30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok
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Even if you're aware of the mental health issues associated with social media use, you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
The only positive trend I've seen is school districts banning smartphones. That could relieve some of the social pressure to hook your kid up with a smartphone so early in their life.
> you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
Are these really the only 2 options you see? No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"?
Edit: People replying to this comment seem to have forgotten the role of parents.
Perhaps our parents have something to do with that?
That has something to do with the law?
I have kids. They watch movies with us, and the nanny gives them more screen time than I'd like. I don't have to talk to them about drugs because nobody is handing my kids drugs. But screens are everywhere and I use them all the time, sadly.
Probably works for some but I imagine it being really hard to do, especially if they're at school. Our brains take a while to mature and I don't see many 5-7 year olds being able to make long term good choices on their own at that point. I think that's too much to ask.
Back in the middle school days, decades ago, I was running proxies on free PHP hosting services to avoid content restriction on school computers.
Learned more from my shenanigans than from the computer lab classes :)
"OK, honey, this is called cocaine. I'm going to let you try it, but only in a safe and reasonable manner. We'll discuss reasonable limits on how much you can use and when."
It's not so much that people are too dumb to do this or don't understand the danger, it's that doing this well is tedious and time-consuming and expensive. Setting up parental controls and monitoring them is a chore, you have to sign up for a bunch of apps you don't want and read outdated docs and troubleshoot random error messages and crap. Most of the good stuff costs money, all of the shitty stuff is free. Finding educational apps that aren't terrible requires research, whereas the worst garbage imaginable is heavily advertised.
So, I'm not saying you're wrong, but that this is a problem with incentives as opposed to a moral failing. I think there's a direct parallel to the rise of highly processed foods. The people 2-3 generations ago understood that junk food was unhealthy, and very few people fed their kids 100% soda and hot pockets, but junk food was so much cheaper and easier that people gradually allowed more and more into their diets, and now here we are with an adult obesity rate 3x that of 1960.
> "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day"
Edit to add, it seems most of your other responders are responding to this bit, which I agree is not realistic (children aren't rational to reliably refrain from something just because you can explain why it's bad) but I can see why you're frustrated that they're zeroing in on that part and not the part I responded to.
Doesn't this sum up being a parent in general? :P
You raise a fair enough point, though.
What's frustrating to me is that people are taking this so literally and not reading into at all. I'm not suggesting parents be like, "Okay Tommy, here's why phones are bad, now here you go!" and never talk about it again. That's utterly absurd, and isn't how anyone should expect a parent to teach a child life skills. It's a constant battle - as you say, tedious, time-consuming, and expensive - to raise a child with good principles. Why is this thread acting as though teaching our children self-control is somehow a different lesson?
Because some things require more self-control than others.
Imagine if the drinking fountains in public parks had non-alcoholic beer instead of water. Installed and maintained by Budweiser, totally free of charge, guaranteed ice-cold. Responsible parents would avoid the beer fountains and bring a thermos of water, but a lot of parents would just let their kids drink from them, right? And even very responsible parents would probably let their kids drink from them occasionally, because we forgot the thermos, and it's right there and it's free.
Raising non-drinking kids in that world would be harder than in this one. Everything you said about "teaching self-control" and the importance of parental effort would still be true, but it would also be true that when kids in that world start drinking earlier than in ours, it's not solely the parents' fault.
That probably sounds like a ridiculous example, but I think it's pretty analogous to schools showing Youtube videos. My kids had never heard of youtube before they saw it in their second grade classroom, and I'm not thrilled about it, but I get it, because it's right there and it's free. Raising kids is hard no matter what, but the fact that the world's biggest and best source of good educational content also happens to be riddled with crap makes it harder.
Not everything is like that. The library doesn't have Stephen King mixed in with the picture books. The Disney channel isn't also Pornhub. The parks don't have beer fountains. That's the difference.
