Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.
Luckily (/s) we have social media to shift blame off of politicians to other groups of people, to fight eachother instead of the ones who profit from all this.
You mean the NIMBYs in their metro area that try to slow down new housing production as much as possible?
There are a few large investors in housing markets though, who have a lot more political power than a few karens in mcmansions.
What about other industries? Do leaders and founders of all these influential industries have anything in common? Tech, banking, media, the industries that influence our youth?
Social media and phones are what youth had left, after adults systemically wiped out every inch of their development environment.
I'm an early genx; the last generation to grow up free of constant supervision. I went everywhere by myself and learned countless critical self-sufficiency and social skills - skill building that was utterly and thoroughly denied to my own kids.
That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions.
We couldn't have designed a more stunting experience, short of tossing kids in forced-labor gulags.
I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states? You'd think the states self-describing as "freedom loving" wouldn't interfere with parenthood as much.
The 'parental freedom' stuff is really just the 'you're free to not ensure your children are educated'.
It is fairly well the same everywhere in the US, red & blue states alike. There's no shortage of adults who are passionately stupid about kids w/o adults around. Maybe you educate one but there are millions more behind them.
At least one state passed a right-to-roam law. However, that didn't stop LEO from endlessly bullhorning false stranger risks or stop news orgs from thoughtlessly parroting it. The life-changing harm John Walsh has done to millions of kids is incalculable.
Not to say that social media isn't bad for mental health, it certainly is. But I've been out in NYC and seen swarms of young people at bars and clubs, it's not like they're not socializing with each other.
I can't say you're wrong. In my formerly inexpensive state, we went from 1 typical income to survive (1993) to 4 typical incomes. Just in 2021, we had to absorb a 70% increase in rent - and we were lucky.
State 'fixes' to home/biz insurance are quadrupling policy costs while mandating more people pay for it. Renters are going to eat every cent of that.
That doesn't even start to touch on things like this year's sudden 40% increase to auto policies, the f.u. surcharge for living in this state.
Of note on the auto insurance: We carry fat comp/med but no liability. Any damage to our cars from weather is fully on us and not the ins company. This means in our case, the f.u. FL increase can not be reasonably said to be proportional to our risk of weather damage.
My 2-bedroom rent has increased only ~23.33% in 13 years, from 815 to currently 1005.
Also small landlords with good tenants often don’t raise rents as fast as they should compared to the market.
There are thousands of cities in the US, and maybe 10-20 of them are so popular that everyone wants to live there. Of course the prices in those places are going to be crazy - you have to outbid everybody else.
IDK man I've seen rents and land prices skyrocket in places like Franklin NC. You know what's in Franklin NC? Nothing.
I don't have an explanation for that, and I don't think it's limited to trendy places
What exactly are you thinking will constitute the end of the world?
Other food sources are impacted by drought, supply chain disruptions, flooding etc.
Large scale migration triggers political instability, revolutions.
Raw materials and inputs fundamental to our way of life become more expensive to obtain due to supply chain disruptions, driving living costs up and creating political tension.
While i don't think the world or civilization to end, i think a lot of people discount how much line can get worse and more uncomfortable for billions, especially in the wealthier parts of the world.
This is major first world problems but: good prices are higher due to droughts and then flooding. Housing prices have risen in part due to reduction in housing inventory and supply due to flooding, wildfires and increasing fire insurance costs.
My recreation options are limited due to so many parks being closed to due to landslides, storm damage, fire damage or fire risk.
Taxes are increasing in my area due to the increasing cost of maintaining infrastructure due to both flooding and fire damage, storm surges and other sources.
In California, one of the wealthiest places in the world, climate change is already gently and subtly eroding our quality of life.
Things can get much much worse in the next few decades, and likely will.
[0] The headline says the world is ending, the smallprint clarifies that no, actually, it’s not.
Not sure how you're defining "stagnated", but Real Weekly Wages have continuously gone up since 1980: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> Rents doubling every decade.
Nope, the average increase per decade is 42%, not 100%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEHA
> 30% credit card interest
Nope, the latest rate is ~20%, and that only comes into play if you don't pay your credit card bill in full, and I'm not about to get into the topic of financial responsibility: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TERMCBCCALLNS
> Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late.
"In 1960, the group of women with the largest share of first births was 20 to 24 years old (43%).
In 2018, first births among women occurred most often between ages 25 to 29 (29%)."
25 to 29 is nowhere near "too late".
> A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
I don't even know where to begin with this one
Wages definitely stagnated in 1980 (your chart shows $319 for both 1980 and 1998, for example, and it's visibly pretty flat for those two decades), and they've continued to be decoupled from productivity and corporate profits. "Trickle-down" turned out to be mostly pee.
https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
If you plot it with the Y-axis starting at 0 instead of 300, it'd looks even flatter. (See my link.)
On credit card interest, per Forbes this week (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/average-credit-c...) the average APR is 24%, indicating that there are rates above 24%, potentially well above.
On childbirth, don't forget the tails as the distribution shifts. 25-29 isn't too late, but as the average age increases you're raising the risk of various issues and you're going to have more people in "too late" side of the distribution. Add in egg-freezing and IVF turning out to not have such a success rate as predicted, you can wind up with a lot of disappointment.
OP is being rather... histrionic, but it doesn't do to overcorrect, either.
But even in the "good" picture, you're looking at real wages increasing by about 10% over 44 years, while real rent prices increased more than 400% over the same time frame. To say nothing of dramatic cost increases in education, healthcare, and the introduction of countless new defacto necessary costs like internet and electronic devices. This is all obviously a complete catastrophe. In some ways it's kind of surprising that society has been getting along as "well" as it has, all things considered.
I suppose it's largely because we've managed to mythologize the past where somebody could do things like graduate college debt free on a part time job, and even have enough tucked away to get started on a down payment for their first house. That past simply no longer sounds even possible, let alone real. Yet it was.
I remember a time when music videos and magazines were the leading causes of teen mental health decline.
Also, what is social media? My nieces and nephews spend more time on messaging than they do on TT or IG.
Let’s say we get rid of TT and IG, do we think that all the issues surrounding YA mental health will go away?
Eh, climate change is a really big problem but you can't go around saying "the world is set to end between 2050 and 2100", it's obviously untrue and demotivating.
I think it is safe to say that the world as we know it is very likely coming to an end between 2050 and 2100. We will be living in a far more inhospitable planet in 2050.
I appreciate that it's hard to communicate fuzzy concepts with lots of unknowns succinctly, but this seems overly-alarmist and simplistic to me.
Or maybe I'm wrong; do you have some reputable sources?
Here's one of mine[1], indicating (paraphrased) "5° by 2100 would result in a mass extinction in the next 300 years." And I'd note that even mass extinction is not the same as "the oceans die."
Agreed about big changes to "the world as we know it", though.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-warn-o...
* the size and severity of algal blooms are increasing across the world
* this year's crab season was delayed (initially predicted to be nonexistent) because the ocean currents and especially the depth of cold waters changed so drastically from last year
etc., etc. These examples are only from this year. We could also point to starfish dissolving, coral bleaching, etc. which have been going on longer.
Temperature is only an indicator, but there are many other nth-order effects which result from the changes to the climate that also severely disrupt life processes. We can be sure that the ocean won't "die", but if biodiversity continues to tank the way it has been, we will see an accelerating rate of decline in the health of the oceans and consequently the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the ocean (somewhere around 1 billion people). Knock-on effects are hard to conceptualize but well worth fully exploring.
Can you give a source on that? Thanks.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/oceans-fisheries-and-coas...
The UN says the oceans are "the main source of protein for more than a billion people around the world".
Before 2050 you will know that the Santa Claus that keeps putting food on your table is not real.
Topsoil depletion, groundwater depletion, overfishing, pollinators and insects dying, etc. And best of all: methane permafrost melting.
In the best case scenario we will all end up eating soylent green.
It's the same with mono-cultural farmlands. By reducing the habitation areas of animals, the population becomes so small that thinking "they just have to adapt" becomes a ridiculous statement.
I wouldn't be surprised if the collections process is easier in the US than in other countries. The economy is not great right now, but credit card companies can also limit your credit to make sure that you don't borrow more than they expect to be able to collect later. And they can see what your existing debts and monthly payments look like, which allows them to de-risk their lending.
This looseness is great boost for economy, but on other side it also means credit risk and thus the interest levels must be higher to in general to cover those losses.
But it sounds like US interest rates are lower than some other places, based on GP's comment.
Is it? People get like one month worth of 'wage after rent, fuel and food' with a CC. Only once.
Plenty of other things to distract yourself from existential dread (video games, movies, streams and shows, actual drugs) and learn about that stuff (the news).
People care about things relevant to subjects they have an emotional connection to already. This system of inference is different between individuals of course.
The relevant question should be, why do so many people care about ultimately meaningless stuff? That's what GP was on about in my opinion, people telling children authoritatively what is or isn't important while being obviously wrong about it.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
I'm sure China has plans too.
I don't think their ascendancy is necessity assured.
The more one looks, the less this appears to be true. Malcom X and the Black Panthers didn't arise because things were just peachy. MLK's murder wasn't just a stray bullet. When the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on their own city, it wasn't just an accident. When the National Guard massacred a defenseless crowd of students in Ohio, it wasn't because twenty-eight trigger fingers slipped simultaneously. All while McCarthyism ran rampant, dividing Americans into Faithful Patriots and Godless Communists, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a nationalistic furor gleefully fed by the upper echelons of government, media, and industry.
I ain't trying to say things are going well these days, but let's not forget how shitty the past was.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
School shootings are such a regular feature of American life that every school holds safety drills for the risk. I don't think all children get to enjoy the same sort of carefree bubble that you did. Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems but many kids are far better informed than many adults admit, or want to be themselves.
Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 school shootings [1]. Certainly more than I’d like there to be, but in a nation with about 129,000 schools [2], I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”. If students are in school for 18 years, let’s say, to include pre-K, Kindergarten, and an undergrad degree, and the number of school shootings stayed steady for that whole time, they’d be in school for 918 school shootings, or a 0.7% chance that they go to a school which experiences a school shooting. Not common.
Yet the media reports them heavily, and that causes fear, and that fear is what drives schools to hold safety drills regularly to prepare students for these situations.
