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Comment by EternalFury | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, I wish people who monetize attention had not hurt the development of my children’s social skills.

We really tried to curb their engagement with attention-channeling apps and devices, but it got to a point where restricting was enough to label parents as harsh, strict luddites.

I suspect it will take a generation or two to revert the effects of that attention hijacking.

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The weirdest thing to me is just how scattershot this problem is. My kids are still young but I’ve got friends who are having a terrible time with this issue, and friends who have had no problem at all with their kids.

I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s some environmental factor I might leverage but I just don’t see a meaningfully obvious difference. I guess people are varied and complex.

I bet the most significant factor is social group. If their friends are classmates are constantly talking about things they’ve seen on TikTok, then it’s going to be very difficult to keep your kids off it.

Peer pressure is the biggest factor. There is probably a threshold beyond which your kids are going to give their attention away because so many of their friends are doing it. I once hosted a birthday party where after the cake was cut, all 7 kids were on their phones, barely interacting. That was one of the most dystopian thing I have experienced.

I imagine it will depend on the child. I recall a friend years ago discussing PTSD and how one soldier will return home scarred for life while another just 50 ft away in another foxhole is just fine.

Yeah mine is a Youtube addict, with almost no control and we kept it like that because while it probably kills her attention, it made her English insane (we re both non native, Im French and my wife Chinese, our daughter speaks like an american while we live in Hong Kong), she knows things we couldnt possibly have taught her, and at 6yo she seems to be genuinely benefitting from it.

Ofc the most annoying is her addiction to toys marketed there, but when I was a kid it was the same with tv, you just need one colorful commercial to be a poisonnous little shit for months until "okay fine yes" is uttered at xmas or someth.

If you've ever seen someone that naturally takes to gambling - like they play, lose, and immediately think they must be due to win now! - that's probably a good analogy as any for how some brains can be more likely to get addicted to activities like this.

It's extremely difficult nowadays to not fall into the temptation of letting a touchscreen be your child's plaything, but I firmly believe the damage they do in their early development stages is so drastic that even if everyone else criticizes you as a luddite (which is hard to take at scale and recurrence), it's worth believing in your own judgement.

The difference between kids with iPads and kids with no access/extremely restricted access is wild.

We were able to resist the pressure until they turned 12 in both cases. But it was not enough, we should have held the line until 16 or 18.

> but it got to a point where restricting was enough to label parents as harsh, strict luddites

Where do you live? I ask because this is not the case where I live in a west coast tech city. People here almost all applaud other parents for limiting screens.

Regardless, don't give in to peer pressure. Setting boundaries is a key responsibility of parenting.

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