The capitalist solution is always to move all the responsibility to the most vulnerable members of society. Your food is infected with a novel bacteria resistant to all antibiotics? Should have chosen your food better! Sorry, not sorry, it's you by yourself vs deception of a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Also, while you are at it, we made it a crime to photograph the farm, so you will never know the condition animals were raised in!
https://sentientmedia.org/ag-gag-laws/
Maybe a common sense solution would criminalise exploitation of children under 10 for profit, but that's too socialist these days.
It starts from no to progressively more access while teaching your growing kid to self regulate. There is no way you can treat your 7-17 year old the same when they are getting full access whether you like it or not when they turn 18.
Yes: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it still makes your decision easier.
Data point: everyone in my HS's class of 1200 who was "cool" is now more or less a bagger in a grocery store, or dead from drug overdose. Everyone who was ostracized and a "loser" is successful.
Do you want your kids to have a happy high school time (4 years) or a happy life being able to afford fun things(~60 years)?
I don't bother him too much about it as long as his grades are good and responsibilities around the house are met. Every so often i'll scroll through his phone but haven't found anything you wouldn't expect from a typical 8th grader. I don't come down on him for language or crude jokes or anything like that, i'm looking for actual danger and not 14 year olds being 14. He knows I have the pin to his phone and he could change it to make it a bigger issue between us but he never has and in return i won't confront him unless i feel like it's a very serious issue.
Our kids basically get 1 hour on Saturday, 1 hour on Sunday (sometimes a bit more), and only shared screen time (like we watch shows as a family, not individualized) on weeknights at most. And they definitely want more, but we have pushed hard enough for them to play outside so they are able to do that with a couple other neighborhood kids and they love it. Neither are teenagers yet so I'm expecting things to get a lot harder in coming years.
And our kids won't get smartphones until they're older (we've said 14 but my wish is for 16. I'm hoping there will be an under-16 social media ban as law). This is going to be the toughest nut to crack, because it requires many parents to agree on the same norms.
We're also holding out hope for proper and official smartphone bans in schools. Many staff in schools are sick of it, so I think it's just a matter of time.
It is also going to depend a lot on each of your kids. Some kids have more FOMO, others don't. Probably worse for girls than boys too at a population level (there's plenty of data supporting that).
Good luck and I hope that parents like us eventually prevail.
I had plenty of friends when I was young that had restrictions on "TV time". My parents, in contrast, were very "hands-off". I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it. Some frame it as "my parents were strict" or "my parents were a little overbearing" but that's about it.
Obviously I understand that it's not the same thing since phones are a 2-way medium and can sometimes be a lynchpin for communication these days, but it's not that crazy or unprecedented either.
What's talked about less (and I suspect the cause of a lot of reluctance to take phones away) is how parents now track their kids' whereabouts using smartphones and apps[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/may/01/honey-lets-tra...
Some of these now-adults felt left out. They resented that they weren’t part of any conversations with their peers about what was on tv etc.
I grew up adjacent to a pretty wealthy area where every kid I went to school with had cable TV. My parents just flat out refused to get cable saying it was a waste of money.
It was a really alienating thing as a kid to not be able to talk about what was on TV.
My parents are nice enough people but their stubbornness over this is something that for the life of me I'll never understand. I don't really interact w/ them much anymore so who knows. My general take on family is that they're just people you were introduced to.
So there's one data point on the other side.
They were right.
But you would have hated having me as a parent. My kids didn't get to watch TV as a habit at all when they were young. They did get to watch TV, but only selected programs and only as a family activity.
As adults, they have all expressed that while it may have angered them sometimes when they were young, they came to appreciate my stance as adults.
If smartphones existed then, there's exactly zero chance that I would have allowed them to have one.
I grew up cable, my parents stopped paying for it all through middle and high school, missed it, grew up and got my own money, paid for cable, and… my parents were right. 200 channels of nothing to watch. Cable is a waste of money.
Who cares if they “bloat webpages”? It’s 2024 our phones and computers can handle it lol. Either don’t go to the site again or deal with it. Websites aren’t free.
