Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content

Ironically she switched to an android phone because she had too many photos I think and was always running out of storage. Of course the new phone had no photos, and her old phone would have been just fine if she was happy to start over too.

I'm basically going to ignore the part where you accuse me of using the "same rhetoric as X". I don't know what that means, or how it's relevant to what we're talking about. I'm certainly not hurt by it, as it doesn't mean anything.

If Adolf Hitler himself arose from the grave to agree with me, and that caused me to change my mind, then I would consider that evidence that I didn't have a good reason to believe it in the first place. This is not the case here.

I am actually pretty skeptical of the claim that the "people calling trans-activists groomers" are making this point. That just sounds like a name that you've given to the entire set of people who disagree with you, regardless of their reason.

Concretely, it seems that we are both of the opinion, based on the content of this comment chain, that it is important for the system to protect children. Either from killing themselves as a result of not being able to receive gender affirming care, or from their parents, who use them as a means of acquiring attention.

My claim is that it is well established that the latter problem exists, and that it exists commonly enough that it is not clear that, even under the most generous assumptions of the causal link between gender affirming care and suicide attempt reduction, that this offsets the damage that is caused by giving Abusive parents this tool.

Moreover, this is clearly not black and white. This is a matter of policy. I am not claiming that it is impossible to protect children from both threats. I am merely claiming that gender affirming care doesn't.

Honestly, who gives a fuck?

Yeah sorry, that may sound a bit harsh... But really, what's this constant renaming of things supposed to be actually good for? The main effects seem to be:

1) Some people get to feel all good and righteous and “with it”, because they know the PC terminology; and

2) The rest of us are A) either annoyed at i) having to learn new shit again, ii) not getting to be in that hip and in crowd, or above all, iii) how smug and pompous those masters of the PC vocabulary come off, intentionally or unintentionally giving the impression that they look down on us peasants...

Or B) Just confused as to what the fuck they're talking about.

So thank you, I guess, for having taught us – me – this, so I won't look like an ignorant bumpkin next time someone says it... But I would very much have preferred not having to.

There is absolutely a reasonable basis for that suspicion. There are simply many times more prepubescent children with claims of gender dysphoria than at any other point.

How effective a test is for diagnosis depends heavily on what my priors are about the population it is applied to. If I were to administer an HIV test to every American adult, and then started everyone who got a positive result back with antiretrovirals, I would almost mostly be giving that treatment to people without HIV. This is true even though the test is very accurate. If the number of people walking into gender clinics goes up by a factor of 5, I cannot, a priori, expect that my test has the same predictive power that it used to.

> is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism

A priori, they are both good explanations. An explanation is good if it's simple, predictive, and you do not have the data to disprove it. The way we distinguish between competing good explanations is through testing. So far no one has proposed a test to tell the two hypotheses apart, except perhaps to look at the rate of detransitioning among the cohort of recent transitioners. This data has yet to become available, as it requires longitudinal study, but the leading signs are not necessarily in favor of your hypothesis. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/107/10/e4261/6604653

You people are like broken records, honestly. Any criticism automatically becomes bigotry or hate or genocide or whatever. It's absurd.

> Without a causal mechanism to explain the increase in both the incidence of the disorder and that particular manifestation, its a pretty crappy explanation

Eh, what? It's right there in what you replied to: The manipulation is the causal mechanism.

I disagree with your apparent assumption that "manipulation" by a parent must not only be a negative thing, but that it must also be a conscious effort made by the parent to affect their child's behavior one way or the other. I put the word "manipulation" in quotes because I believe that for many people the word carries a negative connotation, and I'm attempting to point out that in the context of parenting it absolutely does not have to be negative.

I think it's important to note that when children do things that upset a parent, the parent will naturally react in a way that potentially "manipulates" the child into not acting that way anymore.

For instance, if a child acts out at school and gets suspended for a few days, some parents might frown but then say, "That's okay. We know that this incident doesn't reflect who you are." But then let's imagine that the parent is more distant than usual that night, and doesn't interact with their child as much as they normally do (for instance, they might not ask about the child's day during dinner). Even though the parent may not be intentionally doing this (maybe they're just caught up thinking about their child, and what they can do to help), they are in fact sending signals to their child displaying their displeasure.

