Title is completely misleading.
The problem has nothing to do with an iPhone. It has 100% to do with bad parenting.
The author even acknowledges this, but I guess blaming the iPhone gets more clicks than "Poor parenting harms child".
The problem has nothing to do with an iPhone. It has 100% to do with bad parenting.
The author even acknowledges this, but I guess blaming the iPhone gets more clicks than "Poor parenting harms child".
I gave my son an old computer a couple of years ago because he expressed a vague interest in learning to code like his daddy. That really didn't work out. But he discovered a great big world out there, and the computer was his window to it. And yes, the effects on his creativity were the same as for the child in the article.
So we tried, and partly succeeded, in limiting his time on it. But the truth is, there is a great deal for him to learn on YouTube, and we often do it together. His Minecraft creations are incredible. He maintains relationships with friends, including a distant cousin, through Discord and gaming. He sets up offline playdates the same way. These are not bad things.
Plus, with the pandemic, his schooling is all remote now. He has to log on in the morning and jump from Zoom class to class until early afternoon, and then all of his homework and reading is on Google Classroom. No, I can't limit access if we want him to attend school.
The problem here is not one of addiction and weak parenting. It's that screen time is genuinely valuable, and figuring out how to balance on-screen and off-screen activities isn't easy.
As a kid I had a computer and a few precious programming books. I could program, or... not much really. I guess I could have enjoyed WordPerfect.
As a parent now, I really need an answer for the remote education. I've tried keeping screens visible to parents. That really limits the parents, who have other things to deal with. Parental availability causes a massive reduction in time for online classes.
For reference in case somebody has ideas of a technical nature, mostly I'm dealing with Chromebooks going via DD-WRT, and I don't know much about either. There's also Android and Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Problems are web games, pointless videos, and reddit. Classes are at FLVS, EFSC, Khan Academy, and various textbook publishers like Pearson. Class video appears on all the popular video platforms, not counting the NSFW ones.
Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
My daughter now knows not to expect to be able to Snapchat her friends or anyone else because she's never been able to. When she mentions that her friends all have it, we remind her that our house is not their house and we have our rules in place for a reason, which we are always willing to explain.
While I agree that screens and TV ARE very addicting, that doesn't mean that parents are powerless or that the majority of the problems brought up in this article are not the fault of the parents.
Also, she CAN FaceTime. I would not consider Snapchat or TikTok to be "socializing with friends" for an 8 year old.
You know how we don't really get this whole social media thing the kids are into these days? That's because we lack those social skills. Just like how your parents' generation struggles with E-mail despite it being so simple, because you grew up with that.
It might not bother you that you're bad at Telegram or whatever because none of your peers use it either. But her peers do.
My point was that saying Snapchat or social media leads to greater social skills than what previous generations had is very hard for me to believe.
You can communicate via a method your parents can't because you used it extensively in your prime while they didn't. Your grandparents probably had the same issue with fax machines and your grandchildren will probably have the same problem with neural-messaging. Every generation thinks "but this time it's different" and every generation is wrong.
Likewise, your parents certainly don't have any problem conceptually understanding keyboards, letters, or addresses - they were perfectly comfortable with typewriters, letterheads, and postal codes. Dealing with nigerian princes and chain mail might involve the use of technology, but these are very much social skills.
As someone who only uses social media platforms that are mildly reskinned versions of 80s/90s message forums, I don't really know what the "BCC vs CC" of tiktok is, nor do I care. I have an excellent understanding of how tiktok works technologically, but I lack the particular social skills tiktok requires. Since my peers do not get it either, this has never been a problem for me, but I'm sure in a few years when my kids expect me to just know how to snapple into the televoid with them that I'll look like an idiot as I search for a reply button somehwere.
To your point, if a telegraph operator handed me a message I didn't understand, I could just say, "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" because that is social skills.
That I can have someone translate to and from Urdu for me does not mean I have the social skill required to communicate via Urdu. Likewise, that your parents can ask you whether something is spam or not doesn't mean they have the social skill required to communicate via email.
Wikipedia defines social skills as:
"A social skill is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways."
If the ability to effectively communicate via a medium doesn't satisfy that definition, what does? You are welcome to use a different definition, but that's what I am referring to by social skills.
Whether using your definition or another, my point still stands that social media does not lead to GREATER social skills than previous generations possessed.
Not being skilled in ALL aspects of socialization isn't the same thing as lacking social skills in general.
I never claimed that social media leads to objectively greater social skills, there's no reason why being able to write a great email is inherently superior to being able to write a great telegraph message. However, one skill is undeniably more useful in this day and age. It does not matter if you call it a social skill or a technological skill, the fact remains that there are people who know how to communicate effectively via social media, and those who don't, and just because you are comfortable in the latter category does not mean your daughter will be too.
Conversely, how many people have been scammed out of their life savings by nigerian princes? How many people developed a poor work life balance as they could now do work from home any time?
I'm not going to argue that smart phones have no issues, but everything that came before had issues too, and all were abandoned when something better came along.
Edit: If she's eight years old, then this seems like a more reasonable restriction. Disregard what I said previously. Eleven or twelve might be a better time to get Snapchat, especially since that's about the time that most kids get their first smartphones today anyway.
But anyway, he is right. For most parents is an uphill battle against tech and social media they're bound to lose due to mostly exhaustion.
I mean... They're not. They're inanimate f----- objects. They've never maliciously set out to cause someone harm because they're inanimate f----- objects. They don't have an understanding of the concept of morals or ethics because they're inanimate f----- objects.
