It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope.
You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.)
That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.
You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.)
But that's just recently. The earliest iteration of this moral panic that I know of involved novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo...
That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.