[1]: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...
[2]: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...
Your kid's chances of being killed in a school shooting are about the same as being struck and killed by lightning (many more people are struck and survive).
I know you are most likely anti school shootings. But whats the point of trying to deny it's impact with statistics?
Whatever statistics you try to conjure. 52 in one year is way too much. And 1 in 150 kids being on a school with a school shooting is a lot.
The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here!
You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits.
An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
This: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollme...
Makes it look like there are 55,548,000 K-12 kids enrolled in school in the U.S. in 2020
This: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 Makes it look like there are between 12 and 35 homicides of kids 5-18 years of age at school per year in the years 1992-2019.
The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.
Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.
Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).
Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.
And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).
For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.
(https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-y... for death by drowning)
Edit: this data makes it seem like 11.5 or so deaths per year rather than 24 (because it's shootings specifically, I think), and gives more colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/10/e023114
The children just get stabbed instead
Do you have any sources you can cite?
What exactly makes you say that the Edweek numbers are inflated or distorted?
(I am genuinely curious.)
You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.
Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.
"It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random."
We agree about that. If you mean "it's not okay" OR if you mean "it doesn't happen often".
Per capita comparisons aren't informative because you should care about the ABSOLUTE risk, rather than relative risk.
The ABSOLUTE risk (as I calculate in another comment, charitably about 0.000043% per year per student risk of being killed at school) is extremely small. The fact that it's 5x Greece's or something is irrelevant, because both are tiny. If you're trying to answer the question "How do I make sure my kid grows up happy and healthy?" worrying about school shootings is a waste of time. The kid has a 22x higher likelihood of being killed by drowning, focus on that. Or responsible drug use. Or physical fitness. Or driving safely (or not driving!).
Another basic thing you might want to keep in mind is: kids don't die much. Their overall risk of being killed from ANY cause is quite low. If you're worried about maximizing happiness or something, I wouldn't even worry too much about death. Sure, teach them to swim and when they're little make sure there's a lifeguard, but don't stress about them being killed unless you live in a war zone. (And I recognize that too many people live in war zones, and that's a real problem that real people have)
But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering.
This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
Terrorist attacks are genuinely terrifying. That doesn't mean the probability of experiencing one isn't vanishingly small.
What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk.
There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.
Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head.
To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
There isn't good evidence to support this claim, though it's popular with people who have never thought about such issues before.
Here is a real example from the list: "A student was shot and injured when a sheriff’s deputy’s gun accidentally discharged in a classroom during a law enforcement vocational training."
Another: "A male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting appeared to have resulted from a dispute between the students."
Read down the list and most are accidents, or take place outside the school (e.g. in parking lots) between 2-3 people. These are accidents and individual beefs between students. They have nothing to do with mass murder. They don't involve anyone outside the students concerned. You could be a student at a school during one of these "school shootings" and not even be aware of it.
It's why the _total_ number of deaths is only 40 (!) from those 51 shootings. 8 of those were teachers so the total number of student deaths was only 32.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of damage related to these events is caused by the media and institutions irresponsibly generating fear that creates real psychological problems and distorts decision-making. The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media. The reality is simply nothing like that.
3,058 teenagers ages 13-19 die in motor vehicle crashes. [0]
In a country of 332,000,000 people, if 32 deaths stemming from parking lot arguments seems to require a society-wide blanket of fear and dramatic political anger, you are just badly miscalibrated. You're thinking like it's a village, which is natural, but if you want to discuss broad issues at scale, you need to put on your adult-style numerical/comparative thinking hat. "One is too many" sloganeering is simply a path to stupidity at scale. It distracts badly from things that actually matter and we end up way worse off in every respect.
Also worth noting that based on these data it is more or less completely true that a random student doesn't need to worry about school shootings for their own personal safety at all. If you don't choose to get involved in armed parking lot arguments over girls or respect or drugs, you'll be fine. (However, please wear your seatbelt and choose your driver carefully!)
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teena...
That's not to say we shouldn't strive to get those numbers down, but personally I think we should be focusing on mental health, of which social media has a huge impact. Banning the weapon - as is the common suggestion - is treating the symptom, not the cause.
But we also place too much emphasis on school shootings when, as demonstrated, other things are far more dangerous to kids.
Strictly speaking on numbers though, the evidence I’ve seen weighs heavily on the side of weapon availability being the root cause, with countries and states with fewer weapon restrictions having more weapons-related deaths per capita. All this talk of “weapons aren’t the problem, people are” therefore strikes me as disingenuous.
I thoroughly believe in keeping rifles around because hunting is vital to my community. I remain unconvinced that handguns and automatic weapons are at all important to protecting US democracy (though I’m certainly willing to be disproven).
You compared Japan's rate of violence to America's, and conclude that America's policies must be the cause. This is wrong because you're comparing completely different groups of people. What you should be doing is to compare Japan's rate of violence to the rates among Japanese immigrants in America.
If you want to figure out which variable matters you need to isolate that variable. And if you do, you'll discover that results come from the people much more than the policy.
The difference between America and these places is that America harbors specific subcultures which glorify violence, gangs, drug trade, criminality and generally antisocial behaviour. If you're not involved in these subcultures, or in close proximity to them, you really have nothing to worry about. Hyper-rare stray bullet incidents "in a decent part of town" don't change this. (I recognize that some people can't escape these subcultures and suffer from them, but again, this is a subcultural problem).
But yes, let’s smash the soda vending machines as well!
It's not like there is a complete lack of advocacy about auto safety or school diets. You might remember that during the Obama administration there was a campaign for more healthy school lunches, preferring vegetables and fruits over salty/sugary snacks, and extolling the value of exercise.
My original comment mentioned school shootings as an example of an issue that teens are understandably concerned about, because while the probability is low it's also a fundamentally horrific situation. I'm rather surprised by the rhetorical contortions so many people are putting themselves through to argue that having several massacres a year just in schools is nothing to worry about.
Stop lumping people who don't want to fret about it in with people who actually think the gun status quo is OK. Of course it's not OK, and should change. That doesn't mean we need to obsess over it. It just happens to be an issue that is very effective at driving media engagement.
By all means, vote and write to your lawmakers -- this actually drives change. But don't waste much time doomscrolling and ruminating -- this does not help, and only helps enhance media company shareholder bottom lines.
The point is that kids these days are exposed to constant encouragement to ruminate, ruminate, ruminate. This doesn't translate into actual action, it just translates into anxiety and depression, and increased dividends for media companies.
Nobody is making that argument or getting confused by these numbers. The Edweek figures were linked by someone complaining about media influence.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent.
There are only a few such incidents each year but that is far from 'nearly nonexistent'. Perhaps you'd care to quantify what you consider to be the acceptable number of deaths from shooting sprees?
The fact that there are school shootings for the media to report on at all is so crazy to me.
What a sentence.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate
Publicly stating that you are concerned about child obesity is dangerous because it's implicitly stating that people are raising their children incorrectly and making poor decisions, which is more of an accusatory than empathetical statement.
The "think about the children" crowd don't actually want you to think about the children.
There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives.
By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and that would be "not regular"?
Christ.
As a parent in Australia, youth violence with knives as well as distracted drivers concern me. Guns? Not even on my radar.
(https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/could-a-mass-shoo...)
It's extremely disruptive to a child's psyche even if they are never unlucky enough to be at one of the weekly school shootings (which is a horrifically dystopic line that I'd never considered possible 20 years ago).
More than one a week during the school year definitely makes them a regular feature. I can think of one in my entire lifetime in the UK.
Frankly it’s not clear what point you think you’re making, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one you actually make. A close-to-1%-chance (I didn’t check your math) of experiencing a school shooting is now low, it is ABSURDLY high.
No they're not.
> ...that every school holds safety drills for the risk.
They also hold drills for tornado, fire, etc. These aren't regular parts of life either; they are emergencies for which people can prepare for the extremely rare chance it actually happens.
We could debate the utility or practical implementation of active shooter drills compared to fire drills, but just waving your hands saying they are injecting horrors into children's heads is overblown. Most kids just find them a waste of time. Just like fire drills.
Yes, they are.
But rather than merely gainsay, I'll support that by observing:
a) here in Australia we regularly, consistently, have zero school shootings each year. Can recommend.
b) you are probably misunderstanding the meaning of regular, and conflating it with frequent.
Halley's Comet is regular - at once every ~76 years. But obviously not frequent.
(I'd argue, as per (a), that the USA has too high a frequency of school shootings as well. If your tolerance for slaughtered children is higher than mine you may disagree with that claim.)
Bullying is regular in America. It happens in every school.
Police brutality/abuse is regular in America. It happens in every city with a large enough police force.
Pharmaceutical addiction is regular in America. It happens in every town.
It sounds like instead of just mistakenly using it as a synonym for frequent, you're mistakenly using it to mean something like prevalent or widespread or pervasive.
Either way you're responding to a perfectly valid claim by re-purposing the words used by the parent post and then arguing against that.
Speaking of which, when people bring these things up it's usually framed as "see? there's ALWAYS been some new media to complain about!"
But this isn't really true. The treadmill of new mass media really only began at all (in a very small primordial way) with the printing press, and in earnest with radio. Prior to radio, things really were very different, and did not change dramatically for hundreds of years. Radio brought about massive change and people did have a hard time adapting to it, although they did eventually, but ever since then, we've been on a treadmill where just as one generation manages to get a handle on how to deal with a new media technology, yet another one comes out, throwing everyone off balance again.
The idea that this is how things have always been for humans is ignorant. This is new to the last hundred years or so. Prior to this people had the privilege of learning how to deal with the world and pass on their wisdom to their kids without having most of their wisdom invalidated before they could finish raising their kids.
Also, you seem to conflate locally and personally with globally and universally relevant.
Threats are diverse and not restricted to being simplistic. Proper handling necessitates serious effort on all levels and certainly isn't done by relying on tradition.
I was terrified my entire adolescence by the prospect of nuclear war
I never heard a better justification for blissful ignorance and no, it's not a good thing.
Now, it's a tranquil present, with no hope for the future.
While the latter is materially better, psychologically it's far more damning.