Similarly, when a child does something that pleases a parent, the child might discover that the parent is more talkative than usual at the dinner table that night, and more interested in what's going on in the child's life. This rewarding behavior could be explained by a parent simply being excited about their offspring succeeding.

In this way you can see that it doesn't take much to "manipulate" a child's behavior. Some people might refer to "attempting to manipulate the behavior of their children to produce a desired outcome" as "parenting". If a child throws a rock and breaks a neighbors window then a parent might scold the child, and this absolutely counts as "manipulating" the child's behavior.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, when a parent rewards their child for a specific behavior in a manner that suggests that the child is courageous and unique, the child might feel pressured to continue engaging in that behavior. If a child is considered by their parent to be courageous and unique when they engage in a specific type of behavior, what might the parent think if the child suddenly stops this behavior (from the child's perspective)? Instead of courageous and unique, will the child now suspect that their parent views them as a cowardly sheep, or a quitter? Is it so far fetched to imagine a scenario in which a child takes a certain stance as a rebellious gesture, but then finds that it backfires when their parents are thrilled about it and shares it with the world? Can you imagine the potential embarrassment of the child? Adults aren't the only humans who can get embarrassed, afterall.

In summary, even such small things as a frown or a smile (or even talking a little less or more than usual) can serve to manipulate a child's behavior, let alone ecstatically sharing every detail of a kid's behavior to the online world. Creating the equivalent of a reality TV show of a child's life will absolutely impose the unspoken expectations and unconscious biases of the parent, and will in effect manipulate the child's behavior and course of action.

Edit explanation: Clarified a point earlier in my response, and fixed/embellished a few sentences.

Implementing your proposal is also unreasonable: before one took a photo of their spouse in the park, they would have to clear the background of all persons or get their explicit consent.

The issue is trying to ban an innocent thing - photo of a kid in state normally seen in public vs "making kids perform for camera, encourage them children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience".

No kid ever build parasocial relationship by having photo in family album, even if public. And photos of kids are as old as photography.

One could make regulations about monetization of such things I guess. Monetization does not just happens randomly. You have to enter into contract with social network to send you money, you fill taxes. That could be workable, theoretically.

It's important to protect the private lives of our children. But it's very challenging to draw clear, enforceable lines in criminal laws and social media terms of service.

https://www.verywellfamily.com/difference-between-baby-newbo...

If it's really art for the sake of art, art justifying itself, then let it be done for free. I want the monetization of such things banned, because I don't think this is art for the sake of art. I think child modelling is done for the sake of commercial exploitation.

I think the Scorpions did something similar with putting an underage girl on the Virgin Killer album, but that may have been non-photographic (not looking it up).

Decades later, Nirvana is still a topic of discussion because of it (and still earning royalties), while the kid in question whose image is used in perpetuity gets told to pound sand because he missed an arbitrary deadline.

We don't need to exploit children as a form of creative expression. We just don't. Depravity is not cultural enrichment.

The one line of reasoning I can think of that does limit itself in this regard is the one says "there are no good adult substitutes for child actors, hence an exception," but this is a very cynical moral ground for child labor laws, as there are probably many potential exceptions that could be forced here that we would find profoundly repugnant and we would have to abandon that line of reasoning or be forced to admit we are more interested in industry outcomes than the welfare of children or our moral worth.

People who didn't choose to have children are not called parents.

> Conversely, children have an obligation to care for parents even though they didn’t choose to be born.

You've offered nothing to support this supposed (but not really) symmetry. This seems like back-rationalization of some cultural norm or tradition (especially when coupled with your anti-individualism swipes in the other comment).

Perhaps your beliefs are not as preordained as you may believe.

Parents are adults who can and should care for themselves. You aren't born into debt.

To expect both your parents, as well as your children, to be responsible to you at both ends of your life is selfish and entitled.

Just one example: in India people help one's families to a huge extent. But kids are also brought up under heavy use of corporal punishment and there's a high degree of family involvement in children's affairs, such as dictating career choices and marriage. Is that a healthier society?

If societal pressure is the only reason why people take care of their families, what's the point? So I don't find it individualistic if someone does not feel obliged to help, it's much more complex than that. There should be more between a parent and child than obligation and well-defined roles. I help my family because I love them, because they raised me to love them, not solely because they're my ancestors.