Just to stir the pot a little, one thing I recommend to ALL people - starting with my own children - is to get out a little and see the world. And if you can do it without using the crutch of current technology, so much the better! I was just talking with my wife about this the other day. When I was in the military in my early 20's I lived in Europe for two years. No Internet. No email. No Skype calls. No Google translate. It felt like a two year episode of "the Amazing Race" where I had to constantly figure everything out - how to speak a foreign language, how to navigate country roads with crappy paper maps, how to order food that I wasn't familiar with, what to do when my car broke down in a rural town at 2AM. And I figured it out.
When I got back to the U.S., not only did I have a better appreciation of our country, even with its warts and foibles, but everything was so EASY. I now understand the meaning of the term "worldly".
I see it first hand now with my own children - who don't know how to take a bus anywhere because they always had a parent to drive them to school. If it isn't on the Internet - it isn't "real". And since much of what is on the Internet is a shadow of the truth, or at least someone else's perception of it, my kids often go through life living in a strange alternate reality.
Facebook is one symptom of a greater problem. There have been tons of papers written about how the "reality" that people post on social media is not the "reality" of their lives. People participating in this farce often find themselves in an arms race to "out-socialize" their peers - with cute photos, or videos of themselves doing progressively interesting/crazy things, etc. I have often wondered how many people social media has killed in the last decade - people behaving badly because they want to publicize how amazingly cool they are - and dying in the process. Just look at the fact that distracted driving kills more people every year now than drunk driving - and many times the distracted drivers are doing nothing more than responding to vacuous text messages... or updating their Facebook status to let everyone know they are going Christmas tree shopping
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