Every single successful society survived on a story, or myth, of a better future. The current Western world is the only society that has fully abandoned that notion, and we are seeing the consequences. Every single political struggle, artificial conflict and strife is downstream of this fundamental disruption in this core societal promise.
Social media isn't the cure, but it sure as hell didn't cause all those other things.
The soviet era had the risk of nuclear, but there was still a good chance that would never happen. By contrast, most of the things OP mentioned are already happening.
Kids in our day got it through regular media. The cold war had a big influence on music at the time and shows like The Day After (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After) were on TV. I was very aware that we could be nuked at any moment, and later, that we were destroying the environment. We had the rest of the world's evils pushed on us by Very Special Episodes and After School Specials. I had plenty of other mundane concerns to worry about too, but concern for our future was always there in the background.
Kids today get it much worse since the message is that it's already too late and we're basically doomed.
Perspective, and context are relevant. People in countries that have always been worse off than the US is today are not as depressed.[1]
[1] Well, not until they all got cable TV and social media, that is.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'
Better reasons for why school age children are so addicted to social media are more car centric suburbian developments and the general attitude shift to not let children play outside without supervision. This isn't for cultural reasons only, it's also caused by the increased homeless population and the drug epidemic: in many places, streets are indeed more dangerous than they used to be 40 years ago.
Nobody wants to see it but it is there.
Things are hard because they need to be hard, otherwise we would multiply out of control and devour the planet in no time.
If you give every person a house, lifetime supply of food, free education, guaranteed job, a vehicle, you would see the population going to 30 billion in 20 years. Then we would all perish.
People invest heavily in rapidly depreciating startup equipment like ring lights, PCs, Cameras, Microphones, only to find out that every site is rigged like a casino, and few people truly win (most get predatory contract offers), and now they're actually charging all creators for visibility while shrinking natural post reach, and inventing and fostering scams of all kinds (Crypto/NFTs) while child exploitation is rampant.
Social media is pretty much essential to growing a business now, but the problem is that it's under siege by opportunists that give little care about the toxic wide-scale emotional, mental, and financial manipulation that they now perpetuate and promote for profit. I don't know how or if it's ever going to be reigned in.
so that is how the elites transformed society, and divided society among the different factions and thus maintained control... by changing society via educational propaganda fed into Young minds... the elites have long had a monopoly on shaping society by shaping Young minds.. the elites fear that ordinary people will soon wake up to the power and potential in social media for older people to feed their ideas into the minds of younger people and thereby put a stop to The divided society the elites have created
We have been banging on this key for easily the past 8 years, with varying levels of emphasis. The response from parents has also been universally consistent: A lot of nodding, and, ultimately, very little action. There has always been a small but consistent group of parents who stand firmly on their decision to delay giving their child broad access to social media until later, and the vast, vast majority who can't be bothered to. I haven't noticed the scale tip in any direction in all these years.
I feel like apps should be regulated to for example, only show up to 20 videos max on tiktok per day to prevent doom scrolling. I don't think preventing kids from accessing social media entirely is viable or reasonable.
Also, if some of these kids are being bullied, social media can exacerbate the problem. I allude to this in another comment where I speculate that if my mother had bought me the backpack, I think these kids would have still bullied me over something similar.
i can't remember if it was because having a backpack became uncool, or the school mandated no backpacks because of columbine.
i do specifically remember trenchcoats were not allowed and one very likeable and somewhat popular kid had to give his up (that was sort of his "look").
anyone remember?
That level of "isolation" seems innocuous at worst to me (even though it may seem like the end of the world to the kids).
They're already spending the best hours of every weekday for like 3/4 of each year with their peers. More, if they do any other activities that involve other kids. Seems like quite a bit. I'm skeptical that they'll be harmed if they can't catch up on the latest bullying-memes, creep shots of other students, and tips for getting old guys to send you money online (all real examples, and none of them one-offs—trends) at 1AM on a school night.
While the "simplest" way to archive social isolation is to be physically isolated you can be social isolated while having people around you 24/7.
Because if you look at the time they can choose what to do, like in brakes between classes or in brakes in the classe (e.g. PE) a bunch of it is spend talking, like talking about the latest trend, the grate experience they had yesterday etc. All of which the child with too strict parent can't proper join in. Then after school they join again, but today often over internet instead of meeting physically, and again the child with the too strict parents is left out.
I'm not sure if you living in a fundamental different world then I am, but it's really hard for me to understand how this is hard for anyone to understand. (If you live in the US I guess this might very well be true.)
This never was a discussion about fully unchecked phone usage. The best practical solution for something is most times some some in-between solution.
I'm very curious as to what you recommend for an in-between solution. It seems to me that either the child has a phone or they don't. How is it possible to effectively restrict their use of the phone short of not allowing them to have it unless a parent is present?
Which sadly are currently often sorely lacking especially for younger children and even for the limited functionality often need too much technical understanding (e.g. knowing that "adult-content filters" tend to not work and at least for young children whitelists are preferable while sadly also often cumbersome).
Worse, some of them are school devices that we can't manage. And having to physically manage device access is another annoying, never-ending task.
I assume lucky for a moment.
The problem is less that conversations are more delayed or ad-hoc but more that they can potentially miss out on "group events". And that is where the problem starts. Because they also can't join in on conversations about that event, etc. This means while the rest of the group will frequently have situations where they emotionally bond you get are not included and in turn get subtle unintended socially isolated.
If you are a socially very adapted child you can probably compensate this just fine.
If you have other more important friend groups it probably also doesn't matter too much.
If there is a group of people (not just a small minority) in the same situation as you in the same social circle it also probably is fine.
but if not it really can hurt, and you likely only notice how damaging it was for your social life after the damage is already done and hard to recover even if you now convince your parents to give your more leeway
and that's under the assumption the social group in question is "nice" but you e.g. can't choose the people you go to school with and a not so nice social group can use this to intentionally exclude it or use it as a starting point for bullying which often is only addressed when it has gone out of hand to a point where a parent or teacher stepping in can't fix anything anymore
and sure above's arguments often matter much more for e.g. multiplayer computer games then for "having a phone", through not having a phone also means e.g. not having a camera and not being able to make and share group photos with your social group
instead of denying access to a phone, social media, etc. it's better to control it in a careful and reasonable way. E.g. don't forbid the playing of idk. Fortnight, but explain the problems with it and maybe limit the hours and similar a child can spend, but allow the child to decide when to spend them and allow some degree of saving up hours etc. Similar for social media, etc.
Same applies for going out etc. as far as I can tell it's best for you child to allows it a wide leeway just not unlimited and properly educate them about dangers.
EDIT: deleted the last paragraph it was off topic
That sounds a lot like when kids say "you just don't understand!" to parents restricting their activities.
The reality is that the parents usually understand fully, but also understand other aspects that the kids don't yet.
> that they can potentially miss out on "group events".
I doubt this is a common or inevitable consequence. First, kids spend a great deal of time in person with their peers at school. Even if something is only planned online, they can still get the details by asking in person. Second, they can use a home computer to do that stuff. A phone isn't mandatory.
> not having a phone also means e.g. not having a camera
If that's important to a particular child, give them a camera. They do still exist.
> it's better to control it in a careful and reasonable way.
I agree. But you can't really do that if they have a smartphone. You can do that if they have to use a computer at home to go online.
I fully understand that kids will consider the lack of a smartphone to be essentially social suicide. They'll feel like it's an existential problem. But it's not. Good parenting often requires parents to do things that kids think are abusive, but are actually necessary to give them the best shot possible at having a good, healthy adult life. One of the main jobs of a parent is to gradually introduce children to reality. Emphasis on "gradually".
> I doubt this is a common or inevitable consequence.
I think if you speak with a psychotherapeut which keeps up with the current state of research/sience the answer would be: no many parent have no idea what they are doing, and it is VERY common. It's common enough that some people claim abusing this dynamic is the main source of income for Fortnight ...
> If that's important to a particular child, give them a camera. They do still exist.
this fully misses the point, it's not about making photos, it's about sharing them and slightly about funny filters etc. and do you think a parent who doesn't allow their child to have a phone would allow them to chair photos without a lot of friction?
Absolutely true, but not relevant to the point that I was trying to make. Kids often claim that parents don't understand the kid's point of view, but parents usually do. That was all I was saying. I wasn't claiming that parents were experts on parenting.
> it's not about making photos, it's about sharing them and slightly about funny filters etc.
I understood the point. You can do that with a digital camera. It just takes extra steps and is less immediate.
> do you think a parent who doesn't allow their child to have a phone would allow them to chair photos without a lot of friction?
Maybe not all, but many absolutely will. I did with my children, and I wasn't unusual in that. The issue isn't sharing or talking with friends, the issue is unfettered exposure to social media.
I half agree, but think the issue is more "exposure to unfettered social media" (a bit of a word stunt* I guess, but I'm sure you get what I mean).
Through as a parent I agree that there is only so much you can do about social media itself, so you have to find a compromise like you did.
*it's more like the access/view the child has to (a potential subset) of a social media providers content then the social media itself
There is a huge difference between given a child a phone and giving them unchecked phone and internet access.
> Some things your kid should not do!
Yes and socializing after school is definitely NOT on the list of things a child should not do.
Stop thinking in terms of yes or no, the world doesn't work like that.
A few things.
1. Fuck being on the inside. Work with your kid and their self-esteem and their friends to realize that shit-talking and drama online is shallow, painful and makes you a worse person.
2. Work with the parents in your kid's social circle to talk to them about social media impact, and maybe make sure that in-person time after school is happening. Alternatively, "just" get your kid involved in after-school programs that require social activity. Band, choir, sports, hobby clubs.
3. Don't cut off social media/computing entirely. Abstinence from it full-time would be really hard to enforce. Yes, look at putting parental controls. Yes, consider limiting which apps they can have. Put time limits on it, and yeet any unapproved devices.
This is why "large scale action" e.g. from school or better regulators are needed and why parents only can act very limited.
Don't force social isolation on your children just because idk. "this game is bad". Even if they social circle is "good" and doesn't start excluding or harassing them because of this (totally can happen, you can't really choose with whom you are in a class) it still is leads to a subtle isolation which might by itself not cause any mental issues, but can amplify existing issues, prevent mental scare from being healed etc. And such issues don't always come from "big bad thing" sometimes small bad things wrongly processed as a child can be enough to cause life long mental issues if the child has never the chance to reprocess/recondition/overcome them.
