Isolating them from their peers can be just as mentally devastating. I don't think there is a good solution to this.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Social media is no different from those, IMHO of course.
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.