Some apples have worms in them. Some ads have malware in them. We don’t cry and whine about how terrible apples are as a result.
TV shows arent free. You’re welcome to turn it off if you hate the ads enough.
I agree. It's surprising how few people make rules for thier kids to help direct them in life these days. Of course independent and unsupervised time is important for maturity too. But it's surprising how any sort of discipline seems to be viewed as a negative and many parents give up at the slightest resistance.
To be clear, I don't mean discipline as punishment. I mean it more like order and routine. Stuff like shining your shoes, going to church with your family, helping someone old or disabled in the store, etc. I guess being responsible and productive members of society in a more general sense. I know kids never really liked doing chores, but it seems like in the past we understood we were part of a household and we should do our share. Now it seems like many kids just whine and the parents let them out it. I'm not sure if it's just entitled kids, lazy parents, or something else.
Do they make rules for themselves? If not, I would not expect it for the kids. If the parents are scrolling, then they are not going to have much of a leg to stand on.
But you cannot preach discipline without exhibiting it yourself and still maintain credibility.
For example, you can scroll on your phone sometimes, but if you are doing it hour after hour at every empty moment, but expect your child to watch you and not want to constantly indulge themselves also, you are going to be disappointed.
Especially when everyone around them will be scrolling anyway. Parents are basically the only ones who kids might trust more than their eyes (thinking that scrolling all the time is OK because everyone does it), but it has to be a family effort.
It seems not.
A child without access to (some of) the Internet, is in roughly the same position, in terms of “ability to enculturate”, as a new immigrant trying to attend a University by commuting rather than living in dorms is.
Damn, in the past the "history channel" showed actual history or you could discover things at discovery. Now discovery is psuedo-science about people building the biggest X and blowing it up.
I am not saying that children should not be given access to smartphones, but that tiktok (and modern youtube - especially with the new algorhitms) just feed them complete and utter crap. Worst of the worst.
As a kid it definitely made me feel set apart in an uncomfortable way.
I still have this mildly as an adult. One example where I notice this most acutely is when I was doing a regular bar trivia night with friends in the neighborhood. I could help with science, history, etc, but with many of the pop culture questions I was the only person on our team that didn't immediately know the answer.
Again, not the most important thing in the world, but there is a feeling of separateness I've had as a result. I've felt like I was "catching up" to culture all my life. If I could flip a switch and change it I would.
I do think smartphones are a bit different than all that though. There's something psychologically unsettling about doomscrolling this new TikTok style content. A couple times now I've gotten sucked into Youtube Shorts and then realized I just spent a couple hours on it in a mental fog. I find the idea of kids as young as the headline getting sucked in like that unsettling. I'm not a parent but I can see how it's not a simple dilema.
Anyone who has lived in another country should be able to sympathise with what it feels like to lack shared common culture. I was in Spain and even if someone explained their reference to something from their childhood (like a TV program), it often made no sense to me.
A friend mentioned they served Count Homoginised a coffee the other day. Only people from my country at a similar age to me (and possibly my city) would understand who he was.
On the other hand, I would probably have felt like a social outcast anyway, and whatever mild unpleasantness I experienced sounds a lot milder than some of the effects of social media on kids.
There’s definitely parties where people just play smash bros or inside jokes about water levels that I’ve literally missed out on, though I don’t especially care. If I were a more regretful person or one who experienced FOMO more, I could absolutely see feeling it about video games.
I don’t know that it’s 100% analogous to smart phones/social media (particularly because the required skills are probably lower), but kids are prone to social pressure.
If you want to change a behavior, replace it! After all, given time awake, a human will always have to do something. Give your kid something healthy and productive to do; or at the very least, something neutral. Get them excited about it.
This isn't a war of "do" vs "don't". This is a war of engagement. If you are losing, then the best strategy is "more do".
This just makes me want to home-school my kid if possible.
