Shared Links (bi-weekly) June 28, 2026
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This resource seems like something worth sharing. We spend so much time talking about online safety, banning phones until a certain age, or banning social media, and not enough time making sure we prepare kids for the dangers of being online at all. It’s like banning a child from leaving the house without a parent and then sending them to school with no skills for navigating other people on their own. At some point, kids learning about appropriate and inappropriate behavior and having a safe place to talk about it has to be the priority.
As Whitney says, and I agree, the real work is in the complexities. That goes for our own mental health issues, healing from abuse, and social issues regarding these topics. We aren’t going to solve the mental health crisis by getting people to exercise more. It might help some people, but that one explanation will not work for everyone. We are all much more complex than that simple “fix” would lead us to believe, but believing it reduces the cognitive load of figuring out how to help millions of individuals.
The kids and phones thing was always an easy excuse, but the real mental health issue is much more complicated:
Economic stress isn’t the only factor when it comes to mental health issues. We all know people with plenty of financial resources who struggle, just like we know professional athletes who exercise all the time and still struggle. That being said, we would be stupid not to acknowledge the increased risk.
The impacts of this lack of media literacy can be found in some of the mental health struggles we have across society, with anxiety, stress, burnout, etc. We’re overwhelmed by information with no tools to manage it effectively. We don’t know what’s true, so we keep scrolling for answers that aren’t coming.