Superintendent Heidi Mercer Joins to Discuss The Anxious Generation, Smartphones in School, Free Play, Her District’s New Cell Phone Policy, & What Her Stakeholders Are Saying. About It All

The Best Paragraph I've Read:

"Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and - as I will show - unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness - perpetually - to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptavnce from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescense, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers. They watched increasing quantities of user-generated videos and streamed entertainment, offered to them by auto play and algorithms that were designed to keep them online as long as possible. They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development. The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved. Call it the Great Rewiring of Childhood. It's as if they became the first generation to grow up on Mars."

This paragraph comes from the book The Anxious Generation. The author is Jonathan Haidt.

Zac & Don are joined by Heidi Mercer, the Superintendent of Lake Orion Community Schools. The three discuss how children have grown up differently in the age of the smartphone. They talk about how family concerns and student behavior have changed over the past couple decades. They also discuss cell phone bans and how Lake Orion has arrived at its new policy as a new school year begins.