The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 37 - The Real Reason We Should Keep Our Kids Off Social Media

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

There is nothing good that can come of a child on social media. But many people miss the real danger. Let's talk about that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You may have heard of the controversy surrounding Snapchat. They had added a channel called the After Dark channel, and it was going to be dedicated exclusively to pornographic content. And of course, this channel would have been brought to you by, or brought to your child by, I should say, by that trash heap of a publication known as Cosmo. And I say would be because they've now discontinued the channel after backlash, and so they're not going to have that anymore.

but still the point about Snapchat still stands. It is a toxic dump and nothing worthwhile can be found there and you shouldn't let your kid anywhere near it. And I wrote a piece yesterday talking about why we need to get our kids off of Snapchat and off of social media in general and to whatever extent possible off of the Internet as well. I'm not going to repeat the whole thing. As far as Snapchat goes, this is a conversation that we should, shouldn't really need to have. It's a site widely known for its sexual content because sexual

content is part of the whole point of the thing. It's part of why it was invented is for sexual content. Why do you think when people decide they're going to invent this tool where you can send and interact with photos and then videos that delete themselves after a few seconds, what I mean when most when most people on the internet see that feature what are they thinking how do you think they're going to use it so of course it's going to end up being a site that's overrun with sexual content it's one of the primary points of the thing in the first place so why would we as parents allow our kids into that minefield I try not to condemn other parents or to judge them too partially, especially when I'm dealing with older parents who have older kids. And so they've been through things I haven't been through. They have met challenges that I haven't met yet, and I understand that. But there are some things that are just very difficult to understand and allowing your kid

to use Snapchat. Well, that's a hard one for me to wrap my head around. Now, if you tell me that you have prohibited it, but your kid is sneaking around and trying to find ways around your rules. Well, look, I understand that. I mean, I totally understand. Even now, with my kids as young as they are, it's making a rule is no guarantee that it's going to be followed, of course.

And as kids get older, they're going to be better at breaking the rules. So I understand all that. But you still make the rule. There's still a value in saying to your kids, no, you can't, you can't. No, Snapchat, you can't do Snapchat. If they get around it and they find a way and, you know, then you find out about it, you got to punish them. I mean, that's the back and forth.

that happens in parenting, I get that. But to say as a parent, oh, yeah, sure, fine, go ahead and use that. Fine. Fine. That's the thing I don't get. But it's a tool for sexting. Okay? That's what it is. So just there's no reason your kid needs to be on. But I want to talk about, what I want to talk about is get away from Snapchat for a minute. What I'd like to talk about is the biggest pitfall, the most toxic aspect of social media. Lots of studies have been done talking about its detrimental effects on a child's mental health and well-being and all that stuff. But a lot of times I think those studies, they miss the worst thing. They fail to capture the worst thing about social media for kids.

And the worst thing about social media for kids, the biggest disadvantage is actually the thing that a lot of parents think is the biggest advantage, and that is that social media, and this is what parents who are justifying it, they'll say something like, well, social media allows our kids to network and to stay in touch with their friends. First of all, your 12-year-old kid doesn't need to network, okay? That's not a thing a 12-year-old needs to do. But second, as far as staying in touch with his friends, that's the problem. That's the whole problem with it. Is that a the staying in touch with his friends. Social media robs a child of his home life, of his family life. Social media and the internet generally have become replacements for the home and for the family.

And now, when a kid gets home from school, after spending all day at school, all day around his friends, he spends most of his time at school around his friends, and then you add in after school activities when he's actually physically hanging out with the, so you add all that in. He's spending most of his time and his life at this stage with his friends and with his peers, but then he gets home from school and he's with his family for that brief period of time, but now he's still connected to his peers. He doesn't get away from them. Now you have no time just as a family without any of that stuff.

His peers and that culture, it's always present. He literally is carrying it around with him everywhere, attached to it physically, always. That's the problem. He has his computer and his phone. And so there's like this umbilical cord connecting him to his peers all the time, always. He remains completely immersed in peer culture, even when he's not physically surrounded by it. He's attached to his peers, always. He has no life outside of them.

And that's a bad thing. And if you think about it, you, with your kid either, presumably, either goes to school for most of the day or you're homeschool. And if he goes to school for most of the day, you don't see him. You only see him briefly. And when he comes home, the last thing you should want him to do is to stay in touch with his friends. Like, as if he can't be away from them for, I mean, can he not be away from them for a few hours? So there, if you send your kid away from school, you shouldn't want them to be on social media for that reason.

And if you don't send your kid away for school, any homeschools, well, then if he's on social media all the time, you've basically negated one of the primary benefits of homeschool, which is that he's not immersed in that peer culture and he's not subject to it. and he's getting his cues from you and from adults. He's learning from adults rather than learning to ape his peers. So that separation from peer culture is one of the great benefits of homeschool. It's one of the point, maybe not the point. It's one of the primary points of homeschooling. But then when you add in social media, if your kid's a social media addict on top of that, honestly, there's almost no point then in homeschooling.

