You can prevent as much as you want but then kids go to school nd everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.
Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead because we were 'better'. Other kids did drugs and drank, but we were better than that. Peer pressure didn't have much of an impact on me because I was raised to believe that I was better than 'that' for most values of 'that'. And my parents never had to force me on any of this—they just invited me to be a part of their exclusive club.
There might be a way around this that doesn't involve cultivating a mild condescension towards peers, but I can say from experience that the condescension does work!
"We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego]
Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled.
It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.
Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.
Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.
I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.
There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.
I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.
It seems to work for WASP. Superiority (or I guess family pride) is also big where my parents are from, Iraq and Iran. But my parents didn't take it in moderation, so the outcome wasn't good in the end for them.
they do not have to do that in school. My (home educated) kids did lots of classes and activities where they met other kids. A lot of schools tell kids "you are not here to socialise!" and have strict rules about what you do when which also limits interaction (at least here in the UK)>
The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.
Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.
Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.
And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.
Alcohol it's a drug, with a literal letal withdrawal (delirium tremens). That's right. But I can't agree with your prudeness on sex.
I wish the American people began behaving like Europeans where sex is not taken like a drug or something harmful at all since decades.
If any, pregnancies are a thing because of the lack of sex education and safe learning/practicing.
> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented
The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.
Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.
When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.
> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.
> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.
Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.
Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.
Since when? Many kids grew up learning these things from interacting with other kids, or via the school of hard knocks.
I doubt it’s even 80% of the population that learned primarily from observing their parents.
Odd!
It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them.
Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.
I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO.
"I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school.
The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to.
The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.
“I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…”
It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation
That was basically my high-horse libertarian mindset in high school when I saw other kids using cannabis-- I straight-up said to at least one, "I'm not going to do that, but I don't mind if you do." I thought I was being socially liberal and polite.
Spoiler alert, everyone else "wanted to do something different" and no longer cared about me after I respectfully removed myself from "the cool stuff" without condemning it. Today, I'm much more vocally negative towards cannabis users.
Why? That is bigotry I believe
This statement is othering me.
But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa.
In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale.
I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale.
A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true?
So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest.
I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end.
They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow.
Another day to crush and a life to enjoy.
And I yearn to be even better tomorrow.
No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.
You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...
For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.
We have a no phones in the bedroom and no phones past a certain time rule, but disconnecting entirely makes one a social pariah.
Maybe, maybe not. The real question is.. do I really want my kid to associate with kids that are so heavily invested in social media. I know my personal answer to this. I even know my SO answer and the upcoming battles ahead.
It isn’t a pretend scenario. We had to loosen up rules because it was happening to our kids.
If you don't give the stuff to your kids, they get socially excluded.
The best we can do is to teach them how to use stuff in moderation. Show them how excessive usage can go bad: there are plenty of examples around, all the time.
My wife and I have a loving relationship with our kids but they are quite clear on the fact that we are not equals. The distinction will lessen as they reach adulthood and prove their responsibility.
You can start the conversation with other parents at kindergarten pickup.
Each grade at our school has a pledge that kids & parents can sign to wait until eighth grade to let them have a smartphone. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated site like https://www.waituntil8th.org
My kids are still young but from what I've heard from families with older kids is that holding the line gets increasingly hard as they approach 8th grade. You have to be prepared to socially exclude families that let their underage children use smartphones or social media, the same way you wouldn't invite a family that lets their middle-schooler drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes to your kid's birthday party.
While you can never get everyone to agree to anything, as long as your kids have a critical mass of friends who don't have smartphones then not having one won't make them an outcast.
Limiting screen time is an exceptionally challenging task because of the many loopholes and bugs in parental controls, and my lack of direct control over the chromebooks the schools issue.
Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
My condolences. I agree that it's too late once you hit a tipping point and a critical mass of their friends have smartphones. At that point you have to fall back to weaker backup defenses like parental controls and limiting screen time. The point of Wait Until 8th is to provide a little more time to let them form their own self-image and build up their ability to manage their attention and information diet.
> Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
Instead of trying to predict the "correct" set you can just lobby everyone. Our public school has about a hundred kids per grade from K through 8th. Parents bring it up not just at school pickup but on playdates, the local listserv, the PTO newsletter, when new families move to the neighborhood, etc.
Apparently several older grades have managed to hold the line such that most kids in that grade didn't have smartphones until high school, and many didn't even have smartwatches or dumbphones.
And even if I hadn’t moved I would have had to lobby at not just my elementary school but the other two schools that feed into the same middle school.
Until schools and government restrict phone ownership in a real way, parents are going to keep giving phones to their 8 year olds.
Our district has strict blocks in place at school, but most kids still already have phones. We did it for that reason and so so we don’t introduce phones at the same time they start driving (which is when we figured they’d actually need it)
One thing I wasn’t quite prepared for is kids use huge group chats that result in hundreds of messages a day. Learned how to mute discussions really quick. You can also limit access to groups with parental controls.
Key is talking to your kids regularly and helping them navigate life. Real and digital.
Imagine my frustration one day, when I've discovered that my kindergartner has full access to a brand-new, shiny iPad during class. Despite complaints from parents, the teacher refused to reduce iPad usage (or even activate Screen Distance and Screen Time controls on the iPad, or share usage statistics).
The only thing that I've learned, this is all in line with California’s state-approved computer literacy recommendations.
I do give my son access to a computer but it's a based on misterfpga running the amiga core. Set up in such a way that he can explore and discover how things work from a time when computers were still relatively open.
This brings computers into the classroom, and once they’re available, it is a slippery slope. It is easier for teachers to have students use semi-gamified "educational" apps rather than engage themselves.
Example for K-2 - https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/csstandards.pdf:
K-2.CS.1 Select and operate computing devices that perform a variety of tasks accurately and quickly based on user needs and preferences.
K-2.CS.2 Explain the functions of common hardware and software components of computing systems.
K-2.CS.3 Describe basic hardware and software problems using accurate terminology.
K-2.NI.4 Model and describe how people connect to other people, places, information and ideas through a network.
...
K–2 K-2.AP.12 Create programs with sequences of commands and simple loops, to express ideas or address a problem
K-2.IC.20 Describe approaches and rationales for keeping login information private, and for logging off of devices appropriatelyThat's seriously fucked up!
Kids have been angry at their parents for parenting decisions since time immemorial. I don't think it's actually a big deal.
What you can do, though, is show them that there are tons of better things to do than swiping on their phone for hours. I don't know many kids who would rather watch videos than actually do something cool.
That's why some people prefer home schooling
Just because you think your kids should be limited to the Bible or no phones or no social media or no d&d or whatever arbitrary limits / moral panic you impose, does not extend those limits to other kids in any moral fashion. Those kids have full rights to have whatever they have and you are indeed the bad guy for your arbitrary limits if they are not common or inhibiting socially.
1. Their parents are doing exceptionally bad job 2. Their parents are doing exceptionally good job
Sadly, there is no way to tell, because not all kids are created equal. I know my parents had to basically remove our PC from our home ( how many parents have that option today? ) to put me and my siblings in line.
Unfortunately, this only adds to the problem, because bad parents tend to think they are great and vice-versa.
In the future we will view a child spending hours a day on Tiktok how we currently view a kid smoking cigarettes. It is creating an entire generation of anxious, ADHD addled kids who struggle with school and focused work of any kind.
To put this in perspective, people said the same moral panic about tv and that has also been rigorously proven false yet disagreed with by laymen.
Social media reel scrolling creates a "potato chip" kind of flow state... it seems to satisfy you in the moment, but even after you've consumed more than you thought you would, you're still unsatisfied. The introduction of a new medium is not novel, but the magnitude of the effect is.
Well tv was looking for ways to attract people and also game makers.
But it wasn’t like it is with social media YT specifically designed to suck as much attention as possible. Games nowadays are include much more addictive mechanics like loot boxes.
Doesn't have to be TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc. are all the same thing.