Monday, May 4, 2020

THE ATLANTIC: The Side-Effect of Treating Adolescents Like Children | Santa Claus vs Pornhub



Kate Julian's cover story in the May 2020 issue of The Atlantic is titled "The Anxious Child: And the Crisis of Modern Parenting". It's a long piece; so, I'll give the TL;DR version, which is that, treating adolescents like children causes high levels of anxiety in teens. 

Here are two examples that Julian cites of how (some) parents treat adolescents like children:

"Cutting a 13-year-old’s food because she’s afraid of knives."

"Meanwhile, the efforts parents make to promote belief in, for example, Santa Claus seem more fervent than ever, via tools like Elf on the Shelf and apps that supposedly show Santa’s visit to your home [...] In another era, the desire to keep kids in the dark [about Santa Claus] might not be a problem, but it’s a strange combination with the easy access many of them now have to Pornhub and viral videos of real-life violence [via smartphones]."

Julian's piece reminds us of Winnifred Bonjean Alpart who shared in "In Porn Before Puberty?", an ABC News feature, that when she was in eighth grade, "[..] boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that." In addition, the feature related that nine out of ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen have viewed pornography on their smartphones.

And The Atlantic cover story reminds us of Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex.

 

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