1. I've developed a analog->digital path for my kids. Before they can get a music player, they get a CD player. Before they get video games, they get board games. And then, for video games, before they get Super Mario Odyssey they get the original Super Mario Bros. Each of these "first they get" is a long period. Years long. Give them something that has limitations so they can truly explore it. Find the nooks and crannies of something. Make up their own weird little things within that limitation. And then, back to music, I want my kids to know what a musical album is, know how to savor the highs and the lows, how sometimes certain tracks mean more to you based on your mood or life-stage, then just an endless playlist of newness.
2. The gorilla in the room is that most adults can barely handle online media.
3. The other gorilla in the room is porn. Again, see #2.
4. The classic philosophers placed Prudence as the queen of virtues. What is prudence? It is essentially the ability to grasp reality. Why did they say that was most important? Because you couldn't use any of the other virtues if your didn't have a good grasp of reality (e.g. fortitude would be foolhardiness if you ran into a ill-conceived death thinking you were being brave).
You need to make sure you and your kids are able to grasp reality, not just the appearance of it.
You can prevent as much as you want but then kids go to school nd everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.
The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority.
Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead because we were 'better'. Other kids did drugs and drank, but we were better than that. Peer pressure didn't have much of an impact on me because I was raised to believe that I was better than 'that' for most values of 'that'. And my parents never had to force me on any of this—they just invited me to be a part of their exclusive club.
There might be a way around this that doesn't involve cultivating a mild condescension towards peers, but I can say from experience that the condescension does work!
My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing.
Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.
Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.
I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.
I think you trivialize the benefit of avoiding early-life-damaging activities like alcohol (one in six to one in ten drinkers become problem drinkers, destroying lives, drunk driving), drugs (visit an NA meeting or walk down certain streets in San Francisco), and early unwanted pregnancies (smashing dreams or leading to the morally challenging road of abortion).
The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.
Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.
Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.
And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.
I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.
> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented
The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.
Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.
When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.
> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.
> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.
Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.
Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.
> Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship.
Since when? Many kids grew up learning these things from interacting with other kids, or via the school of hard knocks.
I doubt it’s even 80% of the population that learned primarily from observing their parents.
It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them.
There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.
I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".
Homeschooling is too far for my liking. Kids really need to be around other kids. If anything, my siblings and I needed a bit more of that, because our neighborhood had 0 kids and my parents kept forcing us to hang out with their adult friends. But it was still ok, we still had real enough childhoods.
I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.
I can understand your POV perhaps surprisingly well, as my father was secular growing up and then chose to join Protestantism in college (against his parents wishes). I wonder if at the end of the day it's just teenagers wanting to rebel. My dad's parents were secular, so he became Christian, and I became secular again. I can definitely relate to not enjoying support groups where the suffering is "valorized" to a certain extent. I think I was mostly reacting to the sentiment of superiority in general, but that is also an interesting case because it is pretty clear that families like that tend to have better outcomes overall (at least in monetary terms). My POV is that WASP culture in general breeds these perspectives, and also reinforces them because of the monetary and social inertia.
The flip flopping of religion is maybe just that. It wasn't really the case for me, cause my parents were Catholic but became quietly atheist, and I didn't know until they started complaining to me. But it happens a lot.
It seems to work for WASP. Superiority (or I guess family pride) is also big where my parents are from, Iraq and Iran. But my parents didn't take it in moderation, so the outcome wasn't good in the end for them.
they do not have to do that in school. My (home educated) kids did lots of classes and activities where they met other kids. A lot of schools tell kids "you are not here to socialise!" and have strict rules about what you do when which also limits interaction (at least here in the UK)>
They can also get some of this from non-school activities, but personally I would want it to happen during those ~7 hours they spend every day in school too. They'll even interact with other kids during class, just in an educational way (I hope).
Agreed. I was thinking more of home educated kids like mine who do not have a fixed seven hour day (you can cover what you do in school in a much shorter time if being taught one to one or teaching yourself).
Maybe you’re expecting too much from pithy life advice to avoid bad habits? It’s not a silver bullet guaranteed to solve serious problems such as mental illness.
Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit".
"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]
Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.
It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.
And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true?
So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest.
I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end.
They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow.
Another day to crush and a life to enjoy.
And I yearn to be even better tomorrow.
No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.
I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO.
"I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school.
The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to.
The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.
"You do you" doesn't work at some point. The drinking kids will exclude the one kid who refuses, even if only passively (sober surrounded by drunk). It really matters who the peers are. Fortunately, there are always ways to find new peers.
> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different"
That was basically my high-horse libertarian mindset in high school when I saw other kids using cannabis-- I straight-up said to at least one, "I'm not going to do that, but I don't mind if you do." I thought I was being socially liberal and polite.
Spoiler alert, everyone else "wanted to do something different" and no longer cared about me after I respectfully removed myself from "the cool stuff" without condemning it. Today, I'm much more vocally negative towards cannabis users.
That's one way to make everyone around your kids hate them.
You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...
Agreed. There's a certain age where kids will parrot back whatever you tell them, to whoever they feel like telling. "My parents say you don't value your kids because you let them play video games all day" is a very efficient way to lose friends and alienate people.
I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.
This is SUCH an interesting comment. There’s a “homeschooling” post elsewhere in HN with a comment that espoused the exact opposite view as this one: raise your kids with humility and openness to other people and families.
But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa.
In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale.
I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale.
A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
Yeah, I put 'better' in scare quotes because we didn't use that word exactly, but that was definitely the idea. I realize now that that's the opposite of what a quote usually means, but too late now!
For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.
The one I heard was: "Dad, can you show me Minecraft? All my friends keep talking about Minecraft, but I don't understand it. I want to know more about Minecraft".
If you don't give the stuff to your kids, they get socially excluded.
The best we can do is to teach them how to use stuff in moderation. Show them how excessive usage can go bad: there are plenty of examples around, all the time.
<< disconnecting entirely makes one a social pariah.
Maybe, maybe not. The real question is.. do I really want my kid to associate with kids that are so heavily invested in social media. I know my personal answer to this. I even know my SO answer and the upcoming battles ahead.
I will tell you what I told my colleague as to whether I am sad that having a big dog prevents family reunions or boyfiends coming over. Sometimes things just work out in our favor.
There's almost zero chance for that pretend scenario to happen, kid and parents intermingle all the time at drop off and other school activities, kids are pretty vocal about their birthday and who they want to be present, and their parents will find a way to get the message across, and the kid will know from school interactions anyway if they are invited, and relay the info to the parent.
Drop off in my area is a line of cars. No mingling. Activities are great if the kids share one, but plenty of friends don’t. By high school, parents tend not to be doing the organizing at all. Outside birthdays, the same thing happens with “hey wanna come over?” ad-hoc scenarios.
It isn’t a pretend scenario. We had to loosen up rules because it was happening to our kids.
> everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have
You can start the conversation with other parents at kindergarten pickup.
Each grade at our school has a pledge that kids & parents can sign to wait until eighth grade to let them have a smartphone. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated site like https://www.waituntil8th.org
My kids are still young but from what I've heard from families with older kids is that holding the line gets increasingly hard as they approach 8th grade. You have to be prepared to socially exclude families that let their underage children use smartphones or social media, the same way you wouldn't invite a family that lets their middle-schooler drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes to your kid's birthday party.
While you can never get everyone to agree to anything, as long as your kids have a critical mass of friends who don't have smartphones then not having one won't make them an outcast.
All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones. No exceptions. If I excluded those families my kid wouldn’t be allowed to have friends. Best I can do is take the other kids phones away after a certain number of screen hours at my house.
Limiting screen time is an exceptionally challenging task because of the many loopholes and bugs in parental controls, and my lack of direct control over the chromebooks the schools issue.
Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
> All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones
My condolences. I agree that it's too late once you hit a tipping point and a critical mass of their friends have smartphones. At that point you have to fall back to weaker backup defenses like parental controls and limiting screen time. The point of Wait Until 8th is to provide a little more time to let them form their own self-image and build up their ability to manage their attention and information diet.
> Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
Instead of trying to predict the "correct" set you can just lobby everyone. Our public school has about a hundred kids per grade from K through 8th. Parents bring it up not just at school pickup but on playdates, the local listserv, the PTO newsletter, when new families move to the neighborhood, etc.
Apparently several older grades have managed to hold the line such that most kids in that grade didn't have smartphones until high school, and many didn't even have smartwatches or dumbphones.
It's okay to be "the bad guy". They're your kids, not your friends. Too many parents want to be buddies with their kids these days. That's just setting everyone up for failure.
My wife and I have a loving relationship with our kids but they are quite clear on the fact that we are not equals. The distinction will lessen as they reach adulthood and prove their responsibility.
I know that I have a great friendship as an adult with my parents, in part because they were parents while I was growing up. I had a friend ask what I would do in a situation and I wanted to yell be a parent! Said something nicer, but basically gently pointed out that sometimes that means giving up things you may want to do to show a good example. For instance, if you are always on social media then of course they will want to be too. Right now, you are the biggest influence on your children's life, even when they do not like something now that does not mean they will not thank you later. Anyway, I was debating building a house that wouldn't allow radio waves in so that everything has to be approved. One of the quotes I like is, "It is not the things that I had as a child that makes me the man I am today, but the things I did not." Went on a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to encourage that for most of history it was considered good for children to learn to interact well not with their peers but with their elders. This helps firm realistic expectations of what the majority of life will be like, the opposite of social media and much of the internet. Also, remember that if you address a topic with your child first you are the trusted expert, rather than someone else, in their minds.
Pretty much this. My farther was strict on on the kind of behavior he did not tolerate (and made them explicit early). No compromises. We were aware of the lines and the closer we tread to them, the more he took on the role of authority. But after we became adult and there was no need for that authority role, we became quite good friends with each other. My mother rarely had to take up on that role, but there was still clear separation between children and parents.
Exactly, I see all these idealized strategies around social media and children but the reality is nothing is going to overcome the peer pressure of being 12 years old and the only kid at school without a phone.
Until schools and government restrict phone ownership in a real way, parents are going to keep giving phones to their 8 year olds.
We choose an apple watch for this reason, that way we can still call them / locate them, they are part of their friends iMessage groups, but no social media apps are possible...
We just got Apple Watches for our 11 and 13 year olds. It is a decent middle ground, as up to now we’ve been very limiting of their screen time.
Our district has strict blocks in place at school, but most kids still already have phones. We did it for that reason and so so we don’t introduce phones at the same time they start driving (which is when we figured they’d actually need it)
One thing I wasn’t quite prepared for is kids use huge group chats that result in hundreds of messages a day. Learned how to mute discussions really quick. You can also limit access to groups with parental controls.
Key is talking to your kids regularly and helping them navigate life. Real and digital.
Another Gorilla is the schools, teachers and state-approved recommendations, that extend their reach even into private schools.
Imagine my frustration one day, when I've discovered that my kindergartner has full access to a brand-new, shiny iPad during class. Despite complaints from parents, the teacher refused to reduce iPad usage (or even activate Screen Distance and Screen Time controls on the iPad, or share usage statistics).
The only thing that I've learned, this is all in line with California’s state-approved computer literacy recommendations.
We specifically decided against the school that was closest to us because they give iPads in first grade. Even if the school is good, convenient and very well ranked, I don't want my kid to have a tablet until much later. I despise tablets because of the focus on consumption versus tinkering and creation and I think it's a distraction in a classroom that shouldn't be there.
I do give my son access to a computer but it's a based on misterfpga running the amiga core. Set up in such a way that he can explore and discover how things work from a time when computers were still relatively open.
100% this. Our kids were required to bring laptops to school for no particularly good reason, then allowed to zombie out on them in the library during lunch and free periods. Infuriating.
I understand that it is mostly regulated at the state level. I'm not sure about other states, but The Computer Science Standards for California Public Schools (Kindergarten through Grade Twelve) also tend to be followed by private schools. So they can claim their programs meet state requirements.
This brings computers into the classroom, and once they’re available, it is a slippery slope. It is easier for teachers to have students use semi-gamified "educational" apps rather than engage themselves.
K-2.CS.1 Select and operate computing devices that perform a variety of tasks accurately and quickly based on user needs and preferences.
K-2.CS.2 Explain the functions of common hardware and software components of computing systems.
K-2.CS.3 Describe basic hardware and software problems using accurate terminology.
K-2.NI.4 Model and describe how people connect to other people, places, information and ideas through a network.
...
K–2 K-2.AP.12 Create programs with sequences of commands and simple loops, to express ideas or address a problem
K-2.IC.20 Describe approaches and rationales for keeping login information private, and for logging off of devices appropriately
Yes, we have similar metrics in NSW (Australia). Agreed on the dynamics. There are also a lot if fairly feral edutech entrepreneurs playing special interest capture here - they obviously care more about selling their dubious education novelties than any one group cares about keeping them out. So our kids' schools are littered with semi-functioning "smart whiteboards" and a host of broken edutech apps.
It's not that simple. Had I cut my daughter off and not allowed a phone, she would never have made the connections with the good friends she has. I am convinced these phones are troubling our youth but cutting them off is not advised.
Agreed, you can't prevent them from having access to social media.
What you can do, though, is show them that there are tons of better things to do than swiping on their phone for hours. I don't know many kids who would rather watch videos than actually do something cool.
Just because you think your kids should be limited to the Bible or no phones or no social media or no d&d or whatever arbitrary limits / moral panic you impose, does not extend those limits to other kids in any moral fashion. Those kids have full rights to have whatever they have and you are indeed the bad guy for your arbitrary limits if they are not common or inhibiting socially.
What there is 100% a precedent for prohibiting certain activities from minors because their brains are undeveloped.
In the future we will view a child spending hours a day on Tiktok how we currently view a kid smoking cigarettes. It is creating an entire generation of anxious, ADHD addled kids who struggle with school and focused work of any kind.
Radio was the original moral panic. Then television. Then video games. Now we're on to social media. But this time feels different. Why? Because even the adults are noticing they can't control themselves. Their attention in other things is suffering. Our brains are being trained to seek short dopamine hits from reels instead of entering a real flow state that solves fulfilling challenges.
Social media reel scrolling creates a "potato chip" kind of flow state... it seems to satisfy you in the moment, but even after you've consumed more than you thought you would, you're still unsatisfied. The introduction of a new medium is not novel, but the magnitude of the effect is.
TV and early computer games were not designed to drive addiction.
Well tv was looking for ways to attract people and also game makers.
But it wasn’t like it is with social media YT specifically designed to suck as much attention as possible. Games nowadays are include much more addictive mechanics like loot boxes.
TV is vastly different, it’s tailored to demographics of watchers and at the time the understanding of psychology when it comes to marketing and retention was substantially less developed than it is now.
These days, it also serves to encourage people to build worldviews around fictional scenarios much the same as social media encourages building worldviews around fictional information.
As you said, the psychology of marketing and retention is far more widespread today than it was when TV was invented. Would you agree news stations today report differently than they did 50 years ago? That's a very obvious transition. The transition of how fictional programming has changed is less obvious, but still there-- and the amount people watch (and allow it to shape their personalities) has changed, too.
1. Their parents are doing exceptionally bad job
2. Their parents are doing exceptionally good job
Sadly, there is no way to tell, because not all kids are created equal. I know my parents had to basically remove our PC from our home ( how many parents have that option today? ) to put me and my siblings in line.
Unfortunately, this only adds to the problem, because bad parents tend to think they are great and vice-versa.
Do you have children? We are not bad parents just because we prohibit our children from doing something that is a "common" practice for many other kids in our circles. As for inhibiting socially, do you realize that multiple major publications have just been putting out articles in the past month about adults isolating more than ever? If anything, social media is a contributing factor to that social decline. I'm grateful my kids are young, and were not born a decade earlier because many kids I know that were born around that time have suffered with smartphone access. These are not arbitrary standards--it is a widely understood problem.
I find the overall approach fascinating, but I chuckled at this part because CDs are digital:
"I've developed a analog->digital path for my kids. Before they can get a music player, they get a CD player."
If anyone wants to start with analogue, perhaps start with vinyl, then cassette tape, and then CD. I had a cassette player before a record player, but vinyl seems easier to grok because you can use a steel needle to hear the sound, instead of the cartridge and amplifier.
The generous interpretation of analog in this case refers to the physicality of the CD, not the encoding of the information. It's about creating habits that instill presence and intentionality, not being a Luddite.
Maybe it's due to my age, but CDs don't seem that analog to me.
A few things CDs don't have that tapes and/or vinyl do:
- gradual degradation from repeated use
- need for maintenance (e.g. cleaning vinyl with a brush, or occasionally splicing a broken tape[0])
- time and effort needed to move to the next song or replay the current one (and my first tape deck didn't have a rewind button, so I had to eject the tape, flip the cassette, forward, then flip back and hope I had gotten to roughly the right point)
- the ability to directly manipulate the medium, e.g. using a hand to move the record slightly faster, or using a pencil to wind a tape
I get what scop meant. Family vehicles had cassette or 8-track players when I was a kid and I figured out how to use my parents' record player, but for the purposes of what he was getting at, CDs are a more "analog" experience than streaming music, and give you a feel for what playing an album is like. You have to physically put in and remove the disc to change the music, whereas streaming gives you any song at your fingertips.
I think it’s fair enough to call a CD analog because the data stream is nothing for than wave amplitudes. It doesn’t use a Fourier transform or compression or require “software”.
I like the idea of vinyl for kids too, because of how tactile it is, but man, begin with a cheap player and cheap records. No matter how old they are, they will play with it like a toy.
The good news is my father's old slightly warped prog rock records are finally getting a lot of use.
Would not suggest vinyl for kids. That's a needle on the record player, it scratches everything up. Not easy to aim the arm to the beginning of the track.
Tapes are more foolproof. If you put them in the wrong way, the player won't close. And even though you can damage the actual tape part by mishandling it, you're not all that likely to do so.
Heh, you’re indeed right. I use analog in a very loose sense, perhaps better said as “tactile”. As in “I take a CD out of the case, I open my player, I put the CD in the case, I use physical buttons to move one track at a time”.
Are they allowed to play games at other kid's houses? Like, if they're at their friend's house and everyone is playing Super Smash Bros together, but they haven't "graduated" out of the board game phase, will they get in trouble for joining in?
In theory I like your idea, but there are so many "edge cases" that make it a challenging thing to implement, and something that could backfire if its too strict.
Good question. Yes they can play. The main absolute no-go activity with friends is something with exploration on the internet. That includes things like YT kids. But, hey you want to play Smash Bros even though we don’t at home, sure have fun!
These are not hard and fast rules, more of a system. Our youngest plays video games much younger than our oldest kid, since we have video games in the house now and didn’t with your first. However, I still make sure my youngest is getting plenty of tactile/analog play in as the majority of time spent.
This is how we handle it as well. We were at friends' last night and the older kids had the N64 out. The older kids reported that ours just wanted to be read to the whole time, but early doses of things we intend to introduce anyway (video games predating modern addictive mechanics) are fine at that frequency.
We are mindful of potential Pandora's boxes though. You can't ban everything unhealthy without causing long term issues. You strive though to only introduce things when they're developmentally ready to cope with it, even if that means restrictions on yourself as an adult.
You work to constantly provide good examples via your own life, compelling narratives, etc. of people who exemplify the virtues you want to instill. That's how you help shape (the best you can) the life of someone with an innate identity to, when necessary, "just say no", or simply be uninterested in and unswayed by things that don't conform to their value system.
They aren't stifled by rules and wrestling with temptation--not valuing YT Kids is just who they are.
This is way too slow and thus will be only effective in baiting your kids to try it early or harder. Or give them an anti-tech superiority complex which is counterproductive.
I'd say you need to start actually explaining how things work on these more advanced platforms immediately, as well as healthy patterns in use so they do not get sucked into it forever.
And that these things are tools.
It can be done ELI3, though it's not easy. There are resources abound.
> anti-tech superiority complex which is counterproductive
I didn't have a phone until significantly after my peers, so I used our family computer, Instagram's undocumented API, and a variety of SMS forwarding solutions to keep in touch with my friends, which I think definitely sparked my interest in hacking and a career in software.
I developed a superiority complex, but it was more anti-conformity and pro-hacking than anything.
My kids play Minecraft and Sonic all the time these days. The key is my kids have developed a sense of how some things are different than others and that is good and also bad. It’s a system that allows and encourages discussion.
#1 is exactly what we're doing with ours. The little one understands cassettes and the concept of an audiobook or a Welles radio drama (sometimes MP3/CD, but I record custom cassettes too).
I have a millenium-era iMac set up as the family computer in anticipation of introductory computing when old enough (probably soon) and learning that digital entertainment is a state of mind and place you go to for a time, and then shut down and do something else. It's in the living room and off, so right now we're just building familiarity with it and exploring the keyboard, mouse, etc. and mimicking dad. Currently the little one -loves- the physical interaction of a typewriter and requests one more than a keyboard (but loose keyboards are fun too!).
The TV is a projector screen that recedes into the ceiling. Total screen time for them in the home right now over the past ~2.5y is probably...3 hours? Maybe?
My daily driver mobile is a black and white PDA and almost never a phone. I don't think my toddler has -ever- asked me for my phone and certainly wouldn't think to request, e.g. a video on it. Entertainment comes from our books, legos, and trains.
My theory is an accelerated progression through history. Mastering technology means understanding where it came from. It takes the shine off the modern rectangle of doom if you can place it in time and space and your first habits aren't built around it.
To @ozim's point, the issue is what has been normalized in broader society and so, yeah, we've clearly figured out touchscreens and plenty of local places for kids have unnecessary TVs. The concerns of other kids/parents introducing things to ours too early is mitigated by building a core [home]school and social group who shares enough common values. The differences between our respective households become learning opportunities for everyone.
What's fantastic is that I can go to the grocery store or sit in a restaurant for an hour and a half (and even better, two flights with a layover--with effort) with no tantrum from a toddler and no technology. Just...not even a thought that enters.
> 2. The gorilla in the room is that most adults can barely handle online media.
I think this is the huge one. Kids can spot hypocrisy easily. You can't convince a kid to not get addicted to social media if you yourself are addicted. Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
I do it by 1. not using social media and 2. when I do use my phone, set a good example by visibly using it for a specific purpose, putting it down after I'm done doing the task. Rather than just sitting there like a zombie scrolling and "consuming content." I'm deliberately trying not to normalize sitting there scrolling your phone, oblivious to the world around you. You can't hide this entirely because every time you go out into the world, you see adults everywhere zoned out mesmerized by their phones.
> Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
Wait. Surely these aren't the same. My dad smoked and always told us he'd kick our ass if we started smoking. From as young as I can remember, I understood it was bad and that he was addicted, he had tried, and would continue to try to quit numerous times. He didn't often smoke in front of us when we were young. He passed away before my own kids were born. Emphphysema. At no stage in my life did I ever have any desire to smoke.
However, parents using their phone in front of their kids all the time. Well it's not obviously harming them, as far as the kids are concerned. There are also plenty of legitimate uses for technology. Kids can't discern between the two. Heck adults regularly can't.
Smoking by comparison is pretty freaking obviously a bad idea.
Just a thought: watching a parent leave to have a cigarette outside or something, from a child's perspective, isn't hugely damaging. The kid can't understand addiction nor lung cancer (and so on), so the kid's perception of "smoking = bad" is mostly only on how the kid themself feels.
With a phone, the kid can fell ignored, unheard, unengaged with the addicted parent for hours at a time, every single day.
Maybe kids will grow up thinking "hey, I don't wanna be a phone zombie like my daddy was," or something.
It's insane to me the bandwagon that's developed around cannabis after the bandwagon around tobacco turned out to have been so devastating. "Surely we're smarter this time," everyone thinks.
My wife reminds me of this. And as you both pointed out, it's not just social media, but the algorithmically fueled addiction to endless content. A relative told me their teenagers have to use Chromebooks in middle school, and all quizzes and tests and homework are done on the computer. Not only that, but if they finish a quiz or test in the classroom, they're allowed to sit there and watch YouTube right there in the classroom until the period is over! When I was in middle school, that free time was precious to me because I used it to make a dent in my homework so I'd have less to do after school. It boggles my mind that school administrators would have no clue that kids should have not unfettered access to stuff like YouTube in school. As a guy who has to work on computers most of the time, I'm very grateful my childhood had plenty of analog time, and life in the great outdoors on a daily basis!
When my oldest was going into middle school the district started providing devices for the kids to use in class. There was breathless hype about how this would usher in a new age of technological competence and improved pedagogy. I asked the district IT folks in attendance what types of controls they had in place to prevent misuse -- watching YouTube, open browsing of the web, etc. They had literally nothing in place.
You can guess how that went.
I love Vernor Vinge's works, but the worst prediction of his ever, just 180 degrees totally in the wrong direction, was _Rainbow's End_'s treatment of technology in education. His take (and this was as late as 2006!) was that unfettered access to technology would turn elementary students into a cohort of genius autodidacts. Fast forward to 2025 (coincidently the date the book is set in) and unfettered access to technology has turned children into feed-consuming zombies.
What do you do when other kids are on social media or have advanced devices early? Your own kids will get exposed to those and be upset that they don’t have the same things or the same access to social media. Maybe they’ll even create secret profiles and build a wall between themselves and their parents. I feel like it’s hard to keep society away from one’s own children.
First of all we foster a very strong community of likeminded friends from school, church, and other activities. We don’t all see eye to eye on every little thing, but we have generally the same goal. Second of all is that we talk to our kids about it, we try and make these things a conversation.
FWIW we were homeschooling for quite awhile but they now go to a school that has a No-Phone policy.
Our kids? Hell, my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons. Our kids have zero access to it and never will. Their device usage is kept at a minimum and used for mostly educational or quality conversational purposes.
I hate how many people now, whenever we're around them everyone has their phones out scrolling through 30 sec videos. They want to show you things which aren't funny, aren't entertaining, aren't informative... it's damn near Idiocracy levels of content consumption.
[Insert video of someone badly dancing with caption that says "me."]
Personally, I find it bizarre and extremely boring.
Every week since she was about six months old, I've taken my daughter with me to get groceries. She's absolutely fascinated by the grocery store: the rolling cart, the colors and textures of produce ("ta-to!"), the other shoppers, the illustrations on packaging ("bear!"). I hand her items and give her their names. She shakes them, rotates them, repeats their names back to me.
But every time we go, I see at least one child my daughter's age or younger staring mindlessly at a phone or tablet, oblivious to their environment and the parent pushing their cart. It just seems sad.
I used to judge parents who resorted to tablets to keep their children quiet. I don't really anymore. You don't know how exhausted the parents might be or how many hours they've already spent trying to entertain their kids in a more wholesome manner.
