Social networks: "Isn't it time for a Europe in search of sovereignty to establish itself as a space where adolescents are protected from this jungle?"

T here was a time, within our memory, when the best parents could put a child in the "dead seat" of their car or put their offspring in the back seat without a seatbelt, when smoking was allowed in high schools, when bullying at school and at work was taboo. Will we, in a few years, look with the same dismay at the way we turn a blind eye or claim helplessness in the face of the ravages of screens and social media on today's children and adolescents?

Paradoxically, parents monitor their children infinitely more than before, but accept, willingly or not, that they spend hours (between three and five per day for 7-19 year olds) glued to screens. This practice permanently alters the intellectual capacities of children and encourages adolescents to compulsively look for signs of recognition, gives them examples of absurd stereotypes of beauty or sexuality, confronts them with violence and pornography, and places them under the domination of bullies, charlatans and sowers of hatred.

As with nicotine or speeding on the roads, the reality and extent of the damage are established. "We have solid data and yet nothing is happening. (...) It's about children's health, and we don't care," lamented Bruno Falissard, president of the French Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, co-signatory of an alarming text calling for preventive measures from the government, at the end of April.

Slowed development of language and cognitive abilities, permanent hyperexcitation, sleep and vision disorders, intolerance to frustration... Screens are "not adapted to a developing brain" and should be banned for children under 6 years old, five learned societies have ruled.

As for teenagers, their addiction to social networks "drastically reduces their face-to-face social interactions" and "confiscates social learning," in other words, the emotional connection to others, "as crucial for social development as movement and exercise are for physical development," explains American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in Génération anxieuse (Les Arènes, 448 p., 24.90 euros).

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