You're blaming parents for letting their kids on their own device. If they'd follow your advice, you could then blame them for not letting their kids get bored [0]. And if they're reading you can blame the lack of exercise, or otherwise the lack of reading/writing by hand. Or if they're doing all of that in turn, you can go for the over-parenting angle.
It's infinite, no situation will be blame free if we look at the right angle.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-b...
You're inserting yourself between them and their grand parents, close family etc. not letting them navigate a safe social circle.
You're closing their world and this is a different angle to blame.
PS: I am heavily biased, but in general I think we can give parents a break. Some of them must be shitty, but traditionally the rest of society has been the escape hatch in these situations. If we really think there's an issue, the first question should be why it's not solved at the social/systemic level. Putting kids in a cage and blaming parents can always be done at the very end, when all other solutions have been tried.
I also don't buy the argument that they'll be behind in digital skills or whatever. I was born in the 80s and didn't have access to a computer until I was 8 or 9, (intermittent dial-up) internet access until I was in my teens, and a smartphone until I was nearly 30. I had no problem acquiring all these "digital skills".
My parents grew with no TV, no internet and not that much radio either, and boy they aren't fine. They have other skills, but they're also really bad at understanding what's happening in the world today. What's neither in their local paper nor facebook feed could as well not exist, and they're not better for it.
Do 7 yo kids benefit from having a decent dictionary instead of some skimped "portable" paper version or a 4kg reference with still sizeable limitations ? Does it help if they can google how many legs ants have instead of waiting for you to be available and google it for them ?
You do you, but I also don't buy blanket statement on how technology is wasted on kids, just because we can come up with random scenari where it's not that great.
I get you want me to focus on the downsides, and I offer you to look at the upsides. We do that balancing act for any tool or resource: does pool have positive effects that are worth the drowning risks ? Does letting kids walk the city alone let them do things that outweight the potential of getting run by a car or getting kidnapped ? etc.
I am definitely in favour of having kids as independent as possible and get them accustomed earlier than later with the tools they'll be using as adults.
EDIT: I would rather not have needed to convince my partner that social media FB, tiktok and instagram is obviously bad and I'd have liked to have some laws to give me some basic protection.
When you have thousands of devs trying to break your will power, you're really gonna struggle.
Social media has passed me by (almost 50yo) and I have zero interest in it but I have no doubt that if I did start using it, their algorithms would break me down, no matter how strong willed I am.
Unfortunately, like all addictions, the solution is probably abstinence.
But then real challenge starts - folks with microscopic attention spans themselves are supposed to actually spend hours with their kids on activities that hardly give any dopamine kicks. Kids are really just a brutally honest mirror image of the parents, and very few parents these days like that.
Had few colleagues recently visiting wedding in Singapore. The stuff they said about the city itself is pretty sad - no western parent they saw was actually raising their own kids, cheap (often abused) nannies from ie Philippines were in charge of that. They allow kids anything, no discipline, no boundaries because who wants to be fired if kids complain. And then when whole family minus mighty nanny goes to ie restaurant, they often saw a parent literally begging 7 year old to have 30 minutes for themselves ('I'll buy you any toy, any food, anything, just give us 30 mins please' kind of story). I wonder why they even bothered having kids these days if they couldn't care less about them afterwards, while giving it all to some empty corporate careers and partying.
Or those 'super parents' who travel with kids in the car a lot. Then you look inside and there are X tablets neatly arranged in the back. Our kids are used to stare outside instead or read books/magazines, important 'boredom management skills' that can't be taught otherwise.
I used to get angry but I genuinely feel sorry for the child now: I suspect they will have zero attention span when they grow up and probably won't read books etc - There is no long-term upside to it.
That doesn't bode well, discussing this on a community site.
That also means to ask our kids to only ever establish social ties in setups we control: as adults have moved online (again, we're on a forum having this discussion), there's so fewer places irl to get random information. So a kid has to go through us to get anything, including information about what they want to watch/read/see.
A kid won't stumble upon a movie when there's no local theaters. Bookstores have also become way more limited if they're still there. Record shops are dead. Other kids recommendations only go so far, especially if they are also restricted. Libraries are the last bastion for a modicum of natural discovery imho.
Today for a kid to come into contact with something their parents don't care about, social media access is the main avenue left.
What's the point of pointing the finger at that amorphous, anonymous mass of people? Incarcerate parents if they don't educate their children properly? Fine them if they allow their offspring too much phone time?
I can't realistically monitor what my children are looking 24/7, like I can't listen to every conversation that they have.
I could ban all social media / phones but how is that going to prepare them for life in a world where social media is all encompassing? Plus they likely would be ostracized by their peers.
[I'm talking here about older children, teenagers. We also have a 5 year old and it's pretty easy with him, he doesn't have access to any form of social media.]
This is not the future that I expect. Rather, in my observation/bubble, "radical privacy advocates" are more and more spreading. So, I would expect that you rather prepare the children for a wrong (and worse) world.
> Plus they likely would be ostracized by their peers.
In my school time, the "nerds" (who were also privacy advocates, keywords: Diffie-Hellman key exchange, RSA, war against cryptography) found friends among each others. So, I wouldn't fear that your child becomes ostracized - it very likely will find (better) friends.
There exist quite some other groups of people who reject social media: I just chose the "nerd crowd" example because many HN readers are very familiar with it. For example
- people who are somewhat skeptical about technology
- people who are "anti establishment"/"anti big tech")
- ...
I can easily imagine that if "(mostly) everybody" uses social media, a pubescent girl might easily come to the decision to reject social media completely just to be annoying to other people, and tell them to f... off.
I'm in your same situation but the previous sentence helps to stand my ground.
More complex the network, less control any individual has on anything.
The Borg has no purpose other than to survive. These networks currently have no purpose other than to capture, trade, steal Attention.
That has to be reimagined to escape the current trajectory.