I've taken a 2 year old on vacation and some of that time is spent going to unique restaurants that take a couple of hours for a meal. My toddler would get bored and squirmy and would quickly ruin dinner for the entire restaurant. Same thing for airplanes. Of course I don't resort to it immediately but if talking, interacting, and other toys don't do the trick, iPad is a very useful tool in the arsenal. A carefully curated list of educational, offline content is acceptable in my opinion.
Grocery store, or any other short errand? Sure, that's too much.
Since you're getting some responses to this, I'll add to what we started.
It's important to note: I think "judging" parents isn't productive. People don't understand there are an insane amount of variables involved in raising kids, especially day-to-day.
So even though, I agree with you: we have tried since the beginning to raise children who can go to museums, who can read for long hours, etc. On vacations, we always packed a big bag of books, mini-games, etc. This will keep little kids busy for hours.
The BIG part though...
Really, sometimes you simply have to let stuff happen. Part of being a parent is engaging your child when they're frustrated and bored, NOT getting rid of them. It's a HUGE part... walking with them outside to talk through their feelings and your expectations.
Is it a pain in the ass? Absolutely. Is it one of the most valuable things you'll ever do with them? Without question.
I've walked out of plenty of places to deal with my kid being frustrated. And sometimes we're in a restaurant for the first time in months and he's getting bored and antsy after an hour and a half and we'll put up some Bluey on my phone while we finish off desert. You win some, you loose some.
I've seen a wide spectrum in that. There are those that only wheel out the mind-numbing Youtube videos as a last resort, but I have seen other parents where the kid basically never has dinner without staring at a screen.
I took my 1 year old camping this weekend without my wife. I plopped him in the car seat and put on a Ms. Rachel video so that he would be quiet/calm while I packed up the campsite.
I felt a little bad resorting to using a video like that to "control" him, but then I carried him on a 3 mile hike where he spent the whole time looking at the trees, before eventually falling asleep.
I'm hoping that as he grows up I can just teach him to have a healthy relationship with things like social media and use it like anything else for entertainment.
Man, if you don't want to deal with the challenges of children, why have kids? I don't lie to myself, I know I couldn't do it and I didn't.
Maybe you just don't get to go out for dinner or ride on planes until they don't need to be hypnotized with a screen? You know it's bad for them but you're putting your comforts and freedoms above theirs and everybody else's.
I can't help but feel like the next generation has been completely fucked.
I feel like this mindset is part of why so many people are nervous about having kids, and I couldn't disagree with it more.
Your kid is not an optimization problem, they're a part of your family. If you want to do something unique that's going to bore your kids, it's fine to give them something to do; a half hour of screen time while you enjoy that fancy restaurant while traveling is fine. Your kid will be fine.
Sometimes you should put your comforts and freedoms above your kid's. You are not their servant, you are your own person who has your own wants and needs, and those get to win out sometimes. If your kid throws a tantrum when you're in an art museum, yeah, try to discipline them and calm them down and teach them. If you have a rare opportunity to visit a museum you've always wanted to, though, then it's fine to lose a battle or two here or there if the alternative is missing out on unique experiences that you value.
There are sacrifices to being a parent for sure, but the mindset that it's taboo to allow anything to happen that's not immediately in the best long-term developmental interest of your child is mind-boggling to me. Don't raise your kids in front of screens, but being a parent isn't some phase change that means you have to abandon all your interests and dreams and desires; it just means there's one more person whose interests and dreams and desires you have to care about now.
If you can't deal with the challenges of being on a plane where someone else's kids are screaming, maybe you just don't get to go on commercial flights. Just charter a jet.
Non-parents always have all the answers about how kids should be raised.
Don’t judge until you’ve been there. Screens are more of a last resort for my family but we do use them. We avoid most activities where kids will bore quickly but it’s impossible to avoid all situations like that.
This is so off-base I don't even know where to begin. "Maybe you just don't get to ... ride on planes" -- so the kids never get to meet their grandparents or great-grandparents who are too unwell to make the trip because you won't give them a screen for an hour or two? Like everything else in life, dealing with screens is a balance. Every day for multiple hours is too much; a couple hours on twice-yearly trips is not going to have any effect on them.
We haven't had to resort to an iPad yet, but I won't rule it out eventually. Especially on a long trip.
However, everyday errands just shouldn't require extended screen time. Children are naturally curious, making it even more surprising when one is glued to a screen instead of investigating their surroundings.
Yeah I don't judge other parents, this stuff is hard.
We do use downloaded stuff on netflix on flights or rarely long drives if we need to keep them awake. But we use colouring, activity books etc on planes before resorting to Netflix.
To be honest, sometimes I feel that if they are on a device too much they just get frustrated and wound up anyway, so you end up shooting yourself in the foot a bit.
Having said that we do let them watch TV at home. If you're parenting alone, sometimes it's the only option to get stuff done.
We live in HK where it's part of the culture to have restaurant meals with family from an early age. We started bringing him weekly around 4 months old. At least our son got quickly used to it and it's the same for a lot of our friends. They can handle 2 hours dinner without tablets...
I think it's culture dependent and maybe the fact that in most cases the food is in shared in the middle of the table makes it more engaging?
Ahh I just had to share that my 1 year old daughter also loves the grocery store. She doesn't want to leave the cart when it's time to go. Thanks for the comment.
People talk about kids being addicted, but I had to deal with my dad constantly showing me some Instagram video. Not necessarily a dumb video, but still not something I cared to watch.
These type of people are the people who haven't realized they've been indoctrinated, addicted, and tortured.
They have been induced towards a corruption by dependency scheme in subtle ways, and as a result their rational thought has diminished without them realizing it.
This naturally happens in any totalitarian state where you become dependent on the state for your decisions and values.
Religion in a way used to help protect against this, but with the spread and rise of nihilism and pacifism, religion has taken a back seat especially given the recent controversy and destructive path orthodoxy is taking.
These are the values that are so widely promoted and embedded in things today, following a War and Peace philosophy, which is acceptance of evil, or rather towards inducing a wilful self-inflicted blindness towards evil.
You may find the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", by Ivan Ilyin, an enlightening read, written around the early 1900s, near the dawn of modern psychology. It discusses the topic of evil, in a objectively tied way (not delusion or mere opinion). It does this in a fairly refined way properly following rational principles, first with definition, and then building from there following Method, and the Hyper-rational practices of that generation. A translation to English only recently became available, it was originally written in Russian prior to and through the Bolshevik/Communist takeover.
There are aspects discussed that you can see were used incompletely in the design of the modern day prison system in the U.S and many other insights.
The book was published to refute War and Peace, since the philosophies written about in that book induce evil over time which follows in line with the Banality of evil (the complacent/slothful) becoming the radical evil (related to the Nazi's, and the Wannsee Conference). A semi-recent movie was produced in 2001, that uses the minutes taken at that conference to depict how it happened (quite excellently, albeit dark). Conspiracy(2001).
The problem with totalitarian regimes is people in these societies will attack those that threaten their belief systems, and that threat might include the imposition of the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.
See these authors for more material on the torture/menticide aspects:
They are all experts in their fields, or have been recognized by established experts for the excellence of their published works.
Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind" (1950s)
Robert Cialdini, "Influence" (1990s)
Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism" (1950s)
The rule in the house is; 1) no social media accounts until 13 and 2) one of your parents will be your 'friend' on that account.
This is actually a pretty great expression of "kids keep you young."
But, right now is right now and how kids communicate with each other is constantly changing - social media or not.
So, if you're not a parent to a tween or teens now - I'd say you have little to actually worry about as the landscape will be completely different in a decade.
It’s not necessarily about the parent being excluded. It’s about the kid, the kids friends, and the kids friends parents all knowing that a) bad behavior will get back to the parent and b) screenshots are forever.
Another thing is how to help them learn self control in the face of the massively sophisticated research into how to get them hooked into SM. Allen Carr's book, Smart Phone Dumb Phone, seems pretty insightful and helps the reader understand the root psychological principles behind tech addiction
Perhaps that would be a helpful resource? Another Allen Carr book, Easy Way to Quit Smoking, has a reputation of helping smokers lose their cravings for cigarrettes after undersanding the falasies behind their cravings
Learning those principles at formative ages would probably go a long way
>I'd say you have little to actually worry about as the landscape will be completely different in a decade.
Could be a lot worse though. Imagine if VR/AR does take off and your social media feed is in your eyes 24/7 rather than just when you take out your phone.
Grab any teenager from the street and ask to see their screen time usage on the phone. I bet when you subtract sleeping and school hours (assuming their school has banned phones in classrooms) it will still be nearly double digit hours.
So? There was a time when all the phone-based activities were separate objects and devices. But today, conveniently they’re all in a single device. Aggregate screen time is a useless measure and discrete screen time only matters to help diagnose when something has done wrong. If the kid is wildly successful what doors screen time matter?
That's looking at it with rose coloured glasses. And please don't come back with "maybe they are watching educational content on tik tok" because we all know that's not true.
>22% of US teenagers spend 2-3 hours a day on TikTok [1]
How much time is appropriate?
Who decides?
What _should_ they doing instead?
Who decides?
Where does the kids agency during their discretionary time end?
We don't micromanage their online access, but we do try to encourage being online in healthy ways:
We did no smartphones before high school. (Have had zero problems with that in terms of their social acceptance) Also, no computers in their rooms - everything is done in more shared space, with monitors facing the rest of the room. We talk about what kinds of content to watch out for, how to think critically about it, and what kinds of content or people are more serious, that they need to let us know if they run into. (Stalkers, scammers, other such actively harmful stuff.)
That does give them enough freedom once they hit high school to be more secretive about what they do. But we feel that is also more appropriate as they grow older. There have been problems. When they occur, we talk openly about them and help them both resolve the problems and learn from them. We are big believers that wisdom comes from experience, and experience comes from doing, so we try to focus on letting them expand their autonomy as they grow up, while at the same time minimizing harm when mistakes are made and learning from them.
> Also, no computers in their rooms - everything is done in more shared space, with monitors facing the rest of the room.
Seconded.
I saw an older friend have a dedicated computer room for the desktops of everyone in his family. It was a family space where any family member could plunk down at any time.
We approach the same via a communal laptop in the kitchen.
I was a preteen getting into computers and programming when Anonymous were the 'cool kids' and all over the news. I remember being on their Wikipedia page, then following to the Wikipedia page for 4Chan. My elder cousin walked in behind me, looked at the screen, and said:
He's never used a screen in any significant way. No movies / TV / cellphones / iPads.
My spouse and I read to him a lot. A chapter or two a night from one of the Oz books (there are dozens of them, we're on the 8th one) or something similar.
Results so far? He has a very wide vocabulary, loves learning about the world around him and has almost zero interest in screens.
I hope that by the time he reaches social media age (whatever that is) that the fad has passed and people move on to something less toxic. Even if not, we'll make sure he's in lots of social groups and camps where the focus is doing things rather than spending time on a device.
We have limited access to devices for under ten. Even educational apps on tablets have strict time limits. Initially there is an emotional reaction to limits and we talk to them about who is in control. Them or the technology. We want them to have mastery over the tech so that they can put it down. Only when you can put it down and move on to a real world activity are you the one in control. Personal tech is a tool, a dangerous one. We would not hand car keys to a 5 year old and let them teach themselves how to drive.
Recently my 13 year old asked for a blow torch to do some metal work. We explained the danger and over see the tool. He is totally absorbed in his craft, he has not asked for a phone. In a chat with a neighbour we mentioned the blow torch and said “ we find it to be less dangerous than social media on a smart phone. They stopped and said “yes, that is absolutely right.”
We just got our 16 year old a smart phone but with limits. He needs the tool for work, orchestra communication and for maps of public transport. We are in a constant dialog about gaining personal freedom and responsibility.
We have friends whose children are self harming due to bullying they have experienced on social media. It has been a deep discussion in their home. They are carefully walking their way forward but they regret not having more safety rails and discussion 2 years ago.
I’m of the opinion that we need to think of smart phones like power tools. And that there ought to be significant training and oversight and demonstrated understanding of risks and how to use the tool safely.
I’m just reflecting, I have scars on my hands and arms from power tool accidents, misuse. I wonder what scars are on my psyche from device use? Certainly some. Harder to pinpoint
I don't think this is a good place to go in with hard and fast rules. Every kid is different, everything change. What your kid wants and needs may be different from everyone else.
Having said that, my broad rule is to keep my kid from any social media where their peers rank them and give feedback. No FB, no Instagram, they can't host their own youtube channel, etc. That is where self-esteem goes to die.
I don't think I allow real-name accounts. I'm hyper-sensitive to online predators since a girl I know got assaulted by someone she met on 'words with friends'. My kids are lectured to boredom about personal identifying information and what not to reveal on the internet.
They are allowed Roblox and they spend a lot of time playing with their friends there. I'm happy with that, we do Roblox game night here ourselves.
Oh interesting, only echoes of Roblox I've ever heard were pretty negative but I haven't tried it (my son is still a bit too young for that) so I'm curious to hear something positive about it. What do you like about Roblox?
As a parent of an 11-year-old, messaging is the hardest thing to handle. If you allow kids to message their friends, their friends will send all sorts of inappropriate content, exposing them to essentially everything bad on the internet. If you don't allow kids to message their friends, then they will miss out on fun events that all of their friends are doing.
At least at our local public school, when I talk with parents of high schoolers, 100% of them have given up and allowed messaging.
So by 14 I think you really can't "shield them" from internet content. What you can do is fight back against the human desire to waste lots of time, by limiting screen time. I think that's the best we're going to get.
Do you have thoughts on allowing messaging but making it clear you have access to those same messaging accounts? E.g you have a backup iPhone signed into the same iCloud account as the kid and occasionally scroll through messages to check for bad stuff?
Yeah, I have tried it out, and that's why I am confident that 11-year-olds are happily sending each other every sort of bad thing that exists on the internet!
I can tell my own kid, hey it's really inappropriate to send out thing X to a group chat. But I can't really police all the other kids.
I can at least say, hey I saw this stupid rumor. You'd have to be a complete idiot to actually believe that story is true. But, you know, it feels like I am trying to shovel back the tide.
Most "school bans" that I have seen so far are actually things like, "A teacher-enforced official policy of no using phones during class." In other words, usually the same as the status quo, because what teacher says, "yes go ahead and use your phone while I'm talking to you".
The local public high school makes students put their phones in pouches during classes. It seems good at preventing distraction but doesn't really do much about kids wasting lots of time on social media, sharing terrible material on social media, communicating between classes, or after classes. Probably better than nothing.
Give kids more - teach them media and how to use a computer. Help them find quality programming from a young age so when they are teens they can make informed choices.
Discuss with them values, your and other peoples.
Make time for them IRL, and do things together so they don't have to find fulfilment in digital arms.
While it might sound backwards, it's probably more effective than banning and hard rules in the long run.
Yes, you can isolate them from social media at home, but you have to acknowledge that it also means they will be missing out, won't be invited to things planned on there, will live under constant tension of "what are others talking on there?", all of which might actually stunt their (social) development more than just being on social media with no restrictions. You can take alternative approaches along the lines of "let them use computers first, then phones", but then you're no better than the parents forcing kids into a certain sport because of a personal preference.
I'm not saying don't ever tell them to go offline, just saying dialing down the restrictions a bit and actively providing alternatives-spending time with them-should go a long way. Spend time engaged with them, just generally show them the way-show them sports, activities, ... they can do with or without friends, offline. Lead by example is the term here.
To end this, I also know quite a few cases where the restrictions have backfired to the point the kid feels like they need to use up all precious daily screentime allowance, even tho they might have better things to do, just because it's so limited.
A good start is to avoid giving them a smartphone until they're in high school. And once they have a smartphone require them to get permission from you before installing any social media apps, with consequences if they don't follow the rules (take the phone away). Make the consequences known up front, rather than reactive so they know the guidelines regarding their phone use.
And whatever you do DO NOT give your child a handheld device (tablet or smartphone) before they're in high school. My wife and I are seeing parents give their two year olds a tablet which is absolutely detrimental to their development.
> I are seeing parents give their two year olds a tablet which is absolutely detrimental to their development.
My kid couldn't care less about using a tablet or other device if there is any other activity on the table. In other words, for them to reach the point of using, I have to be completely ignoring them.
Is it really the device that leads to developmental detriment, or parents who aren't involved in their childrens' lives?
Just because your child has been this way does not mean everyone’s is. I have a 3 year old and even though I have been very strict about screen time (tv or phone) - she watched her first cartoon just months before 2nd birthday - from the very beginning screens were hypnotizing for her. She would stop whatever she was doing once a screen was playing nearby. No amount of entertainment I would provide would make her look away. So it’s good for you that you don’t have this problem, but from my experience and from talking to others this is definitely a struggle for many.
There's apps like Google Family Link which basically gives you and the child a contract and enforces that contract. Screen times on what days. What they install. The kind of media they can view on the YouTube on the device. Even if you change the policy, the child is informed.
I’ve got a friend who did this. His 13yr old daughter craved instagram and snuck access.
The story sounded like parents of the previous generation catching their kids smoking and drinking.
I’m pretty sure the prohibition didn’t work and added the spice of forbidden.
I don’t know the answer, but I suspect full prohibition isn’t it.
>Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits,
At least on the iPhone, the parental controls are pretty fine-grained. Even if there was a way to have a web-only account on an Apple device, you can block those too (never used that feature though).
You're not going to be able to stop your kids from doing anything unless you shackle them up nightly. However, you can stop them from doing it while under your roof and that significantly curtails their ability to take anything too far.
I genuinely don't think the tech medium is the problem. There's good and educational software available on tablets just as there is on anything else.
While I've always been anti-tablet myself, and anti-phone for similar reasons (though why a kid would need a phone is beyond me at this stage), there's programs for literacy and learning available on the tablets that work just fine, as well as art, creativity and painting. The "secret" is just no access to the toxic: we have one tablet, my 5/6 year old loves reading-eggs and Minecraft but we have no social media and no YouTube and no purchases, plus the entire house is behind an ad blocking firewall. My kid is allowed to watch videos and access apps like ABC iView/kids, but from the open web they have to be ripped and placed on our local media share drive before they're viewable. No YouTube or YouTube kids obviously because it's a toxic cesspool.
My experience is that without the trash\addictive nonsense, while the kids are drawn to the iPad, they'll also self regulate a bit and move between other activities of they're available and get bored of spending all their time on the pad.
In his room I've just built him a Linux computer, and that's restricted both in time (can only log on to his account at certain hours), has no native web browser, and requires me to install programs and updates. He can access the games we approve but like everything else in the house it's basically a social media and almost ad free zone.
I've introduced him to modded Minecraft because it's basically Lego... And though it's frustrating that Microsoft took it over, we basically just ignore the Microsoft side of things and just operate on the free community modded side of things. I showed him how we could change his sword and I've got a whole modded world where we can set ourselves up and play on LAN together. The other game he loves at the moment is beyond all reason, a community made RTS game I've been involved with, and he just won his first match against the simple AI (though I did have to talk to the other Devs to allow us an account from the same IP so we could play together). The goal of all this is to give the message that technology is all about being a creative tool you choose to use to make what you want, not a medium about being a passive recipient for advertising or marketing or endless video consumption, feeds, recommendations or outrage cycles. No one needs any subscriptions or recommendations or likes or feeds. But there's nothing inherently toxic about a screen or a tablet, those are choices we make (or more accurately are pushed upon and chosen for us if we're not careful).
I think there's a non-zero chance that I'll be setting up a local server for the neighbourhood kids over the next year or two so they can all play together without worrying about the wider internet and I'll probably have to work to admin that in some way.
It can be done, but my take is that until your kid is through puberty their job is to learn how to navigate the real world, how to talk to people in person, and so on. You can give them technology but it has very minimal benefit compared to the alternative, that is if your home is full of books and you're reading to them regularly.
All that being said we're somewhat liberal with TV, and we'll introduce them to a PC in time. But for now the MO is real world skills and intelligence.
Jonathan Haidt also pointed to evidence that technology during the adolescence phase can wreak havoc. Particularly handhelds and social media.
A lot of parents at our school signed a “wait until 8” pledge to wait until 8th grade before getting them smartphones. This way there will be less social pressure from their friends to be connected. My assumption is that without a smartphone they won’t use social media.
Same, and most of it was wasted time. But at least it didn't follow me to school, or bed, or well everywhere.
I'm not sure completely shielding your child from screens is the best approach. I'll be attempting to have a visible space in the house where a laptop or tablet can be used. But they stay there.
My kid didn't get access to Youtube until they were 12. It's fine otherwise now, but Youtube Shorts is a cesspool and it CANNOT be turned off in any way. There are no parental controls to limit or disable it.
Before that we did try Youtube Kids, but it's creepy AF. There's a ton of "this kid gets to buy EVERYTHING he wants!" -shit in there.
I decided I'd rather pay for _every_ streaming service, give the kid a child account in there and let them watch anything. It kinda worked. Their ability to tolerate the basic screaming jump-cutting Youtuber is close to zero.
I've had chats with them where they explicitly said that "X does interesting videos but they shout all the time so I don't want to watch them".
With Netflix, Disney+ and our local PBS equivalent I can sorta trust that the content is professionally made and even slightly educational.
The age limit for social media over here is 13 at the moment, we'll need to burn that bridge this summer. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and all that will be open after that. I'm not going to encourage that but we'll see what peer pressure does.
If you are fortunate enough, put your kid in private school where smartphones tend to be banned in elementary and sometimes up to middle school.
Beyond that, I don't intend to give my kids a device until they are 10. (Heavily restricted smart phone) and won't be allowed to social media until they are 13-14.
My home state of South Carolina just placed a statewide ban on smartphones for our public schools, which is a good thing because the private schools in my area are worse than the public ones
Mine are too small for any of this yet but I gave it some thought and here's what I have:
-Social media etc. are a means of avoiding one's emotions. Your job as a parent is to help your children process those so that they don't crave such distractions as much.
-Education is key. This is a huge topic, but one of the first things I taught my preschooler is that people do all kinds of things only because they want money. That is equally true in meatspace, as e.g. this enclosed playground we occasionally go to is dotted with shelves with toys that are, of course, not free, so if you want one you have to pay. I lost count how many things I explained with a short "they do it only because it brings them more money".
-It so happens that the worst brainrot is at the same time data-intensive, so data allowance is something I'm planning on introducing once the time comes. I sort of had this in my youth when my data plan was a whopping 1GB per month, so I had to be deliberate in my choice of entertainment.
As a final, optimistic note, it appears that generation alfa picked up on the fact that we, the parents, either try to distract them with screens or look at screens instead of paying attention to them. They don't like that one bit and my prediction is that their attitude towards this will be very much like my generation's towards our parents having the TV on at all times.
No phones or SM accounts for kids till they turn 18. Yes, there's a "fear" of being an outcast but they work their way around that quickly and if they have other things to spend time on, they'll be fine. The "need" for social media is mostly FOMO.
Our senior schools (from age 11, "6th grade" in US term) literally mandate a phone (not a computer, an actual phone) for school, both to use in class and to receive homework assignments.
Yes. I have kids. I'm not in the US. My kids school sends homework using an app. I get it on my phone, take printouts etc. and my kids get the work done.
We have a basic feature phone at home which they take if they're going out just to stay in touch/emergencies etc. They don't have phones unsupervised at all times.
Lots of practical but low impact suggestions in this thread.
I think the only real answers involve large scale decoupling from the rapidly changing social norms. Can you cobble together a social group that will go Luddite with you? If not, can you join one?
I was an outcast as a kid, and this was years before social media. I think I turned out alright regardless. Your social status as a pre-adult doesn't really matter at all once you join the real world.
That and I think kids not having any social media will become more and more common, so it's not going to be that big a deal.
But if you blame your parents' or guardians' overly restrictive dogma for your outcast status then it will likely turn into lifelong resentment. Would you want your kid to resent you?
The better alternative is to explore the net together with your children and show them that there is a world beyond typical social media which is far more interesting and rewarding to explore. Encourage them to foster trust and strong relationships with people from around the world.
> But if you blame your parents or guardians' overly restrictive dogma for your outcast status then it will likely turn into lifelong resentment. Would you want your kid to resent you?
That's not a good reason. Would you let your kid take up smoking, because they'd resent you if you said no?
Also: My parents wouldn't let me drive until at least a year after my peers got their licenses. I didn't like it, but I don't harbor a "lifelong resentment."
That is assuming socials are as dangerous as smoking.
Now they have their dangers of addiction, but that can indeed be worked out. As a safeguard, a rate limit filter is what I would recommend. Perhaps one that can recognize roughly the kind of content watched, so you can have a relevant talk.
The self esteem and self-dox part can be really dealt with by actually doing the thing together.
Otherwise you will be at the mercy of peers. Don't kid yourself about how powerful your influence is.
This bold and vague claim is easily countered by my own datapoint as someone who continues to deeply resent the restrictions placed upon them in an extremely dogmatic household. Not everyone is given guardians who have their best interest at heart.
My computer usage was surveilled and highly limited. My guardians feared the knowledge I could access via the internet. No personal computer, no television in my room. All media verified for dogmatic adherence before consumption. Personal belongings frequently searched and thrown away or broken. Any significant amount of money I saved up, stolen. I didn't even get to have a door for long stretches of time. I was surveilled by a network of narcissistic adults whose main interests were turning me into a good little Christian boy.
shrug I have an opinion about my mother, but not for one second do I doubt that she was making the best call she could make given the information she had at hand. How you feel passes, but the consequences of raising an idiot last yet another generation.
No it doesn't. I was nerdy and "low status" in school. I laugh at most of the silly stuff I did or was done to me in school. I don't get the mentality of holding onto all that stuff forever.
That’s good for you. I’m the same, but… we’re here puttering around HN aren’t we? The ones that are not can’t really weigh in to offer a contrary opinion.
I was nerdy in school-- not necessarily "low status," because good grades were seen as good in my schools, but my social life was dangerously small and my self-esteem was trashed (in a "cover it up with arrogance to pretend it's by choice" kind of way). I am somewhat better today than I was then, but I'm still an incredibly unhappy person, and I trace many of the poor patterns I struggle to break out of to how I grew up.
"Leaving it all behind" is, to me, a cope that either pays off if you end up getting what you want later, or that doesn't and leaves you back where you started. Most importantly, every individual is different (or so I'm told), so just because it's worked for you doesn't mean it should be relied on.
As someone who was bullied in middle school (highlight includes being held down by 2 guys while someone else peed on me), trauma does stay.
I mean, I'm a relatively well balanced individual, I have a job, a family etc... But that doesn't mean that I didn't have to have therapy over it, that I didn't commit self harm and that I didn't experience trauma.
I'd rather my son not be a social outcast and experience that. And I do think that past a certain age, there's a need to conform a bit to society in order to integrate with it even if that means using social media at that age. That'll be with my guidance and strict limits but I don't think total abstinence is a solution.
