And if they did complain, what then?
Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.
This is hard to believe to the point of me thinking your kids were in a plato's cave. It was not possible to have a normal social life without social media as a teenager over the last 10 years. Full stop. You will miss out on events because you can not be invited the normal way. Whether that's a big deal or not is certainly debatable, but claiming that it doesn't exist is ostrich behavior.
A lot of things are said (and done) - often in haste - online, which one would simply never experience in a face-to-face interaction.
We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.
This is the way to do it. People forget that while some teenage social life occurs online, not all of it does, and the part that can be done in-person is a lot healthier than what's online. In real life, are people going to be comparing themselves to Instagram posts? Unlikely, but even then, there will be a lot more nuance of something like, say, going on an international trip, where a friend can tell you the good and bad rather than showing only the good on an IG photo and making the viewer feel bad because they didn't go on such a trip.
Real life interaction simply has less ability to lack nuance, which I think is a good thing.
Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.
Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11.
Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school.
> [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS.
Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.
Yes, it happens, but its exceedingly rare.
I think that's a big part of the problem. I want to encourage more of that social life to happen in person. I would feel bad if I was causing them to miss out on IRL events.