(My son, my only kid, is about to turn 3 and I have been carefully watching this ongoing conversation/debate/research.)
You could think of this in terms of training the child that what other people are doing is not a direct indicator of what they should be doing.
The greatest FOMO is missing out on personal autonomy...
I like how we've accepted that a device that can be used to call for help, and is the greatest innovation of the last 20 years, is toxic and dangerous and exploits you. Even if you are a child. And we just accept that.
I think that the cost/benefit ratio is hugely unfavorable when we're talking about very young children.
If you want something that can "call for help," there are many options other than smartphones.
Hot take: as a millennial, I feel like our entire generation is overall failing as parents. The average parent is incredibly conflict-averse but also thoroughly wired for paranoia. So the end result is that children often have no discipline/structure in their lives, but they also have no freedoms.
Their parents give them a phone with unlimited Youtube, but they aren't allowed to have friends. They never get spanked but they are always grounded. They don't sit down and eat meals as a family, but they follow a strict allergen-controlled diet because of a weird rash they had once in third grade.
Not to say that this generation of kids is going to turn out any worse than any other, but the way that Millenials blame Baby Boomers for all of their problems as adults is going to look cute in comparison.
I absolutely choose "FOMO complexes". Just because other parents let their teens do pot and alcohol doesn't mean it's right for my kid. That same logic can extend to less harmful (or more legal or socially acceptable) things like TikTok brain rot.
1. With pot and alcohol, the law is on your side. Any kid will understand that you don't let them do pot and alcohol, it isn't even legal. They may find workarounds if they are rebel enough, but at least they will understand your point of view just fine. With phones, even a normal, properly-raised kid can struggle to understand why you are depriving them from what their peers have, is commonly seen as normal and other parents may be actively validating.
2. If social media become the primary means of communication for the class, not using them means being marginalized. It's not even a matter of "they laugh at me because I don't drink", which can be overcome with self-esteem and self-confidence, even if it's difficult. It's a simple matter of people making plans and your kid not even finding out because they can't communicate.
3. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon and the network effect. I can imagine that if your kid were in a class where 90% did pot, it would be very difficult if not impossible to stop them (other than by just sending them to a different school). But that kind of prevalence is common with social media...
I'm wondering if there are any messenger clients that can basically strip out the other portions of social media if you really want to use it just for communication.
I suppose with the mention of what is legal and what is not, we could start passing age laws on social media usage. Although many places have laws about the age needed for an email account. Seems to be generally ignored.
For similar reasons, legal age limits on social media wouldn't be very effective - age limits on smartphones probably would.
Yeah I went through the same thing as a kid. I didn't have any video game systems until I was 13. Did I get FOMO? Absolutely, did I die from it? Hell no. Instead when I got my own money I bought an n64 and was able to enjoy it later on. In the meantime, my education and professional career thanked me.
FFS, there is an epidemic of bad parents and kids are suffering for it.
However the no-smartphone policy in schools is far from perfect, since a lot of parents are so busy in their phones, that they give their children pretty unrestricted access at home.
You can win a battle but the war is lost
The youngest, about 7 I think, would come home after school and just watch a TT-like show on TV where it was just endless "scrolling" through short videos that appeared as though they were straight off TT/Insta. He was literally addicted to it.
Imagine someone producing/moderating that in a way to get kids to just continue to watch it non-stop.
My point is, you don't even need an app and age verification... this stuff is just right there on regular old TV.
The solution is parents need to be involved with their children and set limitations on their use.
Video games are a very specific genre and in some ways, actually activate the brain. Not trying to defend gaming (I'm not a gamer), but my point is that we are regressing even further away from generations past. We get enough generations of this, and it becomes normal. This kid will grow up, have kids... and they will do same thing.
In contrast, our kids tell us all the time that their peers in various extracurricular activities almost all have unrestricted phone and technology use.
I would like to hope that if we raise our kids with "healthy" technology use, then they will ultimately be better off.