If all of your peers are talking about the stuff they saw on YouTube, but you’re not allowed to, this will naturally make you an outcast in that topic. Now, if almost everything they talk about in the internet, and you cannot relate to it at all, it will hinder your interpersonal skills, because you just don’t talk to your peers.
I hate how we got here, but watching my nephews go through this stuff made me realize you can’t cut the kids off completely. Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits, and slowly get the kids see how others function through it as well.
>I hate how we got here, but watching my nephews go through this stuff made me realize you can’t cut the kids off completely.
Mine are turning out fine. I don't want them to be like those other children, and I've kept them away from those children. Doesn't seem to have been a problem.
>Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits,
This is a matter of who you choose to socialize/fraternize with, not one of geography. But if you opt for public school, then you have no real choice in the matter.
Congratulations, you're raising future disgruntled outcast class of people who are not integrated with the society.
The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
>ongratulations, you're raising future disgruntled outcast class of people who are not integrated with the society.
This society is dying, nearly dead. Anyone who is integrated with it will die by extension. Only lunatics would want to be integrated with it. This society can't even be bothered to make more humans so that it can continue into the future... it wants to be dead.
My children aren't outcast, they have friends. Just not ones that would bully them because they didn't see the latest softcore porn on whatever the most popular social media happens to be today.
>The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
Uh huh. What if someone taught them that it was normal to possess firearms, or to be skilled at using them? Those crazy radicals. What if they were taught that the most fulfilling thing they could do in their life is to make a family of their own, and raise their children well? What if their teachers were so radical that they taught arithmetic and trig and calculus instead of helping them decide they were trans?
Everyone in this thread knows I'm right, even if they can't afford to agree openly. That's what this thread is... we know the society that our parents and ourselves have created is rotten and pathological, or we wouldn't be talking about how to insulate our children from it.
Society is really fine! I live among millions of people every day, and people are genuinely kind and nice on average. It's up to you how you want to perceive the world, but I wouldn't want my neighbours to ever think people around them are lunatics and etc.
I understand you're coming from a very American-specific point of view, which is very hard for me to comprehend. Growing up, I absolutely never had to worry (and now as well) about any of those topics. Even my nephews in public schools (US) are doing pretty decent maths stuff. I do think some of the things you've mentioned are mostly imaginary problems, but I can be wrong.
I'm not special. You're not special either. Nobody's really special. Yet we find ways to sit down, have a drink, go for a drive, or have sex from time to time. That being said, I have quite a few friends who had very restricted childhoods, and would never want my children to feel the same resentment as they do during our hang outs.
Any healthy, long-term viable society has to prioritize one task above all others... making the replacement people that will be society once the current people die. Your society (if you choose to claim it) doesn't do this. Sub-replacement fertility. It's dying because of this. If you think that's fine, go for it.
>I live among millions of people every day
Sure. And each generation is about half the size of the previous. It will look fine, even crowded for awhile yet.
>I understand you're coming from a very American-specific point of view,
This is global. China has sub-replacement fertility. Korea and Japan have sub-replacement fertility. Europe has it, South America has it, India may have finally crept below replacement, but if it hasn't yet it will next year or the year after. This is everywhere. There's not a hidden corner of the world where it's not happening.
You judge people by the amount of kids they have? So like, if a couple has less than 3 kids, they’re awful people and shouldn’t be around?
Interesting take, if that’s the only way you look at people, and whether you want to be around them or not.
I agree we have fertility problems, but if people don’t have kids, well, that’s so not my business. Every person is different and has their priorities. If a person wants to have 0 or 10 kids, god speed to them.
> So like, if a couple has less than 3 kids, they’re awful people and shouldn’t be around?
Wow, what a strawman. No, that's not what he said.
What I will say, though, is if a "couple" has no kids (and does not plan to), they aren't contributing to continuing society and should not receive tax or other marriage benefits.
That's not a punishment, it's treating them the same as everyone else because they have the same burdens as anyone else (and can already take advantage of pooling resources for their earthly pleasure without society bankrolling it). Tax and other financial structure benefits for married couples were meant to encourage and support the raising of families (continuing society), and between several different (and individually well-meaning) social movements, we've lost the plot over the last half-century. Marriage has turned into "best friends with benefits +," which, again, is fine for people to choose if they want to see it that way, but does not deserve any subsidies.
You understand that majority of people still want to get married, and have a kid? And eventually most do. The problem with fertility is, nobody wants to have >=3 kids because of multiple reasons. So, society, by large, is fine, and people are decent even by weird standards that have been mentioned in this thread.
Anyways, I have no idea how this conversation eventually became a "everyone should have a ton of kids because otherwise society is doomed!", because my entire point was "by large, people are nice, we should strive to be around them, and learn from each other, instead of trying to actively exclude ourselves because we are better than them".
You simply don't understand math if you think that every couple (or even most couples, in practice) having only a single child is sustainable to infinity. You are the only person here who brought up the 3 number; 2 on average is (very obviously) all that's needed to sustain a population, and you chose a higher number (and applied it to the individual instead of as an average) to make the argument look unreasonable.
Also, your assertion that "eventually most do" have at least one kid is already close to statistically false in the US, and if current trends continue, will be false very soon (with the story being the same, or much worse, in all other first-world countries). Go check out /r/ChildFree on Reddit if you want to see just one of the many social movements surrounding this.
You’re correct, it’s not sustainable. But that also means the OP thinks anyone who doesn’t contribute to sustainable model (>=3 children) is an awful person.
Well, 2 is not sustainable on average right now, because we’re below replacement level, so we need to get the average up to like 3, then back down to 2.1 if we want somewhat same amount of people like right now.
Either way, judging people with their ability, want, or need to have children is kinda stupid. I have dear friends who are single, couples with no kids, couples with multiple kids and etc. Actively saying one choice is bad is the reason why some people might actually not want to be around those people. Let people make their own choices, and what they think is right to them.
Again, I’m saying this as a person who is planning to have children.
> that also means the OP thinks anyone who doesn’t contribute to sustainable model (>=3 children) is an awful person.
The OP did not say that, for one thing. You're the only one who's used the "awful people" phrase (which is what makes that a strawman, as I pointed out several comments ago).
OP would prefer to raise his kids to see reproduction as a positive aspect of life, as opposed to the current secular "wellll, you can do whatever you waaaant, but it's a whole lot easier and more fun if you just go ahead and kill your bloodline" that's a logical extension of your pseudo-enlightened "no one choice is better than the others" non-answer (only a logical extension, of course, when ignoring self-preservation and societal preservation as legitimate concerns).
I don't know what country you're in, and I don't know if things are actually different there or if you've just convinced yourself that as long as you don't see a problem with your blinders on, there isn't one. But with regards to "let people make their own choices," someone already threw that argument out (in a different context) elsewhere in the thread, and received lots of good answers explaining how we live in a society and you (and your kids) are affected by everyone else's choices, one way or another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705948
Although again, OP didn't even say those people shouldn't exist. He said his family's able to get by without them, and correctly identified that they are not reproducing, expressing optimism that future generations won't have to co-exist with their ideals anyway (I can't say that I share that optimism; there are too many do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do folks around, as well as people like you who may facilitate the spread of bad ideas beyond the bloodlines they kill off out of some sense of respect).
> Yet we find ways to sit down, have a drink, go for a drive, or have sex from time to time.
US born & raised, here. No we don't. I'm 26, have never had a drink, and have never had sex in this country. (ETA: By societal standards, I'm considered "doing well.") You do not understand the severity of the problem.
I'm sorry to hear that. Nobody is really stopping you to have a drink at the bar by yourself though. The above commenters might not like to be associated with those type of "lunatics", but I still think that an average person is good. It is nice to be just around other average people, even if one considers themselves higher than others.
Gotcha, so to borrow a page from your blowing other peoples' arguments out of proportion elsewhere in the thread... your solution to society crumbling is to be an alcoholic by going to the bar and drinking alone. You're right, it's "really fine" after all!
> Mine are turning out fine. I don't want them to be like those other children, and I've kept them away from those children. Doesn't seem to have been a problem.
To each their own. I personally grew up with the idea of "try to be around all different types of people as I will encounter people from different walks of life, just don't be an idiot". I think, it made me a better person and I pride myself in my ability of getting along with most people. One day, I would want the same for my kids, and hope at that point we would resolve the social media issues.
> If all of your peers are talking about the stuff they saw on YouTube, but you’re not allowed to, this will naturally make you an outcast in that topic.
There were plenty of kids when I was in school who were not allowed to watch TV. Like at all.
The real problem is that kids also socialize online now so you can't talk about "that time you hung out at McDonalds" because everyone was sitting at home on their phone instead.
Yeah, I remember the kids who were not allowed to watch TV, although they missed out on some peer-discussions, at least there were other stuff that everyone was involved in. And the kids that were not allowed to do anything (no internet, no TV, no games, no running outside around), well, I genuinely don't know how, as a kid, I could find anything in common with them. I really hope they're doing well, but I wouldn't want to be them at that time.
I agree with your second point, the problem is there is one and only one avenue of doing things, and that's online (for most of the kids at least).
Sometimes I feel grief about the fact that I will almost certainly never have kids, but then I also feel immense relief that I don't have to navigate the extremely complex challenge of raising them in the modern world.
As a parent, I think it's just taking choices. There is no absolute win for either end, just gives and takes. When the dust falls we can just hope that we get a bit more takes than gives. Most of us just walk on ice and skate to wherever fate takes us.
Here's something I accepted. I will mess up, but I'll focus on being a good person that leads by example. The rest is details. I don't know what your situation is, and I'm sorry if you are unable, but I would wish more people get to experience the absolute joy of parenting. It is an exercise of being selfless to the point that you are happy doing things that seem miserable to others for the only reason that there's someone else that benefits from that sacrifice. It's life changing in a great way.
P.S. usual caveats that it's ok if not every person has kids, There's lots of narcisists, etc. that probably shouldnt. However, I feel that in my circles (professional, well adjusted, big city people), the bias is against kids. That is a massive mistake.
If I’m able to put my 2ct in as well, have (at least) two, fairly close together. You’ll have arguments to mediate but there will always be someone to play with around. Friends are not the same unless they literally live in the same house.
Having someone with the exact same life schedule is critical.
No one participating in a moral panic thinks it is a moral panic. They all think they are addressing a real pressing issue. That is why moral panics work.
The easiest key is the focus. Am I worried about my kid? Not a moral panic, that is literally my job as a parent.
Am I worried about society in general because of all the shoddy parenting about screen time? (Or risky play, or being home alone, or riding public transportation, etc) Then it might be a moral panic.
Along those same lines: am I worried about what all those worriers will say about me?
This is what the above comment is referring to. A lot of the stress of parenting is amped up by other adults (parents or not) who have lots of opinions about whether you’re doing everything right. Much of this is some combination of moral panic and/or self-righteous busybodies. If you can learn to tune a lot of that out, parenting is less stressful and less complex.
So you're telling me that by going against social media, I'm actually participating in some big witch hunt to delete it? That's even better, sign me up.
I’m telling you that a lot of people believe they are on one of various missions to Save The Children, by which they justify harassing parents about random moments they observe.
Make sure they are living full lives and have many offline occupations to fill their time with. Social media addicts are just bored teenagers who have nothing else better to do, or teenagers who feel as though they cannot be part of the local social groups so they retreat to the online world.
I am in my late 40s and my two boys are 11 and 15. They make great use of the internet, especially youtube. One is a big fan of all the STEM channels on youtube and he is getting an education through those that, when I was at his age, I could only dream about: Matt Parker, 3B1B, Mark Rober, Steve Mould, and so on. He watches hours of those videos every week. The younger is in the VR/Gorilla Tag phase and has created his own youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MagicianTheMonkey-p1f
He taught himself how to install Mods, how to script and create contents in capcut, how to advertise his channel.
The internet can be an amazing opportunity for kids. We should be careful about policing it too much. My recommendation is: keep a close eye on how their behaviour changes (the output) but do not worry too much on what inputs they choose and receive. They have to build their own filters after all.
At 18, I went to see the movie "RoboCop" in the theater and walked out because I had never been exposed to such gratuitous violence before. This was long before the internet, cell phones, or social media.
Would I have been as shocked/traumatized if I had previously been even a little bit exposed to something much less intense? Now that kind of stuff is passe.
I don't want my children traumatized; obviously I'm going to do whatever I can to prevent them from premature exposure to lots of extreme content.
But we live in a different world than I grew up in, and I'm worried that kids need SOME exposure, especially to positive experiences but also just a little to mild bad experiences, in order to build up life skills like getting along and interacting with others, even with people who aren't nice to you.
I'm struggling with how to do that and where to draw the line but it definitely involves limits (that change over time), supervision, and communication.
Don't let them have a smart phone until high school. Do not allow unlimited use. Do not allow certain apps. No phones in room at night. Continually have to "defend" and argue about it.
Just because you're strict in one area doesn't mean that you're completely mistrusting everything. You can (and should) still teach responsibility in the same way that generations have before social media.
This is a question I keep asking myself. My in-laws live in until May and they give free reins of social media time to my 4-years old so I keep pulling him off. And we tightly control what he watches on TV (only downloaded videos, no YT, no network actually).
So far it's OK. But I don't know what happens when he goes into primary school and his friends start using social media because some parents just don't care. I honestly have no idea. I'll probably ask him to text using a dumb phone instead.
Worst case I'll keep a secret smart phone just for baking/maps but use a dumb phone for daily drive. Probably best for me anyway.
Social media is a nuclear blast for any mind who is not strong enough and doesn't have any hobbies. My father-in-law literally live in Tiktok and Red note. He is watching it when he goes to bed, when he is taking a dump, when he is exercising... it's just part of the body I guess. So much brain rot.
I'd recommend the stuff on this web site and the related book.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
Lots of good research backing this up with some guidance for communities to change the environment for their kids.
8th grade was when all this stuff became mainstream for me. That was the iPhone 3GS release year. Social life went to crap very quickly for everyone. Should be "wait until 18th."
I was of similar age then, before that it was nokias and Bluetooth, Facebook was where you could upload stupid shit and not go viral and people's walls were just rage and 9gag memes. With tiktok I think teenage social media and addiction and the self esteem stuff is a different beast.
Many people talk about screen time and age limitations, if a parent doesn't want to go that far there should to be algorithmic limits like block celebrities/gaming/onlyfans type of content
It's definitely different (and worse) today, but even back then I felt like it was robbing everyone of their childhoods. Kids spent an enormous amount of time there, they were on phones in school or in social settings, and the "bathroom wall" gossip thing was big.
Try to make sure they know how they stay safe online as best as possible.
No phones until high school. Limit phone usage via parental controls. No posting photos of themselves online. Closed social media accounts in their teens. WhatsApp contacts limited to people they know in person.
We play the game of pragmatic averages. We aren’t the first of the parents in their friends group to allow their kids to have access to <insert app here>, but we also aren’t the last.
It all depends on their peer group and their nature. I have one who doesn’t even like to be photographed. That one I have no problem with - there’s no way she’s posting stuff about herself. Also, I’ve told her stuff on the web lasts for ever. She doesn’t do social media but only private iMessage groups with friends.
The younger sister is a “social butterfly” and wants to create “a lot of content”. Luckily she’s in a school program that keeps her real busy. So we haven’t had to deal with it yet.
In short, kids understand when you tell them and more importantly you yourself keep off these apps. If you’re on there all the time, there is no way you’re convincing your child to not be on.
I have children, and I will never allow them to use social media while they are under my care. Once they are grown and independent, they can make their own choices. As a father, my responsibility is to protect them from harm, and I am fully committed to doing so until they reach adulthood. Here's an excerpt from an article titled “Facebook’s War on Free Will” by The Guardian.
> The many Facebook experiments add up. The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analysed to uncover the mother of all revelations, “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about”.
Kids are an experiment that you run without a control group. You do the best you can with the information you have, from a place of love. That's it.
Social media is crappy and dangerous, and you keep them away from it until you are able to explain to them why it's crappy and dangerous. It's also everywhere. YouTube comments, HackerNews, Reddit, Roblox. All are various flavors of social media, many of which are hard to justify complete blockage.
I don't think you can prevent it anymore than you can prevent the impact of advertising billboards, or the news.
Parents should lead by example. Easier said than done I know, but parents need to be the idols in their children's lives. Not influencers.
If a parent leads by example they will win in the long run because influencers are fake and shallow while you're real and always there for them.
Children who seek out other role models are children who didn't, or couldn't, look up to their parents. This has always been going on. Before social media we sought out role models in school or in the streets.
My kids don't have smartphones until they're 17. I keep them busy with maths, programming, robotics and other things they like. It seems to work. But now my older son is 17 and he hangs out with his friends on Discord all the time, sometimes it's even affecting his health (sleep) and his schoolwork. But it's less the effect of social media and more the effect of his age.
However, I don't know how it will be in later years, whether he will be able to develop a healthy habit of using devices or not, and I'm a bit worried.
Partly it’s having a constant discussion about society, the world, and news in general. We talk about how advertisers are trying to manipulate you, social media can be addicting and is also trying to manipulate you, etc. Not an angry way, a discussion, like how magnets work or how rain forms. Just the facts ma’am.
As for permissions, my oldest avoided all social media except iMessage (because for her age that is essentially the phone line), and only got Insta at 16 — but I had the password not her, so she could give out her @handle to people to connect, but she would only go only into the fray once a week with us around (vs the zombie doom scroll scenario for instance). We will probably allow Snapchat soon since it’s becoming the new “basic” connection — I’ve not used it, so does it have a feed and likes?
My younger kids all have iPads and the 13 year old had an iPhone — they use them for music and audio books so end up in their rooms even at night. I don’t love that, but I have on tight screentime so I hope that is helping a bit.
I wish there was a good device for ONLY music and audio books, like a souped up iPod. I locked down enough I think her iPad is limited to that, but it’s not obvious. We tried Alexa devices but navigating audio books is impossible and even song selection was tedious. Kindles could almost do it but we are Apple Music family and don’t think there’s and app, and the audio book library app is finicky, and I find kindles pretty kludgy in general.
> We will probably allow Snapchat soon since it’s becoming the new “basic” connection — I’ve not used it, so does it have a feed and likes?
Just an FYI, from the couple of times I've tried using it and been shown it by friends, Snapchat is essentially just as much of a feed-based social media as Instagram or anything else these days. It's not just a "basic connection" with DM'ing. Instagram also has a DM's page, and I know people who use the DM feature heavily, but that's obviously not the extent of Instagram.
(Part of the problem with drawing that line is that even apps that started out as private messaging only, such as Telegram or LINE, often eventually add public channels and stories where it turns into more of a feed.)
There are good devices for only music / audiobooks, but they're often aimed at younger kids. For example Yoto players (https://yotoplay.com/) or Toniebox (haven't used this one). Basically screenless, except for the number of the playlist.
You can use an app/website to create and upload playlist and couple them to your custom cards (so you don't have to spend money on buying loads of cards).
You don't. I have a baby and a teenager and the teenager is pretty mind-rotted even tho mild restrictions were in place. Kids don't exist in a vacuum and you will only have strong influence over them until they turn 12 or so in my experience. The environment they are in matters a lot. Other kids, etc.. I am very worried about the future of my baby. My main concern is that he'll have a hard time being useful since automation looks like it'll do everything soon enough. Purposeless people are not good.
My teenager has been involved with inappropriate texting with an assuming friend and the textual contents were, quite frankly, disturbing. Therapists say that this is normal these days. Our teen has refused to stop being friends with this person and even suggested that we just get over it. To that end, her phone is locked down with ScreenTime limits but she's somehow getting more time.
The influence of other classmates cannot be underestimated.
Hearing from therapists and other parents that we're doing the best we can is super fucking frustrating because our best isn't amounting to jack shit.
Every kid is different though. Our youngest doesn't seem like he'll be much of a problem but we'll see.
I guess I'll end this mini rant with: good luck and godspeed.
Therapists can be super hit-and-miss. Like schoolteachers, they may seem like they should be domain experts, but they're often just normal people working a job. And it's extremely frustrating to think you're doing the right thing by going to get help (be it for yourself or others), only to be told that there's nothing to be done, not even a suggestion.
They have never had unmonitored access to the internet. Now that they're older, the <18yo boy has a dumb phone for communication, and our >18yo daughter has an older iPhone she only uses for comms and directions.
They have also not ever had access to drugs, alcohol, or modern cinematic fiction, because that would have similarly negative effects on their development as compassionate human beings. They have also not hung out with children raised in this compassionless media landscape.
Remember, people, that your tech overlords don't give a sh_t about any of you, except insofar as they can make a buck off of you. They don't care one bit about your happiness or the misery their products cause; they only care that you can't prove that they caused those harms.
They don't care that their "bitcoin"s are burning up our already-overheating Earth. They don't care that their LLMs are consuming massive amounts of water and electricity. They have sold our children's future for a small price.
And they have the temerity to call us "woke" for waking up to the fact that our world is run by callous, unscrupulous scoundrels.
Compassion is the essense of humanity. Without it, we are just very talented animals perpetuating dumb pack warfare amongst packs and within our pack, often for a buck.
We watch some older movies, occasionally, but no TV, except for the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 80's and 90's.
They haven't been inundated with adult shows with their sexy content/jokes and/or violence and bad folks of various degrees. They have gotten the flavor of the kinds of bad people can be from the Sherlock Holmes bad guys and women. They don't need Hannibal Lecter or his ilk and those kinds of movies that I grew up with.
Our daughter works on her crafts and our son on his chess. And we watch European football (soccer) highlights, where they get plenty of over-acting from those guys ;-) We also watch some select YouTube videos from time-to-time.
Two buddies and I built a private “landline” network for their kids (~9 year olds) and their kids’ friends. We used analog phones and VoIP components, so there’s no screens or anything like that. It’s been cool seeing kids go from begging to use the family iPad after school to running to the home phone to dial their friends.
We ended up turning it into a network others can join[1] after other families started to ask about it. Having over a hundred local families join within a few weeks has given me hope that the next generation isn’t just condemned to live in a social-media-saturated hell, or that smartphones will inevitably be a part of kids’ lives earlier and earlier.
[1] https://tincan.kids/ – Disclosure: it’s not free, but we’ve tried to make it low-cost.
You could try out the https://wisephone.com to see if that helps. It doesn't allow social media, but it does allow apps that are tools to get a job done. I think if you let your kids experience boredom, they'd be sad and potentially spiteful, but it's what they need. Kids need to experience boredom. That's when the best experiences and ideas happen.
It should worry you. There are dreadful things happening in these spaces, and they are of such sophistication that children, and even many adults cannot fully ascertain.
The problem you describe is a cursed problem. You have so many malign influences being exposed that the only rational approach is to teach them as much as you can early to recognize and appropriately deal with these things.
That is easier said than done because at its core, you effectively have to teach your children how to lie, so they can recognize and discern the sophisticated lies.
There is also an element of biology, we call it the age of reason because there's a point where reason emerges, and prior to that point it isn't possible.
Prior to that age, they shouldn't be exposed. That will require a monumental amount of work because these influences are everywhere. Even in the Family movies (especially Pixar).
I would start following a classical education curricula (Trivium/Quadrivium) which includes philosophy, aristotle-in logic, Method, and reason.
Following that, there should also be education on perceptual blindspots, and its intrinsic link to communication, as well as how distorted reflected appraisal works (and its impacts). These are blindspot biases we all have as humans, and they will need to know and recognize the limits to defend themselves.
Robert Cialdini wrote a book on the levers of Influence. Communications should roughly follow an Intro course that you see in college with particular emphasis on perception, uniquely shared meaning, deceitful or manipulative structures, with guided exposure towards the end, relating to deceitful, misleading, and false narratives.
The basis requirements for torture should also be taught, so they can recognize it when it happens to them. Coercion should be fully understood so they are not helpless when its eventually applied to them. This should also include how you handle people who lie and how to case-build, and employ countermeasures in such areas.
Being capable of retaining rational thought under applied stress at higher amounts than others, will offer them the best chance at survival.
Fwiw, I don't have kids but my two nephews went to a Waldorf school K-12 (graduating this year).
They are by far the most well-adjusted young men I'm around. Excelling academically, sports, volunteering, lots of interest in the outdoors, part-time jobs, all of their own volition. Barely ever catch them on a cell phone, despite having their own with unrestricted access for a while now at this point. It might be worth looking into some of that school's principles around gradual introduction of technology specifically (I know there is some other controversial stuff you can ignore).
Although... I do think the benefit in their case is in part due to everyone in their grade having had the same rules in years prior. So, it may be difficult to replicate in an environment where phones are ubiquitous by middle school.
We can maybe borrow from some past generational issues, but it seems old forms of media and societal problems are growing worse (e.g bullying, self-esteem, harmful cliques, peer-pressure, etc), or are certain areas getting better (e.g. respecting different cultures and differences, etc.)
1990's: TV, Games (e.g. consoles), ...
2000's: Internet, TV, Games, ...
2010's: Social Media, Games, Streaming Content, ...
2020's: Social Media, Games, Streaming Content, ...
I have to respect all the parents at this time learning to deal with such changes and no past to learn from with the technological changes. Was there ever a time destructive to "reading books too much" (e.g. bookworm)?
Would love to hear thoughts (ideas?) for what ought to be done for a new generation of children being born. What can we learn from the past here and what are some ideas of the correct approaches? Not 100% convinced about banning devices until some later time since technology is being integrated also in classrooms, so I wonder if that hinders growth.
Our strategy has been limited access, and I feel it’s not a great one. There’s a constant desire to be on a device and a large inability to think of what else they could be doing. Not helped by being a single child and papa not always feeling up to playing pretend Pokémon.
At the same time, it could be far worse. Whenever there are other kids outside/to play with they really easily fall back into a pattern of pure play. We’ve had whole days of just playing basketball too.
I’m largely resentful of my inability to play with devices when I was younger (see how well I turned out despite my parents saying I shouldn’t look at screens too much), and it affects the way I approach this thing.
It's been a challenge to me to figure out what's too much. If you let them, they will spend hours watching YouTube shorts, or tiktoks. I've removed YouTube from our TV for that reason. Also the devices are locked down using Google family, plus the screen pin code is only known by the parents. One of the most wholesome digital experiences I've seen is setting up a Minecraft server, and watching the kids have a build battle. You do need to set up grief prevention though, they will try to vandalize each other.
>However, it's undeniable that at that age it's all about fitting in and it would likely make them feel like a bit of an outcast if I were to limit them from being a part of it, l
Should homeschool. The elimination of peer pressure makes alot of these choices dead simple. "But all the other 11 yr olds are going to the 3am tattoo orgy" just isn't a counter-argument I'll ever hear in my household.
