Xia Zhuzhi, an associate professor at Wuhan University, has long dealt with villages, land and farmers, and has written books such as "City and Countryside: Rural Breakthrough in the Process of Urbanization", "Half-work and Half-cultivation: A Study of Peasant Class and Differentiation in the Context of Urbanization" and "The Logic of Land Rights 3: Why China's Land System is the Most Advanced in the World" to study governance issues on the road of rural development in China.
Recently, the latest research results of Xia Zhuzhi's research group have attracted a lot of media attention. They found that the addiction of rural teenagers, especially left-behind children, to smartphones has reached the point of getting out of control.
In the past five years, Xia Zhuzhi's team of 5 people has gone to 300 counties (districts) in four provinces of Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi to carry out special research, and visited 4 villages every year to form a research report on the "Investigation and Countermeasures of Mobile Phone Addiction of Left-behind Children in Rural Areas".
The report shows that the increase in mobile phone time and the early age of Internet access are "increasing" among left-behind children.
Guardians of left-behind children cannot restrict left-behind children from using mobile phones. While taking care of their children, grandparents need to do farm work or other work, and it is difficult to take care of them all the time. During holidays, I even use my mobile phone as a "babysitter" and throw it to my children, so that I don't run around and don't disturb myself...
The survey found that watching short videos and playing games have become the main online entertainment methods for left-behind children, accounting for 69% and 33.1% respectively. Among them, 67.3% of parents believe that their children have a trend of mobile phone addiction, and 21.3% of parents believe that their children are seriously addicted to mobile phones.
In a sixth-grade class in a county in Jiangxi, the teacher reported that more than half of the students played with their mobile phones at home for more than 10 hours on weekends. Many teachers reported to the research group that the learning state of many students is basically "going home for two days, sleeping at school for five days, muddy, and not interested in learning".
A psychology teacher at a school in Henan Province took a live quiz and asked the students what they liked, and in the class of 55 people, all the boys said in unison, "Game!" The "outstanding figures" among their peers are also those "game gods", that is, classmates who are highly skilled in games or have a lot of rare game equipment.
In an interview with the Yangtze Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter, Xia Zhuzhi said that smart phones seem to provide teenagers with a lot of information content to choose from, but at the same time form a closed information cocoon. If children rely on mobile phones to communicate with the outside world for a long time, such growth and society must be disconnected, and it is difficult to form a complete socialized personality.
The following is the conversation between the reporter and Xia Zhuzhi
Reporter: What is the difference between being addicted to short videos and being addicted to watching TV series and movies? When our generation grew up, there was also a discussion of "minors addicted to television". After the current medium of communication became smartphones, the controversy revived. Is this worry too much?
Xia Zhuzhi: The difference is fundamental. The content production of TV series and movies has a set of strict supervision and management and system, for example, the production of a TV series, there is a production company behind it, there is an entry threshold, and the content creation authority belongs to a small number of people. But this is not the case with the content on smartphones, everyone is a producer, including children and teenagers themselves.
Left-behind children use their parents' mobile phones to swipe short videos, attracted by some content that should not be his age, indirectly affecting the cultivation of personal values, ugly as beautiful, good as evil, who should be responsible for this problem? We have a term called "systemic irresponsibility", which is a growth problem brought about by psychology, and no one will be responsible.
Reporter: I note that the results of this study deliberately frame the scope of rural left-behind children.
Xia Zhuzhi: Relatively speaking, the problem of smartphone addiction among left-behind children is more serious because family supervision is not in place. Our survey found that the social interaction and values of left-behind children mainly come from the Internet, and schools can only influence the school period, and in extracurricular time, the online world of entertainment and gamification becomes the "guide" of left-behind children.
Reporter: At what age is the problem of mobile phone addiction more serious for children?
Xia Zhuzhi: I am about 9-15 years old, in the stage of compulsory education, my mind is slowly active, I begin to have my own independent ideas, and I don't want to only listen to the opinions of teachers and parents. We often encounter situations where just after the Spring Festival, eight- and nine-year-old children take the money to buy themselves cool mobile phones.
Reporter: When you go to the countryside to do research, do parents or teachers often report problems in this regard?
Xia Zhuzhi: Yes. For example, if you ask "what are the difficulties encountered in educating children", five years ago and ten years ago, everyone would talk about the gap between urban and rural education. In terms of school management, answers related to "teaching order" are generally given.
Now the questions are all answered "students are addicted to mobile phones, addicted to games, addicted to short videos". In 5 years of rural research, basically everyone has this answer.
Interviewing parents, it turned out to be the answer "children are too naughty to study without care" or something, but now they add another one to these questions - "my child fell into the phone".
Some accompanying parents expressed their concerns to us like this: Five years ago, they were worried about whether their children would be able to become successful, whether they would be able to get into a good high school and a good university. Now that there has been a change in thinking in the past two years, it seems that "adult" is more important than the finished material.
The so-called "waste" is, in sociological terms, unsuccessful socialization, failure to acquire the mainstream values, morality and ethics and the most basic legal provisions of society. They are disconnected from society and do not have a complete socialized personality.
Reporter: Doesn't getting information conveyed through the Internet from mobile phones help them form a relatively complete social personality?
Xia Zhuzhi: No. Why not? In fact, many sociologists have conducted research and research. One theory is about "adultization of the world of children", which refers to the premature rehearsal of adulthood by children for social and family reasons.
When they swipe their phones, children receive the same information as the adult world. In the long run, it will mature prematurely, which is not conducive to the healthy growth of children.
Reporter: It's a kind of false maturity.
Xia Zhuzhi: Yes, that is, you think he is mature, but his mental age and cognition have not reached that step.
Reporter: What are the consequences of this?
Xia Zhuzhi: The more extreme example is this. Children seem to fall into an emotional state of diseaseless moaning, their psychological, physical and mental maturity, can not resist the impact of values from the adult world, depression, self-harm and other behaviors.
Reporter: Can "school education" complement "smart phone education" and play a certain corrective role?
Xia Zhuzhi: Absolutely. In addition, we have not completely denied the positive role of the mobile Internet. It is also impossible to completely isolate the children.
Reporter: In recent years, some people have suggested that the problem of children's mobile phone addiction can be solved through a grading system.
Xia Zhuzhi: This is definitely to be done, but it is unrealistic, because mobile phones are often in the hands of children, and it is not like the Internet cafes in the past, which have special personnel to review and manage them. They can take parental identification and bypass the restrictions of teen mode.
The problem is, we don't have a dedicated phone for teenagers. At least for now, I haven't thought of a good solution, just come up with the results of the survey. Calling for public attention, parents are concerned, so that the negative impact of smart phones on children can be reduced a little, and the proportion is smaller.
To really solve the problem, the most important thing is not to lose the mobile phone to the child, especially not to give the adult mobile phone to them.
Yangtze Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Sun Qingyun