead begging for short, highly edited YouTube videos. Some more cautious parents allow them supervised use, but it requires constant vigilance.
Christina Davies, mother of three and elementary school teacher in Hopewell Valley, says “If [my three-year-old] ends up on YouTube, he can be watching something weird in a matter of seconds…We could be watching something that seems okay and then all of a sudden they drop an F-bomb,” says Davies.
Juliana Joy Davies, twelve-year-old daughter of Christina Davies says, “A lot of [kids] have their phones out at recess. I would say at least fifty percent.”
When these Gen-Alpha kids grow up and file into the halls of Mercer, we are going to need even more mental health resources, and professors will be even more hard-pressed to keep their attention.
It’s crucial to lead by example and be mindful of the escapist tendencies made easier than ever by social media. Scrolling sprees are a maladaptive coping mechanism to avoid the challenges of daily life that algorithmically skew our perception of the world and destroy our attention spans. If today’s children don’t learn healthier habits, read reliable sources, and learn to cope with boredom without doomscrolling, we could have serious problems in the not-so-distant future when they’re set to inherit our world.
“[When I was a kid] we went outside and our parents had to scream our names to come home. There’s definitely times that I make my kids go outside, and I will lock the door, because they’ll come right back in. Once they’re out there, they’re having a great time. It’s just [hard] getting them off of the thing they think they have to be on” says Davies.