The real trouble is that you're constantly running around playing whackamole with the router, there must be 3 or 4 dozen social media platforms I have to police. And Youtube, like it or not, is probably essential, so it can't be blocked really... my daughter is using it today to learn to sharpen knives (wasn't a boy scout, never learned it myself). Though, last week I expected that she'd want to use it for cheesemaking, but she worked from a written-word recipe (was kind of proud of that). Best advice for Youtube is to just try to keep an eye on what they gravitate to when watching and steer them away from the garbage.
Homeschooling without a ton of extracurriculars with interaction with children their age makes your kids weird. It completely stunts their ability to socialize.
I did fencing as a kid. It was basically a 50/50 split between homeschooled kids and private school kids. It was immediately obvious which were which, and the friend groups that formed were made almost exclusively of the private school kids and the smattering of public school kids.
If you're restricting your children's social life sufficiently to avoid peer pressure, you're causing irreparable harm.
>The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
I've heard this claimed many times. But I also went to school with hundreds of other children, and I remember high school enough to know that many end up weird regardless. I don't think it's the homeschooling that does this.
I hear people whine about school shootings and that it's such a big problem that it must absolutely be solved, but on the other end "don't keep your children out of school they might end up weird" strikes me sort of strange. That's really your biggest concern?
>If you're restricting your children's social life sufficiently to avoid peer pressure, you're causing irreparable harm.
I've seen zero evidence that supports this hypothesis.
Exactly, and additionally, it's not just about putting them into extracurriculars. You have to let them go outside and make friends without adult organization because that's what it's going to be like once they grow up and don't have your (or some organization's) help on every step. If you don't let them do this, you're hindering their ability to learn to make friends on their own. Which in turn is where the peer pressure eventually kicks in, because, "hey, all those kids outside..."
> The elimination of peer pressure makes alot of these choices dead simple.
Except you're not really eliminating any peer pressure unless you also lock them in your house for their entire childhood life. The moment they go out (alone or in your company), the peer pressure will kick in simply because "oh look they're all on those phones and I'm not".
My son's best friend goes to the same judo class he does. We're invited over there for holidays and other celebrations quite often. He doesn't have a phone either. They have a few chickens and some rabbits. He likes going out and seeing the animals.
We simply don't hang out with the same sort of people, nor do we let our children do so, as you do.
Having kids in the near future. Wife and I agreed to "just say no" until they're 17 or 18.
We've also decided it's important to lead by example. I assume that any adult saying "kids need social media to not get bullied" or "we can't tell them no" is using it heavily themselves. We could be wrong, but we'll see.
At a young age, have strict rules. Example: they can watch stuff on a phone/tablet only at the doctors or at an airport (or on a plane.) That works for us.
Let them watch something in the car only ONCE, and they'll be sure to remind you that "watching in the car is ok."
I'm thinking ahead of this myself for my kids' sake. Some approaches I'm considering:
- NextDNS with device rules/filtering (primarily for adult and malicious content). This also has monitoring capability, don't think I'll use it though.
- Social media restriction in the early years, but eventually allow access through a notebook. This is a more useful creative tool and will mediate passive consumption, as they won't carry it everywhere with them. Instead it's a log-in at home, when time permits.
- I can't imagine a scenario where my kids "need" a phone, but if so, dumbphones are an option
Some parents I guess will opt for overscheduling kids as an offset, but I think unstructured time is important. Just so long as it's not entirely spent on media consumption.
Mostly, right now I should be setting by example. In instances where kids are playing alone and I don't have to be hovering over them, I'm avoiding excessively reaching for the phone and instead pick up a book. Or do nothing.
They don't really have any interest in social media as we use them. It's likely there will be some other new form of social media, probably something more metaverse like Roblox or Minecraft.
As a kid, I remember we had these things on TV and people would dial on phones just to have messages show up on TV. It seems kind of the same with Gen Alpha and YouTube. There's all these things like Discord, but they feel more like being lonely in a group.
Our kids play Roblox but we don’t let them chat or add friends. They just have FaceTime on in the background while playing with school friends. Seems fun to me, and none of them appear to have become demented.
We give them access. They get bored of it because their friends aren't on it. They will swipe on TikTok, but it's missing the social aspect.
When is the last time you met anyone younger than 20 on Instagram? I'd be skeptical on that alone. Reddit and Discord still have teenagers, and those are the ones I would watch.
Influencers do exist in their lives but they seem exclusively from YouTube and Roblox. These tend to funnel into Discord and... wikis?
Things that went viral with my kids in 2024: Sprunki, The Amazing Digital Circus, Fundamental Paper Education. These are not popular on IG, FB, Twitter, TikTok, so I assume these platforms aren't popular with kids either.
Yeah, I find it completely implausible that kids wouldn’t have interest in social media. Perhaps the OP is using a very restrictive definition that excludes TikTok and instagram.
I meant as we use them. Exclusionary of the [HN crowd]. I don't think most of the ones we use market to children anyway. And social networks rely on a network effect to be useful.
They will certainly find a way to socialise on the internet, but unlikely in the form we're used to. I'm saying it's like giving antibiotics to viruses; most of the solutions we have will be ineffective because the next generation will be doing something different.
Many kids will have Roblox and learned to interact in worlds with others without texting, posting, or commenting. If you play mobile games, most even disable typing because of toxicity/language/app store restrictions, and they rely on emoting to communicate.
Mine aren’t teenagers yet, so we aren’t quite at the danger zone. So far we’ve been focused on letting them use devices in a controlled manner.
I’ve set up various network level controls via Pi-hole and opendns family shorties (obviously this is mostly dns based). YouTube and all the search engines are set to in strict mode.
The devices we have also have various restrictions on them. Kindle kids edition has been great- lots of options for games and videos but limited ability to get into stuff they shouldn’t. We also have iPads now, with the suite of family controls applied.
Our lives are complex enough that our kids have Apple Watches now, again with parent controls in place. It’s a good compromise- they can chat with thier friends in sms, but not the stuff that pushes content on you.
It’s not perfect, but we plan on not getting smart phones or allowing normal social media until like age 18
- Understands responsible use.
- Writes a log of when they use "screen time", including what they plan on doing (purpose + which sites/apps) and for how long. (with a max time limit per day)
- They only can use it in our common areas when we are around, with no expectation of privacy.
- Sets a timer and can self stop
> They only can use it in our common areas when we are around, with no expectation of privacy.
Sorry, but this just feels completely off-putting and I can tell you myself, if I were your kid, I'd find a way to get myself a phone, connect to some nearby Wi-Fi and use it all the time when you're not looking.
Sure, regulate it time and content-wise, but mandate they have absolutely no privacy doing things and it will likely backfire.
Screen Time (iOS), and teach them to think for themselves. It really depends on what kind of personality your kid(s) have too. Our son is a rule-follower, so it's generally not an issue once he gets past the initial annoyance of not being allowed to do/have something.
Isn’t the teachable moment to realize your kids are going to see those things no matter what I do? Kids on the internet see all sorts of stuff and almost all of them end up fine.
I would've ended up a lot more "fine" if my parents hadn't given up on parental controls almost immediately after I learned to circumvent them. Some of the things they'd have had to tell me would've been embarrassing for all parties involved, but I genuinely believe it would have improved my socialization and overall happiness during critical parts of my development, with ramifications continuing to this day. Instead, they took the opposite approach and praised me as "good with computers" when they failed to impart either voluntary discipline or mandatory access controls on my computer usage.
I do appreciate your overarching message, but I also agree with others that there is a ton to worry about, and I think it can be a disservice to assume things will work out "fine" when they could potentially work out better if parents make different choices. Things "working out fine" is more how to get to sleep at the end of the day when not everything has gone to plan, as opposed to the first line of defense.
> Things "working out fine" is more how to get to sleep at the end of the day when not everything has gone to plan
Yes I agree with this.
I mean look at most people’s lives. Have they all gone to plan? For the most part, no.
Every part of them could be better if they took different actions and made different choices. So what? They didn’t and they didn’t. They’ve got what they’ve got.
Why stress yourself out over what you could have done better when you’ve done good enough?
I actually agree with you that a vast majority of people are living sub-optimally in one way or another. I don't stress myself out over "most people's lives" because I have no stake in them. I do have a stake in my own life and my family's-- that's why it's to be "stressed out over."
As of right now, despite all appearances, my parents actually haven't "done good enough." Mistakenly thinking it was good enough if I was financially successful, they failed to properly socialize me. But they're on the same feel-good train as you and most of society, so they won't acknowledge it.
There’s no going back in time and assuming you are financially successful you’re in a very good position to learn how to socialize yourself.
Essentially everybody feels like their parents let them down in some way to some extent. Your parents could’ve socialized you properly and then you’d find some other way they let you down.
Additionally, I didn’t say that most people’s lives are suboptimal. I said that most people’s lives didn’t go according to plan. There’s a pretty significant difference.
My 7 year old gets access to YouTube and that is about 4 hours per week, split between Saturday morning and Sunday morning. His content is of his choice but we make sure he watches something interesting and we have discussions about what he watches: some cartoons and science shows or instructional videos. As far as social media goes, we try to keep it as far away as possible and instead fill his time with a lot of activities and sports and daily time spent outdoors. I noticed when screen time exceeds 4 hours a week he feels bored and having some minor mood issues.
Set clear boundaries for screen time, monitor content, encourage open communication, and promote offline activities to balance social media's influence on your children.
“Large, well-attended primary schools in more populous or affluent areas tend to have higher numbers [of pacts], whereas small primaries, grammar/secondary schools, or independent schools with fewer total pupils often appear with lower numbers.”
I definitely see a relationship in the data whereby affluent areas have a higher number of pacts. I wonder if this is due to stronger societal cohesion / shared norms in affluent areas?
Whereas in deprived areas in the UK there's more unassimilated immigration from cultural groups that self-segregate.
When kids were young (< 13), kept them off it for as long as possible. In fact, it was forbidden. Friends/colleagues thought I was a tyrant (and some thought I was an idiot) for trying to shield my kids this way, but those were the rules. Eventually, I had to capitulate. But even now, I regularly check in with the now much older kids to discourage worthless hours of doom-scrolling.
I have a kid (5~8 range) and what we did was to limit PC consumption, avoid getting our kid a tablet and cellphone. It has been really good and my kid still has his/her innocence intact. Hopefully this will continue until adolescence. We're also trying to put the kid in different outdoor activities as well as playing with him/her (chess, uno, etc...). It's not easy, but is doable.
I play Roblox with my kids age 11 and 6. I grew up with the original Nintendo when I was seven. The older child is allowed to use YouTube to look up learning videos and cat videos. Screen time is strictly limited to 15-30 minutes a day.
So we compromised on giving them devices/phones (with restricted access) but in return, got them to agree that they will not use social media of any kind at least until 18.
I think it is very difficult in today's world to prohibit completely. It may create more rebellion down the road and I like to be open with my kids. A little bit of device is not end of the world as long as you control it which we do.
I know they won’t understand, but the fact remains they are a 10 year old and can cry about it all they want but they are still a child and supposedly you are the adult. Who really runs your household?
Constantly reminding someone of your authority surely leads to resentment over time. Is it not basically a recipe for your kids systematically removing you from their life as they grow?
My kids aren't interested but as far as I can tell it doesn't have a huge impact on kids. And I don't believe there's any convincing research to support it's dangers. I tell my kids to not believe everything they see online but that's about it.
I don't do research, I'm saying there isn't any academic research to back it up. And some decent research saying it doesn't have much effect at all. And it's such a hot topic and subject to so much research, and there's been very little conclusive data to say much of anything. I'm pretty comfortable that it's not worth worrying about. My kids don't have screen time limits. They are not without their issues, but they are generally healthy and happy and doing well in school.
They did not have screen time without me watching with them, discussing what we were watching.
Also, paying for no ads was a big benefit, but we talk about ads to make sure they are prepared for the psychic assault.
It’s a non-stop, swash-buckling battle to get them to put down their phones and do literally anything IRL. Their attention has been completely hijacked, their childhood robbed from them, and I feel like it’s pretty much a total parent fail on my part. But it’s the same with all their friends too. Shameful and sad and just wrong
At the risk of ridicule, I think we need to incentivize kids/people to use social media less. Think, “Touch grass. Earn points.”
As a former teen who had parents try this, we were wily enough to find the relevant computer power cables quickly. And it's harder today.
You won't win this way. The kid will obtain a second device and you'll have both a screaming match and an uphill battle. Or they will mooch elsewhere and forget about seeing your kid.
My parents didn't let me have video games as a kid. Sure I could still play at a friends' house, but it was very different from having my own console or handheld.
3 thoughts, ordered from most concrete and practical to most speculative.
Concretely, how do I do this? My kids go to a Waldorf school. (waldorfeducation.org) Is it expensive? Yeah. But, among many other benefits, you're automatically joining a conspiracy of parents dead set against tech-ified childhood. (A HUGE number of whom, you know, _work in technology,_ which tells you something.)
Second, and more reflective: I find that as a general matter, I spend more time thinking about how to call my kids toward things rather than away from things. Yes, social media and TV and video games will fill attention voids. But only if there are voids. The stereotype is that a parent will try to keep kids from doing 12 million things, but really you spend your best parenting effort trying to get them to love or value about 4 things. If you succeed, avoiding destructive habits and behaviors is much easier.
Third, and most speculative but most optimistic: I think we have hit peak social media for teens. It feels a lot like that point with cigarettes where everyone was still addicted to nicotine but nobody was pretending it was cool or sexy anymore. If you don't have kids yet, then society has 10-15 years to get its act together on this stuff before your kid is in the really dangerous age range for bad mental health outcomes from being drowned in tech. Could it remain this bad? Sure. But it's (literally) a generation from now in every respect: culturally, technically, politically, and socially. There is momentum for reform at many levels: legislative, private, school-level, and social. You have time for several of those reforms to fail and iterate. Someone will have figured it out by then. You may have to move—or join a cult—but I promise your kid will be worth enough to you to go find those people and live among them.
This is an interesting question which will lead to interesting answers on its own right, but be aware that by the time you have children your worries will already be outdated.
Not putting your infant in front of a screen to shut them up is going to be an evergreen good recommendation, but social media will have changed drastically by the time your kids are old enough for it. More importantly, our attitudes around it will have changed. You can already see countries and communities adopting social media bans on children, so in ten years you can expect that the main things to worry about will be different. Today, I worry that adults just gobble up any misinformation they read regurgitated by some rando or an LLM without critical thinking.
My experience from parenting two children to adulthood and being way too lax about devices led me to roughly the following rules for the rest of my kids:
1. Absolutely no phones in bed at any point of the day. Dpublecheck at bedtime that the phone is where it's supposed to be.
2. I vet every app on the phone.
3. Web browser is whitelisted.
4. I vet every contact on signal/whatsapp. No other messaging apps.
5. When they get access to a computer, I let them know that I can know everything they do with it. Also, the computer is stationary in a central place in the house.
When they complain that their friends have more rights, I will lament the unfortunate situation where I cannot dictate the rules of other families.
I'll obviously revise these rules as they grow and I get the feeling that they can handle it. The default mode for parents must always be that they can not.
Ours are now a bit older - 17 and 20. So - on the one hand, I have no experience of kids who have lived an "always-digital" life. On the other, I feel I've learned quite a lot about how to think about this in a feasible / managed kind of way, and I think (?!) that we've emerged with two reasonably balanced kids who have both "real" and "digital" lives and a somewhat realistic world view. As a concerned nerd I've also been on the case from the beginning, worrying about it, trying different approaches, etc.
My strongest opinion is probably about the age that kids are exposed to this stuff, and the role that parents take (or - more often - don't take) in defining what is ok and what isn't ok. The headline here is that kids have too many gadgets and too much exposure to the online world, and they have this too young. IMO, it is not ok for a kid of 7 to be spending all their time looking at screens, let alone a kid of 3 or 4. I mean, really, I don't think it's ok for my son of 20 to be spending all his time looking at a screen either - but in that I now have limited (no) control :-)
In this - sorry - but parents of younger kids are often complicit. Granted, we all face huge pressure from all corners and I totally take on board that social media and the digital world in general is built in order to make us addicted, and our individual power is limited. But... parents often don't say no enough. It's understandable - they're tired, the kid is kicking off, pop a screen in front of them, job done. But - parenting is hard, and it's always been hard, and you have to work at it - whether it's learning to read, fixed bed times, eating vegetables. Letting your kid get away with stuff is going to bite you / them on the ass at some point. A screen is not a golden bullet, and as we all know it's also often actively harmful. So, sometimes you'll have to say no, and the kid will cry, and you'll be the bad guy - but that's ok. It's always been ok, it's not abusive, it's about setting sensible boundaries.
The thing is, you're not going to stunt your kids' social life or anything else by not letting them have a phone until they're 13 or 14. And - tough if they say "all my mates have them" - that's been the argument since I was a kid and Matt over the road had a Grifter and I didn't. My mum didn't take that shit back then and nor should parents now.
The "but all their friends are on there, it's how they communicate now" thing - I mean, yeh. But - if I'd spent 20 hours a day talking to my mates on the phone or even in person my mum would have (rightly) freaked out. It's not ok, and until they're 16 or 17, and even beyond! - it's ok to express your opinion and apply pressure as much as you can within the constraints of your world / network. After all, you're (probably) in charge of the PiHole, their phone payments, whatever - so you do have an element of control. And as the old trope says - "while you're living under my roof, you play by my rules"...
In practical terms - no phones in bedrooms, limited screen time, no screens (ever) at the table during mealtimes, some parental monitoring of what apps are installed, keeping tabs on email inboxes for younger kids. All the usual stuff.
Finally - lest I sound like a loon - all of this should be done with open dialogue, even from a very young age. Talking about access to pr0n, safeguarding, why unfettered access to social media isn't great, what harms this stuff may do, why you know better as a parent - all of this is best done in an open, friendly way. Open and friendly does not equal "parents are a pushover" - but this works best in my experience when you're very honest about why you have concerns and are applying the controls that you're applying.
I can already see a big difference between "kids" that are now 20 and those that are 10: parents are now way more aware of how nasty and exploitative social media are.
Ten years ago parents had zero issue handing their used phone to their kid when buying a new one. Now many parents have a "no phone whatsover until at least 13 years old" (some even pick an older age).
Schools too: it's very common now to have school with a very strict "phone stays in the locker or you get disciplined" policy.
I did buy my 10 y/o a "phonewatch" (I'm not calling it a "smartwatch" for it's really dumb). A real one, with its own SIM card (funnily enough it's a real, physical, SIM card, not an eSIM). So she can do what a phone what supposed to allow: give and receive phonecalls. Some people shall buy a dumbphone I guess. Works too. That watch's screen is so tiny and pathetic that it's impossible to anything with it: no TikTok. No Instagram. No nothing. (we're in control anyway, with an app on our phones, of what goes on the "phonewatch").
Kid knows that she won't have a phone before at least 13. Maybe 15. That's the deal.
The thing is: as a parent, you are the boss and you set up the rules. A kid is not the boss.
We're no luddite: she's also one hour of Nintendo Switch play per day. She can have fun solving "code monkey" coding puzzles on a computer. She's allowed to watch a few Minecraft vids.
But mindless media consumerism no a smartphone at 10 y/o, like some of the other kids at school are doing as soon as they're not at school? No way. We simply don't allow that.
> How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?
By being the boss.
P.S: as a sidenote good luck bypassing the DNS blocker I put in place without an admin account. On my LAN, I'm the boss too. No SIM: no SIM to put somewhere else. SIM subscriptions with monthly allowed data usage set to 0 bytes works darn well too (we've got one such SIM).
<< No SIM: no SIM to put somewhere else. SIM subscriptions with monthly allowed data usage set to 0 bytes works darn well too (we've got one such SIM).
Can you elaborate on that one a little? I wasn't aware of that option in US.
Four thoughts:
1. I've developed a analog->digital path for my kids. Before they can get a music player, they get a CD player. Before they get video games, they get board games. And then, for video games, before they get Super Mario Odyssey they get the original Super Mario Bros. Each of these "first they get" is a long period. Years long. Give them something that has limitations so they can truly explore it. Find the nooks and crannies of something. Make up their own weird little things within that limitation. And then, back to music, I want my kids to know what a musical album is, know how to savor the highs and the lows, how sometimes certain tracks mean more to you based on your mood or life-stage, then just an endless playlist of newness.
2. The gorilla in the room is that most adults can barely handle online media.
3. The other gorilla in the room is porn. Again, see #2.
4. The classic philosophers placed Prudence as the queen of virtues. What is prudence? It is essentially the ability to grasp reality. Why did they say that was most important? Because you couldn't use any of the other virtues if your didn't have a good grasp of reality (e.g. fortitude would be foolhardiness if you ran into a ill-conceived death thinking you were being brave).
You need to make sure you and your kids are able to grasp reality, not just the appearance of it.
Gorilla in the room are other f*ng parents.
You can prevent as much as you want but then kids go to school nd everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.
The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority.
Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead because we were 'better'. Other kids did drugs and drank, but we were better than that. Peer pressure didn't have much of an impact on me because I was raised to believe that I was better than 'that' for most values of 'that'. And my parents never had to force me on any of this—they just invited me to be a part of their exclusive club.
There might be a way around this that doesn't involve cultivating a mild condescension towards peers, but I can say from experience that the condescension does work!
My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing.
Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.
Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.
I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.
I think you trivialize the benefit of avoiding early-life-damaging activities like alcohol (one in six to one in ten drinkers become problem drinkers, destroying lives, drunk driving), drugs (visit an NA meeting or walk down certain streets in San Francisco), and early unwanted pregnancies (smashing dreams or leading to the morally challenging road of abortion).
The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.
Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.
Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.
And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.
On sex, sex is healthy, but you need contraceptives.
Alcohol it's a drug, with a literal letal withdrawal (delirium tremens). That's right. But I can't agree with your prudeness on sex.
I wish the American people began behaving like Europeans where sex is not taken like a drug or something harmful at all since decades.
If any, pregnancies are a thing because of the lack of sex education and safe learning/practicing.
I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.
> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented
The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.
Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.
When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.
> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.
> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.
Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.
Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.
> Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship.
Since when? Many kids grew up learning these things from interacting with other kids, or via the school of hard knocks.
I doubt it’s even 80% of the population that learned primarily from observing their parents.
It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them.
There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.
I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".
Homeschooling is too far for my liking. Kids really need to be around other kids. If anything, my siblings and I needed a bit more of that, because our neighborhood had 0 kids and my parents kept forcing us to hang out with their adult friends. But it was still ok, we still had real enough childhoods.
I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.
I can understand your POV perhaps surprisingly well, as my father was secular growing up and then chose to join Protestantism in college (against his parents wishes). I wonder if at the end of the day it's just teenagers wanting to rebel. My dad's parents were secular, so he became Christian, and I became secular again. I can definitely relate to not enjoying support groups where the suffering is "valorized" to a certain extent. I think I was mostly reacting to the sentiment of superiority in general, but that is also an interesting case because it is pretty clear that families like that tend to have better outcomes overall (at least in monetary terms). My POV is that WASP culture in general breeds these perspectives, and also reinforces them because of the monetary and social inertia.
The flip flopping of religion is maybe just that. It wasn't really the case for me, cause my parents were Catholic but became quietly atheist, and I didn't know until they started complaining to me. But it happens a lot.
It seems to work for WASP. Superiority (or I guess family pride) is also big where my parents are from, Iraq and Iran. But my parents didn't take it in moderation, so the outcome wasn't good in the end for them.
> Kids really need to be around other kids
they do not have to do that in school. My (home educated) kids did lots of classes and activities where they met other kids. A lot of schools tell kids "you are not here to socialise!" and have strict rules about what you do when which also limits interaction (at least here in the UK)>
They can also get some of this from non-school activities, but personally I would want it to happen during those ~7 hours they spend every day in school too. They'll even interact with other kids during class, just in an educational way (I hope).
Agreed. I was thinking more of home educated kids like mine who do not have a fixed seven hour day (you can cover what you do in school in a much shorter time if being taught one to one or teaching yourself).
Maybe you’re expecting too much from pithy life advice to avoid bad habits? It’s not a silver bullet guaranteed to solve serious problems such as mental illness.
Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit".
"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]
Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.
It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.
This truly works.
And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true?
So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest.
I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end.
They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow.
Another day to crush and a life to enjoy.
And I yearn to be even better tomorrow.
No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.
> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority.
Odd!
It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them.
Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.
Same.
I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO.
"I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school.
The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to.
The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.
"You do you" doesn't work at some point. The drinking kids will exclude the one kid who refuses, even if only passively (sober surrounded by drunk). It really matters who the peers are. Fortunately, there are always ways to find new peers.
What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but
“I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…”
It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation
It’s definitely not something that you should do on purpose
> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different"
That was basically my high-horse libertarian mindset in high school when I saw other kids using cannabis-- I straight-up said to at least one, "I'm not going to do that, but I don't mind if you do." I thought I was being socially liberal and polite.
Spoiler alert, everyone else "wanted to do something different" and no longer cared about me after I respectfully removed myself from "the cool stuff" without condemning it. Today, I'm much more vocally negative towards cannabis users.
> Today, I'm much more vocally negative towards cannabis users.
Why? That is bigotry I believe
Exactly, people don't live in isolation.
That's one way to make everyone around your kids hate them.
You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...
Agreed. There's a certain age where kids will parrot back whatever you tell them, to whoever they feel like telling. "My parents say you don't value your kids because you let them play video games all day" is a very efficient way to lose friends and alienate people.
I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.
This is SUCH an interesting comment. There’s a “homeschooling” post elsewhere in HN with a comment that espoused the exact opposite view as this one: raise your kids with humility and openness to other people and families.
Nothing beats "othering" the out-group members to really pull the tribe together!
I know this is a flip dismissal.
But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa.
In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale.
I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale.
A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
> "othering" the out-group members
This statement is othering me.
Politics 101
My family didn't exactly say "better," but they meant it.
Yeah, I put 'better' in scare quotes because we didn't use that word exactly, but that was definitely the idea. I realize now that that's the opposite of what a quote usually means, but too late now!
Same experience for me
For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.
I think you're on to something...
Yup. "Why didn't my kid get invited to that birthday? Oh, it was organized on Snapchat..."
We have a no phones in the bedroom and no phones past a certain time rule, but disconnecting entirely makes one a social pariah.
The one I heard was: "Dad, can you show me Minecraft? All my friends keep talking about Minecraft, but I don't understand it. I want to know more about Minecraft".
If you don't give the stuff to your kids, they get socially excluded.
The best we can do is to teach them how to use stuff in moderation. Show them how excessive usage can go bad: there are plenty of examples around, all the time.
<< disconnecting entirely makes one a social pariah.
Maybe, maybe not. The real question is.. do I really want my kid to associate with kids that are so heavily invested in social media. I know my personal answer to this. I even know my SO answer and the upcoming battles ahead.