EDIT: Just to be clear doesn't mean children should have unchecked social media/game/etc. access.
They swim, ski, kayak and play school volleyball and badminton so there's lots of opportunities for that sort of interacting but I think it would be pretty harsh to cut them off of their phones. If I could get 3/4 of their friends parents to agree I would for sure until they are 16.
and in many situation it is pretty much guaranteed to at least cause slight degree of social isolation, in some (like very rual) it might cause a large degree of social isolation
similar having a phone isn't a yes/no question, things like parent control exist, even through they often slightly suck
If your solution is "go play outside with other kids" and the park is empty because all other kids are busy doing isolated things or on tic tok, then you have a problem.
So there is no isolation from peers, but also no other usage of the device.
We turn it off completely at 9pm.
Edit: oh, the other important detail is that they have no-data SIM cards. Tello sells text and talk only sims for $8/mo or whatever. Weirdly, when they are away from home, apple finds a way to tunnel blue bubbles through (sms only) … not sure how … bottom line is, at home, it’s iMessage or nothing.
To put it more bluntly: if social media is the only thing standing between a child and total isolation, that child has far bigger problems.
Maybe sign your kid up for little league?
Are we talking children or teenagers?
What's frequently missed is that most organization of meet-ups, birthday parties, talking to romantic interests, going to concerts et al, all happens on social media and in group chats now, and has done for the best part of fifteen years in the West. For the prior generation, if you aren't online, you aren't cool, and you won't know about cool things that are happening.
The current generation seems to have a fascination with dumb phones and eschewing tech obsession if the media spin is to be believed versus the numbers on social media apps. Both can be valid things that are occurring though, but I'm willing to bet that the dumb phone movement is a small one or a LARP for elitist cool points.
Yeah, no. People still talk to each other.
I leave it to you to exercise some adaptability and find suitable workarounds. This is a small problem. I guarantee you that you solve harder ones on a daily basis.
What workarounds am I looking for? And for whom? Why aren't the people concerned looking for their own workarounds?
If you value convenience over the well-being of your children, you'll have a convenient life and children who are unwell.
Do what you think is best, but don't pretend it's impossible to live well without social media. It's laughable. It deserves snippiness.
Even if you have a teenager who is social at school and through extracurriculars, many meaningful social interactions are happening online or through social media.
For example, almost every team/club these days has a "group chat", where kids spend time bonding outside of practice / organized events. Even if your child shows up to every organized event, they still may feel isolated due to being excluded from the conversations happening outside of practices.
Also, social media is the predominant force that is shaping Gen-Z culture. Being excluded from such a large driver of your peer's culture can definitely create feelings of isolation. Imagine if you had grown up in a household where music wasn't allowed, and how that could have made conversations with your peers more difficult. And social media is a significantly bigger cultural force than music was when you were a kid.
These are just a couple of examples, if you'd like I can list more ways that social media is semi-necessary for many kids to avoid feeling excluded.
I'm not saying this is necessarily always a bad thing (there are definitely strong arguments to be made for abstaining from some elements of society), but I would make sure you're communicating with your child and that you understand their social situation.
At Church on Sunday? No, that has collapsed.
At other social civic meetings... um, no not there.
Social gathering and civic interaction in the US has become highly commercialized and put into non-public places such as social media.
Check out your local recreation center. It's how I joined a local fencing club.
Check out meet ups in your area. It's how I join a language exchange group that meets weekly.
Check out your local library. They often have book clubs, kid and adult events, and more.
There are tons of options that people used before social media which still exist today. It's trivial to find them. The biggest problem is that many people don't want to move out from behind the screen.
Hospitality in general is struggling here. Pubs disappearing too.
Basically, find anything which interests you that places you in a context where you bump into the same group of people regularly. From that, connections with develop.
For many, the biggest challenge isn't finding a place to be but actually getting themselves out there in the first place.
All of this organization doesn't actually happen on social media in my social group. We pretty much all just text each other, and everyone I know and care to spend time with does this. The people who are utterly reliant on Facebook to organize their lives have filtered themselves out of my friend group.
I trust you can find alternatives to little league. I also trust you can understand the broader point.
What about cities? What about stores? What about TV? What about magazines? What about the radio? What about school? What about music? What about books?
Whilst I agree with you, where do we draw the line? Personally, having worked in advertising/marketing for over a decade and grown completely disenchanted with it and pivoted to just doing creative shit, I don't think we should advertise to kids, period. It's exploitative and gross.
For example, when our children were small, we didn't allow phones or social media, but allowed them to text/call friends with our phones. As they got older, we introduced Google Voice via family desktop computers so they had their own number for texts/calls, but given that it was on a desktop computer, it had limited usage. After that, we introduced a family smartphone that was shared among our younger children so they could text and have some limited social media, mainly group chat apps based on their clubs/sports. Once they became teenagers, we allow them their own phone, but still had restrictions on apps installed, types of websites available and time spent. Gradually over time, we introduce new apps, discuss app usage and review how things are going with the goal of increased independence over time.
For managing restrictions, we've used a lot of things, but never found a perfect solution. Bark works pretty well for signalling us of potential problems while giving our children a level of privacy. I use a Firewalla router to manage home internet access restrictions and Google Family Link to manage mobile devices. Both are mainly used to restrict time-based access (no middle of the night access) and for temporary restrictions to allow us to focus on things like homework and family events.
I can see why a lot of parents put no restrictions up or just ban too much. It takes a lot of work to create a nuanced set of restrictions that gradually give more independence as the child matures. Unfortunately, we've seen friends of our children who have had a lot of issues due to totally unrestricted internet access. We need to find and foster more middle grounds for easing children into social media and related technologies. Neither full unrestricted access nor total bans are helpful.
If you don't ban it at the source and society-wide, then parents are left with very little means to protect their children's development and growth into good individuals that reflect their beliefs.
I don't get how we're being so laissez-faire and willing to just "see where it goes" when it comes to our society and our future as a species. We're at a critical juncture right now and need to make a decision; we can't fence sit any longer while the winds of peer pressure randomly drag us wherever and based on nothing more than who shouts the loudest or who cancels dissent the best.
/rant
Yes, you do, because they will not want to interact with you if you're not on the preferred app. This is the case even with adults: I somewhat regularly meet people who will flatly refuse to talk to you if you don't have a green bubble, or an Instagram account, or whathaveyou. These are educated professionals in their 20's and 30's.
Find better friends?
Social media is no different from those, IMHO of course.
By keeping everything on the device-level, we would hopefully reduce the need for third-parties, ISP-level filtering, or providing too much information. The downside is that for open-source phones, in order for the system to be secure, there would likely need to be a similar Age ID check at checkout for any device that can bypass said filter. This would not be the first time that the US Government strongly "encouraged" device manufacturers to build-in rating system equipment (remember V-Chip?).
And as for "some kids might bypass it," I don't really care. Speed Limits are easily and frequently bypassed, but that doesn't mean it would be safe to get rid of them.
And who's checking that ID? In what form is the record of it being kept, and where? I would not use a device that had this sort of requirement. There's too much surveillance as it is.
The solution to this with children is easy -- don't get them a smartphone.
I would do it on a state-by-state level. Your phone verifies your age with, say, the state of California one time, and then it's set and California has no idea what you visit or why.
And if you don't like this due to hacking risk; remember that the State of California literally has your photo, social security number, address, height, weight, gender, and more. Hacking risk increase is minuscule from what it already is. And not just California - any state can look you up if they want; otherwise, how would traffic tickets or arrests for interstate drivers happen?
> The solution to this with children is easy -- don't get them a smartphone.
Or we ban children from possession or purchase of smartphones under a certain age. Which, I would be favor of, but may be too politically unpalatable.
> remember V-Chip?
Remember it didn’t work and was only pushed for by a bureaucracy that eventually did nothing but make regulation into the TV market and surely some Clinton connected suppliers of the IP very happy?
It had about a 10% usage, tops, according to the people that pushed for it and made money off it's regulatory implementation.
No is the answer whenever someone proposes “the aught to be a law”. There almost always aught’n’t.
The problem was that generation was so fucking lazy they refused to read a paragraph of an instruction manual to stop the "12:00" blinking on their VCRs, and spent all their time blaming everyone else for the problems they were causing, like violent videogames.
Though if my kids are any indication, it's still 50/50 - one is on tiktok/snapchat/insta constantly, and the other could care less.
One solution to this is to have a public computer in the house that the children can use. As they age and become more responsible you can give them more computing privacy. In the mean time you can kind of get an idea if they're developing bad habits and address it.
And, letting them use it only after 20:00, encourages them to hang out with friends after school (instead of running home to play games alone all afternoons and evenings).
If they are just queuing with randoms or spending all their time watching a stupid twitch streamer, that's not socialization though. I don't think you can actually form connections with other gamers anymore with the way modern matchmaking works.
I basically learned how to lie, sneak around, and keep two separate worlds going, as long as I needed my parents’ financial support.
I would argue that almost all of Gen-Z culture today is driven by internet communities and social media, and raising a child without access to online media will make it difficult for them to relate to many (not necessarily all) of their peers.
Because of social media. Sports teams and after school clubs didn't go anywhere. Parks didn't go anywhere. Malls are in decline but the period of time they were an active social location was the 80s and 90s, which is a blip in the grand scheme of things. Community centers still exist, churches still exist, libraries still exist, basements and backyards and living rooms still exist. My neighborhood is full of young children who are always playing at the park, at each other's homes, at the pool. Yes, if you hand your kid a phone and a social media account to occupy their time, they will struggle to identify non-social media ways to interact with their peers. That doesn't mean those avenues no longer exist.
I agree with you that parents shouldn't be required to watch their child's every move, and I would go further and say that our modern society in general is actively working against parents ability to parent their children properly. But when it comes to social media, the facts remain: social media isn't remotely crucial for a child's growth or ability to socialize with their peers, they may in fact socialize better without it, and regardless, its extremely damaging and risky to their mental and emotional health.
The ancient Greeks went to the marketplace (το αγορά) as a social location. That’s where agoraphobia, the fear of public spaces, stems from.
