Love Johnathan Haidt’s work and can’t wait to read this new book. I have been following some of the work he has been doing with Jean Twenge as well. I did read a few months ago that some schools in the UK had meetings with parents and in total agreements - the schools and parents decided to ban phones from 8am -3pm or so but it took immense work and a trust between the parents and school leadership. I don’t actually see that ever happening in American schools. Most parents I know from our little town of 80k love our school, but would much rather have their students have access to cell phones/smart watches or at the very least iMessage enabled on their iPads. Our family experimented with this a few years ago- when our child was in 8th grade we took away his phone for a month becuase of some bad choices he made and told him he could use the land line to connect with friends. It was probably the most lonely we had ever seen him. Not one friend called/texted/came to visit - this was over the summer break. Despite my efforts to pass on our number to the adults no one connected. We finally gave back the phone in two weeks and life came back to “normal” - what I find even more intriguing is that the majority of my friends don’t want to connect face to face or even have a phone chat - the would prefer texting or connecting via social media- I think we need to dig deeper and research - are we are becoming a society that would rather communicate via a keyboard versus actual sounds coming out of our mouths! Why are we all so addicted to our phones? Are we headed for a weird future where holograms and texts take the place of embodied friendships?
I'd love it if my son's school banned phones, but also I'm not sure it would matter: Every kid has an iPad instead of textbooks. Which would make a ban pointless.
At home, we instituted a rule a few months ago: When he's in the house, he has to leave his phone on the kitchen table. Unused. He can use it when he leaves the house. He can use his iPad to do homework *in the living room.* But for pure messing around purposes? Nah.
It's not a death penalty for the phone. He can reach us - and us him - when he's left the house, which is often useful. But the time he spends at home is a heck of a lot nicer now: He doesn't disappear to his room to scroll through memes for hours. He'll come hang out with us more, and more time is spent in books. He still listens to podcasts, still texts his friends - but he generally does that when he takes his long walks. (He's obsessive about his step count, which would be the case whether he had a phone or not.) The "phone on the table" policy was initially a punishment; it's now policy, because it makes our collective family life a lot more balanced.
Now I just need to spend less of my free time screwing around on the internet.
My comments pertain to the questions regarding IVF. Your questions are at the heart of the ethical concerns regarding IVF and reflect our tendency to allow technological advances to run ahead of ethical considerations. Are embryos persons created in the image of God? How one answers that question shapes how one sees the concerns surrounding IVF. It is an inconvenient truth that many embryos will get left in cryogenic storage. It is technologically possible to select preferred embryos while “discarding” others. Because not every embryo will survive attempted implantation, often more than one embryo is inserted in hopes that one survives. Due to technological advances the number needed to insert to increase the success of IVF has decreased thankfully. However, sometimes more than one embryo will survive resulting in higher risk multiple gestation pregnancies. There have been embryo adoptions, but they have their own ethical concerns such as who gets to speak for the embryo? Is it possible to have an ethically permissible IVF? I believe it is possible but requires more consideration than I wish to explore at this time. IVF still has a number of ethical questions that need to be understood and addressed. This is true of almost any technological advancement. It is one thing to achieve a technological breakthrough. It is another to understand the implications of applying the new technology. This is true for IVF as it is for AI or any other technological achievement.
Love Johnathan Haidt’s work and can’t wait to read this new book. I have been following some of the work he has been doing with Jean Twenge as well. I did read a few months ago that some schools in the UK had meetings with parents and in total agreements - the schools and parents decided to ban phones from 8am -3pm or so but it took immense work and a trust between the parents and school leadership. I don’t actually see that ever happening in American schools. Most parents I know from our little town of 80k love our school, but would much rather have their students have access to cell phones/smart watches or at the very least iMessage enabled on their iPads. Our family experimented with this a few years ago- when our child was in 8th grade we took away his phone for a month becuase of some bad choices he made and told him he could use the land line to connect with friends. It was probably the most lonely we had ever seen him. Not one friend called/texted/came to visit - this was over the summer break. Despite my efforts to pass on our number to the adults no one connected. We finally gave back the phone in two weeks and life came back to “normal” - what I find even more intriguing is that the majority of my friends don’t want to connect face to face or even have a phone chat - the would prefer texting or connecting via social media- I think we need to dig deeper and research - are we are becoming a society that would rather communicate via a keyboard versus actual sounds coming out of our mouths! Why are we all so addicted to our phones? Are we headed for a weird future where holograms and texts take the place of embodied friendships?
I'd love it if my son's school banned phones, but also I'm not sure it would matter: Every kid has an iPad instead of textbooks. Which would make a ban pointless.
At home, we instituted a rule a few months ago: When he's in the house, he has to leave his phone on the kitchen table. Unused. He can use it when he leaves the house. He can use his iPad to do homework *in the living room.* But for pure messing around purposes? Nah.
It's not a death penalty for the phone. He can reach us - and us him - when he's left the house, which is often useful. But the time he spends at home is a heck of a lot nicer now: He doesn't disappear to his room to scroll through memes for hours. He'll come hang out with us more, and more time is spent in books. He still listens to podcasts, still texts his friends - but he generally does that when he takes his long walks. (He's obsessive about his step count, which would be the case whether he had a phone or not.) The "phone on the table" policy was initially a punishment; it's now policy, because it makes our collective family life a lot more balanced.
Now I just need to spend less of my free time screwing around on the internet.
My comments pertain to the questions regarding IVF. Your questions are at the heart of the ethical concerns regarding IVF and reflect our tendency to allow technological advances to run ahead of ethical considerations. Are embryos persons created in the image of God? How one answers that question shapes how one sees the concerns surrounding IVF. It is an inconvenient truth that many embryos will get left in cryogenic storage. It is technologically possible to select preferred embryos while “discarding” others. Because not every embryo will survive attempted implantation, often more than one embryo is inserted in hopes that one survives. Due to technological advances the number needed to insert to increase the success of IVF has decreased thankfully. However, sometimes more than one embryo will survive resulting in higher risk multiple gestation pregnancies. There have been embryo adoptions, but they have their own ethical concerns such as who gets to speak for the embryo? Is it possible to have an ethically permissible IVF? I believe it is possible but requires more consideration than I wish to explore at this time. IVF still has a number of ethical questions that need to be understood and addressed. This is true of almost any technological advancement. It is one thing to achieve a technological breakthrough. It is another to understand the implications of applying the new technology. This is true for IVF as it is for AI or any other technological achievement.