It’s widespread enough your question boils down to “do I really want my kid to have friends”.
I will tell you what I told my colleague as to whether I am sad that having a big dog prevents family reunions or boyfiends coming over. Sometimes things just work out in our favor.
There's almost zero chance for that pretend scenario to happen, kid and parents intermingle all the time at drop off and other school activities, kids are pretty vocal about their birthday and who they want to be present, and their parents will find a way to get the message across, and the kid will know from school interactions anyway if they are invited, and relay the info to the parent.
Drop off in my area is a line of cars. No mingling. Activities are great if the kids share one, but plenty of friends don’t. By high school, parents tend not to be doing the organizing at all. Outside birthdays, the same thing happens with “hey wanna come over?” ad-hoc scenarios.
It isn’t a pretend scenario. We had to loosen up rules because it was happening to our kids.
> everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have
You can start the conversation with other parents at kindergarten pickup.
Each grade at our school has a pledge that kids & parents can sign to wait until eighth grade to let them have a smartphone. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated site like https://www.waituntil8th.org
My kids are still young but from what I've heard from families with older kids is that holding the line gets increasingly hard as they approach 8th grade. You have to be prepared to socially exclude families that let their underage children use smartphones or social media, the same way you wouldn't invite a family that lets their middle-schooler drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes to your kid's birthday party.
While you can never get everyone to agree to anything, as long as your kids have a critical mass of friends who don't have smartphones then not having one won't make them an outcast.
All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones. No exceptions. If I excluded those families my kid wouldn’t be allowed to have friends. Best I can do is take the other kids phones away after a certain number of screen hours at my house.
Limiting screen time is an exceptionally challenging task because of the many loopholes and bugs in parental controls, and my lack of direct control over the chromebooks the schools issue.
Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
> All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones
My condolences. I agree that it's too late once you hit a tipping point and a critical mass of their friends have smartphones. At that point you have to fall back to weaker backup defenses like parental controls and limiting screen time. The point of Wait Until 8th is to provide a little more time to let them form their own self-image and build up their ability to manage their attention and information diet.
> Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
Instead of trying to predict the "correct" set you can just lobby everyone. Our public school has about a hundred kids per grade from K through 8th. Parents bring it up not just at school pickup but on playdates, the local listserv, the PTO newsletter, when new families move to the neighborhood, etc.
Apparently several older grades have managed to hold the line such that most kids in that grade didn't have smartphones until high school, and many didn't even have smartwatches or dumbphones.
I moved from the east coast to the Midwest during the pandemic. Any lobbying I would have done during early elementary years would have gone to waste.
And even if I hadn’t moved I would have had to lobby at not just my elementary school but the other two schools that feed into the same middle school.
It's okay to be "the bad guy". They're your kids, not your friends. Too many parents want to be buddies with their kids these days. That's just setting everyone up for failure.
My wife and I have a loving relationship with our kids but they are quite clear on the fact that we are not equals. The distinction will lessen as they reach adulthood and prove their responsibility.
I know that I have a great friendship as an adult with my parents, in part because they were parents while I was growing up. I had a friend ask what I would do in a situation and I wanted to yell be a parent! Said something nicer, but basically gently pointed out that sometimes that means giving up things you may want to do to show a good example. For instance, if you are always on social media then of course they will want to be too. Right now, you are the biggest influence on your children's life, even when they do not like something now that does not mean they will not thank you later. Anyway, I was debating building a house that wouldn't allow radio waves in so that everything has to be approved. One of the quotes I like is, "It is not the things that I had as a child that makes me the man I am today, but the things I did not." Went on a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to encourage that for most of history it was considered good for children to learn to interact well not with their peers but with their elders. This helps firm realistic expectations of what the majority of life will be like, the opposite of social media and much of the internet. Also, remember that if you address a topic with your child first you are the trusted expert, rather than someone else, in their minds.
Pretty much this. My farther was strict on on the kind of behavior he did not tolerate (and made them explicit early). No compromises. We were aware of the lines and the closer we tread to them, the more he took on the role of authority. But after we became adult and there was no need for that authority role, we became quite good friends with each other. My mother rarely had to take up on that role, but there was still clear separation between children and parents.
Exactly, I see all these idealized strategies around social media and children but the reality is nothing is going to overcome the peer pressure of being 12 years old and the only kid at school without a phone.
Until schools and government restrict phone ownership in a real way, parents are going to keep giving phones to their 8 year olds.
We choose an apple watch for this reason, that way we can still call them / locate them, they are part of their friends iMessage groups, but no social media apps are possible...
We just got Apple Watches for our 11 and 13 year olds. It is a decent middle ground, as up to now we’ve been very limiting of their screen time.
Our district has strict blocks in place at school, but most kids still already have phones. We did it for that reason and so so we don’t introduce phones at the same time they start driving (which is when we figured they’d actually need it)
One thing I wasn’t quite prepared for is kids use huge group chats that result in hundreds of messages a day. Learned how to mute discussions really quick. You can also limit access to groups with parental controls.
Key is talking to your kids regularly and helping them navigate life. Real and digital.
Another Gorilla is the schools, teachers and state-approved recommendations, that extend their reach even into private schools.
Imagine my frustration one day, when I've discovered that my kindergartner has full access to a brand-new, shiny iPad during class. Despite complaints from parents, the teacher refused to reduce iPad usage (or even activate Screen Distance and Screen Time controls on the iPad, or share usage statistics).
The only thing that I've learned, this is all in line with California’s state-approved computer literacy recommendations.
We specifically decided against the school that was closest to us because they give iPads in first grade. Even if the school is good, convenient and very well ranked, I don't want my kid to have a tablet until much later. I despise tablets because of the focus on consumption versus tinkering and creation and I think it's a distraction in a classroom that shouldn't be there.
I do give my son access to a computer but it's a based on misterfpga running the amiga core. Set up in such a way that he can explore and discover how things work from a time when computers were still relatively open.
> The only thing that I've learned, this is all in line with California’s state-approved computer literacy recommendations.
That's seriously fucked up!
100% this. Our kids were required to bring laptops to school for no particularly good reason, then allowed to zombie out on them in the library during lunch and free periods. Infuriating.
I understand that it is mostly regulated at the state level. I'm not sure about other states, but The Computer Science Standards for California Public Schools (Kindergarten through Grade Twelve) also tend to be followed by private schools. So they can claim their programs meet state requirements.
This brings computers into the classroom, and once they’re available, it is a slippery slope. It is easier for teachers to have students use semi-gamified "educational" apps rather than engage themselves.
Example for K-2 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/csstandards.pdf:
Yes, we have similar metrics in NSW (Australia). Agreed on the dynamics. There are also a lot if fairly feral edutech entrepreneurs playing special interest capture here - they obviously care more about selling their dubious education novelties than any one group cares about keeping them out. So our kids' schools are littered with semi-functioning "smart whiteboards" and a host of broken edutech apps.
There is a sister thread on HN currently asking why people homeschool. Welcome to the conversation.
It's not that simple. Had I cut my daughter off and not allowed a phone, she would never have made the connections with the good friends she has. I am convinced these phones are troubling our youth but cutting them off is not advised.
> and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.
Kids have been angry at their parents for parenting decisions since time immemorial. I don't think it's actually a big deal.
Agreed, you can't prevent them from having access to social media.
What you can do, though, is show them that there are tons of better things to do than swiping on their phone for hours. I don't know many kids who would rather watch videos than actually do something cool.
> Gorilla in the room are other f*ng parents
That's why some people prefer home schooling
“Devices or accounts they should not have”
Just because you think your kids should be limited to the Bible or no phones or no social media or no d&d or whatever arbitrary limits / moral panic you impose, does not extend those limits to other kids in any moral fashion. Those kids have full rights to have whatever they have and you are indeed the bad guy for your arbitrary limits if they are not common or inhibiting socially.
What there is 100% a precedent for prohibiting certain activities from minors because their brains are undeveloped.
In the future we will view a child spending hours a day on Tiktok how we currently view a kid smoking cigarettes. It is creating an entire generation of anxious, ADHD addled kids who struggle with school and focused work of any kind.
[citation needed] for evidence that somehow TikTok is at all responsible for causing adhd
It may not cause ADHD but it is certainly not doing anything good to their brains
Infinite feeds designed to learn the user's preferences and then show them endless content are bad for your attention span.
Doesn't have to be TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc. are all the same thing.
Bruh we have a decade of Research on this. Go type some words in to Google Scholar.
The closest thing I can find is in the floods cause rain sense, so please post the links
To put this in perspective, people said the same moral panic about tv and that has also been rigorously proven false yet disagreed with by laymen.
Radio was the original moral panic. Then television. Then video games. Now we're on to social media. But this time feels different. Why? Because even the adults are noticing they can't control themselves. Their attention in other things is suffering. Our brains are being trained to seek short dopamine hits from reels instead of entering a real flow state that solves fulfilling challenges.
Social media reel scrolling creates a "potato chip" kind of flow state... it seems to satisfy you in the moment, but even after you've consumed more than you thought you would, you're still unsatisfied. The introduction of a new medium is not novel, but the magnitude of the effect is.
TV and early computer games were not designed to drive addiction.
Well tv was looking for ways to attract people and also game makers.
But it wasn’t like it is with social media YT specifically designed to suck as much attention as possible. Games nowadays are include much more addictive mechanics like loot boxes.
TV is vastly different, it’s tailored to demographics of watchers and at the time the understanding of psychology when it comes to marketing and retention was substantially less developed than it is now.
These days, it also serves to encourage people to build worldviews around fictional scenarios much the same as social media encourages building worldviews around fictional information.
Implying it wasn’t always that way?
As you said, the psychology of marketing and retention is far more widespread today than it was when TV was invented. Would you agree news stations today report differently than they did 50 years ago? That's a very obvious transition. The transition of how fictional programming has changed is less obvious, but still there-- and the amount people watch (and allow it to shape their personalities) has changed, too.
ADHD is a real neurological condition that people are born with; not something learned via an app. Post links to research please.
No, those kids can't have whatever they have if they're under 13, 14 or 18, depending on what it is that they have.
They can.. if one of the following is true:
1. Their parents are doing exceptionally bad job 2. Their parents are doing exceptionally good job
Sadly, there is no way to tell, because not all kids are created equal. I know my parents had to basically remove our PC from our home ( how many parents have that option today? ) to put me and my siblings in line.
Unfortunately, this only adds to the problem, because bad parents tend to think they are great and vice-versa.
Do you have children? We are not bad parents just because we prohibit our children from doing something that is a "common" practice for many other kids in our circles. As for inhibiting socially, do you realize that multiple major publications have just been putting out articles in the past month about adults isolating more than ever? If anything, social media is a contributing factor to that social decline. I'm grateful my kids are young, and were not born a decade earlier because many kids I know that were born around that time have suffered with smartphone access. These are not arbitrary standards--it is a widely understood problem.
I find the overall approach fascinating, but I chuckled at this part because CDs are digital:
"I've developed a analog->digital path for my kids. Before they can get a music player, they get a CD player."
If anyone wants to start with analogue, perhaps start with vinyl, then cassette tape, and then CD. I had a cassette player before a record player, but vinyl seems easier to grok because you can use a steel needle to hear the sound, instead of the cartridge and amplifier.
I , of course, allow them to only sing music with their voices. Later we introduce percussive instruments, violin, and harpsichord.
By 18 they will be introduced to the piano forte.
The generous interpretation of analog in this case refers to the physicality of the CD, not the encoding of the information. It's about creating habits that instill presence and intentionality, not being a Luddite.
Yeah that point wasn't lost on me.
Maybe it's due to my age, but CDs don't seem that analog to me.
A few things CDs don't have that tapes and/or vinyl do:
- gradual degradation from repeated use
- need for maintenance (e.g. cleaning vinyl with a brush, or occasionally splicing a broken tape[0])
- time and effort needed to move to the next song or replay the current one (and my first tape deck didn't have a rewind button, so I had to eject the tape, flip the cassette, forward, then flip back and hope I had gotten to roughly the right point)
- the ability to directly manipulate the medium, e.g. using a hand to move the record slightly faster, or using a pencil to wind a tape
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXx2nq6dmpg
I get what scop meant. Family vehicles had cassette or 8-track players when I was a kid and I figured out how to use my parents' record player, but for the purposes of what he was getting at, CDs are a more "analog" experience than streaming music, and give you a feel for what playing an album is like. You have to physically put in and remove the disc to change the music, whereas streaming gives you any song at your fingertips.
I think it’s fair enough to call a CD analog because the data stream is nothing for than wave amplitudes. It doesn’t use a Fourier transform or compression or require “software”.
It does require a digital to analog converter, though.
I like the idea of vinyl for kids too, because of how tactile it is, but man, begin with a cheap player and cheap records. No matter how old they are, they will play with it like a toy.
The good news is my father's old slightly warped prog rock records are finally getting a lot of use.
Would not suggest vinyl for kids. That's a needle on the record player, it scratches everything up. Not easy to aim the arm to the beginning of the track.
Tapes are more foolproof. If you put them in the wrong way, the player won't close. And even though you can damage the actual tape part by mishandling it, you're not all that likely to do so.
Buy some cheap records and let them have fun. Many turntables have a push button start, no need to aim anything.
Heh, you’re indeed right. I use analog in a very loose sense, perhaps better said as “tactile”. As in “I take a CD out of the case, I open my player, I put the CD in the case, I use physical buttons to move one track at a time”.
Are they allowed to play games at other kid's houses? Like, if they're at their friend's house and everyone is playing Super Smash Bros together, but they haven't "graduated" out of the board game phase, will they get in trouble for joining in?
In theory I like your idea, but there are so many "edge cases" that make it a challenging thing to implement, and something that could backfire if its too strict.
Good question. Yes they can play. The main absolute no-go activity with friends is something with exploration on the internet. That includes things like YT kids. But, hey you want to play Smash Bros even though we don’t at home, sure have fun!
These are not hard and fast rules, more of a system. Our youngest plays video games much younger than our oldest kid, since we have video games in the house now and didn’t with your first. However, I still make sure my youngest is getting plenty of tactile/analog play in as the majority of time spent.
This is how we handle it as well. We were at friends' last night and the older kids had the N64 out. The older kids reported that ours just wanted to be read to the whole time, but early doses of things we intend to introduce anyway (video games predating modern addictive mechanics) are fine at that frequency.
We are mindful of potential Pandora's boxes though. You can't ban everything unhealthy without causing long term issues. You strive though to only introduce things when they're developmentally ready to cope with it, even if that means restrictions on yourself as an adult.
You work to constantly provide good examples via your own life, compelling narratives, etc. of people who exemplify the virtues you want to instill. That's how you help shape (the best you can) the life of someone with an innate identity to, when necessary, "just say no", or simply be uninterested in and unswayed by things that don't conform to their value system.
They aren't stifled by rules and wrestling with temptation--not valuing YT Kids is just who they are.
I like it! Thanks for the explanation of your process.
This is way too slow and thus will be only effective in baiting your kids to try it early or harder. Or give them an anti-tech superiority complex which is counterproductive.
I'd say you need to start actually explaining how things work on these more advanced platforms immediately, as well as healthy patterns in use so they do not get sucked into it forever. And that these things are tools. It can be done ELI3, though it's not easy. There are resources abound.
> anti-tech superiority complex which is counterproductive
I didn't have a phone until significantly after my peers, so I used our family computer, Instagram's undocumented API, and a variety of SMS forwarding solutions to keep in touch with my friends, which I think definitely sparked my interest in hacking and a career in software.
I developed a superiority complex, but it was more anti-conformity and pro-hacking than anything.
This complex is deserved.
My kids play Minecraft and Sonic all the time these days. The key is my kids have developed a sense of how some things are different than others and that is good and also bad. It’s a system that allows and encourages discussion.
How do you explain these kind of ideas to a three-year-old?
#1 is exactly what we're doing with ours. The little one understands cassettes and the concept of an audiobook or a Welles radio drama (sometimes MP3/CD, but I record custom cassettes too).
I have a millenium-era iMac set up as the family computer in anticipation of introductory computing when old enough (probably soon) and learning that digital entertainment is a state of mind and place you go to for a time, and then shut down and do something else. It's in the living room and off, so right now we're just building familiarity with it and exploring the keyboard, mouse, etc. and mimicking dad. Currently the little one -loves- the physical interaction of a typewriter and requests one more than a keyboard (but loose keyboards are fun too!).
The TV is a projector screen that recedes into the ceiling. Total screen time for them in the home right now over the past ~2.5y is probably...3 hours? Maybe?
My daily driver mobile is a black and white PDA and almost never a phone. I don't think my toddler has -ever- asked me for my phone and certainly wouldn't think to request, e.g. a video on it. Entertainment comes from our books, legos, and trains.
My theory is an accelerated progression through history. Mastering technology means understanding where it came from. It takes the shine off the modern rectangle of doom if you can place it in time and space and your first habits aren't built around it.
To @ozim's point, the issue is what has been normalized in broader society and so, yeah, we've clearly figured out touchscreens and plenty of local places for kids have unnecessary TVs. The concerns of other kids/parents introducing things to ours too early is mitigated by building a core [home]school and social group who shares enough common values. The differences between our respective households become learning opportunities for everyone.
What's fantastic is that I can go to the grocery store or sit in a restaurant for an hour and a half (and even better, two flights with a layover--with effort) with no tantrum from a toddler and no technology. Just...not even a thought that enters.
> 2. The gorilla in the room is that most adults can barely handle online media.
I think this is the huge one. Kids can spot hypocrisy easily. You can't convince a kid to not get addicted to social media if you yourself are addicted. Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
I do it by 1. not using social media and 2. when I do use my phone, set a good example by visibly using it for a specific purpose, putting it down after I'm done doing the task. Rather than just sitting there like a zombie scrolling and "consuming content." I'm deliberately trying not to normalize sitting there scrolling your phone, oblivious to the world around you. You can't hide this entirely because every time you go out into the world, you see adults everywhere zoned out mesmerized by their phones.
> Just like children of smokers know their smoking parents telling them not to smoke are full of shit.
Wait. Surely these aren't the same. My dad smoked and always told us he'd kick our ass if we started smoking. From as young as I can remember, I understood it was bad and that he was addicted, he had tried, and would continue to try to quit numerous times. He didn't often smoke in front of us when we were young. He passed away before my own kids were born. Emphphysema. At no stage in my life did I ever have any desire to smoke.
However, parents using their phone in front of their kids all the time. Well it's not obviously harming them, as far as the kids are concerned. There are also plenty of legitimate uses for technology. Kids can't discern between the two. Heck adults regularly can't.
Smoking by comparison is pretty freaking obviously a bad idea.
Just a thought: watching a parent leave to have a cigarette outside or something, from a child's perspective, isn't hugely damaging. The kid can't understand addiction nor lung cancer (and so on), so the kid's perception of "smoking = bad" is mostly only on how the kid themself feels.
With a phone, the kid can fell ignored, unheard, unengaged with the addicted parent for hours at a time, every single day.
Maybe kids will grow up thinking "hey, I don't wanna be a phone zombie like my daddy was," or something.
I begged my parents to quit smoking for a decade, and they finally did when I was 12.
I am so sensitive and triggered to smoke even as a middle aged man, it just smells so awful to me, even the hint on a smokers clothes makes me gag.
Now we have pot, which apparently I can smell across state lines?? And through my cars hepa filter? Devils weed indeed.
It's insane to me the bandwagon that's developed around cannabis after the bandwagon around tobacco turned out to have been so devastating. "Surely we're smarter this time," everyone thinks.
My wife reminds me of this. And as you both pointed out, it's not just social media, but the algorithmically fueled addiction to endless content. A relative told me their teenagers have to use Chromebooks in middle school, and all quizzes and tests and homework are done on the computer. Not only that, but if they finish a quiz or test in the classroom, they're allowed to sit there and watch YouTube right there in the classroom until the period is over! When I was in middle school, that free time was precious to me because I used it to make a dent in my homework so I'd have less to do after school. It boggles my mind that school administrators would have no clue that kids should have not unfettered access to stuff like YouTube in school. As a guy who has to work on computers most of the time, I'm very grateful my childhood had plenty of analog time, and life in the great outdoors on a daily basis!
When my oldest was going into middle school the district started providing devices for the kids to use in class. There was breathless hype about how this would usher in a new age of technological competence and improved pedagogy. I asked the district IT folks in attendance what types of controls they had in place to prevent misuse -- watching YouTube, open browsing of the web, etc. They had literally nothing in place.
You can guess how that went.
I love Vernor Vinge's works, but the worst prediction of his ever, just 180 degrees totally in the wrong direction, was _Rainbow's End_'s treatment of technology in education. His take (and this was as late as 2006!) was that unfettered access to technology would turn elementary students into a cohort of genius autodidacts. Fast forward to 2025 (coincidently the date the book is set in) and unfettered access to technology has turned children into feed-consuming zombies.
How far along this path are your kids?
What do you do when other kids are on social media or have advanced devices early? Your own kids will get exposed to those and be upset that they don’t have the same things or the same access to social media. Maybe they’ll even create secret profiles and build a wall between themselves and their parents. I feel like it’s hard to keep society away from one’s own children.
First of all we foster a very strong community of likeminded friends from school, church, and other activities. We don’t all see eye to eye on every little thing, but we have generally the same goal. Second of all is that we talk to our kids about it, we try and make these things a conversation.
FWIW we were homeschooling for quite awhile but they now go to a school that has a No-Phone policy.
Thanks. When you homeschool how do you create enough opportunities for social development?
I can only see this working if they're being homeschooled.
What does it mean to "handle online media?" How is it you would say "most adults" fall short of this?
"analog->digital path" thank you!
Excellent suggestions. I'd add
5. Teach them impulse control and practice delayed gratification.
Our kids? Hell, my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons. Our kids have zero access to it and never will. Their device usage is kept at a minimum and used for mostly educational or quality conversational purposes.
I hate how many people now, whenever we're around them everyone has their phones out scrolling through 30 sec videos. They want to show you things which aren't funny, aren't entertaining, aren't informative... it's damn near Idiocracy levels of content consumption.
[Insert video of someone badly dancing with caption that says "me."]
Personally, I find it bizarre and extremely boring.
Every week since she was about six months old, I've taken my daughter with me to get groceries. She's absolutely fascinated by the grocery store: the rolling cart, the colors and textures of produce ("ta-to!"), the other shoppers, the illustrations on packaging ("bear!"). I hand her items and give her their names. She shakes them, rotates them, repeats their names back to me.
But every time we go, I see at least one child my daughter's age or younger staring mindlessly at a phone or tablet, oblivious to their environment and the parent pushing their cart. It just seems sad.
I used to judge parents who resorted to tablets to keep their children quiet. I don't really anymore. You don't know how exhausted the parents might be or how many hours they've already spent trying to entertain their kids in a more wholesome manner.
I've taken a 2 year old on vacation and some of that time is spent going to unique restaurants that take a couple of hours for a meal. My toddler would get bored and squirmy and would quickly ruin dinner for the entire restaurant. Same thing for airplanes. Of course I don't resort to it immediately but if talking, interacting, and other toys don't do the trick, iPad is a very useful tool in the arsenal. A carefully curated list of educational, offline content is acceptable in my opinion.
Grocery store, or any other short errand? Sure, that's too much.
Since you're getting some responses to this, I'll add to what we started.
It's important to note: I think "judging" parents isn't productive. People don't understand there are an insane amount of variables involved in raising kids, especially day-to-day.
So even though, I agree with you: we have tried since the beginning to raise children who can go to museums, who can read for long hours, etc. On vacations, we always packed a big bag of books, mini-games, etc. This will keep little kids busy for hours.
The BIG part though...
Really, sometimes you simply have to let stuff happen. Part of being a parent is engaging your child when they're frustrated and bored, NOT getting rid of them. It's a HUGE part... walking with them outside to talk through their feelings and your expectations.
Is it a pain in the ass? Absolutely. Is it one of the most valuable things you'll ever do with them? Without question.
I've walked out of plenty of places to deal with my kid being frustrated. And sometimes we're in a restaurant for the first time in months and he's getting bored and antsy after an hour and a half and we'll put up some Bluey on my phone while we finish off desert. You win some, you loose some.
It is possible to do without tablets/phones. It means you can’t do 2 hour dinners for the first 5 years. Always have a parent ready to walk outside.
Once the child is 5 they will sit and talk to you for hours, do puzzles, and play games.
I've seen a wide spectrum in that. There are those that only wheel out the mind-numbing Youtube videos as a last resort, but I have seen other parents where the kid basically never has dinner without staring at a screen.
I took my 1 year old camping this weekend without my wife. I plopped him in the car seat and put on a Ms. Rachel video so that he would be quiet/calm while I packed up the campsite.
I felt a little bad resorting to using a video like that to "control" him, but then I carried him on a 3 mile hike where he spent the whole time looking at the trees, before eventually falling asleep.
I'm hoping that as he grows up I can just teach him to have a healthy relationship with things like social media and use it like anything else for entertainment.
seems like you have to learn it first, how else is he supposed to learn that?
Man, if you don't want to deal with the challenges of children, why have kids? I don't lie to myself, I know I couldn't do it and I didn't.
Maybe you just don't get to go out for dinner or ride on planes until they don't need to be hypnotized with a screen? You know it's bad for them but you're putting your comforts and freedoms above theirs and everybody else's.
I can't help but feel like the next generation has been completely fucked.
I feel like this mindset is part of why so many people are nervous about having kids, and I couldn't disagree with it more.
Your kid is not an optimization problem, they're a part of your family. If you want to do something unique that's going to bore your kids, it's fine to give them something to do; a half hour of screen time while you enjoy that fancy restaurant while traveling is fine. Your kid will be fine.
Sometimes you should put your comforts and freedoms above your kid's. You are not their servant, you are your own person who has your own wants and needs, and those get to win out sometimes. If your kid throws a tantrum when you're in an art museum, yeah, try to discipline them and calm them down and teach them. If you have a rare opportunity to visit a museum you've always wanted to, though, then it's fine to lose a battle or two here or there if the alternative is missing out on unique experiences that you value.
There are sacrifices to being a parent for sure, but the mindset that it's taboo to allow anything to happen that's not immediately in the best long-term developmental interest of your child is mind-boggling to me. Don't raise your kids in front of screens, but being a parent isn't some phase change that means you have to abandon all your interests and dreams and desires; it just means there's one more person whose interests and dreams and desires you have to care about now.
This is not the typical coastal educated elite liberal mindset. The social pressure to treat birth as a permanent phase change (good term) is immense.
If you can't deal with the challenges of being on a plane where someone else's kids are screaming, maybe you just don't get to go on commercial flights. Just charter a jet.
Non-parents always have all the answers about how kids should be raised.
Don’t judge until you’ve been there. Screens are more of a last resort for my family but we do use them. We avoid most activities where kids will bore quickly but it’s impossible to avoid all situations like that.
