1. So drop the sports and volunteer work. Let them do schoolwork, homework and then free time.

It is a myth that kids have to do all of these things. Sports should be extracurricular activity, i.e. outside education. You don't need to do sports to be healthy or to learn about team work.

And volunteering? Volunteering is called community service if you're a criminal. Why punish kids like that? They will soon have to be grown ups, let them have some years to remember positively.

2. applies to adults too, and has always been true.

3. has always been true.

Social media maybe somewhere frustrated kids go, but it is also a place where the shit starts or festers.

If you think it's a fault of the society and parenting, hey everyone, stop making your kids suffer.

Work ethic doesn't come with being overworked as a kid, work ethic is something you can rationally explain as being beneficial for the individual and the group, and I would dare say that work ethic is strongly correlated with physical health.

You have to remember that the teens going on social media now are meeting a cesspool of nonsense that has been there for over a decade. The cesspool was long in the making before they showed up, and by older individuals, themselves arguably a product of our messed up society.

Capitalism, marketing, fanning the flames of consumerism, maximising profitability — these things feed down into society and create bad parenting habits and bad habits in individual measures of self esteem as well.

I happened to look at Instagram the other day someone was showing me their account on their phone, and the sheer amount of commercialisation was horrifying to behold. People of all ages will eventually be quite unable to determine art from advertisement, because they will have been bombarded with so much kitsch advertising that they'll equate the two.

People are more or less just turning themselves into adverts as well. And those that pay attention to it feed into a sort of tribalism. Each brand forms a tribe of supporters. I've noticed this with fashion, food, music, and more.

And if people are being pushed into social media, it still occurs to me that social media is pretty much the last place I would want kids to end up. People are impressionable and naive, and for them to end up somewhere where blatant falsities and conspiracies are viral just can't be good.

I'm not suggesting free speech be stopped, but the problem is that journalism used to be profitable because it was a source of truth or at the very least a source of feasible opinions.

But it has turned out to be more profitable to instead churn out bullshit, and profitability is all anyone cares about.

And this is to say nothing of the implications of having all this data about people and what they do, flying around between tech-marketing giants that could probably afford to buy countries if there were an appropriate mechanism...

Social media is nothing but bad news. It's not confined to kids either, you may have noticed my use of the word "people" not "kids". Many adults are just as impressionable and easily taken in by the same bullshit. They're just as glued to their mobile devices. They're just as dysfunctional. And they will go on to raise kids.

Dysfunctional parents raising kids in a dysfunctional society results in what? Probably dysfunctional kids.

Some will prove resistant and able to carve themselves their own identity and think critically in the face of it all, but they will probably be vilified or at least ignored or considered crazy.