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My SO is a Occupational Therapist, so she spent part of her master's degree studying pediatric development milestones. A LOT of those milestones (ability to handle objects with hands, develop muscle strength, resolve conflict with others, etc) depend on playing with other kids in the real world. If a child is proportionally spending more time on a device than interacting with peers, they're going to have problems.

Prime example: W-sitting. Lots of "iPad kids" have an unusual sit pose where they splay their legs out. Oftentimes it's because they're sitting on a device so often that their core muscles are underdeveloped.

what about the parents and teachers?

turns out the more control you remove from a class of people's lives, the more petty disobedience they engage in, in order to wrest some semblance of control back

this is measured "post-pandemic" but especially in North America it's also post-Trump's first term, during economic struggles largely affecting middle and lower classes, at a breaking point in classroom surveillance escalation that's included sealed bags for cell phones and monitored devices, all coupled with declining funding, training, and educational quality for teachers. throw a generation that self-organizes action against every wrong (many real and some mostly perceived) and you get a school environment that is actively hostile the more one tries to enforce order upon it

but also just look at "quiet quitting", slacker culture, civil and labor rights movements, and most of the rest of American history at various inflection points. dismissing student misbehavior as children being inherently bad for some reason means willfully looking past all of the major events and figures around them that are influencing that behavior

How many more bits of evidence do we need to acknowledge that in the war between culture and counter-culture, culture lost.

#MoralPanic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS4GFaG7Ypw

2 or 3 generations of being coddled instead of paddled. New moms on their phones.

Demographics

"Kids today have no respect."

-- Socrates, probably

This seems to be the study (gated): https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2025-40514-001

Can somebody see if they asked the same students (between 9 and 14, an age range where behavior changes quite a bit)?

> The goal of the current work was to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic school shutdowns may have impacted classroom incivility in children and adolescents.

> Study 1 compared prepandemic (Fall 2019) to postpandemic school shutdown (Fall 2022) rates of classroom incivility in a sample of 308 adolescents (49.7% boys; 61.0% White) between the ages of 9 and 14 (M = 12.06; SD = 1.38). Classroom incivility was significantly higher postpandemic shutdowns, while bullying, emotional problems, and friendships remained stable.

> In Study 2, we surveyed 101 primary educators (95% females; 88.1% White). Findings suggested that young students lacked social skills and knowledge of classroom expectations, contributing to increased classroom incivility. Our results highlight the need to monitor ongoing levels of classroom incivility.

I would encourage anyone in the U.S., who has the opportunity, to become a substitute teacher. In my area it requires a degree and background check. So you can observe first hand.

When I was a kid, the most advanced tech we had was an electric calculator. If our parents didn't watch us, a babysitter did. At most, we had an Atari 2600 for video games on the spare B&W TV that got replaced with a Color TV for the father and mother. We played outside and kickball in the streets until the lights came on.

Today's kids have smartphones, PCs/Macs, Video Game Consoles, and movie streaming devices and are unsupervised on the Internet. For role models, they have rap stars who sing about sex and drugs. They have no respect for teachers or other adults and don't know how good they have it compared to me and the rest of Generation X. No wonder they are getting ruder.

https://www.chron.com/business/article/Why-didn-t-Steve-Jobs...

Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use iPads. He must have known something of the side-effects in kids and iPads. Just try to take the iPad or iPhone away from a kid and see how they react.