This is so off-base I don't even know where to begin. "Maybe you just don't get to ... ride on planes" -- so the kids never get to meet their grandparents or great-grandparents who are too unwell to make the trip because you won't give them a screen for an hour or two? Like everything else in life, dealing with screens is a balance. Every day for multiple hours is too much; a couple hours on twice-yearly trips is not going to have any effect on them.
We haven't had to resort to an iPad yet, but I won't rule it out eventually. Especially on a long trip.
However, everyday errands just shouldn't require extended screen time. Children are naturally curious, making it even more surprising when one is glued to a screen instead of investigating their surroundings.
Yeah I don't judge other parents, this stuff is hard.
We do use downloaded stuff on netflix on flights or rarely long drives if we need to keep them awake. But we use colouring, activity books etc on planes before resorting to Netflix.
To be honest, sometimes I feel that if they are on a device too much they just get frustrated and wound up anyway, so you end up shooting yourself in the foot a bit.
Having said that we do let them watch TV at home. If you're parenting alone, sometimes it's the only option to get stuff done.
Yeah don't take a 2-year-old to a dinner like that. Do it later, when they are old enough to sit through it or get a sitter.
It's only a few years when they are this needy. You'll survive without exotic vacations and fancy restaurants for that time.
We live in HK where it's part of the culture to have restaurant meals with family from an early age. We started bringing him weekly around 4 months old. At least our son got quickly used to it and it's the same for a lot of our friends. They can handle 2 hours dinner without tablets...
I think it's culture dependent and maybe the fact that in most cases the food is in shared in the middle of the table makes it more engaging?
Ahh I just had to share that my 1 year old daughter also loves the grocery store. She doesn't want to leave the cart when it's time to go. Thanks for the comment.
Especially if they have a cart that’s a car or train.
People talk about kids being addicted, but I had to deal with my dad constantly showing me some Instagram video. Not necessarily a dumb video, but still not something I cared to watch.
let's not forget the parents addicted to tv shows yes they still exist
>my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons
do you not consider HN to be social media?
Oh ok, I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds those things idiotic, not fun and not useful
How old are your kids?
These type of people are the people who haven't realized they've been indoctrinated, addicted, and tortured.
They have been induced towards a corruption by dependency scheme in subtle ways, and as a result their rational thought has diminished without them realizing it.
This naturally happens in any totalitarian state where you become dependent on the state for your decisions and values.
Religion in a way used to help protect against this, but with the spread and rise of nihilism and pacifism, religion has taken a back seat especially given the recent controversy and destructive path orthodoxy is taking.
These are the values that are so widely promoted and embedded in things today, following a War and Peace philosophy, which is acceptance of evil, or rather towards inducing a wilful self-inflicted blindness towards evil.
You may find the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", by Ivan Ilyin, an enlightening read, written around the early 1900s, near the dawn of modern psychology. It discusses the topic of evil, in a objectively tied way (not delusion or mere opinion). It does this in a fairly refined way properly following rational principles, first with definition, and then building from there following Method, and the Hyper-rational practices of that generation. A translation to English only recently became available, it was originally written in Russian prior to and through the Bolshevik/Communist takeover.
There are aspects discussed that you can see were used incompletely in the design of the modern day prison system in the U.S and many other insights.
The book was published to refute War and Peace, since the philosophies written about in that book induce evil over time which follows in line with the Banality of evil (the complacent/slothful) becoming the radical evil (related to the Nazi's, and the Wannsee Conference). A semi-recent movie was produced in 2001, that uses the minutes taken at that conference to depict how it happened (quite excellently, albeit dark). Conspiracy(2001).
The problem with totalitarian regimes is people in these societies will attack those that threaten their belief systems, and that threat might include the imposition of the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.
See these authors for more material on the torture/menticide aspects: They are all experts in their fields, or have been recognized by established experts for the excellence of their published works.
Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind" (1950s) Robert Cialdini, "Influence" (1990s) Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism" (1950s)
I've 4 kids, the youngest is 11.
The rule in the house is; 1) no social media accounts until 13 and 2) one of your parents will be your 'friend' on that account.
This is actually a pretty great expression of "kids keep you young."
But, right now is right now and how kids communicate with each other is constantly changing - social media or not.
So, if you're not a parent to a tween or teens now - I'd say you have little to actually worry about as the landscape will be completely different in a decade.
> one of your parents will be your 'friend'
That doesn't do much since they will just keep the spicy posts hidden from the parent.
You're presuming a great deal here.
What am I presuming? Most social media platforms let you have post-level privacy settings.
If a kid wants to post something that they don't want their parents to see they can exclude them from seeing the post
It’s not necessarily about the parent being excluded. It’s about the kid, the kids friends, and the kids friends parents all knowing that a) bad behavior will get back to the parent and b) screenshots are forever.
It’s an entire community.
Another thing is how to help them learn self control in the face of the massively sophisticated research into how to get them hooked into SM. Allen Carr's book, Smart Phone Dumb Phone, seems pretty insightful and helps the reader understand the root psychological principles behind tech addiction
Perhaps that would be a helpful resource? Another Allen Carr book, Easy Way to Quit Smoking, has a reputation of helping smokers lose their cravings for cigarrettes after undersanding the falasies behind their cravings
Learning those principles at formative ages would probably go a long way
>I'd say you have little to actually worry about as the landscape will be completely different in a decade.
Could be a lot worse though. Imagine if VR/AR does take off and your social media feed is in your eyes 24/7 rather than just when you take out your phone.
VR/AR won't take off. It'll get better, if only in that our moral panic about it will evaporate as it did for comic books and video games.
Kids prefer being IRL with other kids w/ or w/o screens.
Grab any teenager from the street and ask to see their screen time usage on the phone. I bet when you subtract sleeping and school hours (assuming their school has banned phones in classrooms) it will still be nearly double digit hours.
So? There was a time when all the phone-based activities were separate objects and devices. But today, conveniently they’re all in a single device. Aggregate screen time is a useless measure and discrete screen time only matters to help diagnose when something has done wrong. If the kid is wildly successful what doors screen time matter?
That's looking at it with rose coloured glasses. And please don't come back with "maybe they are watching educational content on tik tok" because we all know that's not true.
>22% of US teenagers spend 2-3 hours a day on TikTok [1]
1. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/time-spent-on-tiktok
How much time is appropriate? Who decides? What _should_ they doing instead? Who decides? Where does the kids agency during their discretionary time end?
> Kids prefer being IRL with other kids w/ or w/o screens.
Who are these kids you speak of?
Last sentence is just…so inaccurate
We don't micromanage their online access, but we do try to encourage being online in healthy ways:
We did no smartphones before high school. (Have had zero problems with that in terms of their social acceptance) Also, no computers in their rooms - everything is done in more shared space, with monitors facing the rest of the room. We talk about what kinds of content to watch out for, how to think critically about it, and what kinds of content or people are more serious, that they need to let us know if they run into. (Stalkers, scammers, other such actively harmful stuff.)
That does give them enough freedom once they hit high school to be more secretive about what they do. But we feel that is also more appropriate as they grow older. There have been problems. When they occur, we talk openly about them and help them both resolve the problems and learn from them. We are big believers that wisdom comes from experience, and experience comes from doing, so we try to focus on letting them expand their autonomy as they grow up, while at the same time minimizing harm when mistakes are made and learning from them.
> Also, no computers in their rooms - everything is done in more shared space, with monitors facing the rest of the room.
Seconded.
I saw an older friend have a dedicated computer room for the desktops of everyone in his family. It was a family space where any family member could plunk down at any time.
We approach the same via a communal laptop in the kitchen.
I was a preteen getting into computers and programming when Anonymous were the 'cool kids' and all over the news. I remember being on their Wikipedia page, then following to the Wikipedia page for 4Chan. My elder cousin walked in behind me, looked at the screen, and said:
That website... Don't go on that website.
And I didn't!
My son is 4.
He's never used a screen in any significant way. No movies / TV / cellphones / iPads.
My spouse and I read to him a lot. A chapter or two a night from one of the Oz books (there are dozens of them, we're on the 8th one) or something similar.
Results so far? He has a very wide vocabulary, loves learning about the world around him and has almost zero interest in screens.
I hope that by the time he reaches social media age (whatever that is) that the fad has passed and people move on to something less toxic. Even if not, we'll make sure he's in lots of social groups and camps where the focus is doing things rather than spending time on a device.
We have limited access to devices for under ten. Even educational apps on tablets have strict time limits. Initially there is an emotional reaction to limits and we talk to them about who is in control. Them or the technology. We want them to have mastery over the tech so that they can put it down. Only when you can put it down and move on to a real world activity are you the one in control. Personal tech is a tool, a dangerous one. We would not hand car keys to a 5 year old and let them teach themselves how to drive. Recently my 13 year old asked for a blow torch to do some metal work. We explained the danger and over see the tool. He is totally absorbed in his craft, he has not asked for a phone. In a chat with a neighbour we mentioned the blow torch and said “ we find it to be less dangerous than social media on a smart phone. They stopped and said “yes, that is absolutely right.” We just got our 16 year old a smart phone but with limits. He needs the tool for work, orchestra communication and for maps of public transport. We are in a constant dialog about gaining personal freedom and responsibility. We have friends whose children are self harming due to bullying they have experienced on social media. It has been a deep discussion in their home. They are carefully walking their way forward but they regret not having more safety rails and discussion 2 years ago.
I’m of the opinion that we need to think of smart phones like power tools. And that there ought to be significant training and oversight and demonstrated understanding of risks and how to use the tool safely.
I’m just reflecting, I have scars on my hands and arms from power tool accidents, misuse. I wonder what scars are on my psyche from device use? Certainly some. Harder to pinpoint
I don't think this is a good place to go in with hard and fast rules. Every kid is different, everything change. What your kid wants and needs may be different from everyone else.
Having said that, my broad rule is to keep my kid from any social media where their peers rank them and give feedback. No FB, no Instagram, they can't host their own youtube channel, etc. That is where self-esteem goes to die.
I don't think I allow real-name accounts. I'm hyper-sensitive to online predators since a girl I know got assaulted by someone she met on 'words with friends'. My kids are lectured to boredom about personal identifying information and what not to reveal on the internet.
They are allowed Roblox and they spend a lot of time playing with their friends there. I'm happy with that, we do Roblox game night here ourselves.
Oh interesting, only echoes of Roblox I've ever heard were pretty negative but I haven't tried it (my son is still a bit too young for that) so I'm curious to hear something positive about it. What do you like about Roblox?
I feel like a YouTube channel is different. They might learn to create stuff and be self directed
The problem with posting to YT is kids might seek validation of their content from peers or strangers and that always comes with risks.
I seriously disagree that that is likely, and I think as a parent you could monitor the channel to make sure there’s no signs of that.
Or you could explain to them how people tend to lie on these sites about how they are.
Throttling it for very small kids is a maybe. Real name and other anti-dox stuff is also a good practice.
However you do need to also yeah kids that not everyone there is a predator or evil with examples, or they will get digital anxiety.
As a parent of an 11-year-old, messaging is the hardest thing to handle. If you allow kids to message their friends, their friends will send all sorts of inappropriate content, exposing them to essentially everything bad on the internet. If you don't allow kids to message their friends, then they will miss out on fun events that all of their friends are doing.
At least at our local public school, when I talk with parents of high schoolers, 100% of them have given up and allowed messaging.
So by 14 I think you really can't "shield them" from internet content. What you can do is fight back against the human desire to waste lots of time, by limiting screen time. I think that's the best we're going to get.
Do you have thoughts on allowing messaging but making it clear you have access to those same messaging accounts? E.g you have a backup iPhone signed into the same iCloud account as the kid and occasionally scroll through messages to check for bad stuff?
Yeah, I have tried it out, and that's why I am confident that 11-year-olds are happily sending each other every sort of bad thing that exists on the internet!
I can tell my own kid, hey it's really inappropriate to send out thing X to a group chat. But I can't really police all the other kids.
I can at least say, hey I saw this stupid rumor. You'd have to be a complete idiot to actually believe that story is true. But, you know, it feels like I am trying to shovel back the tide.
We have an iMessages WiFi AP that only allows iMessage and FaceTime.
Very easy to set up and you can then turn off general purpose internet without ostracizing them from their friends.
I think OP was saying the most damaging content is arriving via iMessage.
It might show link previews depending on how configured but likely the damaging content would be links to YouTube etc I imagine
how do you prevent images / videos from being sent via iMessage?
I do wonder what the dumb hammer of a blanket school ban is going to do. A bunch of states are trying that.
Most "school bans" that I have seen so far are actually things like, "A teacher-enforced official policy of no using phones during class." In other words, usually the same as the status quo, because what teacher says, "yes go ahead and use your phone while I'm talking to you".
The local public high school makes students put their phones in pouches during classes. It seems good at preventing distraction but doesn't really do much about kids wasting lots of time on social media, sharing terrible material on social media, communicating between classes, or after classes. Probably better than nothing.
Nothing dumb about it, unless you are not a parent. No reason for kids to be scrolling in school.
People are incredible inquisitive and intelligent about finding ways around bans. Kids are this, intensified. They literally have nothing but time.
Right but speed demons don't nullify the need for Stop Signs and Speed limits.
Give kids more - teach them media and how to use a computer. Help them find quality programming from a young age so when they are teens they can make informed choices.
Discuss with them values, your and other peoples.
Make time for them IRL, and do things together so they don't have to find fulfilment in digital arms.
While it might sound backwards, it's probably more effective than banning and hard rules in the long run.
Yes, you can isolate them from social media at home, but you have to acknowledge that it also means they will be missing out, won't be invited to things planned on there, will live under constant tension of "what are others talking on there?", all of which might actually stunt their (social) development more than just being on social media with no restrictions. You can take alternative approaches along the lines of "let them use computers first, then phones", but then you're no better than the parents forcing kids into a certain sport because of a personal preference.
I'm not saying don't ever tell them to go offline, just saying dialing down the restrictions a bit and actively providing alternatives-spending time with them-should go a long way. Spend time engaged with them, just generally show them the way-show them sports, activities, ... they can do with or without friends, offline. Lead by example is the term here.
To end this, I also know quite a few cases where the restrictions have backfired to the point the kid feels like they need to use up all precious daily screentime allowance, even tho they might have better things to do, just because it's so limited.
A good start is to avoid giving them a smartphone until they're in high school. And once they have a smartphone require them to get permission from you before installing any social media apps, with consequences if they don't follow the rules (take the phone away). Make the consequences known up front, rather than reactive so they know the guidelines regarding their phone use.
And whatever you do DO NOT give your child a handheld device (tablet or smartphone) before they're in high school. My wife and I are seeing parents give their two year olds a tablet which is absolutely detrimental to their development.
> I are seeing parents give their two year olds a tablet which is absolutely detrimental to their development.
My kid couldn't care less about using a tablet or other device if there is any other activity on the table. In other words, for them to reach the point of using, I have to be completely ignoring them.
Is it really the device that leads to developmental detriment, or parents who aren't involved in their childrens' lives?
Just because your child has been this way does not mean everyone’s is. I have a 3 year old and even though I have been very strict about screen time (tv or phone) - she watched her first cartoon just months before 2nd birthday - from the very beginning screens were hypnotizing for her. She would stop whatever she was doing once a screen was playing nearby. No amount of entertainment I would provide would make her look away. So it’s good for you that you don’t have this problem, but from my experience and from talking to others this is definitely a struggle for many.
For what it’s worth. Mine was like this at 3, but at 6 he’ll definitely take playing super saiyan over watching them on TV.
There's apps like Google Family Link which basically gives you and the child a contract and enforces that contract. Screen times on what days. What they install. The kind of media they can view on the YouTube on the device. Even if you change the policy, the child is informed.
Steve Jobs himself restricted the iPad from his own children way back in 2010: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...
I’ve got a friend who did this. His 13yr old daughter craved instagram and snuck access. The story sounded like parents of the previous generation catching their kids smoking and drinking.
I’m pretty sure the prohibition didn’t work and added the spice of forbidden. I don’t know the answer, but I suspect full prohibition isn’t it.
I've got a brother who did this. His son is about to graduate med school in the 98th percentile.
More seriously, it's not beyond the pale to introduce them to the internet. The more important thing is to put off handhelds for as long as possible.
>Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits,
At least on the iPhone, the parental controls are pretty fine-grained. Even if there was a way to have a web-only account on an Apple device, you can block those too (never used that feature though).
You're not going to be able to stop your kids from doing anything unless you shackle them up nightly. However, you can stop them from doing it while under your roof and that significantly curtails their ability to take anything too far.
Having caved on this idea, I 100% agree
I genuinely don't think the tech medium is the problem. There's good and educational software available on tablets just as there is on anything else.
While I've always been anti-tablet myself, and anti-phone for similar reasons (though why a kid would need a phone is beyond me at this stage), there's programs for literacy and learning available on the tablets that work just fine, as well as art, creativity and painting. The "secret" is just no access to the toxic: we have one tablet, my 5/6 year old loves reading-eggs and Minecraft but we have no social media and no YouTube and no purchases, plus the entire house is behind an ad blocking firewall. My kid is allowed to watch videos and access apps like ABC iView/kids, but from the open web they have to be ripped and placed on our local media share drive before they're viewable. No YouTube or YouTube kids obviously because it's a toxic cesspool.
My experience is that without the trash\addictive nonsense, while the kids are drawn to the iPad, they'll also self regulate a bit and move between other activities of they're available and get bored of spending all their time on the pad.
In his room I've just built him a Linux computer, and that's restricted both in time (can only log on to his account at certain hours), has no native web browser, and requires me to install programs and updates. He can access the games we approve but like everything else in the house it's basically a social media and almost ad free zone.
I've introduced him to modded Minecraft because it's basically Lego... And though it's frustrating that Microsoft took it over, we basically just ignore the Microsoft side of things and just operate on the free community modded side of things. I showed him how we could change his sword and I've got a whole modded world where we can set ourselves up and play on LAN together. The other game he loves at the moment is beyond all reason, a community made RTS game I've been involved with, and he just won his first match against the simple AI (though I did have to talk to the other Devs to allow us an account from the same IP so we could play together). The goal of all this is to give the message that technology is all about being a creative tool you choose to use to make what you want, not a medium about being a passive recipient for advertising or marketing or endless video consumption, feeds, recommendations or outrage cycles. No one needs any subscriptions or recommendations or likes or feeds. But there's nothing inherently toxic about a screen or a tablet, those are choices we make (or more accurately are pushed upon and chosen for us if we're not careful).
I think there's a non-zero chance that I'll be setting up a local server for the neighbourhood kids over the next year or two so they can all play together without worrying about the wider internet and I'll probably have to work to admin that in some way.
It can be done, but my take is that until your kid is through puberty their job is to learn how to navigate the real world, how to talk to people in person, and so on. You can give them technology but it has very minimal benefit compared to the alternative, that is if your home is full of books and you're reading to them regularly.
All that being said we're somewhat liberal with TV, and we'll introduce them to a PC in time. But for now the MO is real world skills and intelligence.
Jonathan Haidt also pointed to evidence that technology during the adolescence phase can wreak havoc. Particularly handhelds and social media.
A lot of parents at our school signed a “wait until 8” pledge to wait until 8th grade before getting them smartphones. This way there will be less social pressure from their friends to be connected. My assumption is that without a smartphone they won’t use social media.
Meanwhile I spent every minute of free time from 2000-2005 using phpbb, irc, and aim, on a big CRT and PC
Same, and most of it was wasted time. But at least it didn't follow me to school, or bed, or well everywhere.
I'm not sure completely shielding your child from screens is the best approach. I'll be attempting to have a visible space in the house where a laptop or tablet can be used. But they stay there.
Those aren't the same, but even those weren't good. I was on that stuff too, big waste of time that I wish I had back.
I did the same. But sometimes I wonder if that’s why I’m so unfocused today.
none of those were specifically engineered with the attention-economy in mind.
The demographics of those online were probably more healthy than today.
My kid didn't get access to Youtube until they were 12. It's fine otherwise now, but Youtube Shorts is a cesspool and it CANNOT be turned off in any way. There are no parental controls to limit or disable it.
Before that we did try Youtube Kids, but it's creepy AF. There's a ton of "this kid gets to buy EVERYTHING he wants!" -shit in there.
I decided I'd rather pay for _every_ streaming service, give the kid a child account in there and let them watch anything. It kinda worked. Their ability to tolerate the basic screaming jump-cutting Youtuber is close to zero.
I've had chats with them where they explicitly said that "X does interesting videos but they shout all the time so I don't want to watch them".
With Netflix, Disney+ and our local PBS equivalent I can sorta trust that the content is professionally made and even slightly educational.
The age limit for social media over here is 13 at the moment, we'll need to burn that bridge this summer. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and all that will be open after that. I'm not going to encourage that but we'll see what peer pressure does.
If you are fortunate enough, put your kid in private school where smartphones tend to be banned in elementary and sometimes up to middle school.
Beyond that, I don't intend to give my kids a device until they are 10. (Heavily restricted smart phone) and won't be allowed to social media until they are 13-14.
My home state of South Carolina just placed a statewide ban on smartphones for our public schools, which is a good thing because the private schools in my area are worse than the public ones
Mine are too small for any of this yet but I gave it some thought and here's what I have:
-Social media etc. are a means of avoiding one's emotions. Your job as a parent is to help your children process those so that they don't crave such distractions as much.
-Education is key. This is a huge topic, but one of the first things I taught my preschooler is that people do all kinds of things only because they want money. That is equally true in meatspace, as e.g. this enclosed playground we occasionally go to is dotted with shelves with toys that are, of course, not free, so if you want one you have to pay. I lost count how many things I explained with a short "they do it only because it brings them more money".
-It so happens that the worst brainrot is at the same time data-intensive, so data allowance is something I'm planning on introducing once the time comes. I sort of had this in my youth when my data plan was a whopping 1GB per month, so I had to be deliberate in my choice of entertainment.
As a final, optimistic note, it appears that generation alfa picked up on the fact that we, the parents, either try to distract them with screens or look at screens instead of paying attention to them. They don't like that one bit and my prediction is that their attitude towards this will be very much like my generation's towards our parents having the TV on at all times.
No phones or SM accounts for kids till they turn 18. Yes, there's a "fear" of being an outcast but they work their way around that quickly and if they have other things to spend time on, they'll be fine. The "need" for social media is mostly FOMO.
Do you have kids in double digits?
Our senior schools (from age 11, "6th grade" in US term) literally mandate a phone (not a computer, an actual phone) for school, both to use in class and to receive homework assignments.
That's ok, they can borrow a parent's phone.
In class though?
I'd be very concerned if a school relied on a smart phone even for class work.
Yet it's quite normal - at least in the three schools I know about
Yes. I have kids. I'm not in the US. My kids school sends homework using an app. I get it on my phone, take printouts etc. and my kids get the work done.
No phones period is stupid. Just get them a jitterbug or a startac
We have a basic feature phone at home which they take if they're going out just to stay in touch/emergencies etc. They don't have phones unsupervised at all times.
Star tacs don't work anymore, of course. Any alternative?
Lots of practical but low impact suggestions in this thread.
I think the only real answers involve large scale decoupling from the rapidly changing social norms. Can you cobble together a social group that will go Luddite with you? If not, can you join one?
A good cheater in such a group will prosper heavily due to being better informed and connected.
Game theoretically it's a loser proposition. Even with an intense price of shunning. It's happened in Amish communities many a time.
I was an outcast as a kid, and this was years before social media. I think I turned out alright regardless. Your social status as a pre-adult doesn't really matter at all once you join the real world.
That and I think kids not having any social media will become more and more common, so it's not going to be that big a deal.
But if you blame your parents' or guardians' overly restrictive dogma for your outcast status then it will likely turn into lifelong resentment. Would you want your kid to resent you?
The better alternative is to explore the net together with your children and show them that there is a world beyond typical social media which is far more interesting and rewarding to explore. Encourage them to foster trust and strong relationships with people from around the world.
> But if you blame your parents or guardians' overly restrictive dogma for your outcast status then it will likely turn into lifelong resentment. Would you want your kid to resent you?
That's not a good reason. Would you let your kid take up smoking, because they'd resent you if you said no?
Also: My parents wouldn't let me drive until at least a year after my peers got their licenses. I didn't like it, but I don't harbor a "lifelong resentment."
That is assuming socials are as dangerous as smoking.
Now they have their dangers of addiction, but that can indeed be worked out. As a safeguard, a rate limit filter is what I would recommend. Perhaps one that can recognize roughly the kind of content watched, so you can have a relevant talk.
The self esteem and self-dox part can be really dealt with by actually doing the thing together. Otherwise you will be at the mercy of peers. Don't kid yourself about how powerful your influence is.
It is absolutely not true that placing limits on your child will create lifelong resentment. This is an irrational fear on the parents’ part.
This bold and vague claim is easily countered by my own datapoint as someone who continues to deeply resent the restrictions placed upon them in an extremely dogmatic household. Not everyone is given guardians who have their best interest at heart.
My computer usage was surveilled and highly limited. My guardians feared the knowledge I could access via the internet. No personal computer, no television in my room. All media verified for dogmatic adherence before consumption. Personal belongings frequently searched and thrown away or broken. Any significant amount of money I saved up, stolen. I didn't even get to have a door for long stretches of time. I was surveilled by a network of narcissistic adults whose main interests were turning me into a good little Christian boy.
shrug I have an opinion about my mother, but not for one second do I doubt that she was making the best call she could make given the information she had at hand. How you feel passes, but the consequences of raising an idiot last yet another generation.
>Your social status as a pre-adult doesn't really matter at all once you join the real world.
Trauma stays.
No it doesn't. I was nerdy and "low status" in school. I laugh at most of the silly stuff I did or was done to me in school. I don't get the mentality of holding onto all that stuff forever.
That’s good for you. I’m the same, but… we’re here puttering around HN aren’t we? The ones that are not can’t really weigh in to offer a contrary opinion.
I was nerdy in school-- not necessarily "low status," because good grades were seen as good in my schools, but my social life was dangerously small and my self-esteem was trashed (in a "cover it up with arrogance to pretend it's by choice" kind of way). I am somewhat better today than I was then, but I'm still an incredibly unhappy person, and I trace many of the poor patterns I struggle to break out of to how I grew up.
"Leaving it all behind" is, to me, a cope that either pays off if you end up getting what you want later, or that doesn't and leaves you back where you started. Most importantly, every individual is different (or so I'm told), so just because it's worked for you doesn't mean it should be relied on.
As someone who was bullied in middle school (highlight includes being held down by 2 guys while someone else peed on me), trauma does stay.
I mean, I'm a relatively well balanced individual, I have a job, a family etc... But that doesn't mean that I didn't have to have therapy over it, that I didn't commit self harm and that I didn't experience trauma.