But my fear is that unhealthy technology use is so pervasive that they'll end up in the same sort of unfortunate situation as being the only humans left after a zombie outbreak.
My one year old can already steal my phone, hold it, and scroll/mess with buttons with her thumbs, open camera to look at herself... so I try not to use it around her anymore.
A lot of people who used to be loners become loners later in life, too.
And a lot of artists, scientists, and tinkerers weren't loners early in life.
You can make up whatever story your heart desires to convince yourself you're making a good decision.
The older you get, the more important family becomes and your group of close friends is typically small.
Maintaining a large number of superficial friendships is typically some you grow out of anyway, so maybe we should be teaching kids to skip that step.
Until the homework requires them to use a device...
We have also slowly increased his freedom to regulate his own screen time, both TV and Computer, and have seen him self-regulating, and commenting how easy it is to get sucked into being a screen zombie.
Based on my personal observation the rapid, repeated change of scene (5 to 8 seconds) trigger some sort of addiction combined with not understanding what's going on, as well as inability to talk with friends about the scene (too little time). i observed one of my daughter's friends completely shutdown and forgetting we were even there. We kept calling her, she didn't even respond. I'm still shocked. Granted there is way more than the tv problem, this is just the last of a long chain.
I suspect the boredom signal is important.
EDIT: Mr. Burnham is vintage 1990, so he's a bit too old to have been weaned onto it
The median American household today has >1 internet-enabled screens, many children from the age of 5-7 have their own "personal device".
Twitch. Whatever Microsoft’s version was called at the time. And YT Live.
Probably better of a nanny than YT vods.
1) when he's sick
2) when on a plane
3) when we are at dinner with others and NEEEEED the break. Last resort.
How old were you when you gained access to the internet?
Personally I think the educational advantage that a tablet or phone can provide is too quickly overlooked. People assume phone or tablet equals bad with black/white thinking. Sure it can be used to scroll junk mindlessly (although this would be blocked from a child account).
It also can be used to playback educational content with subtitles enabled. Kids can learn languages, math, puzzle solving, all sorts of things. A time limit can be enforced on it too.
TikTok at its core is a mechanism to share information directly between parties. If you allow your kids on there, and what they are allowed to do there, is up to you as a parent. I will say there is a STEM section that can be enabled, and I'm not personally opposed to it.
Internet access was mostly restricted as it made the single phone line busy and for a long time the ISP plan my father had was limited with only a few hours allowance.
There were absolutely no filters and my parents didn't watch what I was doing. They just hammered in my mind that nobody in the Internet should be trusted, and absolutely no real names, no photos and no addresses. Stranger danger.
By the time I had access to a broadband always-on connection, this was already set in my mind. Only years later that people thought that putting their real names and pictures on the book of faces would be cool.
Kids that young shouldn't be using social networking that is also used by adults.
It's good that TikTok is bringing attention to this issue but don't let anyone tell you for a second that it is the sole problem.
I think the current US stance is: we are allowing the crop dusting of american high schools with digital heroine, however, we demand the right to potentially regulate it in the future. A Chinese owned TikTok sits outside that potential regulation where a Facebook or YouTube exists within that potential regulation.
China themselves ban TikTok for kids, and only have an educational version available.
says who? they shouldn't be using social media full stop. handing a 5 year old a device is the cheapest and laziest way to parent, akin to feeding them mcdonalds
> The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. - Huxley
It will likely make them a social outcast, to a degree. The question is whether that's a good thing or not.
(a) 5-7 year olds are "on" tiktok producing content.
(b) 5-7 year olds are watching funny videos of cats on TikTok.
My 7 year old son will sometimes watch pet and food shorts with my wife on her phone with Douyin (TikTok China). He isn't really "on" TikTok, he is just consuming some of the content while waiting for his Nasi Goreng at the Indonesian restaurant.