Sports teams and school clubs haven't changed, and good parents take substantial advantage of them, sure. Community centers are all but dead in my town. The local youth centers I attended as a child have shut down. Churches exist; in my town, everyone who attends them is 60 and over. Libraries exist; they are near empty, or full of people quietly studying. Not a place for a kid to socialize. The local spaces that children used to hang out after school are empty, because everyone is at home playing games and using social media, and kids don't want to stop using them because the local spaces are empty. There's no winning.
These places are different than they used to be. The avenues exist, but there's no-one on them. If I told my kids to go play outside with their friends like people did in the 90s and prior, they'd be on their own. I'd need to start a societal revolution in my town with at least 50% of the other parents to get them to coordinate in sending their kids out as well. It seems like if it's not a validated group activity like sports or clubs, then people just keep their children at home.
[citation needed]
For the latter group, do you feel like it's always willful ignorance? For example, some parents think you're talking about TikTok, when (as I'm sure you know) it often starts with Roblox/Minecraft chat and associated Discord servers.
What tools have you found useful to help parents understand and manage this?
Whilst I do agree that it's a failure to parent to a large extent, locking things behind restrictions can also make people want it more without them understanding why they're being restricted from having something that clearly makes a lot of people happy.
I go back to my teenage self, and if instead of treating me like an idiot, people explained the pros and cons to it, and helped me to understand it, I might just not want it for myself. In the same way that I had teen pregnancy and accidental overdoses explained to me, I understood the risk-to-reward ratio and why people were concerned enough to try and educate about it.
FWIW, whilst I don't take drugs, I do believe in legalizing them because punishing users makes precious little sense instead of helping them kick the addiction and get their life on track. However, legalizing of drugs equally doesn't mean I think people should seek them out, but those who are going to take them are probably going to take them anyway, and that should be something we can deal with in an appropriate and compassionate manner.
> those who are going to take them are probably going to take them anyway
I also think this is a common fallacy. As you said, some individuals are dead set on using drugs, participating in risky sex, teenage drinking, or utilizing social media may circumvent any restrictions you place on them. But there is also a large proportion of the population who isn't "dead set" on using those things, and are only interested enough to use them if convenient, but if otherwise restricted or disincentivized will move on to other things. Its certainly a far more nuanced equation than "People will do whatever they want, regardless".
What is effective in preventing x person from doing something bad for themselves isn't going to be effective on y person. This is where parenting styles must vary in order to be effective.
There are things that have been shown to have an effect on teen drinking, smoking, casual sex, and drug use. And things that have not.
Parents forbidding it is definitely not in the effective category.
It is wild to me that the GP's analysis of what might be done begins and ends at "we've run programs asking parents to forbid social media use, and they just can't be bothered to!"
Likewise, the kid will smoke less weed and drink less beer if they have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it. Most of the studies showing harmful effects of drug/alcohol consumption on teenagers identify subgroups who used multiple times per week or every day. Interpolating these effects linearly, they usually become very small below once per week.
In my experience/observation, how strict the parent is at trying to forbid drug and alcohol use doesn't actually have much correlation with whether and how much the kids use drugs and alcohol. Or if it does, it's a negative correlation. The kids with the biggest problems always seemed to have the strictest most punitive parents, whether as cause or effect. I am pretty sure plenty of research backs up that an effective way to reduce teen drug use is _not_ to have parents just try to be really strict and punitive about it.
Sure, there are a few parents who are totally absentee or abusive (say, giving kids drugs) and it can be related to kids with drugs and alcohol problems. But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it". And I don't find the kids whose parents try to be stricter or are scarier about it are in fact any less likely to have problems. I wouldn't be shocked if the correlation is the opposite.
You seem to be arguing for the same thing as I did. The status quo regarding social media is for parents to be "totally absentee" as you put it, while the usual approach to alcohol is "don't let me catch you". It's very rare for parents to take a permissive approach regarding teen alcohol use, especially considering it's illegal to do that.
>But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it".
The vast majority of kids have to jump through hoops to get alcohol, period.
>I am pretty sure plenty of research backs up that an effective way to reduce teen drug use is _not_ to have parents just try to be really strict and punitive about it.
Are you?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030646030...
"Results indicate that parental permissibility of alcohol use is a consistent predictor of teen drinking behaviors, which was strongly associated with experienced negative consequences."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037687161...
"harsh parental discipline was positively associated with alcohol use in the lower-use group only."
(But if children are in the lower-use group we have already avoided most of the physiological problems!)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048674.2010.50...
"Reduced levels of later drinking by adolescents were predicted by: parental modelling, limiting availability of alcohol to the child, disapproval of adolescent drinking, general discipline, parental monitoring, parent–child relationship quality, parental support and general communication."
Of course, the more important factor is not discipline of the child by the parent, but discipline of the parent by the parent. Parental use is the strongest predictor of children's use. So we should also consider that parents who use social media too much may influence their children to do so as well.
Feel free to share your research and sources, because this sort of assertion seems to get made all the time, but I haven't actually seen anything supporting it.
He smoked cigarettes for 50+ years starting at 13 in the 1930s. No one gave a shit about smoking then.
Why you being so ridiculous? Let the kid smoke his cigarettes. Making such a big deal out of nothing. From what he told me it sounded like cigarettes then were on the level of having a sandwich. Literally as normal as waking up in the morning and the kid checking their phone. What is the big deal? What could possibly go wrong?
US psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said there is an interesting distinction in impact between cooperative online play, e.g. gaming, and using social media, e.g. posting on instagram and reading others posts. He says the data shows the former can benefit a child's social development while the latter is absolutely toxic.
That’s not going anywhere.
Exploitation of young agency to prop up value stores and ideals of elders is what awaits them away from the screen.
Setting themselves aside to clean up the toxic mess of dying generations awaits them.
This may come as a shock but I don’t feel an obligation to your existence specifically.
Look at the public dismiss public healthcare and demand the kids work just as we did; we censored TV coddling their sensibilities and office jobs to protect the hallucinated value of private corporations.
I feel as much obligation to the “American Civic Life” hallucination as I do a more traditional religion. ACL has just taken hold of the biology religion did; causing people to hallucinate I owe them recognizing some spoken meme like “this person has high net worth.”
That’s thought policing. Western society is a police state and it spends billions on hypernormalized messaging to insure it stays that way.
Not one person on this forum is an obligation to me. You’re all hallucinating authority.
Just like the parents you’re complaining about, you’re going to ignore the idea you have real obligation to yourself and society owes you nothing.
Vain coddled primate; do it my way! … No. You’re not a divine mandate. Grow that potato.
Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
It is a LOT of work. But so far, it has paid off. The more responsible the usage, the more freedom we give. When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
> IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
There are also parents who disagree with this ideology and would find this an invasion of their child's privacy. I'd caution against the thinking "we find this valuable and if people don't do it it's because they aren't willing to put as much work in as we do"
And we make it extra clear that the moment they go online, they have no expectation of privacy. Better they learn that someone's snooping now than be surprised when it's Google/Facebook/NSA.
they will have their problems - just, outside of your reach, and they will not talk about them with you. (why? any reason, ranging from 'you don't get to surveil me - i'm going to have my privacy', to 'there's a looming possibility of blowback - I don't want to deal with that (or just, being afraid of that), so i'm just gonna keep my appearances neat (while doing real stuff elsewhere - and keeping that to myself')
I can assure you that this has not been the result of whatever is going on at home.
Getting teenagers to care about their online privacy is like pulling teeth.
I think this might be because they get so much positive reinforcement from sharing what they are doing on social-media-platform-Z.
Why? Teenagers are kids too, or have we forgotten that? They are actually worse than kids in some respect, still immature but with changing body and new hormones.
It may seem weird to them at this time, but hopefully they’ll appreciate when they grow older - or even if not, at least one did what they could.
We're simply talking privacy in the digital context. When I was a teenager the world looked different so I had N/A for digital privacy.
You're justifying invasion of privacy with vagueries about "the world being different". This isn't saying anything.
Growing up in the 90s we had a home computer, and by extension, digital privacy.
No on-device privacy is different than no privacy.
the realistic expectation, is that they will talk about some things and do some things, and you will not be part of those things (just by the nature of things, and whichever way it is, whether you're trying to surveil their chats or not, or just letting people have their own privacy), and all you can do is just hope that when something happens, they will be more inclined to talk to you and ask you for help, than not. setting it up in a way like 'i'm scanning your communications - and if something happens, it's gonna become a thing to deal with' - is not gonna help with that. it's setting up for it to be like 'i'm gonna try to avoid having anything out that could be seen by parents and become a thing'. not even 'avoiding getting into trouble' - but just 'avoiding writing about that trouble, or talking about that trouble with you'.
It it is possible to be firm on dangers, still be understanding and calm, and let them have face-to-face conversations with privacy... even a beer once in a while or whatever else harmless thing that might excite them in other ways. Pick your battles in other words.
I have been raised differently, and with certain values. It is frustrating but ok to forbid or limit things, and to talk about issues. But to snoop through one's private messages or similar communication, that's completely disgusting and I would have what? Appreciated? No, never forgiven (works both ways btw, the trust). Especially at teenage age.
I guess I shared voluntarily more with my parents and voiced issues than I would have in such circumstances, can just repeat: dis gus ting.
Your comment and the parent point to the theme that matters to me most: do you care to understand/show interest in what your kids are doing. Forget about social media - just think about TV. You can park your kid in front of the TV and forget about them, converse with them as they watch, or something in between. Your kids also need quiet/down time as well.
Again, not to say I'm right, but I try not to litigate what is happening so much, and instead I try to just be an active participant in whatever my kids are doing. The counter where you restrict or limit or challenge doesn't always work out better in the end.
This I think precisely embodies what works and what doesn't. If this is your goal, you'll figure out something that works.
People generally value their privacy. How are children supposed to learn the same if their's is not respected?
In my experience, there's a lot of the second.
I mean, I've seen this sort of controlling behaviour carry over for three generations(that I know of) among my relatives - the person to (hopefully - the jury is out on that) break the chain moved countries.
While I understand the intention behind it, this practice can easily lead to conflicts and strained relationships.
