Is school worse for your kids than social media?

For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

Yes, there’s the obvious twist — all the data I just listed is true for the effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest threat to the mental health of children. At the very least, the evidence for its negative effects is unambiguous: the same cannot be said for social media…

From 1990-2019, suicide rates among young people have always dropped precipitously during the summers and spiked again in September. Adults show no such trend…

Beyond these clinical statistics, there’s also the simple fact that kids say they find school more stressful than pretty much anything else in their life.

Here is much more from Eli Stark-Elster, interesting throughout.