If you want to get your A250 on, Louise Dube of iCivics and I talked about state standards for civics and history, the messiness and why they matter. Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It’s on YouTube as well, here:
And ICYMI Jed and I went deep on WonkyFolk last month with Lisa Graham Keegan about a range of issues and why she’s still in the fight for better quality for kids.
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The Intensity Is Different
Hard to miss the backlash against tech that’s been brewing — court cases, parent pushback, and a mashup of concerns about social media, ed tech, and AI. You don’t have to be all-in on that to be concerned about some of what’s happening, both the backlash and some of what’s on offer for kids. I regularly recommend Julia Freeland-Fisher on AI and relationships, for instance.
At the same time, the McKay Coppins Atlantic article about his foray into sports betting is rightfully getting a lot of attention and might be a better jumping-off point. The magazine staked Coppins $10k to try sports betting and — well, read it. The short version: the distance from church-going family man to having to use a state’s self-exclusion list to curb a gambling habit is shorter than you might think.
No small part of that is because many of us came of age in an era where sweating a bet meant waiting for an event to play out, then betting again sometime later. In today’s attention economy, you don’t have to do that. Sweat a bet? For what, one play? Online platforms offer AI-generated in-game bets and constant prop bets, so you can always be in action — on obscure or even previously unbettable sports, around the clock. The closest you used to get to that was a casino or a racetrack, and even then it wasn’t as intense.
This is why when you hear people say, of young people increasingly betting on sports, “oh, we’ve always done that” — it’s worth pausing. Yes, we have. But at nothing near this level of intensity and access. You have a casino and sportsbook in your pocket.
The same is true of some other vices, temptations, and activities facing young people. Porn is an obvious one. When I was growing up, porn was a purloined Playboy before a Little League game — a more explicit magazine if you were really lucky. Everyone knew whose dad had a stash, and we all wanted sleepovers at that kid’s house. (Playboy even published interviews with world leaders — look it up.)
Today? Algorithm-driven platforms are exposing young people to all kinds of content, including loads of fetish material. Hide the stepsisters. Fine for adults who choose it; not great for young people. Don’t kid yourself — porn is the default sex-ed curriculum now, which is unhealthy and should especially worry parents of girls, though it’s not good for boys either. With a VPN, a kid has a porn studio in their pocket. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but even directionally, a lot of kids are looking at porn — and young kids at that. Multiple studies put first exposure before kids are even teenagers.
And weed. Today’s weed is not like the mellow stuff that made music and other things a bit more sensory — maybe at most got you a little too stoned, but basically you put on the Allman Brothers and relaxed. That kind of thing. The legendary really good weed? It’s everywhere now. That’s not perception or selective memory. THC content has been increasing , and that has real consequences, especially for young people’s mental health. Not surprisingly, ER visits for young people related to cannabis are on the rise.
Locking people up for weed was problematic policy in several ways, but we jumped pretty quickly from “let’s not do that” to — with apologies to Bob for the misappropriation — everybody must get stoned. Talk to school administrators or ER staff and you get a sense of the change.
And of course smartphones and addictive social media — and soon, AI. You don’t even have to go full Haidt to see the problems. Sure, kids have talked on phones since we’ve had phones and party lines. But the intensity of today’s apps, their addictive design, and their intrusiveness is a lot different from three-way calling. Not surprisingly, countries are trying to ban them and politicians here are taking a hard look — and raising the alarm. (This is a problem for ed tech, something easier to regulate than what kids do out of school.)
Look, life’s short; do what makes you happy. In my view these are all activities that should be available to consenting adults. An afternoon at the racetrack is a happy place for me, for example. I used to play cards a lot. My wife and I have a side hustle in the bar business. I’m not interested in bans or vice policing or kink shaming. I think many of the proposed reforms are problematic on First Amendment grounds even if they’re aimed at real potential harms.
But we do need to talk about these things when it comes to young people, especially during their development, because the level of intensity of what they are doing has changed dramatically under our noses. That’s not gauzy nostalgia — there is real evidence. If you’re content that it’s all cool, every generation navigated the same vices, then you’re missing the intensity shift. We’re looking at more than a slightly modernized version of what kids have always done. And as the Coppins article makes clear, we should probably talk more openly about the impact and risks and make sure people really understand what they — and especially their kids — are getting into.
Right now, it seems we are failing at both. With real consequences for young people.
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