Teenagers are at a stage in their lives where they are trying to establish their independence and develop a sense of self. By invading their privacy, parents risk undermining their trust and creating an atmosphere of constant surveillance. This not only hampers the natural process of growing up but also sends a message that their thoughts and personal space are not respected.
I don't think the remedy is more helicopter parenting. It suffices to limit screen time across the board and empower kids with knowledge surrounding the risks of over use.
It's a great way to ruin relationships with your kids. Keep at it, HN know-it-alls.
You've just described modern life—better get used to it early. Never every put anything sensitive in an electronic message.
On the surface, it seemed like it was effective and they had model kids. But in every case I can remember it resulted in the kids just becoming much better at finding ways to rebel (in increasingly escalating ways) that the parents couldn't catch, until they got a knock at the door from the police, or their kid was pregnant, or overdosed, etc.
My 5 kids had always-present parenting (because independent growth became effectively illegal+impossible). Being it's such a counterproductive situation, it required strictness to pull it off.
They're adults now and all live with me.
FWIW there's a rule in play that success is kids'; failure is parents'. I can't do their hard work of growing up but I could surely sabotage it.
I think the approach should highly depend on the kid. I for one was good at academic subjects and also reasonably concerned about my future to put in the work at school (I never ran off with the circus etc.), so hands-off approach worked well with me. It might not work as well with someone completely different.
Anecdotally, I got in trouble occasionally as a teenager, but those moments of trouble were considerably less rebellious than friends of mine with helicopter parents.
Kids in trouble are often kids developing ambition. I'd wager the disproportional punishments (arrest+record over getting yelled at and shooed off) are what do actual harm.
> When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
Can you elaborate on what sorts of things you'd ask about, or what bad patterns are? I'm not a parent but if I were I think I'd have a hard time drawing the line in the right place.
You should not be going through your teenager's text messages... that is absolutely insane.
My parents were kind of similar and I had a very negative experience growing up as a result. I still remember my mom throwing out all my NiN CDs I had bought after she read the lyrics. And all my DnD material because Satan was controlling my brain through it.
As a parent you should be teaching your child to be independent and learn how to make the right choices themselves. Micro managing every aspect of their lives is the absolute wrong approach.
we don't know from the singular fact that they're reading through teenagers text messages how heavy handed that monitoring is. Maybe there's a recurrence of satanic panic, but we don't actually know that. That you had that experience with your parents is awful but it sounds like parents are more likely to be their kids DnD DM than anything else these days.
So do you leash your kids and monitor every single one of their actions? Do you really think that is the solution? Parents have tried this for millennia and it never works. Some go completely overboard and shelter their kids, who have mental breakdowns when they enter the real world. I've seen it happen first hand with home-schooled/overly protected friends.
You throw out an extreme anecdote. Remember the war on drugs? It was the same thing. Oh, your kids are gonna do crack at their friends house if you are not careful. Drugs are everywhere and kids are melting their brains. Yes, extreme things can happen to anyone, you can get hit by a car and die, that doesn't mean you ban your kids from crossing a road.
How do you teach them the right choice? Well, this is the art of parenting, and is hard. There are many approaches here. My approach is to treat my teens with respect, have frank conversations with them, and set some clear boundaries and expectations (you must do your schoolwork).
I also try to set myself as a role model for them by living my life to the same morale standards I'd want them to. I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink lots, I don't go on random hookups (all things which I see common in men my age). I work hard but also try to remember to have fun and laugh.
It's worked so far. They are confident and happy and will confide in me things they are struggling with. I know they will do things that I wouldn't be happy with and will be unaware of, but that is the risk inherent in life and they will learn from it. All I can do is try to set them up for success best I can, and impart my limited wisdom.
you establish trust
General rules, like:
-Assume everything you send can at some point become available to everyone, forever.
-Anyone saying "don't tell your parents" is definitely up to no good and should not be trusted.
-On the internet anyone can convincingly pose as anyone.
etc.
Also children usually converse with their peers, so you'll be going through messages of quite a lot of other people's children. Do you have the consent of all the people involved, including their parents?
Forever is a hard concept to grasp for a kid - I was doing stupid things in my 20s that could have had forever consequences. Much worse than something available online forever. I was lucky and had none, but this argument wouldn't work on me
You teach them principles, obviously. Or are you planning on weighing in on their choices for the rest of their lives?
Holy crap.
Maybe you’re aware, but things like this are commonly cited reasons by young adults as to why they’ve never again spoken to their parents after they were able to escape them, sometimes even voluntarily becoming homeless to get away.
it would be HUGE news if this were the case, very curious about your reply
The one VERY CLEAR correlation that I see, though, is that families who are EXTREMELY intentional about this fare far better. More than the minutiae of what age they did or didn't give phones, which apps to allow or not, etc., the families that I have seen have lots of success are families who have dedicated time for these conversations and have made them a habit in their family. The ones who I have seen struggle have been of the "set it and forget it" mentality, even the ones who try to just "install an app" that will just do the parenting for them.
Relying on parents to somehow prevent their kids from doing what all their peers are doing, I'm not surprised this is a fight parents choose not to have, or don't know how to win, or don't have the energy for.
Can the school "be bothered" to try to do something at the school level, that will effect the entire peer group, instead of hoping that parents will find a way to swim against the stream? There might be other ways than simply prohibiting phones. Or maybe the school "can't be bothered" to try?
As someone that grew up with social media and the internet from the moment I could read, I struggle to understand how social connections worked before it. Broadband become mainstream in just the last ~20 years. Social media that quantifies someone's popularity absolutely affects teenagers' mental health. But social media also means support groups on reddit and places like HN.
The surgeon general wants to explore and understand the way different social media affects mental health. But the way this issue is presented by NYT, and in general, categorizes all social media as the same. This framing is going to make younger generations ignore these "warnings" as out of touch, because it is. Similar to how my parents call every game console or video game, "playing the Nintendo". These overgeneralized discussions make most people dig in to their already held beliefs. This also gives overbearing parents fuel to invade the privacy of their children, which harms children's mental health, and leads to trust issues, more than social media ever will.
Facebook was amazing when it first came out because it allowed people to keep in touch easier and share photos with each other. It also is arguably the progenitor of "bad" social media with tallied likes/reactions and algorithmic skinner boxing of posts.
Unfortunately, it boils down more to usage than whether or not a site is a "good/bad" social media. And even a good one can turn bad if it gets too popular and the culture dies (reddit)
I don't really know how to feel about it. To me, it feels like smartphones. I recognize the utility but at the same time know that the manufacturers/developers are intentionally designing psychologically addictive patterns to keep me engaged, and am inclined to utilize it less as a result. Which in turn limits the utility I get out of them!
Our attention - and our kids attention is being extracted and resold.
The algorithm-ization of social media feeds to promote addictive behaviors optimized to maximize addiction triggers for the personality of every single individual + the maximization of paid content (sometimes ads, sometimes secretly promoted) has long replaced the feeds serving the interest of the user.
The enshittification of social media is in place and the platforms are basically competing to squeeze the last few remaining drops of our attention, already having collected and monetized most of that resource.
Facebook can be an extremely helpful and useful tool for keeping in touch with your friends and something that is addictive and harmful to your mental health.
As a father of 3 young children, my view is that social media like reddit, tumblr, discord, facebook, instagram, twitter should be out of bounds for anybody younger than 16. I would really like them avoid until their very late teens, early 20s but I know this will be impossible. The risks far outweigh the benefits, perhaps a social feed monitored by a parent is fine, but never unsupervised, the damage is real and kids can be pulled into niche subjects that may form their personality in their teen years with no sight to the long term damages. Call me square I don't care.
HN and other forums with a somewhat narrow interest/focus are fine by me, in fact I would somewhat encourage them to read and participate in these activities. People here tend to be more genuine about their interest and they tend to keep it narrow--just look at how little traction political discourse gets on this site, it's refreshing, people on this site are intrinsically focused at the task at hand.
"It is possible that an entire cohort of Americans, now in their 60s and beyond, lacks the level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online." [2]
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/done-right-internet-us...
Do you not see how this is a problem?
In my circle of friends and family I've seen the majority of them go from being people you could talk to and spend time with to people that just stare at their phones constantly, I've heard others say the same about their circles. Parents let Youtube raise their kids because they don't want to get their eyes off the screen themselves. You could be on a luxury vacation on a yacht in the Mediterranean but they never get off their damn phones. There's no way that's healthy.
That's not even getting into how social media shapes your mind at a young age. I have two teachers in the family and they both say that kids have become borderline retarded since around 2010.
The multi billion dollar attention economy wants to dodge responsibility by holding an unrealistic standard of evidence for their externalities but use your common sense. Humanity has never had anything that constantly demands your attention, are we just supposed to pretend it will have no effect on our mental health?
People just stare at the TV constantly. Parents let the TV raise their kids. People watch TV even on vacation. TV has made kids stupid.
And it probably goes back further -- can you believe the parents letting radio raise their kids? Don't get me started on the children who spend all day staring at words in a book. I have a teacher friend who says cuneiform carvings have made kids stupid since around 1000 BC.
Now obviously overconsumption of any media can be unhealthy, but there seems to be a lot of fear-mongering over social media that isn't well-justified. It's just "old man yells at clouds" for the digital age. Lots of broad assertions and very little evidence to back them up.
Similarly, we could instead say that yeah, maybe TV had some negative effects, but there's no TV outside, at work, at school, at least not usually. And at least for TV, you turn on a channel and watch it. Also there's some pretty good stuff on TV. How many scientists were inspired watching Star Trek as a kid? But I'm sure there were kids who did watch too much TV, and it really did have a negative impact on them. It's just that eventually norms were established yadda yadda that mitigated the severity of it on a societal scale.
With smart phones and social media, maybe we're scaling up the sorts of negative effects that people were worried about with TV, to where it really can have some disturbing effects even on a societal scale. And maybe we really should be worried that we're effectively conditioning children to have shorter attention spans due to the emergent properties of a smartphone with multiple different social media apps firing off notifications with very short form content. And the rate of adoption has been so huge, that if it is the case, we might already be fucked pretty soon.
