Good start. But this still leaves them at the mercy of these tech companies.
Kids—especially pre-teens—should not have social media. There is just way too much evidence that this has harmed and is harming an increasingly class-segregated generation.
Gas stations are careful about selling cigarettes to kids. We need these developers to have even a shadow of that concern.
Not saying you're wrong, but it's more complicated than you think in many cases. The rot goes deep into society as a whole, which tech corpos then exploit.
A phenomenon that's facilitated by their access to screens. (There is a horrifying class divide emerging in the West in the 1:1 relationship between kids' screen time and the parents' wealth.)
30 years ago: Video games are harming our kids, ban it!
60 years ago: Rock and roll is harming our kids, ban it!
There is little evidence to support social media causes harm. Even correlations are weak. As a large study on the subject put it, the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with [social media] use.
This looks like yet another moral panic.
Maybe regularly eating potatoes is a lot worse for a person that most of us currently realize. (They do have an extremely high glycemic index and high levels of oxalic acid.)
Seriously though, the correlation is just weak - far to weak to actually draw conclusions from let alone ban it.
You have any pointers to well designed studies that show it's as innocent as a video game or rock and roll?
As did the Surgeon General in 1980 who warned kids were addicted to video games body and soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/10/us/around-the-nation-surg...
Are those kids spending more than 3 hours a day already suffering from depression/anxiety? What would those adolescents say about the impact of their classmates/school on their body image?
> We have gaps in our full understanding of the mental health impacts posed by social media but at this point cannot conclude it is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. We must better understand the answers to key questions, such as, which types of content are most harmful and what factors can protect young people from the negative effects of social media.
This seems to recognize a lot more nuance than "the data seems pretty clear"
(To say nothing of what even "social media" is. Is HN social media?)
The alternative is for your children to learn about these things on their own, which isn't that bad either. Most kids turn out just fine that way.
That is moronic. And destructive.
Children are human beings, and are supposed to get a chance to grow naturally into being community members. That is an incremental process. Not everybody does all the parts in the same order, nor at the same rate. And you don't suddenly snap from being a "child" into being an "adult", and reboot all your human connections in that moment.
You don't mature at all without interacting with some adult role models (not just seeing them from afar, and not just seeing the parts people want to show you). No, your parents are not enough. You also need to interact with slightly older, and substantially older, non-adults. The tight age cohort isolation produced by schools is already destructive enough to social development.
Children are also entitled to have access to information and activities, just like everybody else. And, no, not all of that would somehow get duplicated into your child ghetto.
And it means absolutely nothing that people "used to do that just fine without the Internet". That was before everything was done via the Internet.
> Not just because of pedos, but because young adults don't have the same level of respect and filters that one should have when dealing with kids and it's exposing them to behavior they shouldn't.
Get a fucking grip. Kids can handle knowing about behavior you don't like. They can handle knowing about really bad behavior. They can handle seeing what older people do,and what the consequences are. In fact, that is essential to the development of their own values and capacity for self-governance.
If you raise somebody in a box until the age of 18, don't be surprised if they can't deal with the outside world when you force them out of it.
I try not to think of everybody who plays video games as an arrested adolescent in Mom's basement, but it's kind of hard. Especially with the "Lol" stuff.
There is a disease going around among the "youngsters" who are parents these days. I'd call it overprotectiveness, but it doesn't actually protect anybody, just stunts them and actually makes them vulnerable. What it is is what's known as a purity spiral, a dangerous form of groupthink in which people compete to be the most extreme.