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I'm a parent, and I was what you call a "non-participant" kid who was bullied when I was in junior high and high school. Here's the thing: School ends. It's a tiny part of one's life. I know, when you're in it, it feels like it takes forever, but once you graduate high school, nobody on earth gives a shit about where you were on the social totem pole. In the grand scheme of things, the cliques and social circles are entirely unimportant, and I plan to teach my kid that. Keep your eye on the prize. K-12 school is something you simply endure until you are an adult in the adult world.

When your kid leaves high school at 18, 2/3 of their life will have been hell to endure. Yeah, no thanks.

I get what you're saying but we shouldn't escalate this into a type of prison gang situation, there's significant middle ground.

When the research is becoming clear that these dynamics and these years of a teen life cause so much harm, we can't be so fatalistic to say that giving in is mandatory.

Oh, I'm certainly not suggesting just giving in to it. But in contrast to the person I replied to, I think we should take teens' perspectives on their social cliques seriously, because even though the cliques don't have importance in society, they have impacts on those within, and our understanding of how cliques operate is surprisingly under-appreciated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary's_karate_club

Now combine the natural fact of cliques and fissures in small groups with the amplification/reinforcement effects that social media provides, and you can see the potential for acceleration/intensification of social stresses during formative years - like Mean Girls but potentially spread across the entire internet, or at least similar cohorts.

> But in contrast to the person I replied to, I think we should take teens' perspectives on their social cliques seriously

Of course I take teens' perspectives seriously. There really is no reason for you to personalize things in that way. You have talked about being accepting, yet you have consistently 100% dismissed the lived experiences of parents who disagree with your opinions.

I responded to your original comment of 'That's letting kids parent themselves' with an in-depth answer, and then you later went off on me in quite a sarcastic way. A very short comment like that doesn't give others very much to go by.

Kids setting their own bounaries and deciding what and when they can do literally is kids parenting themselves. Parents are more than just older people who ask kids what they want to do, tell them they are perfect, and give them money.

  It's easy to be dismissive of these ideas, but there is an
  extensive and rigorous literature on network topology and
  dynamics.

Parenting through rigorous literature on network topology and dynamics?

  Arguing on the basis of your own developmental experience
  in which significantly different conditions obtained (eg
  the non-existence/availability of social media or the
  internet) is equivalent to just wishing the problem away.

Actually, it was a description of having fixed the problem, because it wasn't as much of a problem as people believe beforehand through network topology that simulates k-12 social circles. When parents love their children, talk to them, are privy to their kids' social circles, and make decisions in the best welfare of their children, those children are able to recover from the intense loss of missing what Stacy posted last night.

Ah, sarcasm.

The problem comes down to putting kids in forced confinement with a bunch of other kids for 6 hours a day with no way for them to escape. Mandatory "education" of teens is harmful on the net. It wastes some of the most energetic and productive hours of life while teaching very few useful skills (and those could be taught in a fraction of the time).