I seriously wonder if the vast majority of of that 30% are just watching funny dance videos or something like that on the web or on a phone as some form of screen time (damaging because it is screen time, but no more damaging than watching YouTube kids). I think it is crazy for a kid to have phone at that age, but a tablet with screen time limits is much more reasonable. Especially on Sunday when there aren't so many activities scheduled and they've already done their homework.
Screen time in general is a challenge.
Then the internet and cable TV came to our house, and I was glued to that for most of my time. Faster internet followed, giving us access to all sorts of unfiltered online content (sites like Ogrish were the norm with my friend group). Smartphones and apps hit the scene not long after.
Nowadays, I have a 7-year-old son who's constantly on his tablet, playing Roblox or Minecraft on my computer, or watching YouTube videos about trains and tornado sirens on the TV (yep, he's autistic). He's been seeing me do similar stuff since he was born. No surprise he started mimicking that behavior. It doesn't really bother me, though.
I would like to know more about the details of the study, but right now I would say it's reasonable to believe that there is a moderately high degree of certainty that these numbers are accurate (but of course the study was limited to the UK).
After Snapchat, and not TikTok nailed it - all other platforms (including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc) are trying to not improve their platforms, but keep you on their platforms for a longer period of time by switching to that binge-watching short video content.
There is nothing good about it. It does not teach you anything, just a very dump spend of your time. Maybe that sounds like an old man speaking in me. But that is how I feel about myself spending time watching shorts on YouTube, FB or Instagram.
And at 5-7 they didn't even have access that often... it is wild to me that kids that age would be out there free to roam the internet.
They seem to find even more 3-4 year olds (27%) have a smart phone than 5-7 year olds (26%) which seems implausible.
Maybe banning TikTok is not a bad idea especially when you consider who owns TikTok.
As long as COPPA only applies to the platforms, it essentially doesn't apply.
There is zero reason anyone under the age of 13 should be accessing social media.
Unless your point is literally "The united states should be the only one spewing blatant propaganda to its citizens," what you're saying lacks any real substance and is just parroting talking heads on stations like fox and cnn.
Really? Other social media platforms are exfiltrating US data to China after claiming it doesn’t happen under oath?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/06/21/tikt...
> There has been zero evidence of the CCP influencing what American citizens see on tiktok, it's pure speculation based on Bytedance being a Chinese company
What sort of evidence could exist when it is a black box? Bytedance / TikTok are not transparent about any of it, and given that they are willing to lie under oath, why should anything they say be trusted at all? All we have is what people have studied in terms of the prevalence of certain messages and hashtags, and it is very clear from various evaluations of this, that TikTok is very skewed. And it seems to be skewed in the very ways that would create political chaos.
> Unless your point is literally "The united states should be the only one spewing blatant propaganda to its citizens," what you're saying lacks any real substance and is just parroting talking heads on stations like fox and cnn.
I wonder why TikTok’s parent company said they prefer to shut it down rather than sell it. It only makes it more clear that it is mainly a tool of the CCP. I am not sure what “blatant propaganda” you’re referring to, but creating any kind of equivalence between the US and the CCP is ridiculous.
This wasn't what your parent comment claimed - you claimed that the CCP was propagandizing people through the Tiktok platform. The "exfiltrating us data to china" is still a disputed claim as far as I'm aware, and even if true still doesn't support your original extraordinary claim.
> What sort of evidence could exist when it is a black box? Bytedance / TikTok are not transparent about any of it, and given that they are willing to lie under oath, why should anything they say be trusted at all? All we have is what people have studied in terms of the prevalence of certain messages and hashtags, and it is very clear from various evaluations of this, that TikTok is very skewed. And it seems to be skewed in the very ways that would create political chaos.
I guess then you can speculate and make wild claim you want about it then - why stop there?
> I wonder why TikTok’s parent company said they prefer to shut it down rather than sell it. It only makes it more clear that it is mainly a tool of the CCP. I am not sure what “blatant propaganda” you’re referring to, but creating any kind of equivalence between the US and the CCP is ridiculous.