When I ingest them into my body -- that's when all hell breaks loose. They become a problem for me when I use them.
> Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
Who is this mythical "they"?
Technology is designed to do many jobs. Some of them include gamification to "maximise engagement" or some other cringeworthy buzzword. Some of them are literally as simple as "turn the lights off at 10pm" or "wake me up at 10am".
It's how we, as a collective species, implement and use technology that's usually the problem.
"technology" itself is, again, an inanimate f----- object.
> It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
I think this is called life? Yes, lots of things all happen at the same time and there's alway societal pressures one way or another.
But calling it warfare is pretty extreme and may be something useful to reflect on.
Of course there's some blame goes to the teacher, but hey.
I think your response is disingenuous.
Aside, I don't know what tech you're using but mines all been blinken-lights and conditioned-response dings (by default) for years.
There is certainly a conflict, OP might have been slowly melodramatic in their choice of words but just as casinos foster their whales, so too tech companies use the psychology of addiction against consumers.
- teacher
- video maker
- YouTube Devs
- companies
- "kids"
- individual
- school
- etc
YouTube (the drug) is just a series of instructions that make a slab of glass light up in a certain pattern and a speaker to oscillate in a particular fashion (depending on hardware).
It's an inanimate f----- object. It doesn't have "responsibilities".
That's the point I'm getting at. Why don't we, collectively, stop blaming the drugs/tech and start finding solutions to the actual problem?
It's easy to point the blame finger, it's harder to solve a problem.
The other parties want to maximise utility.
In your schoolwork example I can come up with four potential solutions off the top of my head:
- Speak to the teacher about concerns and ask about other ways of doing what is required
- Speak to parents and ask them to help with the homework
- Buddy up with a friend and watch the required video with a friend to avoid falling down a rabbit hole
- Use software like youtube-dl to download the video locally, to avoid temptation of watching another video
Then we come back full circle to the parent comment. It's not the drug's fault. It's not the phone's fault. It's not some software instruction's fault.
Blaming and ascribing fault is only helpful in identifying the problem. After that, the question becomes what can I do about it that will helpful for me today? What is my solution for how this affects me?
i.e. learning to develop personal responsibility.
Phones and youtube specifically are made to make money by gaining and keeping one's attention. They achieve it with tactics that trigger addiction. Some people become addicts, some not so much, but if you have a human brain you will feel the pull to abuse them.
In the case of phones and youtube the "mythical they" are the ones who profit from them and don't care about the effects of their tactics on the users. Maybe it is not warfare but it sure is asymmetric.
I'm saying that it's not the software's fault. In the immortal words of Philip K Dick: "dont blame the drug dude".
Blaming some faceless, mythical "they" gets everyone exactly nowhere. It doesn't solve anything.
There's a bigger question that everyone could be asking...
In common usage of the english language, a thing can be a 'problem' without being sentient or unavoidable.
A pothole in the highway can be a problem if it's damaging people's cars - even if they could avoid it by driving more cautiously.
In the pothole analogy - it's like saying potholes are the reason for all these people's cars being damaged.
If no cars were driving over the pothole then the pothole wouldn't be a problem as no damage would ever be caused! It's an inanimate f----- object. It's just there.
It's the fact that people are driving cars on a road that has potholes that causes their cars to be damaged. It's some action that was taken that causes an effect to occur.
Then we get into the murky world of who is actually responsible and what is the solution. Which I don't have an answer for.
Phones certainly can be a problem, but the problem here has nothing to do with the phone.
It's not all their fault. They're fighting an asymmetric war. Millions of parents are.
No, this article was written by a narcissist who can't handle her little girl growing up and rather than dealing with it in a healthy way is instead raging against an inanimate object.
If covid happened in 1990, we'd all be on our land lines for 9 hours a day, and there would be nothing wrong with that either.
Now as I got older I realize a lot of it was just crap stuffed into our faces keeping us from discovering the real good artists out there. Those folks did have a point here and there. A lot of that music was pumped by the music industry purely to make money and similarly this addictive software is doing the same thing with amplified effects and more shamelessness.
You clearly feel that statement is false but don't provide any support for your strange point of view.
Or is it? Maybe it's actually good parenting and they only perceive the outcome to be bad because of misguided ideas of what "good children" should be. Case in point: if it wasn't for my addiction to video games growing up and constantly finding ways around my parent's restrictions, I would never have become a software developer. That much is certain. Not only that, but I would have a horrid disdain for my parents much like my step-sister (now in her 30s) does for her mother (whom was always praised for being a "good parent") that restricted everything when she was growing up; so much so that she moved more than 7,000 miles away when she finally reached college age.
Somehow everyone thinks they're an expert on parenting and that there's only one way to parent a child and it's a one-size-fits-all situation. Frankly that's asinine. People come in all flavors and sizes so to speak. What you consider to be "good parenting" might be viewed as bad parenting by another person. In that sense, there's a subjective component to parenting. I've seen a lot of parenting elitists here on HN and I doubt many of you even have children let alone understand the complexities that comes with parenting them at various stages.
Parenting isn't easy. But most rewarding things aren't.
But with everything we know now, there’s no excuse. Parents are being irresponsible letting their child have a smart device.
A ten year old? Forget it.
My niece went through that and my sister caved in. I get it. I'm with you in principle but the reality is harder than that in my opinion.
There is a multi-billion dollar concerted effort by the largest companies in the world to get an iron grip on the attention of children at a level of granularity never before seen - don't pretend like that isn't a novel cultural force that should be reckoned with.