Why Social Media Is Not Smart for Middle School Kids | Hacker News Reader

Why Social Media Is Not Smart for Middle School Kids

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34 pointsattawahid13 comments

> A tween's underdeveloped frontal cortex can’t manage the distraction nor the temptations that come with social media use.

Can any of us? Personally, I have to resort to all sorts of tricks to keep myself from spending far too long browsing social media feeds. They're frighteningly good at what they do.

Those of us who aren't so excited about socialising, I suppose.

I suppose the article is written by someone in the US? If so middle school is (in most states) from year 6 or 7 to year 8 or 9, i.e. roughly equivalent (for those who live in a country where middle school doesn't exist) to the last year of primary and the first couple of years of high, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_the_Uni...

Is giving smartphone to 7 yo a thing ?

A friend of mine have an iPhone to his kid on his 9th birthday and, despite the fact that his son is really smart, I thought it was way to early to give a child a smartphone. The parents were going through a divorce, so it was a classical « I’m better than your mom » bad attitude, but still.

I hope when the times come my own kids won’t be to needy on this, because I’m thinking like the author of the post and if I can, they’re going to wait sometimes before getting any.

After all, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs prohibited smartphones and pads for their kids. There’s a reason behind that...

I just realised that my previous comment might be confusing: "year 7" is the 7th year of schooling so, (depending on the country) kids would be around 10 to 12 years of age.

Parental handwringing is dangerous. I can speak to it in my own life-- my parents actually kept me from using a computer for any reason other than homework for a significant portion of my high school years. I didn't discover programming until I was 24. I don't know if I would've discovered it in High School, but it seems likely that it wouldn't have taken as long as it did. I've always felt behind the curve in my career, struggling. I think part of the blame rests with my parents keeping me from technology growing up.

While I think I agree with the title, I didn't find the content of this post to be particularly useful.

Does anyone have effective strategies for getting the kid to not want to use social media as much?

We have taken the approach of not allowing our middle school children to have any social media accounts. iMessage and facetime have created enough teachable moments, hopefully by the time they do get social accounts we will have covered the basic dos and don'ts

We also make them charge their phones in a room away from them at 8pm each night. Not a lot of good things can happen on facetime late at night for a middle schooler.

No, because social media is purpose-built to be as addictive as possible.

Should the minimum age for social media be 18? The minimum is current 13, per COPPA.

Nah, it'd basically be impossible to enforce, and usage of it in moderation seems perfectly fine. I mean, how many people do you actually know who care about COPPA or the age restrictions associated with? Probably not very many; even in the olden forums of internet forums most kids just said they were in their 20s or 30s and skipped past any terms and conditions.

>It'd basically be impossible to enforce,

Microsoft's Face API can detect age. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...

So, automatically flag accounts with a face that is <18, and force age verification. Facebook already has identity verification mechanisms.

All of their reasons why social media is bad for middle schoolers are all highly relevant to many/(most?) adults I meet. Not sure if that says great things about middle schoolers or bad things about adults.

In my experience, parents like these that need to turn their child into an “other” and can’t see how their own behavior is very similar if not the same as the child 20-30years their junior, are just really bad parents. They’re very oblivious. Maybe that’s why they have to write these articles so they can try and signal to people that they aren’t as awful at parenting as they truly are.

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