You may as well not do it because you have. erased one of the great benefits of it. So either way, no matter what your kid does in terms of schooling, I think we should not want our kids to be on social media. They don't need to be on it. There's really no benefit. And the one thing that's usually cited as a benefit is actually the worst thing about it. Now, here's the thing that this is really, and I've talked about this before, this is really what lies at the root of the suicide and depression epidemic among our kids. Okay, we've talked about before how suicide is on the rise. Suicide is much more common among teenagers and preteens today than it's ever been before.

This is something that you talk to an older person, you talk to someone who's 60 or 70 years old, and they'll tell you, this is just, you never heard about it when they were growing up. You didn't hear about this. You never heard about a 13-year-old committing suicide. This is, this happens now frequently. it's terrible, it's tragic. And a lot of times we'll chalk it up to bullying. We'll say, well, they're bullied in school, and that's what led to it.

But that doesn't tell the full story. The problem is not just that kids are bullied at school. The problem is that bullying has had such a deep effect on kids because they're so desperate to find approval and affirmation from their peers because they're so immersed in this culture and they can't escape it. The point is, children have always been mistreated by their peers. That's another thing. If you talk to someone who's 60 or 70 years old, they'll tell you that,

oh, bullying happened when I was a kid. It was probably worse than it is now, which maybe is true. But if you're 60 years old, think back to when you were 12. Maybe bullying happened then, and it was a terrible thing. But then at the end of the school day, what happened? you went home and there wasn't internet there wasn't a smartphone

there wasn't social media it wasn't any of that so you went home and now you were away from them you were away from that environment and yeah you had to go back to and maybe you dreaded that

but there was a break there was this oasis of time where you were not around your peers or subjected to them or to their opinions and you so it was not like You didn't feel like every second of your day you had to spend desperately searching for approval from your peers because there were these big chunks of time where you were not around them at all.

That is now gone. Because of the phones, smartphones and social media, the kids, they never escape each other anymore. They're always with each other either physically or in the cyber realm. They're always around each other always. They're always in that world. So it's not that kids are more mistreated now by their peers. It's that they're now more attached to their peers than they've ever been before. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft.

I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply.

Which means that if they're not accepted by their peers, if they're mocked, if they're treated cruelly, that has a much deeper impact on them. Because this is their whole life, is their peers. that's so that's where a lot of this bullying epidemic and suicide depression all this stuff and kids terrible thing that's where a lot of it comes from is that attachment that orientation that kids have where they're completely immersed in this world together in this kind of fog that just follows them around and they never get away from it they never get a break and they don't

want to break because it's compulsive internet social media phones, it is a, it's something that breeds compulsion. So they, at some level, they might want to escape it, but at another level, they're dependent on it, addicted to it practically. So you, that's when parents need to step in and give them the thing that they really need and at a deeper level want, even though they don't know it, which is a break. And we have to force that on our kids. But whether a kid is bullied or not, this is a problem. And people in generation, you know, people that are my generation, people that are around my age, we have kind of a unique perspective on this, because if you're about my age, then you probably,

you probably remember, as I do, a childhood where the internet really wasn't a thing, and social media wasn't a thing, and you also remember half of a childhood where the internet was a dominant force in your life. And if you're like me, if you're my age, then there's this very sudden dividing line, like before internet and then after internet. And it all happened very sudden. For me, it was probably, I think it was around eighth grade, seventh, eighth grade, heading into high school. And before that point, from birth to about eighth grade, the internet didn't exist.

It existed in some form, but it wasn't ubiquitous. People weren't using it. It was just a novelty. AOL in 1995 was, I didn't have AOL in 1995, but it was not, it did not even begin, kids, kids that are younger don't know this. But the internet in like 1995, 94, before that it existed, but it did not even begin to resemble what we have now. It was, it basically was, you wouldn't even recognize it as the internet. So it was just kind of a novelty for a while. And so, you know, we didn't even have a computer for a long time.

basically didn't exist. But very suddenly, right as I came into high school, everything changed. And people had, that's when AOL was the big thing. I think our first version of AOL was AOL, I think, 2.0 or 3.0. And I think what really changed everything was the communication mechanism. So you had the AOL buddy list and instant messenger. And then you also had MySpace came along, shortly after that, you had chat rooms. When I was a kid, for a while, chat rooms were a big thing.