I'd rather my son not be a social outcast and experience that. And I do think that past a certain age, there's a need to conform a bit to society in order to integrate with it even if that means using social media at that age. That'll be with my guidance and strict limits but I don't think total abstinence is a solution.
> Your social status as a pre-adult doesn't really matter at all once you join the real world.
The way you feel during that time does though. It decides who you are as an adult.
but your competency and how you communicate does.
Are you implying that children need social media to develop competency and communication skills?
If all of your peers are talking about the stuff they saw on YouTube, but you’re not allowed to, this will naturally make you an outcast in that topic. Now, if almost everything they talk about in the internet, and you cannot relate to it at all, it will hinder your interpersonal skills, because you just don’t talk to your peers.
I hate how we got here, but watching my nephews go through this stuff made me realize you can’t cut the kids off completely. Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits, and slowly get the kids see how others function through it as well.
>I hate how we got here, but watching my nephews go through this stuff made me realize you can’t cut the kids off completely.
Mine are turning out fine. I don't want them to be like those other children, and I've kept them away from those children. Doesn't seem to have been a problem.
>Ideally, you would live in a community where all parents have agreed on the social media limits,
This is a matter of who you choose to socialize/fraternize with, not one of geography. But if you opt for public school, then you have no real choice in the matter.
Congratulations, you're raising future disgruntled outcast class of people who are not integrated with the society.
The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
It's happened many times.
>ongratulations, you're raising future disgruntled outcast class of people who are not integrated with the society.
This society is dying, nearly dead. Anyone who is integrated with it will die by extension. Only lunatics would want to be integrated with it. This society can't even be bothered to make more humans so that it can continue into the future... it wants to be dead.
My children aren't outcast, they have friends. Just not ones that would bully them because they didn't see the latest softcore porn on whatever the most popular social media happens to be today.
>The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
Uh huh. What if someone taught them that it was normal to possess firearms, or to be skilled at using them? Those crazy radicals. What if they were taught that the most fulfilling thing they could do in their life is to make a family of their own, and raise their children well? What if their teachers were so radical that they taught arithmetic and trig and calculus instead of helping them decide they were trans?
Everyone in this thread knows I'm right, even if they can't afford to agree openly. That's what this thread is... we know the society that our parents and ourselves have created is rotten and pathological, or we wouldn't be talking about how to insulate our children from it.
Society is really fine! I live among millions of people every day, and people are genuinely kind and nice on average. It's up to you how you want to perceive the world, but I wouldn't want my neighbours to ever think people around them are lunatics and etc.
I understand you're coming from a very American-specific point of view, which is very hard for me to comprehend. Growing up, I absolutely never had to worry (and now as well) about any of those topics. Even my nephews in public schools (US) are doing pretty decent maths stuff. I do think some of the things you've mentioned are mostly imaginary problems, but I can be wrong.
I'm not special. You're not special either. Nobody's really special. Yet we find ways to sit down, have a drink, go for a drive, or have sex from time to time. That being said, I have quite a few friends who had very restricted childhoods, and would never want my children to feel the same resentment as they do during our hang outs.
>Society is really fine!
Any healthy, long-term viable society has to prioritize one task above all others... making the replacement people that will be society once the current people die. Your society (if you choose to claim it) doesn't do this. Sub-replacement fertility. It's dying because of this. If you think that's fine, go for it.
>I live among millions of people every day
Sure. And each generation is about half the size of the previous. It will look fine, even crowded for awhile yet.
>I understand you're coming from a very American-specific point of view,
This is global. China has sub-replacement fertility. Korea and Japan have sub-replacement fertility. Europe has it, South America has it, India may have finally crept below replacement, but if it hasn't yet it will next year or the year after. This is everywhere. There's not a hidden corner of the world where it's not happening.
You judge people by the amount of kids they have? So like, if a couple has less than 3 kids, they’re awful people and shouldn’t be around?
Interesting take, if that’s the only way you look at people, and whether you want to be around them or not.
I agree we have fertility problems, but if people don’t have kids, well, that’s so not my business. Every person is different and has their priorities. If a person wants to have 0 or 10 kids, god speed to them.
> So like, if a couple has less than 3 kids, they’re awful people and shouldn’t be around?
Wow, what a strawman. No, that's not what he said.
What I will say, though, is if a "couple" has no kids (and does not plan to), they aren't contributing to continuing society and should not receive tax or other marriage benefits.
That's not a punishment, it's treating them the same as everyone else because they have the same burdens as anyone else (and can already take advantage of pooling resources for their earthly pleasure without society bankrolling it). Tax and other financial structure benefits for married couples were meant to encourage and support the raising of families (continuing society), and between several different (and individually well-meaning) social movements, we've lost the plot over the last half-century. Marriage has turned into "best friends with benefits +," which, again, is fine for people to choose if they want to see it that way, but does not deserve any subsidies.
You understand that majority of people still want to get married, and have a kid? And eventually most do. The problem with fertility is, nobody wants to have >=3 kids because of multiple reasons. So, society, by large, is fine, and people are decent even by weird standards that have been mentioned in this thread.
Anyways, I have no idea how this conversation eventually became a "everyone should have a ton of kids because otherwise society is doomed!", because my entire point was "by large, people are nice, we should strive to be around them, and learn from each other, instead of trying to actively exclude ourselves because we are better than them".
You simply don't understand math if you think that every couple (or even most couples, in practice) having only a single child is sustainable to infinity. You are the only person here who brought up the 3 number; 2 on average is (very obviously) all that's needed to sustain a population, and you chose a higher number (and applied it to the individual instead of as an average) to make the argument look unreasonable.
Also, your assertion that "eventually most do" have at least one kid is already close to statistically false in the US, and if current trends continue, will be false very soon (with the story being the same, or much worse, in all other first-world countries). Go check out /r/ChildFree on Reddit if you want to see just one of the many social movements surrounding this.
You’re correct, it’s not sustainable. But that also means the OP thinks anyone who doesn’t contribute to sustainable model (>=3 children) is an awful person.
Well, 2 is not sustainable on average right now, because we’re below replacement level, so we need to get the average up to like 3, then back down to 2.1 if we want somewhat same amount of people like right now.
Either way, judging people with their ability, want, or need to have children is kinda stupid. I have dear friends who are single, couples with no kids, couples with multiple kids and etc. Actively saying one choice is bad is the reason why some people might actually not want to be around those people. Let people make their own choices, and what they think is right to them.
Again, I’m saying this as a person who is planning to have children.
> that also means the OP thinks anyone who doesn’t contribute to sustainable model (>=3 children) is an awful person.
The OP did not say that, for one thing. You're the only one who's used the "awful people" phrase (which is what makes that a strawman, as I pointed out several comments ago).
OP would prefer to raise his kids to see reproduction as a positive aspect of life, as opposed to the current secular "wellll, you can do whatever you waaaant, but it's a whole lot easier and more fun if you just go ahead and kill your bloodline" that's a logical extension of your pseudo-enlightened "no one choice is better than the others" non-answer (only a logical extension, of course, when ignoring self-preservation and societal preservation as legitimate concerns).
I don't know what country you're in, and I don't know if things are actually different there or if you've just convinced yourself that as long as you don't see a problem with your blinders on, there isn't one. But with regards to "let people make their own choices," someone already threw that argument out (in a different context) elsewhere in the thread, and received lots of good answers explaining how we live in a society and you (and your kids) are affected by everyone else's choices, one way or another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705948
Although again, OP didn't even say those people shouldn't exist. He said his family's able to get by without them, and correctly identified that they are not reproducing, expressing optimism that future generations won't have to co-exist with their ideals anyway (I can't say that I share that optimism; there are too many do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do folks around, as well as people like you who may facilitate the spread of bad ideas beyond the bloodlines they kill off out of some sense of respect).
> Yet we find ways to sit down, have a drink, go for a drive, or have sex from time to time.
US born & raised, here. No we don't. I'm 26, have never had a drink, and have never had sex in this country. (ETA: By societal standards, I'm considered "doing well.") You do not understand the severity of the problem.
I'm sorry to hear that. Nobody is really stopping you to have a drink at the bar by yourself though. The above commenters might not like to be associated with those type of "lunatics", but I still think that an average person is good. It is nice to be just around other average people, even if one considers themselves higher than others.
Gotcha, so to borrow a page from your blowing other peoples' arguments out of proportion elsewhere in the thread... your solution to society crumbling is to be an alcoholic by going to the bar and drinking alone. You're right, it's "really fine" after all!
... because they don't have social media? That's a stretch.
> Mine are turning out fine. I don't want them to be like those other children, and I've kept them away from those children. Doesn't seem to have been a problem.
To each their own. I personally grew up with the idea of "try to be around all different types of people as I will encounter people from different walks of life, just don't be an idiot". I think, it made me a better person and I pride myself in my ability of getting along with most people. One day, I would want the same for my kids, and hope at that point we would resolve the social media issues.
> If all of your peers are talking about the stuff they saw on YouTube, but you’re not allowed to, this will naturally make you an outcast in that topic.
There were plenty of kids when I was in school who were not allowed to watch TV. Like at all.
The real problem is that kids also socialize online now so you can't talk about "that time you hung out at McDonalds" because everyone was sitting at home on their phone instead.
> There were plenty of kids when I was in school who were not allowed to watch TV. Like at all.
The kids I knew like this were definitely ostracized for that. Hell, even kids that didn't have _cable_ were usually seen as a little weird.
Yeah, I remember the kids who were not allowed to watch TV, although they missed out on some peer-discussions, at least there were other stuff that everyone was involved in. And the kids that were not allowed to do anything (no internet, no TV, no games, no running outside around), well, I genuinely don't know how, as a kid, I could find anything in common with them. I really hope they're doing well, but I wouldn't want to be them at that time.
I agree with your second point, the problem is there is one and only one avenue of doing things, and that's online (for most of the kids at least).
The solution is always to get different peers. If you're surrounded by bad influences, fitting in or not fitting in are both bad options.
Sometimes I feel grief about the fact that I will almost certainly never have kids, but then I also feel immense relief that I don't have to navigate the extremely complex challenge of raising them in the modern world.
As a parent, I think it's just taking choices. There is no absolute win for either end, just gives and takes. When the dust falls we can just hope that we get a bit more takes than gives. Most of us just walk on ice and skate to wherever fate takes us.
Here's something I accepted. I will mess up, but I'll focus on being a good person that leads by example. The rest is details. I don't know what your situation is, and I'm sorry if you are unable, but I would wish more people get to experience the absolute joy of parenting. It is an exercise of being selfless to the point that you are happy doing things that seem miserable to others for the only reason that there's someone else that benefits from that sacrifice. It's life changing in a great way.
P.S. usual caveats that it's ok if not every person has kids, There's lots of narcisists, etc. that probably shouldnt. However, I feel that in my circles (professional, well adjusted, big city people), the bias is against kids. That is a massive mistake.
If I’m able to put my 2ct in as well, have (at least) two, fairly close together. You’ll have arguments to mediate but there will always be someone to play with around. Friends are not the same unless they literally live in the same house.
Having someone with the exact same life schedule is critical.
once moral panic is subtracted out, it's not actually that complex.
How does moral panic factor into this? I don't think being worried about the effects of technology on children is a moral panic.
No one participating in a moral panic thinks it is a moral panic. They all think they are addressing a real pressing issue. That is why moral panics work.
The easiest key is the focus. Am I worried about my kid? Not a moral panic, that is literally my job as a parent.
Am I worried about society in general because of all the shoddy parenting about screen time? (Or risky play, or being home alone, or riding public transportation, etc) Then it might be a moral panic.
Along those same lines: am I worried about what all those worriers will say about me?
This is what the above comment is referring to. A lot of the stress of parenting is amped up by other adults (parents or not) who have lots of opinions about whether you’re doing everything right. Much of this is some combination of moral panic and/or self-righteous busybodies. If you can learn to tune a lot of that out, parenting is less stressful and less complex.
So you're telling me that by going against social media, I'm actually participating in some big witch hunt to delete it? That's even better, sign me up.
I’m telling you that a lot of people believe they are on one of various missions to Save The Children, by which they justify harassing parents about random moments they observe.
> No one participating in a moral panic thinks it is a moral panic
This argument feels like a Kafka trap
Social media within Wikipedia's Media Panic article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_panic#Social_networking_...
HN parenting thread…
> Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Better than just about every other social media platform if you ask me
Make sure they are living full lives and have many offline occupations to fill their time with. Social media addicts are just bored teenagers who have nothing else better to do, or teenagers who feel as though they cannot be part of the local social groups so they retreat to the online world.
I am in my late 40s and my two boys are 11 and 15. They make great use of the internet, especially youtube. One is a big fan of all the STEM channels on youtube and he is getting an education through those that, when I was at his age, I could only dream about: Matt Parker, 3B1B, Mark Rober, Steve Mould, and so on. He watches hours of those videos every week. The younger is in the VR/Gorilla Tag phase and has created his own youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MagicianTheMonkey-p1f He taught himself how to install Mods, how to script and create contents in capcut, how to advertise his channel.
The internet can be an amazing opportunity for kids. We should be careful about policing it too much. My recommendation is: keep a close eye on how their behaviour changes (the output) but do not worry too much on what inputs they choose and receive. They have to build their own filters after all.
At 18, I went to see the movie "RoboCop" in the theater and walked out because I had never been exposed to such gratuitous violence before. This was long before the internet, cell phones, or social media.
Would I have been as shocked/traumatized if I had previously been even a little bit exposed to something much less intense? Now that kind of stuff is passe.
I don't want my children traumatized; obviously I'm going to do whatever I can to prevent them from premature exposure to lots of extreme content.
But we live in a different world than I grew up in, and I'm worried that kids need SOME exposure, especially to positive experiences but also just a little to mild bad experiences, in order to build up life skills like getting along and interacting with others, even with people who aren't nice to you.
I'm struggling with how to do that and where to draw the line but it definitely involves limits (that change over time), supervision, and communication.
Pov: (denmark) No SoMe, no smartphones - until 5th grade (class agreement and school policy).
No SoMe at all for kids under 13.
No messaging after 20:00.
1.5 h screentime (ios) maximum a day.
O.5 h enforced reading (actual books) from 17:30-18:00 (we make it a family thing - all reading together).
No screens at all at playdates until 4th grade.
No movies or media below age-level ratings without consent from parents.
No phones in bed or while sleeping.
Heavy utilization of screentime, unifi network blocks etc.
Works well for us
Delay, Deny, Defend
Don't let them have a smart phone until high school. Do not allow unlimited use. Do not allow certain apps. No phones in room at night. Continually have to "defend" and argue about it.
How are they going to learn how to control themselves when you're not around though?
Just because you're strict in one area doesn't mean that you're completely mistrusting everything. You can (and should) still teach responsibility in the same way that generations have before social media.
This is a question I keep asking myself. My in-laws live in until May and they give free reins of social media time to my 4-years old so I keep pulling him off. And we tightly control what he watches on TV (only downloaded videos, no YT, no network actually).
So far it's OK. But I don't know what happens when he goes into primary school and his friends start using social media because some parents just don't care. I honestly have no idea. I'll probably ask him to text using a dumb phone instead.
Worst case I'll keep a secret smart phone just for baking/maps but use a dumb phone for daily drive. Probably best for me anyway.
Social media is a nuclear blast for any mind who is not strong enough and doesn't have any hobbies. My father-in-law literally live in Tiktok and Red note. He is watching it when he goes to bed, when he is taking a dump, when he is exercising... it's just part of the body I guess. So much brain rot.
I'd recommend the stuff on this web site and the related book. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/ Lots of good research backing this up with some guidance for communities to change the environment for their kids.
My kids are too young to use it and I'm hoping all said companies have failed by the time they're of age.
Maybe try pushing your community towards adopting https://www.waituntil8th.org/
8th grade was when all this stuff became mainstream for me. That was the iPhone 3GS release year. Social life went to crap very quickly for everyone. Should be "wait until 18th."
I was of similar age then, before that it was nokias and Bluetooth, Facebook was where you could upload stupid shit and not go viral and people's walls were just rage and 9gag memes. With tiktok I think teenage social media and addiction and the self esteem stuff is a different beast.
Many people talk about screen time and age limitations, if a parent doesn't want to go that far there should to be algorithmic limits like block celebrities/gaming/onlyfans type of content
It's definitely different (and worse) today, but even back then I felt like it was robbing everyone of their childhoods. Kids spent an enormous amount of time there, they were on phones in school or in social settings, and the "bathroom wall" gossip thing was big.
Try to make sure they know how they stay safe online as best as possible.
No phones until high school. Limit phone usage via parental controls. No posting photos of themselves online. Closed social media accounts in their teens. WhatsApp contacts limited to people they know in person.
We play the game of pragmatic averages. We aren’t the first of the parents in their friends group to allow their kids to have access to <insert app here>, but we also aren’t the last.
Honestly though, it’s a minefield.
It all depends on their peer group and their nature. I have one who doesn’t even like to be photographed. That one I have no problem with - there’s no way she’s posting stuff about herself. Also, I’ve told her stuff on the web lasts for ever. She doesn’t do social media but only private iMessage groups with friends.
The younger sister is a “social butterfly” and wants to create “a lot of content”. Luckily she’s in a school program that keeps her real busy. So we haven’t had to deal with it yet.
In short, kids understand when you tell them and more importantly you yourself keep off these apps. If you’re on there all the time, there is no way you’re convincing your child to not be on.
I have children, and I will never allow them to use social media while they are under my care. Once they are grown and independent, they can make their own choices. As a father, my responsibility is to protect them from harm, and I am fully committed to doing so until they reach adulthood. Here's an excerpt from an article titled “Facebook’s War on Free Will” by The Guardian.
> The many Facebook experiments add up. The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analysed to uncover the mother of all revelations, “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about”.
Kids are an experiment that you run without a control group. You do the best you can with the information you have, from a place of love. That's it.
Social media is crappy and dangerous, and you keep them away from it until you are able to explain to them why it's crappy and dangerous. It's also everywhere. YouTube comments, HackerNews, Reddit, Roblox. All are various flavors of social media, many of which are hard to justify complete blockage.
I don't think you can prevent it anymore than you can prevent the impact of advertising billboards, or the news.
Parents should lead by example. Easier said than done I know, but parents need to be the idols in their children's lives. Not influencers.
If a parent leads by example they will win in the long run because influencers are fake and shallow while you're real and always there for them.
Children who seek out other role models are children who didn't, or couldn't, look up to their parents. This has always been going on. Before social media we sought out role models in school or in the streets.
My kids don't have smartphones until they're 17. I keep them busy with maths, programming, robotics and other things they like. It seems to work. But now my older son is 17 and he hangs out with his friends on Discord all the time, sometimes it's even affecting his health (sleep) and his schoolwork. But it's less the effect of social media and more the effect of his age.
However, I don't know how it will be in later years, whether he will be able to develop a healthy habit of using devices or not, and I'm a bit worried.
Partly it’s having a constant discussion about society, the world, and news in general. We talk about how advertisers are trying to manipulate you, social media can be addicting and is also trying to manipulate you, etc. Not an angry way, a discussion, like how magnets work or how rain forms. Just the facts ma’am.
As for permissions, my oldest avoided all social media except iMessage (because for her age that is essentially the phone line), and only got Insta at 16 — but I had the password not her, so she could give out her @handle to people to connect, but she would only go only into the fray once a week with us around (vs the zombie doom scroll scenario for instance). We will probably allow Snapchat soon since it’s becoming the new “basic” connection — I’ve not used it, so does it have a feed and likes?
My younger kids all have iPads and the 13 year old had an iPhone — they use them for music and audio books so end up in their rooms even at night. I don’t love that, but I have on tight screentime so I hope that is helping a bit.
I wish there was a good device for ONLY music and audio books, like a souped up iPod. I locked down enough I think her iPad is limited to that, but it’s not obvious. We tried Alexa devices but navigating audio books is impossible and even song selection was tedious. Kindles could almost do it but we are Apple Music family and don’t think there’s and app, and the audio book library app is finicky, and I find kindles pretty kludgy in general.
> We will probably allow Snapchat soon since it’s becoming the new “basic” connection — I’ve not used it, so does it have a feed and likes?
Just an FYI, from the couple of times I've tried using it and been shown it by friends, Snapchat is essentially just as much of a feed-based social media as Instagram or anything else these days. It's not just a "basic connection" with DM'ing. Instagram also has a DM's page, and I know people who use the DM feature heavily, but that's obviously not the extent of Instagram.
(Part of the problem with drawing that line is that even apps that started out as private messaging only, such as Telegram or LINE, often eventually add public channels and stories where it turns into more of a feed.)
There are good devices for only music / audiobooks, but they're often aimed at younger kids. For example Yoto players (https://yotoplay.com/) or Toniebox (haven't used this one). Basically screenless, except for the number of the playlist.
You can use an app/website to create and upload playlist and couple them to your custom cards (so you don't have to spend money on buying loads of cards).
You don't. I have a baby and a teenager and the teenager is pretty mind-rotted even tho mild restrictions were in place. Kids don't exist in a vacuum and you will only have strong influence over them until they turn 12 or so in my experience. The environment they are in matters a lot. Other kids, etc.. I am very worried about the future of my baby. My main concern is that he'll have a hard time being useful since automation looks like it'll do everything soon enough. Purposeless people are not good.
I wish I had something helpful to add.
My teenager has been involved with inappropriate texting with an assuming friend and the textual contents were, quite frankly, disturbing. Therapists say that this is normal these days. Our teen has refused to stop being friends with this person and even suggested that we just get over it. To that end, her phone is locked down with ScreenTime limits but she's somehow getting more time.
The influence of other classmates cannot be underestimated.
Hearing from therapists and other parents that we're doing the best we can is super fucking frustrating because our best isn't amounting to jack shit.
Every kid is different though. Our youngest doesn't seem like he'll be much of a problem but we'll see.
I guess I'll end this mini rant with: good luck and godspeed.
Therapists can be super hit-and-miss. Like schoolteachers, they may seem like they should be domain experts, but they're often just normal people working a job. And it's extremely frustrating to think you're doing the right thing by going to get help (be it for yourself or others), only to be told that there's nothing to be done, not even a suggestion.
I wish you and your family luck!
Thank you, we’ll take all the luck we can get!
They have never had unmonitored access to the internet. Now that they're older, the <18yo boy has a dumb phone for communication, and our >18yo daughter has an older iPhone she only uses for comms and directions.
They have also not ever had access to drugs, alcohol, or modern cinematic fiction, because that would have similarly negative effects on their development as compassionate human beings. They have also not hung out with children raised in this compassionless media landscape.
Remember, people, that your tech overlords don't give a sh_t about any of you, except insofar as they can make a buck off of you. They don't care one bit about your happiness or the misery their products cause; they only care that you can't prove that they caused those harms.
They don't care that their "bitcoin"s are burning up our already-overheating Earth. They don't care that their LLMs are consuming massive amounts of water and electricity. They have sold our children's future for a small price.
And they have the temerity to call us "woke" for waking up to the fact that our world is run by callous, unscrupulous scoundrels.
Compassion is the essense of humanity. Without it, we are just very talented animals perpetuating dumb pack warfare amongst packs and within our pack, often for a buck.
What do you mean by modern cinematic fiction?
Modern TV shows and movies.
We watch some older movies, occasionally, but no TV, except for the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 80's and 90's.
They haven't been inundated with adult shows with their sexy content/jokes and/or violence and bad folks of various degrees. They have gotten the flavor of the kinds of bad people can be from the Sherlock Holmes bad guys and women. They don't need Hannibal Lecter or his ilk and those kinds of movies that I grew up with.
Our daughter works on her crafts and our son on his chess. And we watch European football (soccer) highlights, where they get plenty of over-acting from those guys ;-) We also watch some select YouTube videos from time-to-time.
Two buddies and I built a private “landline” network for their kids (~9 year olds) and their kids’ friends. We used analog phones and VoIP components, so there’s no screens or anything like that. It’s been cool seeing kids go from begging to use the family iPad after school to running to the home phone to dial their friends.
We ended up turning it into a network others can join[1] after other families started to ask about it. Having over a hundred local families join within a few weeks has given me hope that the next generation isn’t just condemned to live in a social-media-saturated hell, or that smartphones will inevitably be a part of kids’ lives earlier and earlier.
[1] https://tincan.kids/ – Disclosure: it’s not free, but we’ve tried to make it low-cost.
You could try out the https://wisephone.com to see if that helps. It doesn't allow social media, but it does allow apps that are tools to get a job done. I think if you let your kids experience boredom, they'd be sad and potentially spiteful, but it's what they need. Kids need to experience boredom. That's when the best experiences and ideas happen.
It should worry you. There are dreadful things happening in these spaces, and they are of such sophistication that children, and even many adults cannot fully ascertain.
The problem you describe is a cursed problem. You have so many malign influences being exposed that the only rational approach is to teach them as much as you can early to recognize and appropriately deal with these things.
That is easier said than done because at its core, you effectively have to teach your children how to lie, so they can recognize and discern the sophisticated lies.
There is also an element of biology, we call it the age of reason because there's a point where reason emerges, and prior to that point it isn't possible.
Prior to that age, they shouldn't be exposed. That will require a monumental amount of work because these influences are everywhere. Even in the Family movies (especially Pixar).
I would start following a classical education curricula (Trivium/Quadrivium) which includes philosophy, aristotle-in logic, Method, and reason.
Following that, there should also be education on perceptual blindspots, and its intrinsic link to communication, as well as how distorted reflected appraisal works (and its impacts). These are blindspot biases we all have as humans, and they will need to know and recognize the limits to defend themselves.
Robert Cialdini wrote a book on the levers of Influence. Communications should roughly follow an Intro course that you see in college with particular emphasis on perception, uniquely shared meaning, deceitful or manipulative structures, with guided exposure towards the end, relating to deceitful, misleading, and false narratives.
The basis requirements for torture should also be taught, so they can recognize it when it happens to them. Coercion should be fully understood so they are not helpless when its eventually applied to them. This should also include how you handle people who lie and how to case-build, and employ countermeasures in such areas.
Being capable of retaining rational thought under applied stress at higher amounts than others, will offer them the best chance at survival.
Fwiw, I don't have kids but my two nephews went to a Waldorf school K-12 (graduating this year).
They are by far the most well-adjusted young men I'm around. Excelling academically, sports, volunteering, lots of interest in the outdoors, part-time jobs, all of their own volition. Barely ever catch them on a cell phone, despite having their own with unrestricted access for a while now at this point. It might be worth looking into some of that school's principles around gradual introduction of technology specifically (I know there is some other controversial stuff you can ignore).
Although... I do think the benefit in their case is in part due to everyone in their grade having had the same rules in years prior. So, it may be difficult to replicate in an environment where phones are ubiquitous by middle school.