Television WAS terrible. I have many older relatives who are basically zombies whenever one is on. It has crippled their ability to critically think, it indoctrinates them, and leads to numerous health complications
Just because a population has been adequately addicted doesn’t mean the addiction isn’t a problem
Now fast forward to today and realize that these modern digital drugs can be many many times more potent than your TV of yesteryear
“Lots of broad assertions and little evidence to back them up”
Friend I think you need to put down your screen and take a long hard look at what the world is and where it’s heading
I grew up with TV, the number of people spending almost all their free time on a phone completely dwarfs any TV consumption I've ever seen.
Estimates of smart phone usage varies, but it is mostly around 4-5: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045353/mobile-device-da...
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. ... this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation.
<https://www.rtdna.org/murrows-famous-wires-and-lights-in-a-b...>
Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest" (1964):
Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world. ...
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it.
<https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...>
Television technology is inherently antidemocratic. Because of its cost, the limited kind of infomration it can disseminate, the way it transforms the people who use it, and the fact that a few speak while millions absorb, television is suitable for use only by the most powerful corporate interests in the country. They inevitably use it to redesign human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form, that nicely fits the artificial environment. Television freewayizes, suburbanizes and commoditizes human beings, who are then easier to control. Meanwhile, those who control television consolidate their power.
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Quill Press, 1978, p. 349.
You can look at phenomena such as radicalisation, "QAnon orphans" (or Fox orphans, or right-wing talk-radio orphans), at instances in which new and emerging media played a significant role in radicalising populations (radio in Nazi Germany, under Father Coughlan in the United States, in the Rwandan genocide), the printing press's role in the Reformation and 30 Years' War (see especially Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979: <https://archive.org/details/printingpressas01eise> and vol. 2 <https://archive.org/details/printingpressas02eise>, also McLuhan, Robert W. McChesney's work generally, Chomskey & Herman, Neal Postman, Socrates, Ecclesiates, and many, many more. (I've compiled a bibliography, which could use some updating, here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...>).
Keep in mind that a major factor which makes pre-transition views seem so quaint is that we are living in the world those transitions created. Our world is normal to us, and generally comfortable, acceptable, or at least known, and the concerns seem ... antique. Because in fact they are, and the world from which they were voiced was destroyed and no longer exists.
We’re living in times where no one is held accountable. Literally billions of lives are being destroyed or seriously damaged for relatively minor profits (per damage caused anyway). When will it change? The populace is so powerless and the politicians are so evil… it’s perfectly understandable why nihilism is so embraced these days
YouTube is absolutely social media no different than Instagram or TikTok. Even something like Mr. beast who is generally a good guy can warp and expose kids to a suddenly transexual and borderline pedophile character who abandons his wife and child. Anyone can post anything. My goal is to limit what my kids are exposed to in much the same way parents did before social media. It just means I have to be involved which is something we should all strive to do.
YouTube is not social media because there's no real network of friends. You have creators making content for users to consume. There are comments under videos, but there's no friends feature or direct messaging. Anyone can't post anything. The rest of the world is going to continue to use social media, limiting access won't change that. My perspective mostly agrees with this Unicef report.
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/done-right-internet-us...
I don't have kids but I have been tutoring kids for the last 14 years, since I was basically a kid. I do individual tutoring for mostly high school, and occasionally middle school kids. Some of the have been with me from 7th through 12th grade, and a couple have even asked me to help them prep for finals even after starting college. They end up trusting me with things they wouldn't tell their parents, because I'm still someone they see as an authority figure. Because of cultural reasons, the kids I've tutor think of me and address me as an older brother. I've noticed covid catalyzed the shift to using digital platforms to keep in touch.
I don't have children, but empathize with the feeling of wanting to be protective. It took a lot of effort to make sure some of kids I tutored weren't taken advantage of by people like Andrew Tate. Telling them not to watch didn't help, pointing out the problems with Tate's message and taking time to dissect it did. Doing that also helped them learn how to identify similar manipulation tactics from other creators. It's important to separate the platform from the users.
I think we disagree on the importance of teaching kids how to use these tools. It feels sort similar to countries banning people from accessing AI tools like ChatGPT. The ban won't slow down AI development, those banned countries are simply left behind.
and?
For me, (athiest as well) I'm slightly right of center or probably right smack in the middle of what used to be the center a decade ago. I don't think there is such a thing as toxic masculinity.
I teach my kids that to be a man means: being kind to those less fortunate than you or even to those that you disagree with. I teach them that if someone puts a hand on you or someone you care about then all bets are off, fight until they can't continue or you can't. To lose is to risk death when not in a controlled environment (boxing ring, etc). Don't be a bully either physically or emotionally. No one is better than you. Never let anyone shame you for what you are. Always try your best. Look after the people that rely on you. You live the life that you earn.
There is more but that's the gist. Essentially boys look at their father to learn what a man is. If he is absent or does not give them attention they will seek validation else where.
Note: I'm not an expert, just a guy doing the best he can with 2 elementary school age boys.
Putting aside whether I agree or disagree, did you ever consider sitting down with your kids to teach/coach/guide them through what social media is, the content on it, what's valuable or not? And if you decided not to, what criteria did you use to make the decision? Did you waver in that decision, or do you take time to reevaluate it on a regular basis?
Or is it instead that you categorically believe all social media is rotten.
I think you're right about the objective quality of most of what's there. It's garbage. I have two girls under age of 5 but this topic will inevitably bubble up to the surface up to the age of 5. We actually pulled YouTube out of rotation for my older one because, much like you fear, one video slightly off the path played more than a couple times directed the algorithm down a black hole of nonsensical kids videos.
I'm telling myself - with time to go - that at I need to know what's going on in social media to help them understand what their friends might be allowed to do or not when we get to that point. And I'll monitor phones/iPads. Not yet sure about full bans on all of social media but we'll see where things are in that moment and evaluate.
Let me flip side this around: do your kids come to you about apps/social media/etc. with curiosities? Surely they hear about things. How do you redirect?
Luckily enough my kids don't ask about social media yet although I do ask them every few weeks if their friends are on it. Some of them have YouTube primarily for video game tutorials. One of my kids friends has more but he is in a single parent household and pretty much left to fend for himself. Any games my kids play I generally playa couple times myself to validate. Their main game is Fortnite, groups of their friends play together.
Told my oldest he can have a phone next year when he starts middle school but it's my phone and he can use it as long as he follows the rules. Have not defined what those are yet for him or me.
I really think social media leads to depression, bullying and change in beliefs. I'd rather sit down with my kid when it's time, discuss with him why he can't have whatever I am saying no to and have him be mad at me for a bit rather than he gets involved in something detrimental.
I don't spank my kids so it's always come down to discussion. Has worked well so far but tomorrow is another day.
Can you expand on this? Who are you talking about?
It also helps a lot with democracy as it's much harder for autocratic states (or governments aspiring to become such) to censor and mute the news about their bad deeds.
The main problem I'm seeing is not "social media" but how exactly it is implemented, often stuffed full of dark patterns designed to lead to addictive behavior and nearly always with no consequence to people which try to use it for scams (targeting young people) harassment and similar.
IMHO we need laws to ban "dark patterns" and "engineered addiction" as well as a system to handle and reduce harassment and other abuse. That alone might make enough difference to make any further steps unnecessary. But to be safe early (and reoccurring) education about social media, social media hygiene, and media manipulation would be excellent additions. Just not seeing most governments doing the later point, as it probably would mean them not getting elected again in the future.
Another "problem" is that the internet in general allow young people to relatively early see how messed up the world is and at the same time how the people in power often double down on it to gain more power then to fix it. This can lead to a feeling of helplessness and despair young people preferably should not be exposed to. At the same time denying them access to the truth doesn't seem right either. In the end despair and helplessness are like poison, it is what drives people to suicide and it is also what often is a major factor for weather or not a "bad situation" becomes a trauma or not.
as far as I can tell this seems to be a very US thing, through somewhat exported from there through YT/TickTock/etc. (especially to other English speaking countries)
similar to this "over the top social justice" I'm mainly seeing in the US
honestly I have no idea what is going on with the US but it looks really really unhealthy and dangerous not just for the US (not just the points above but also many other points, like religious extremism, or the distribution of fascistic mindsets (but not Nazis) and others)
a lot of overlapping factors
like being able to realize how messed up the world is, or how bad your own situation and future chances are can have a huge negative impact for a child which doesn't really have has much power (or at least it seems so for the child) to change anything until it's too late
at the same time while there are a lot of support structures in the internet and I have meet people which likely wouldn't be alive today without that there are also many bad places and people in the internet
and the way TockTock (and similar but lesser degree YouTube) work can easily lead to a situation where people can intentionally target young people, most times without any consequences or risk for themself
additionally there are factors unrelated to the internet but more related to the fact that "the west" moved from a economical boom time to a sequence of one down turn after another with few good long term outlooks
For example when I grew up with the feelings that I can make mistakes, especially in my youth, and have chances to recover. Even if I had messed up to a point of not geting a school degree the outlook was still one where I could recover from it if I put effort in.
But when I speak with kits today they often say they get the feeling they aren't allowed to do any mistakes, they have no second and third chances, no time to experiment, and hardly any chances to recover. They have the feeling that even if they don't mess up in the internet they might be punished for small mistakes they did in their youth years later.
This puts a _lot_ of pressure on them.
Then their is how poisons the climate change debate is for children, on one hand you have the people which just don't take it serious at all, but even a small child can relatively easily research that that is pretty much nonsense. But on the other side you often have people which go into extremes like "humans will die out", "it's already nearly to late", "if we don't act now we are all domed". Which is also somewhat nonsensical as while climate change will most likely make the quality of live for humans in general way way worse the chance for direct extinction is limited (sadly not non-existing due to hard to estimate chain effect, and many especially cost cities and even some flat countries will most likely not survive if we look at it realistically). That is depressing, but that isn't what makes the debate poisonous. What makes it poisonous is that you get told you can change it by "being a better human and not doing this or that". Except that this is pretty much a lie. For one especially if you are less wealthy you often don't have a realistic choice in many cases. For the other a lot of problem areas for climate pollution are not in the reach of what some normal person can effect through their buying decisions, even if most do so. But telling someone "they" can change it while it pretty obvious doesn't seem to work and looks pretty hopless is _extreamly_ poisonous to the mental state of a person if they believe it and care about the outcome, especially if they are young and inexperienced.