Nothing you've said makes anything "clear," and again, is pure speculation and regurgitating of actual propaganda on this topic. Now that I understand you're completely unserious, I can move on with my day. Have a good one
I was responding to your comment, not my own parent comment. You used the word “privacy”. TikTok is clearly worse on privacy, and the link I shared is an example of that.
> I guess then you can speculate and make wild claim you want about it then - why stop there?
If your argument is nothing should be done because a company controlled by an adversarial government is hard to examine, then that’s not very convincing. Like I said, with what evidence is possible to collect, it shows that TikTok is highly skewed in an artificial and likely malicious way.
> Now that I understand you're completely unserious, I can move on with my day
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: * Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.*
> Like I said, with what evidence is possible to collect, it shows that TikTok is highly skewed in an artificial and likely malicious way.
Can you show such evidence? I’m genuinely curious. Such evidence would make top headlines, so I’m a little skeptical, but maybe you know something more than I do other than “China is bad.”
I've come around to the screen-free childhood plan, but most people who I know that have implemented it are affluent enough to have a stay-at-home parent or a high quality daycare.
Not using screens as a babysitter requires a significant amount of a parent's time and energy, so I also won't condemn any parents who use that strategy.
Ideally, it's a place our social safety nets would be better, but they're pretty bad when it comes to helping children right now in the US.
> People nowadays are letting their TVs be nannies instead of caring about their children.
> This is fundamentally different from the last thousands of years because <some bullshit>
People were worried about computer security 30 years ago therefore computer security is nothing to worry about today.
Russian aggression was a concern throughout the 20th century yet we are still here, Ukraine shouldn't worry so much.
What is this general form of argument called? Appeal to nothing-ever-happens?
People aren't getting addicted as a side-effect. Addiction is the primary-effect of the way the companies have designed these experiences, and addition (or the more harmless term "customer engagement") is a direct measure of success at these companies.
So the analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
They're more like Slot machines, which are highly regulated and age-gated.
At least I believe so. It is just a gut feeling though.
Like, it is poison due to the manipulative algorithmic feeds, or something. Like how Facebook turned into a genocide enabler in 2013 something when they added their crappy non chronological feed.
The format in it self is probably OK, as in, short amusing videos.
Moving the goal posts all the time is a terrible means to form an argument.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
> A 5-7 year old kid having access to certain thing is just awful parenting.
Sure is, but what do you want a system where we have to license people before the can have kids? Because there have been quite a few dumb, irresponsible parents that have birth brilliance.
Comparing this to Tipper Gore is so ridiculous. It's as to write off potential concerns because she was against video games and rap music, then applying that logic to an algorithm that is specifically designed to draw you in and make you consume. Forums and Newsgroups were also much harder to find. Google didn't even exist at that point (or at the very least wasn't popularized); it took minutes to get a single "explicit" image to load. Not only that, but the idea of a "filter bubble" didn't exist, because generally speaking information was harder to find, but also more diverse once you found it. That isn't true once you're sucked into an algorithm. I said in another post, I think you could let a kid explore around the age of 13 on these platforms. It's still probably not healthy, but 5 years old? That's insanity, and for the numbers to be near 30% is outrageous.
>but what do you want a system where we have to license people before the can have kids?
Weird jump in logic here. I was never suggesting this. You can be concerned about something and not want such drastic measures. That is usually how adults operate. Teenager logic deals in absolutes like this.
Social media is tailored to the individual and also two-way. Completely different.
A book doesn't give you access to the content produced by billions of people instantly, neither music, refined apps where people that earn more than six figures work daily to ensure you spend more and more time on them. Neither does a TV.
They are not the same.
Candidly the current landscape is a drop in a long full bucket, printing press, papers, radio, film, television, music, the internet, video games all of these things were going to "destroy the children" and yet somehow we managed to survive.
You like all those before you a prognosticating our doom because the world is not the one you grew up in.