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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.

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...

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"I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it."

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.

Part of it is that we’ve destroyed many of the sociable spaces in which this sort of acculturation can take place and be supported.

> It's surprising how few people make rules for thier kids to help direct them in life these days.

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.

Ridiculous. Swap out scrolling for beer or staying up past 10 and see how silly this sounds.

I agree that it doesn't have to be 1-to-1. But there are many parents that don't seem to have discipline for themselves in many ways. Using your beer example, getting drunk, or drunk driving, or drinking instead of helping with homework or something. Having a couple beers is fine if it's done responsibly, and one can still be a good role model.

It is about being a good role model. There is nothing wrong with different people having different standards. Even a child understands that they cannot drive, but a taller adult can. Or myriad other things.

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.

"Do they make rules for themselves?"

It seems not.

I grew up in a strict evangelical family with tv time limits, only the 4 major over the air stations (cable tv was a tool of satan etc), and overall very restricted access to media.

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.

Shared common culture doesn't seem to exist much now. Even popular movies are only watched by a small percentage of people. How many here watched the latest episode of XYZ on TV last night? Plays hardly exist, few people read books (or if they do, not much in common (time/genre/recency)).

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.

And the pipe dream of having personalized AI-generated coooontent to enjoy means that it will be nigh impossible to have "common interests" with anyone else.

I wasn’t allowed to play video games as a kid (in the 90s and early 00s). I don’t really care about it, but it has 100% been an occasional barrier to socializing. I don’t have any of the necessary coordination, so I’m not even fun to beat, because I just shoot myself or fall off the road immediately.

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.

being out of the loop of some video games, TV shows or any other entertainment can be awkward at times, for sure. But if you have a good groups of friends, they don't care one bit, and should embrace you for who you are, not for what popular things you have knowledge of.

I’ve heard it.

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.

How much of this is TV specifically and how much is social signalling about wealth and class? I know I resented that my parents made me buy clothes at "Zellers" (defunct Canadian WalMart) and "Value Village" (thrift store) because kids made fun of my "poor" clothes once in a while. By the time I was 20 I realized that my parents were right and none of those opinions from my peers mattered the least bit.

Phones for children are not (just) entertainment devices; they’re social spaces (i.e. where other kids are) and channels for absorbing social norms and cultural shibboleths (which used to be a role played by mainstream media — kids growing up knowing the same quotes from the same cartoons, etc — but now is almost exclusively played by p2p media.)

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.

never seen a kid in that age group ever text(or communicate with) anyone. It's just a zombie device.

Not in the 5-7 age range. Once they hit middle-school what you stated becomes more applicable.

We are talking about 5 - 7 year olds!

What social norms will you get from weird spiderman movies on youtube (that look like some sort of russian psy-ops) or from chinese tiktok algorhitm, that shows educational stuff for chinese children and complete utter garbage for those in the West?

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.

Immigration doesn't drastically increase your chances for depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, insomnia, and executive dysfunction.

The analogy is between what happens afterward, due to missing the enculturative influence: failing to make friends at school due to lack of primary enculturation; vs. failing to get a job related to your degree due to lack of tertiary enculturation (a.k.a. "lack of culture fit.") Both situations can result in environmentally-induced mental illness.

Many things can induce mental illness, but few can so reliably and universally increase such a broad swath of mental illnesses, and they usually aren't literally engineered to be addictive.

My parents didn't let me watch much TV/movies at all growing up. This was never a problem when I was a kid — books and the Internet filled the TV-role perfectly well — but as a teenager and young adult I often found myself confused by things that everyone my age was "supposed" to know from TV/movies.

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.

Like I tell my parents, taking away "The love boat" rerun away from ME on channel 4 when I was eight, IS NOT LIKE taking away a phone from a kid today that is playing Roblox. Roblox is NOT a rerun of a horrible 70s show. It is a fully immersive, awesome and a complete social network. I view it closer to cocaine.

I can't tell if this is an argument for or against taking away Roblox.

Only downside I've seen is my wife doesn't get cultural references, and doesn't do anything without a TV show on, after having grown up without TV. And god help you if you're talking to her while she's watching it; she may as well have noise cancelling headphones on turned to 11, even if the volume is low from her laptop speakers.

> I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it

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.

> My parents just flat out refused to get cable saying it was a waste of money.

They were right.

No, I pay for it as an adult and I love it. Great value.

One person's waste is another person's value. Both stances are correct.

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.

Wow. TIL

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.

Neat! I watch it every day. Didn’t realize it was a waste of money until just now.

Based on your previous posts, it seems like you are fully invested in advertising for some reason. Don't know why you'd pay to watch it as well, but hey... different strokes.

Yeah, ads are good. They tell me about new things I might want to buy that might make my life better. Why wouldn't I want to see them?

They bloat webpages, take time from what you're actually looking for, and are a huge vector for malware delivery & social engineering. They literally take away from the programming you're watching if it's television, sometimes are even detrimental to the product that consuming.

Eh, not that compelling.

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 have. Many many people have. This conversation is literally about not paying for cable.

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