So even more pressure, perceived dark future and hopelessness.
Then us potentially heading into another cold war or WW3 probably isn't helping either.
Sometimes not knowing can be bliss.
But even without access to a phone can a child still grow up in a innocent world today?
Honestly, I wished I hadn't deleted it. It made me feel like I had missed connecting with my friends, I sometimes look at my friends old posts and feeling a little left out. And there are countless people I could probably still be in at least a little bit of touch with. And I know I'll get people saying that its pointless because I'm not friends with them irl, but I still kinda enjoy seeing what even acquaintances are up to these days on social media. Social media is a part of life now, and forcing your kids off it isn't gonna automatically make them live healthier lives. Let them make their own decision at least, they really are smart enough.
So much of life happens online these days: college, the workplace, dating, etc. Kids need to learn how to communicate over the internet because they're going to be doing it for the rest of their lives, and social media really does help with that.
You’d still feel left out even if you were on social media too, and you’d have that feeling 10 fold. The only reason for that feeling is social media pressure and not actually connecting to people IRL. If you did connect to people IRL you did the right thing and what you’re experiencing is just a surface level illusion.
It seems like extreme helicoptering to restrict your children from things like this that are in the world and it’s an easy way out. Hey! All of a sudden you don’t have to parent. Some software can do it for you.
I’d prefer to teach my children right from wrong instead. Not shelter them from it.
It’s super weird.
But those things are nothing like the hyper connected hyper expectations of being constantly online and being part of “current thing”.
I get your goals, but I’m not sure as parents we can compete with an absolutely all encompassing relationship with a screen, where the best in the brightest in the world are working constantly to make sure your kids sees x, believes y, repeats z.
There is a strong chance that the only way to win is to not play.
Because of the functional difference, using parental controls on the most addicting apps and sites during younger ages starts to make sense. Getting your child to conform to your value system is not the important part, what's arguably more damaging is the negative effects of emotional and mental addiction to social media and its trends, along with addiction to touchscreen usage itself - kids raised with touchscreens too early often lack the patience or self-control to read books, indulge their own imagination, or even watch a movie.
I too was allowed free reign on the internet in the early 00's as a child and teenager. I saw the shock sites, and browsed /b/ with schoolmates. However, the computer I used was a shared computer in the living room, not my own room. And I still fell into game addiction that affected my academic performance and mood until parental intervention. It's worth looking out for.
The paper talks about the amount of time spent, taking time away from sleep and physical activity. This might apply.
I don't think other factors like privacy or cyberbullying apply here.
If everyone knew how large the X+Z percentage was, there could be a large enough group that most kids wouldn't be on social media, and they wouldn't feel bad about it or miss out on most social activities.
But as it stands, Y% have their kids on social media, Z% go along for the ride so they don't miss out, and then X% have a tough choice to make.
It would be great if schools had presentations for parents (and kids) that talk about these potential harms, and encouraged families to make decisions in the long-term interest of their kids. This could have the side benefit (for the school) of reducing smartphone usage, which distracts kids during school.
I'm thinking of talking to my kids' school about this, since they spend so much time/money on all sorts of presentations/trainings already, and often for stuff that would be less impactful. I'd even encourage them to tell students that parents use phones too much, and they can feel free to bug us to have no-phone time. That would get the kids invested in the concept, and make it less likely they fall prey to smartphone addiction.
If it works for cigarettes...
I don't they held back, I remember getting shown rotting lungs, the effects of lung cancer, holes in the throat, yellow teeth. Lots of death statistics.
Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts? Hacker news?
If we can figure this out then we can have a productive talk about kids and phones and pros and cons. Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media? Can kids call and text? Can they access Wikipedia? Can they play Minecraft? Can they take photos? Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.
It doesn't feel like science. It feels like hand-waving, correlation, and anecdote.
If I'm the Surgeon General of the United States, I'm doing the follow up study. As far as I can tell, that follow up study hasn't been done with kids and social media.
"In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly... Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor. "
Like I wrote in a comment back then, it's like blaming "computers" or "the internet". Vague to the point of useless.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-th...
This article is about social media, and doesn't suggest an all-or-nothing approach of not giving kids phones. Hell, a ctrl+f for "phone" brings up 0 results.
>Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts? Hacker news?
If you go to the NYT article and follow the link to the 19-page report in the first article, you can find this[1] in the second citation. This appears to suggest that, at a minimum, social media includes YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. These are, to my mind, obvious choices, but maybe it's not so obvious to others?
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anyone mention group texts and shared Google docs being considered "social media", and it's often mentioned and acknowledged on this very forum that HN can be considered social media.
>Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media?
No, because contrary to you saying that "saying 'no phones' is throwing the baby out with the bathwater", nobody has actually said that here. A ctrl+f for "phone" in this thread currently brings up 12 results, 9 (well, 10 now that I've edited this sentence in) of which are in my comment and yours, and the other three aren't about banning phones outright, in fact two of them are about taking the more nuanced approach you've suggested.
>It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.
It's not hard if we're not being so reactionary.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...
Am I in the minority of not thinking of TikTok and YouTube as social media? Perhaps it's only in my head. I mention shared google docs because I've actually seen bullying behavior in shared google docs - it's an easy way for kids to talk to each other with their school laptops outside of any other supervision.
I'd say they are "social media", but they aren't the most problematic sort. By default there is little or no interaction with their circle of "real life" friends, so the issues that tend to arise around social media are largely mitigated.
All that's really left is the safety concern, and we mitigate that by requiring that they not expose their real name, their face, or their geographic location at anything more specific than a regional level ("I'm in northern Arkansas").
> why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?
They're lousy parents who give their kids phones, not lousy parents because they give their kids phones.
Like everything "parenting", I feel like it's a bit more subtle/situational than a simple list.
We have two daughters, the oldest of which is 14. We recently bought her a cheap pay-as-you-go Android phone to take with her when she's out at events and such. She's been great about taking it, but at the moment it's sitting on a shelf in her room with a dead battery and no service plan. She just isn't interested in "having" a phone.
On the other hand, she has an 11" 5G/LTE iPad Pro. Both her mother and grew up with unfettered Internet access from a relatively early age (~13, in 1997) and agree that it was a huge net benefit to us. That's the overall approach we've taken, with one modification: unlike _our_ parents, we're savvy to both the tech and social aspects.
They aren't allowed to have social media accounts tied to their names without them first coming to us and talking about it. They both have YouTube accounts (and post very frequently, with more followers than their parents), but they're under aliases and they don't show their faces. If they really wanted a Facebook account or something - they won't, because that's "for old people", but for the sake of argument - we'd figure out a way to satisfy both of us.
I require that they keep all of their passwords in Bitwarden, and I have access to the vault where they're stored. This serves multiple purposes: security, ease of access across devices, and access for us in an emergency. We let them know that we wouldn't access their accounts without them present except in an emergency, and they trust us to follow through with that.
Instead, "social monitoring" is done when we sit down, about once a week, and let them talk about what's going on in their digital lives.
Finally, we have fairly comprehensive logging set up on all of our devices and access points. I have a list of the top 5k or so "problematic" sites - including, obviously, porn - and a cron job that scans our logs for those hostnames. If something comes up that concerns me, I let my wife know and speak to our kids directly and privately. The theory here is if they're old enough to sit down and talk to their parents about a given piece of content, they're old enough to consume it if they choose to.
We've only felt the need to have those conversations a handful of times, and while sometimes awkward, it has had the effect we intended: they're spending their (prodigious) time online reading, watching mostly instructional YouTube videos, and creating content.
... and yes, before HN points this out, I'm well aware that there is no such thing as a system that cannot be compromised or bypassed. I'm not even trying that hard: the logs are written to a USB drive connected to our home router, and the router's admin password is written right there on a label. If they figure out how to SSH into the router, modify the logs, and cover their tracks... well, I don't think there is much that would make me happier to be honest. I'll take "hacker mentality" over "has never seen a porn video" every day of the week.
TikToc is content creators sharing their videos with the whole world.
Seems like a "social"ly focused way of producing/consuming a particular kind of "media".
In all seriousness, I think the defining characteristics of social media for me include:
- a social graph, I can follow other entities, and they can follow me - bottomless, user produced content and feeds - interactive commentary and messaging between users - promotion algorithms, where the endless content is filtered and promoted, potentially leading to something going "viral", including by those who aren't in my immediate social network - a focus on sharing content between users - some form of voting, liking, or reacting
I don't think something needs all of the above to be considered social media. Some things ride the line quite a bit: a Discord server, if small between friends, probably doesn't qualify and is closer to a group chat. A large Discord server with lots of users who don't know each other? Probably counts. HackerNews, and other message boards? You could make an argument either way, but in HN's case, I'd say it is social media.
I think it's wrong to be upset at them.
>Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bath water
I completely disagree. Outside of the top maybe tenth percentile of focused/competent people smartphones are a net negative. They're practically designed to be. I don't own one for that reason.
This happens over and over again for anything. Vaccines is just one known example. I'm also talking about gay people. People who have sex before marriage. Immigrants. People with suspiciously dark skin tone. Body image. etc.
Providing "guidance" on adequate use sounds so naive though. It's like telling an overweight person that the guidance is to eat less. Trust me, they know this already.
Adults are just as addicted, with pretty much the same consequences.
I doubt the surgeon general would directly call this out in the USA, since we're one of the few countries that allows pharmaceutical corporations to market directly to the public (and social media seems to be a big part of their advertising budget).
It's very nature induces abnormal behavior.
I recently wrote an article of some perspectives on the topic. Focusing on how the lack of privacy is a key factor.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dakara/p/uniform-thought-machi...
Do you want your child exposed to any arbitrary adult or other child, doing or talking about or showing any arbitrary thing, and in an environment that encourages and celebrates unconstrained sociopathic behavior?
It should have been an easy call for any parent long ago, and adult social media needs to be treated like a bar or R or NC-17 rated movie - not a place for children.
Bars that don't keep out children are considered nuisances to the neighborhood and shut down. Did you know that in some (maybe most) places, if someone leaves a bar and trashes the neighbor's car, the bar is liable?