We can maybe borrow from some past generational issues, but it seems old forms of media and societal problems are growing worse (e.g bullying, self-esteem, harmful cliques, peer-pressure, etc), or are certain areas getting better (e.g. respecting different cultures and differences, etc.)
1990's: TV, Games (e.g. consoles), ... 2000's: Internet, TV, Games, ... 2010's: Social Media, Games, Streaming Content, ... 2020's: Social Media, Games, Streaming Content, ...
I have to respect all the parents at this time learning to deal with such changes and no past to learn from with the technological changes. Was there ever a time destructive to "reading books too much" (e.g. bookworm)?
Would love to hear thoughts (ideas?) for what ought to be done for a new generation of children being born. What can we learn from the past here and what are some ideas of the correct approaches? Not 100% convinced about banning devices until some later time since technology is being integrated also in classrooms, so I wonder if that hinders growth.
Wondering all these things as a new parent.
Our strategy has been limited access, and I feel it’s not a great one. There’s a constant desire to be on a device and a large inability to think of what else they could be doing. Not helped by being a single child and papa not always feeling up to playing pretend Pokémon.
At the same time, it could be far worse. Whenever there are other kids outside/to play with they really easily fall back into a pattern of pure play. We’ve had whole days of just playing basketball too.
I’m largely resentful of my inability to play with devices when I was younger (see how well I turned out despite my parents saying I shouldn’t look at screens too much), and it affects the way I approach this thing.
> what else they could be doing
Great feedback. Makes me wanting to start building out a cheatsheet (or things to bring) by situation (e.g. restaurant -> coloring book).
Same for daily conversation topics, without it being a bore / repetitive.
Happy to get any ideas were successful (and not).
It's been a challenge to me to figure out what's too much. If you let them, they will spend hours watching YouTube shorts, or tiktoks. I've removed YouTube from our TV for that reason. Also the devices are locked down using Google family, plus the screen pin code is only known by the parents. One of the most wholesome digital experiences I've seen is setting up a Minecraft server, and watching the kids have a build battle. You do need to set up grief prevention though, they will try to vandalize each other.
It is usually some 'set hours' of device time?
Also, wondering what was meant by wholesome digital experience (positive?) in going through setting up a server with your kids?
Yes, Google family allows to set time limits per android device, require parent permission to install apps, and also set time limits per app.
I set up the server, they connected and played on it. Fun to hear them yelling at each other.
>However, it's undeniable that at that age it's all about fitting in and it would likely make them feel like a bit of an outcast if I were to limit them from being a part of it, l
Should homeschool. The elimination of peer pressure makes alot of these choices dead simple. "But all the other 11 yr olds are going to the 3am tattoo orgy" just isn't a counter-argument I'll ever hear in my household.
The real trouble is that you're constantly running around playing whackamole with the router, there must be 3 or 4 dozen social media platforms I have to police. And Youtube, like it or not, is probably essential, so it can't be blocked really... my daughter is using it today to learn to sharpen knives (wasn't a boy scout, never learned it myself). Though, last week I expected that she'd want to use it for cheesemaking, but she worked from a written-word recipe (was kind of proud of that). Best advice for Youtube is to just try to keep an eye on what they gravitate to when watching and steer them away from the garbage.
Homeschooling without a ton of extracurriculars with interaction with children their age makes your kids weird. It completely stunts their ability to socialize.
I did fencing as a kid. It was basically a 50/50 split between homeschooled kids and private school kids. It was immediately obvious which were which, and the friend groups that formed were made almost exclusively of the private school kids and the smattering of public school kids.
If you're restricting your children's social life sufficiently to avoid peer pressure, you're causing irreparable harm.
>The next step is some canny asshole will take advantage of these people by selling them on their superiority or offering community, and radicalize them.
I've heard this claimed many times. But I also went to school with hundreds of other children, and I remember high school enough to know that many end up weird regardless. I don't think it's the homeschooling that does this.
I hear people whine about school shootings and that it's such a big problem that it must absolutely be solved, but on the other end "don't keep your children out of school they might end up weird" strikes me sort of strange. That's really your biggest concern?
>If you're restricting your children's social life sufficiently to avoid peer pressure, you're causing irreparable harm.
I've seen zero evidence that supports this hypothesis.
Exactly, and additionally, it's not just about putting them into extracurriculars. You have to let them go outside and make friends without adult organization because that's what it's going to be like once they grow up and don't have your (or some organization's) help on every step. If you don't let them do this, you're hindering their ability to learn to make friends on their own. Which in turn is where the peer pressure eventually kicks in, because, "hey, all those kids outside..."
> The elimination of peer pressure makes alot of these choices dead simple.
Except you're not really eliminating any peer pressure unless you also lock them in your house for their entire childhood life. The moment they go out (alone or in your company), the peer pressure will kick in simply because "oh look they're all on those phones and I'm not".
My son's best friend goes to the same judo class he does. We're invited over there for holidays and other celebrations quite often. He doesn't have a phone either. They have a few chickens and some rabbits. He likes going out and seeing the animals.
We simply don't hang out with the same sort of people, nor do we let our children do so, as you do.
Having kids in the near future. Wife and I agreed to "just say no" until they're 17 or 18.
We've also decided it's important to lead by example. I assume that any adult saying "kids need social media to not get bullied" or "we can't tell them no" is using it heavily themselves. We could be wrong, but we'll see.
At a young age, have strict rules. Example: they can watch stuff on a phone/tablet only at the doctors or at an airport (or on a plane.) That works for us.
Let them watch something in the car only ONCE, and they'll be sure to remind you that "watching in the car is ok."
I'm thinking ahead of this myself for my kids' sake. Some approaches I'm considering:
- NextDNS with device rules/filtering (primarily for adult and malicious content). This also has monitoring capability, don't think I'll use it though.
- Social media restriction in the early years, but eventually allow access through a notebook. This is a more useful creative tool and will mediate passive consumption, as they won't carry it everywhere with them. Instead it's a log-in at home, when time permits.
- I can't imagine a scenario where my kids "need" a phone, but if so, dumbphones are an option
Some parents I guess will opt for overscheduling kids as an offset, but I think unstructured time is important. Just so long as it's not entirely spent on media consumption.
Mostly, right now I should be setting by example. In instances where kids are playing alone and I don't have to be hovering over them, I'm avoiding excessively reaching for the phone and instead pick up a book. Or do nothing.
They don't really have any interest in social media as we use them. It's likely there will be some other new form of social media, probably something more metaverse like Roblox or Minecraft.
As a kid, I remember we had these things on TV and people would dial on phones just to have messages show up on TV. It seems kind of the same with Gen Alpha and YouTube. There's all these things like Discord, but they feel more like being lonely in a group.
Our kids play Roblox but we don’t let them chat or add friends. They just have FaceTime on in the background while playing with school friends. Seems fun to me, and none of them appear to have become demented.
> They don't really have any interest in social media as we use them.
This seems misleading, even if it's true. My kids keep asking for TikTok/Instagram etc access. Because their friends have these apps.
Seeing certain messaging will them have a similar impact that it does on older individuals.
We give them access. They get bored of it because their friends aren't on it. They will swipe on TikTok, but it's missing the social aspect.
When is the last time you met anyone younger than 20 on Instagram? I'd be skeptical on that alone. Reddit and Discord still have teenagers, and those are the ones I would watch.
Influencers do exist in their lives but they seem exclusively from YouTube and Roblox. These tend to funnel into Discord and... wikis?
Things that went viral with my kids in 2024: Sprunki, The Amazing Digital Circus, Fundamental Paper Education. These are not popular on IG, FB, Twitter, TikTok, so I assume these platforms aren't popular with kids either.
Yeah, I find it completely implausible that kids wouldn’t have interest in social media. Perhaps the OP is using a very restrictive definition that excludes TikTok and instagram.
I meant as we use them. Exclusionary of the [HN crowd]. I don't think most of the ones we use market to children anyway. And social networks rely on a network effect to be useful.
They will certainly find a way to socialise on the internet, but unlikely in the form we're used to. I'm saying it's like giving antibiotics to viruses; most of the solutions we have will be ineffective because the next generation will be doing something different.
Many kids will have Roblox and learned to interact in worlds with others without texting, posting, or commenting. If you play mobile games, most even disable typing because of toxicity/language/app store restrictions, and they rely on emoting to communicate.
There's one way stuff like this, which don't resemble most of today's social media: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1070710/Kind_Words_lo_fi_...
I wouldn't be surprised if a new app emerged where they'd poke each other without typing any words. Those are the ones I'd watch out for.
Mine aren’t teenagers yet, so we aren’t quite at the danger zone. So far we’ve been focused on letting them use devices in a controlled manner.
I’ve set up various network level controls via Pi-hole and opendns family shorties (obviously this is mostly dns based). YouTube and all the search engines are set to in strict mode.
The devices we have also have various restrictions on them. Kindle kids edition has been great- lots of options for games and videos but limited ability to get into stuff they shouldn’t. We also have iPads now, with the suite of family controls applied.
Our lives are complex enough that our kids have Apple Watches now, again with parent controls in place. It’s a good compromise- they can chat with thier friends in sms, but not the stuff that pushes content on you.
It’s not perfect, but we plan on not getting smart phones or allowing normal social media until like age 18
- Understands responsible use. - Writes a log of when they use "screen time", including what they plan on doing (purpose + which sites/apps) and for how long. (with a max time limit per day) - They only can use it in our common areas when we are around, with no expectation of privacy. - Sets a timer and can self stop
> They only can use it in our common areas when we are around, with no expectation of privacy.
Sorry, but this just feels completely off-putting and I can tell you myself, if I were your kid, I'd find a way to get myself a phone, connect to some nearby Wi-Fi and use it all the time when you're not looking.
Sure, regulate it time and content-wise, but mandate they have absolutely no privacy doing things and it will likely backfire.
Screen Time (iOS), and teach them to think for themselves. It really depends on what kind of personality your kid(s) have too. Our son is a rule-follower, so it's generally not an issue once he gets past the initial annoyance of not being allowed to do/have something.
Limit the amount of exposure to social media and talk to them. There are no shortcuts.
Don't cut off completely, but limit, talk to them about it, show examples of when it is a positive impact, show examples of negative impact.
You don’t need to worry that much. Most people turn out pretty OK despite their parents screw-ups and best intentions.
That is pretty dangerous position to take. “That much” is a very vague line.
It is more true that more kids turn out to be fine when their parents care, than when they don’t.
But I’m not saying “don’t care.”
I’m saying that if you screw up sometimes but generally have good intentions your kid is probably going to be fine.
But it is also your right to try to figure out the perfect thing to do in every situation.
Fair enough
lol, take a quick peek at your home’s Internet access logs. You’ll almost certainly find opportunities for some parenting / teaching moments.
Isn’t the teachable moment to realize your kids are going to see those things no matter what I do? Kids on the internet see all sorts of stuff and almost all of them end up fine.
I would've ended up a lot more "fine" if my parents hadn't given up on parental controls almost immediately after I learned to circumvent them. Some of the things they'd have had to tell me would've been embarrassing for all parties involved, but I genuinely believe it would have improved my socialization and overall happiness during critical parts of my development, with ramifications continuing to this day. Instead, they took the opposite approach and praised me as "good with computers" when they failed to impart either voluntary discipline or mandatory access controls on my computer usage.
I do appreciate your overarching message, but I also agree with others that there is a ton to worry about, and I think it can be a disservice to assume things will work out "fine" when they could potentially work out better if parents make different choices. Things "working out fine" is more how to get to sleep at the end of the day when not everything has gone to plan, as opposed to the first line of defense.
> Things "working out fine" is more how to get to sleep at the end of the day when not everything has gone to plan
Yes I agree with this.
I mean look at most people’s lives. Have they all gone to plan? For the most part, no.
Every part of them could be better if they took different actions and made different choices. So what? They didn’t and they didn’t. They’ve got what they’ve got.
Why stress yourself out over what you could have done better when you’ve done good enough?
I actually agree with you that a vast majority of people are living sub-optimally in one way or another. I don't stress myself out over "most people's lives" because I have no stake in them. I do have a stake in my own life and my family's-- that's why it's to be "stressed out over."
As of right now, despite all appearances, my parents actually haven't "done good enough." Mistakenly thinking it was good enough if I was financially successful, they failed to properly socialize me. But they're on the same feel-good train as you and most of society, so they won't acknowledge it.
Who cares if they acknowledge it?
There’s no going back in time and assuming you are financially successful you’re in a very good position to learn how to socialize yourself.
Essentially everybody feels like their parents let them down in some way to some extent. Your parents could’ve socialized you properly and then you’d find some other way they let you down.
Additionally, I didn’t say that most people’s lives are suboptimal. I said that most people’s lives didn’t go according to plan. There’s a pretty significant difference.
If you don't mind me asking... do you have kids?
no im a junior in high school and they gave me a bag of flour to tote around for a week and i think i got the gist of it
Teachable moments is things learning about things like DNS, vpns elsewhere, man in the middle attacks, etc.
My 7 year old gets access to YouTube and that is about 4 hours per week, split between Saturday morning and Sunday morning. His content is of his choice but we make sure he watches something interesting and we have discussions about what he watches: some cartoons and science shows or instructional videos. As far as social media goes, we try to keep it as far away as possible and instead fill his time with a lot of activities and sports and daily time spent outdoors. I noticed when screen time exceeds 4 hours a week he feels bored and having some minor mood issues.
Set clear boundaries for screen time, monitor content, encourage open communication, and promote offline activities to balance social media's influence on your children.
At my kids' school (UK, ages 5-11), many parents have signed an online pact to agree not to give smartphones to their children:
https://smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/
The website lists the number of pacts, broken down by school and year group.
My kid is in year 1 (age 5) and the website received pacts on behalf of 42 out of approx 60 children in this year group.
Hopefully with a little more publicity, the remainder will agree to sign the pact too.
Given the website shows all the data for pacts by school, I ran it past ChatGPT o1 to look for any correlations.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6786bc74-9e18-800d-b474-d57ef2c107...
“Large, well-attended primary schools in more populous or affluent areas tend to have higher numbers [of pacts], whereas small primaries, grammar/secondary schools, or independent schools with fewer total pupils often appear with lower numbers.”
I definitely see a relationship in the data whereby affluent areas have a higher number of pacts. I wonder if this is due to stronger societal cohesion / shared norms in affluent areas?
Whereas in deprived areas in the UK there's more unassimilated immigration from cultural groups that self-segregate.
When kids were young (< 13), kept them off it for as long as possible. In fact, it was forbidden. Friends/colleagues thought I was a tyrant (and some thought I was an idiot) for trying to shield my kids this way, but those were the rules. Eventually, I had to capitulate. But even now, I regularly check in with the now much older kids to discourage worthless hours of doom-scrolling.
I have a kid (5~8 range) and what we did was to limit PC consumption, avoid getting our kid a tablet and cellphone. It has been really good and my kid still has his/her innocence intact. Hopefully this will continue until adolescence. We're also trying to put the kid in different outdoor activities as well as playing with him/her (chess, uno, etc...). It's not easy, but is doable.
My take is to defer them having an unlimited internet access as much as reasonably possible + build trust.
I don’t believe blocking things from a position of authority would work well for the most kids longterm.
I play Roblox with my kids age 11 and 6. I grew up with the original Nintendo when I was seven. The older child is allowed to use YouTube to look up learning videos and cat videos. Screen time is strictly limited to 15-30 minutes a day.
I have 3 daughters. This is kinda working for us, with ongoing negotiation.
- No phones before 8th grade
- Phones start out locked down (talk/text only)
- Enable select apps (e.g. Camera, Duolingo) with proven responsible behavior.
- No social media apps or accounts
- Youtube and similar are blocked at the router at home
- Computer (Chromebook) use is supervised, mostly
- No phones when you have a group of friends over. Yes I will confiscate them.
> No phones when you have a group of friends over.
How does this work with the whole, lets instead go to my friends place so my phone doesn’t get stolen?
So we compromised on giving them devices/phones (with restricted access) but in return, got them to agree that they will not use social media of any kind at least until 18.
I think it is very difficult in today's world to prohibit completely. It may create more rebellion down the road and I like to be open with my kids. A little bit of device is not end of the world as long as you control it which we do.
This is unpopular but I don’t gives a shit:
1. Children don’t need a cell phone until high school.
2. Block social media at the house with a PiHole.
3. When your kids get sad about how unfair is it they aren’t popular or don’t have access like other kids remind them they aren’t paying for it.
> remind them they aren’t paying for it.
Do you really think an average 10 year old will understand what you mean by that?
I know they won’t understand, but the fact remains they are a 10 year old and can cry about it all they want but they are still a child and supposedly you are the adult. Who really runs your household?
My dad used to do that, I don't speak with him much anymore.
Constantly reminding someone of your authority surely leads to resentment over time. Is it not basically a recipe for your kids systematically removing you from their life as they grow?
My kids aren't interested but as far as I can tell it doesn't have a huge impact on kids. And I don't believe there's any convincing research to support it's dangers. I tell my kids to not believe everything they see online but that's about it.
what research have you done to lead you to the conclusion that it doesn't have a huge impact on kids?
I don't do research, I'm saying there isn't any academic research to back it up. And some decent research saying it doesn't have much effect at all. And it's such a hot topic and subject to so much research, and there's been very little conclusive data to say much of anything. I'm pretty comfortable that it's not worth worrying about. My kids don't have screen time limits. They are not without their issues, but they are generally healthy and happy and doing well in school.
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/teens-social-medi...
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
Good question. I feel my smartphone having a huge impact on me. I don't get how kids would be somehow exempt.
It’s easy. Don’t let them have it.
They did not have screen time without me watching with them, discussing what we were watching. Also, paying for no ads was a big benefit, but we talk about ads to make sure they are prepared for the psychic assault.
Going thru this now with an 11 yo and 14 yo.
It’s a non-stop, swash-buckling battle to get them to put down their phones and do literally anything IRL. Their attention has been completely hijacked, their childhood robbed from them, and I feel like it’s pretty much a total parent fail on my part. But it’s the same with all their friends too. Shameful and sad and just wrong
At the risk of ridicule, I think we need to incentivize kids/people to use social media less. Think, “Touch grass. Earn points.”
Faroff dot fun
> It’s a non-stop, swash-buckling battle to get them to put down their phones and do literally anything IRL.
What a bizarre statement. You are their parent. They are 11 and 14.
You can physically take their phones away. If they accept it - give the devices back. If they keep throwing tantrums - don't.
Obviously that is a last resort, but it seems like you've already tried other things and failed.
As a former teen who had parents try this, we were wily enough to find the relevant computer power cables quickly. And it's harder today.
You won't win this way. The kid will obtain a second device and you'll have both a screaming match and an uphill battle. Or they will mooch elsewhere and forget about seeing your kid.
My parents didn't let me have video games as a kid. Sure I could still play at a friends' house, but it was very different from having my own console or handheld.
Do you have kids?
Competing with free enjoyment is pretty hard, yeah. I'd recommend IRL friends going out, good time to try is a holiday or two.
Sports can also be reasonably fun. Kid parties are a thing. Etc.
It's sad but teach them to use an LLM so they know where to find the best response when they are being bullied online.
Device time limits and prerequisites, and periodically check-ins (hey, what are you doing/watching?)
Even with all this, it's obvious that the influence is very strong
(Father of children ages 7, 5, and 2.)
3 thoughts, ordered from most concrete and practical to most speculative.
Concretely, how do I do this? My kids go to a Waldorf school. (waldorfeducation.org) Is it expensive? Yeah. But, among many other benefits, you're automatically joining a conspiracy of parents dead set against tech-ified childhood. (A HUGE number of whom, you know, _work in technology,_ which tells you something.)
Second, and more reflective: I find that as a general matter, I spend more time thinking about how to call my kids toward things rather than away from things. Yes, social media and TV and video games will fill attention voids. But only if there are voids. The stereotype is that a parent will try to keep kids from doing 12 million things, but really you spend your best parenting effort trying to get them to love or value about 4 things. If you succeed, avoiding destructive habits and behaviors is much easier.
Third, and most speculative but most optimistic: I think we have hit peak social media for teens. It feels a lot like that point with cigarettes where everyone was still addicted to nicotine but nobody was pretending it was cool or sexy anymore. If you don't have kids yet, then society has 10-15 years to get its act together on this stuff before your kid is in the really dangerous age range for bad mental health outcomes from being drowned in tech. Could it remain this bad? Sure. But it's (literally) a generation from now in every respect: culturally, technically, politically, and socially. There is momentum for reform at many levels: legislative, private, school-level, and social. You have time for several of those reforms to fail and iterate. Someone will have figured it out by then. You may have to move—or join a cult—but I promise your kid will be worth enough to you to go find those people and live among them.
This is an interesting question which will lead to interesting answers on its own right, but be aware that by the time you have children your worries will already be outdated.
Not putting your infant in front of a screen to shut them up is going to be an evergreen good recommendation, but social media will have changed drastically by the time your kids are old enough for it. More importantly, our attitudes around it will have changed. You can already see countries and communities adopting social media bans on children, so in ten years you can expect that the main things to worry about will be different. Today, I worry that adults just gobble up any misinformation they read regurgitated by some rando or an LLM without critical thinking.
Don't let them use it. Are you fucking dumb?
Don't let them use it. Are you dumb?
My experience from parenting two children to adulthood and being way too lax about devices led me to roughly the following rules for the rest of my kids:
1. Absolutely no phones in bed at any point of the day. Dpublecheck at bedtime that the phone is where it's supposed to be.
2. I vet every app on the phone.
3. Web browser is whitelisted.
4. I vet every contact on signal/whatsapp. No other messaging apps.
5. When they get access to a computer, I let them know that I can know everything they do with it. Also, the computer is stationary in a central place in the house.
When they complain that their friends have more rights, I will lament the unfortunate situation where I cannot dictate the rules of other families.
I'll obviously revise these rules as they grow and I get the feeling that they can handle it. The default mode for parents must always be that they can not.
Ours are now a bit older - 17 and 20. So - on the one hand, I have no experience of kids who have lived an "always-digital" life. On the other, I feel I've learned quite a lot about how to think about this in a feasible / managed kind of way, and I think (?!) that we've emerged with two reasonably balanced kids who have both "real" and "digital" lives and a somewhat realistic world view. As a concerned nerd I've also been on the case from the beginning, worrying about it, trying different approaches, etc.
My strongest opinion is probably about the age that kids are exposed to this stuff, and the role that parents take (or - more often - don't take) in defining what is ok and what isn't ok. The headline here is that kids have too many gadgets and too much exposure to the online world, and they have this too young. IMO, it is not ok for a kid of 7 to be spending all their time looking at screens, let alone a kid of 3 or 4. I mean, really, I don't think it's ok for my son of 20 to be spending all his time looking at a screen either - but in that I now have limited (no) control :-)
In this - sorry - but parents of younger kids are often complicit. Granted, we all face huge pressure from all corners and I totally take on board that social media and the digital world in general is built in order to make us addicted, and our individual power is limited. But... parents often don't say no enough. It's understandable - they're tired, the kid is kicking off, pop a screen in front of them, job done. But - parenting is hard, and it's always been hard, and you have to work at it - whether it's learning to read, fixed bed times, eating vegetables. Letting your kid get away with stuff is going to bite you / them on the ass at some point. A screen is not a golden bullet, and as we all know it's also often actively harmful. So, sometimes you'll have to say no, and the kid will cry, and you'll be the bad guy - but that's ok. It's always been ok, it's not abusive, it's about setting sensible boundaries.
The thing is, you're not going to stunt your kids' social life or anything else by not letting them have a phone until they're 13 or 14. And - tough if they say "all my mates have them" - that's been the argument since I was a kid and Matt over the road had a Grifter and I didn't. My mum didn't take that shit back then and nor should parents now.
The "but all their friends are on there, it's how they communicate now" thing - I mean, yeh. But - if I'd spent 20 hours a day talking to my mates on the phone or even in person my mum would have (rightly) freaked out. It's not ok, and until they're 16 or 17, and even beyond! - it's ok to express your opinion and apply pressure as much as you can within the constraints of your world / network. After all, you're (probably) in charge of the PiHole, their phone payments, whatever - so you do have an element of control. And as the old trope says - "while you're living under my roof, you play by my rules"...
In practical terms - no phones in bedrooms, limited screen time, no screens (ever) at the table during mealtimes, some parental monitoring of what apps are installed, keeping tabs on email inboxes for younger kids. All the usual stuff.
Finally - lest I sound like a loon - all of this should be done with open dialogue, even from a very young age. Talking about access to pr0n, safeguarding, why unfettered access to social media isn't great, what harms this stuff may do, why you know better as a parent - all of this is best done in an open, friendly way. Open and friendly does not equal "parents are a pushover" - but this works best in my experience when you're very honest about why you have concerns and are applying the controls that you're applying.
Good luck out there.
I can already see a big difference between "kids" that are now 20 and those that are 10: parents are now way more aware of how nasty and exploitative social media are.
Ten years ago parents had zero issue handing their used phone to their kid when buying a new one. Now many parents have a "no phone whatsover until at least 13 years old" (some even pick an older age).
Schools too: it's very common now to have school with a very strict "phone stays in the locker or you get disciplined" policy.
I did buy my 10 y/o a "phonewatch" (I'm not calling it a "smartwatch" for it's really dumb). A real one, with its own SIM card (funnily enough it's a real, physical, SIM card, not an eSIM). So she can do what a phone what supposed to allow: give and receive phonecalls. Some people shall buy a dumbphone I guess. Works too. That watch's screen is so tiny and pathetic that it's impossible to anything with it: no TikTok. No Instagram. No nothing. (we're in control anyway, with an app on our phones, of what goes on the "phonewatch").
Kid knows that she won't have a phone before at least 13. Maybe 15. That's the deal.
The thing is: as a parent, you are the boss and you set up the rules. A kid is not the boss.
We're no luddite: she's also one hour of Nintendo Switch play per day. She can have fun solving "code monkey" coding puzzles on a computer. She's allowed to watch a few Minecraft vids.
But mindless media consumerism no a smartphone at 10 y/o, like some of the other kids at school are doing as soon as they're not at school? No way. We simply don't allow that.
> How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?
By being the boss.
P.S: as a sidenote good luck bypassing the DNS blocker I put in place without an admin account. On my LAN, I'm the boss too. No SIM: no SIM to put somewhere else. SIM subscriptions with monthly allowed data usage set to 0 bytes works darn well too (we've got one such SIM).
<< No SIM: no SIM to put somewhere else. SIM subscriptions with monthly allowed data usage set to 0 bytes works darn well too (we've got one such SIM).
Can you elaborate on that one a little? I wasn't aware of that option in US.
i cast a shielding spell if you believe in religion can plug