Came here to say this, would not surprise me to have the children post on r/raisedbynarcissists as soon as they turn 18.
As a parent you have to make decisions with your child’s best interests at heart even when you know they conflict with the child’s desires. Doing this is not narcissistic it’s just good parenting.
The list of things that are conceivably harmful to a child or teenager is practically infinite. It includes almost all sports, most hobbies, travel, and most food and drink. If you're going to ban everything that might be harmful of out an abundance of caution you will do tremendous harm to your kid. Yes, a smartphone might harm your kid but so might the absence of a smartphone. That's why it's good to look at the actions of other dedicated and thoughtful parents. If they all decide to give their kid a smartphone despite the known downsides it's not neglect, but the result of a thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons. Demanding that a smartphone must be proven safe (impossible) is an absurd standard of evidence you don't apply to other areas of your life.
Suspecting drinking from lead pipes was bad would make you look crazy to your contemporaries fifty years ago. Avoiding them would require huge amounts of behavioral change and investigation. But with perfect information very few parents would consciously choose to let their children damage their brains.
When it’s technology, and we’re starting to see the indicators, why is it different?
Using your kids as a social experiment to sell your blog posts while preventing them to access any online content seems quite narcissistic to me.
Allowing your kids in-pocket access to adversarial forms of entertainment, each competing to maximize time on platform, seems like a riskier bet to me. The experiment is forced. We’re all a part of this brave new world.
Most people against device use that I’ve talked to have a distinction between consumption and creation. Writing a blog is a creative activity. Consuming TikTok is not, even if you are a “creator” on the platform. Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
And instead of teaching your kids to live in this world you're trying to create a world for them which does not exist anymore.
> distinction between consumption and creation
You can not become a creator if you are not a consumer first.
> Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
That's where your role as a parent comes in handy - teach them with the best of your abilities, don't give up on them.
Much like you don’t need to have any experience with computers to become a programmer, you don’t need experience with TikTok to swipe or messenger to text.
But avoiding making these behaviors entrenched from a young age is important. I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes, so does having a phone, social media, etc.
So far the data seems to pan out. Time will tell. But at this point there’s mainly intuition and critical thought. Mine has led me here and yours has led you somewhere else.
I’m not going to judge you for it. I just don’t agree with you.
That's a good analogy. In my experience, most alcoholics/gamblers/dangerous substance abusers never had parents which taught them how to deal with a given addiction - they just brush off the subject strictly forbidding their kids to do any of them.
My 3 year old daughter picks up my guitar and strums it and makes up a song about not wanting to do bed time. She doesn't need exposure to consumer culture to create; it's innate. In fact she's already got some Wesley Willis vibes going without ever having heard him.
Sure you can keep your kids away in a farm away from any human interactions too. Or in a basement if you live in a city.
> it's innate
Playing guitar is innate to your 3 year old daughter? Hope one day I'll listen to her album with chords & rhythms no one has ever heard before! /s
Obviously she's not going to go through life having never heard any music, but I don't think you'd really need to hear someone else to be able to walk up to a piano, press some keys (perhaps even simultaneously), and think "hey, that sounds nice". It's pretty easy to discover a bunch of chords by accident. Rhythm is even easier to make up your own thing. Whether no one has ever heard it is irrelevant to whether you need to have heard someone else to make it up.
She doesn't need to make an album for you. She can create for her and for us. You and the people in your life can create for you. That's kind of the point of not buying into consumer culture.
Nobody exists in a vacuum, we're all consumers of the culture which surrounds us. I think you're confusing consumption and mass consumption.