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Comment by RyanHamilton | Hacker News Reader

It's hard for parents to fight against huge corporate interests that hire thousands of phds to grab your child's attention and influence them at every turn. Realistically it's almost impossible for parents to deny their teenager a mobile without ostracising them from their friends.

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My parents denied me all kinds of things my friends were doing when I was a kid and looking back they were absolutely right to do that. Don't be afraid of that.

Sure they made mistakes here and there. The names of Pokemon aren't actually names of demons. Looking where a lot of my friends ended up though I think they got things right on balance.

Same here. It was movies and TV for my parents. I have thanked them for it on several occasions when it occurred to me as an adult how affected people are by having not just grown up watching various age inappropriate movies and were trained by TV in general, because their whole world view, their whole mental superstructure is extremely influenced by TV and movies.

It has clearly spread across the world to some degree, but I don’t think the average person even realizes just how much the post ~1920 American consciousness is trained on Hollywood, TV, movies. It has become a bit more diffuse lately due to decentralization of TV and movies, but the training on TV also seems to have gotten worse, even if in more covert ways because of the decentralization. You consume your TV drug in isolation and do not even talk about it anymore because everyone is watching different things at different times now. America has gone from the social drinker, the highlight of the party, to the binger I’m downs a bottle of vodka TV a day, alone.

Our culture is effectively centered around what is on the real life telescreen, the one that you carry around now, that knows where you are at all times and can listen in on you. Even Orwell could only imagine a world where telescreens were fixed and could be evaded at times, or maybe he just believed that.

Yeah TV is particularly nasty. I can't believe how much I was shielded from as a kid. They didn't have the theory totally right and a lot of it was based on their feelings but that seems to work plenty well enough.

What part of parenting is easy again? That's the gig

Try replacing "social media" with "fast food" and think about how hard that would be for parents to control.

My dude, the parents literally have to buy the fast food. If they do not, the fast food is literally not there to eat.

What is even going on

"All these kids walking around with fast food in their pockets" ..nah just doesn't sound right, the most you could get in there is a nugget or two

I don't think one needs to deny their kids access to every-day modern technology in order to teach them about the dangers of it.

When you understand this is a topic that is similar to drugs or functions in similar ways, you may not say that.

How does this sound to you?

> I don't think one needs to deny their kids access to alcohol in order to teach them about the dangers of it.

Except many parents understand and accept that their teenagers go and have some beers or drinks with friends; as long as they do it as safely as they can. And of course this sort of approach to it - rather than the heavyhandedness some parents apply - means your children are more likely to trust you enough to, say, call you for a ride home rather than drive drunk, or otherwise come to you if they have a problem.

Anyway, it's a bit silly to compare having a cellphone (what GP was talking about) to regularly consuming alcohol. Sure, maybe social media is the equivalent, but then, those might be the "dangers" I talked about.

You are missing the point of just how impactful "media" is on people's minds. It may even affect you so much that you either don't realize it or do not want to realize it. It is most apparent in America, but it has spread across the globe, where people's whole world view and mental framework is materially impacted by what they see in movies and on TV in general; they think cars explode when you shoot at them and you can take shelter behind them from bullets, they scheme and connive as if they are on Survivor, they style themselves and speak and quote things form TV and movies, they take queues on how to be, live, act, and even parent from sitcoms and movies, they have delusional senses of romance, sexuality, and relationships... the list is long.

You may not recognize it as alcohol and you make make the laissez-faire argument, but it is really kind of irresponsible even if you do it. Permissiveness should not be the response to detrimental things, especially with what all else happens in environments related to and gateway by alcohol permissiveness.

Interestingly, nobody I know falls into those descriptions... Still, I don't deny that media has an impact on people. That's not really the question though, is it?

Nor is it a question of unqualified permission. My point was that strictly disallowing some things tends not to work, while the opposite - not permission, per se, but reluctant acceptance that it's going to happen anyway - will at least allow children to come to their parents for help, as opposed to hiding it.

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