I don't even know if chat rooms still exist, do they? I'm not sure. I feel like if they do, they're now probably 100% populated by sex predators. When I was a kid, it was probably like 80% kids on chat rooms and then 20% sex predators, which was a dangerous situation. So, but back then, you had the instant messenger, you had chat rooms, you had MySpace, which came along shortly after that. And out of nowhere, all this stuff became a defining feature of our lives as kids. We still didn't have phones with the internet. And the internet still wasn't anything like it is now. But it was similar in that you came home from school and the main thing that you did was you got on the computer and you were messaging through instant messenger. You were messaging people from school.

and then through the broader internet experience, you connected with other people who you didn't even know and you assumed were your peers, but maybe they weren't. And I distinctly remember this as kind of a revolutionary concept for me as a kid, that I would come home from school and the school culture, the peer culture, would migrate onto the internet. And so I could stay immersed in. And then that culture also changes on the internet a little bit too, because now you can be more uninhibited.

You have more control over how you present yourself. You're willing to say things to people over instant messenger that you wouldn't say in real life. So then there's this exchange where pure culture migrates to the internet. Things change there, the dynamic changes, and that bleeds back over into the physical interaction. so very quickly began to change your personal relationships too. And so I remember all this happening. People my age, we remember this. I thought it was pretty fun at the time.

But I didn't see what was really happened. And I didn't see that even at this early stage, it had consumed my home life and my family life replaced it. Even though the Internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now, it had already done that. And even though my parents did a good job of regulating it, they were more on top of that than most parents were of the kids of my age. But this was also, people didn't really understand what they were dealing with. They didn't understand the internet.

It all happened pretty quickly for most of us. And for parents, I think a lot of parents in my parents' generation were kind of fumbling around trying to, like, they didn't see this coming. It's when they first started having kids, they didn't factor in the internet at all. Wasn't even on the radar screen. and then all of a sudden you've got this thing and it's taken over everyone's life and parents are like, what are we supposed to do about this? So my parents did the best they could,

but it still became this dominant force and so there's this dividing line. The internet came onto the scene, kind of split our childhood into two, and now you can distinctly remember childhood before internet and after internet, and it's not hard for me to see now that the before internet chunk was much better.

There were more blue skies and trees and scrapneys and pick up football games and everything during that first half. So the thing that we desperately need to give our kids and that they desperately need to receive from us is a life outside of this, not just outside of the internet, but outside of their peer circle. outside of that.

We take it for granted these days that a kid will get to a certain age and I hear this from older parents all the time. They tell me like it's inevitable, like it's going to happen, there's nothing you can do about it. So we take it for granted that a kid will get to a certain age,

maybe 12 or 13, something like that. And the dichotomy between you and your kid will drastically and suddenly shift. And a kid will come to almost hate his family, really all of a sudden out of nowhere. There will be this sudden shift where the kid wants nothing to do with his family and basically hates them. And we talk about this now like it's normal and natural. It's a natural part of growing up. It's just the way it is. Now, it is the way it is, but it's not natural and it's not normal and it doesn't need to be that

way. Obviously, it's always been the case that a kid will grow and, uh, and he's going to become less dependent, less emotionally dependent on his parents and on his family. And that's part of the, part of the growing process. But this thing we have now where a kid becomes a teenager and just severs himself completely, emotionally from his parents. And then teenagers have now their own culture and their own world, their own universe, their own language, their own everything. and adults are not allowed to access it or be a part of it, that is not normal. I'm here to tell you. That's not how things have worked throughout human history.

It's just not. That is a modern phenomenon. It's a phenomenon that began in the industrial age, and it just got worse over time with the advent of these different forms of media, TV, you know, going into the internet. and now it's just gotten worse over time because of all this. And when you added in these kind of things in these areas where kids could congregate and, you know, when you gave them all these sort of things that they could have to themselves

and that adults just didn't understand. The advent of rock music is another example. It was this completely new and foreign thing that our parents' generation, it was sort of their thing, and their parents just didn't even, it was like a foreign language, they didn't understand it. And in the modern age, it's just every generation has its own thing, has its own music, its own clothes, its own language.

And again, we take that for granted. We shouldn't take it for granted. That's not the way it's historically been for the human species. And now it's gotten to the point where it's just worse than it's ever been before. Because the kids, they carry around their phones, and they have their own worlds, where they interact with each other and where they're with each other and adults just can't access it

and don't understand it and they don't really know. Like you see your kid all day at his house looking at his phone, you don't really know what he's looking at or what he's doing. He has this whole life to himself. It's not normal, it's not natural.

I admit it's a very difficult thing to break free of in modern society, but it is possible because it is not a natural and normal part of growing up. We have only decided that it must be for us now. So a child wants to be on social media so that he doesn't miss out. But what I'm saying is missing out is exactly what he needs. He doesn't need more ways to connect with his friends. He's already way too connected to them. He needs a break from his friends. He needs to have a

life and an identity outside of them. He needs to escape them. And I think the home and the family should be an escape from that. And that's what we have to give them. And that means, at a minimum, to begin with, keeping them off of social media, because nothing good can come over. All right, guys, thanks for watching and listening. Godspeed, have a great weekend and a great Memorial Day.

So I'll talk to you on Tuesday. Thank you.