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Should children under 18 be allowed access to the Internet?

Rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers have increased by 70 percent in the past 25 years. What has changed since then? The use of the Internet for starters!
Teens are already very vulnerable during this period of time in their life because they are trying to figure out who they are and establish themselves as adults. Add in social media and watch the fireworks!
Teens feel so much pressure because social media is similar to being on a stage ALL THE TIME. They have to post selfies that impress friends and be exciting enough to drag in more friends. And of course there is always the potential for it to go drastically wrong...take an embarrassing or revealing photo and it will spread like wildfire, say the wrong thing and there will be screenshots, and if someone wants to bully you now they have hundreds of different ways to do it!
We thought life was tough with traditional school bullies and peer pressure long before all of this was added in! No wonder kids are BURNED OUT today. The Internet is everywhere because everyone has cell phones and there is no escaping it.
Do you think it would be better for kids these days to go back to no Internet and no cell phones?

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Picklebobble2 · 56-60, M

Nothing to do with the internet.
It's expectation. Or rather, the unrealistic expectation ! That being, that it's fine to have children. But don't think you can afford to stay home and raise them !!
My generation of kids had one parent who worked and one who stayed home to raise children.
Then the idiot 80's happened.
Japan stormed the world with new technologies for home entertainment. Recession and depression hit the west as suddenly Western goods were more expensive than those produced in the East.
All of which meant that suddenly it was the expectation that BOTH parents went out to work to cover the bills.
Which meant many of us 70's kids raised ourselves (ever heard the term 'Latch key kids ?) as work and life pressure on parents forced many to eventually separate.
So the expectation today is that grown ups have to work
So these days kids aren't being raised by parents anymore. They are being raised by technology !
Mobile phones; PDA's Laptops; internet connections etc.
And when you consider that nobody remembers who made the first telephone, but they praise Jobs and Gates as 'Gods of the era'.....tells you something is very wrong.