There's a balance. We don't let 13 year old kids drink alcohol, have sex, take drugs, drive cars, own guns, vote etc. Gradual exposure to responsibility, or harmful / addictive experiences isn't "sheltered", it's "responsible parenting". Jeez, I wouldn't even let my friend smoke "the strong weed" and he's 46.
"Doom scrolling" didn't exist when I was a kid and I'm glad it didn't. I would never have developed a love of computers. The closest thing I had in the 80s was TV. 6 channels, and they all shut down at midnight and displayed a test signal. When they were "on" the content was mostly shit.
Infinite scroll on social media is designed to be addictive. What chance does a 13 year old have when most adults (who have outgrown their teenage desperation for social acceptance) can't control that addiction?
What happens when your kids is sent home from school because they assaulted someone or vandalized the school because it's a new cool thing on TikTok?
Next they're yelling that the you're a bigot based on some obscure heuristic that doesn't even make sense?
Ever tried using logic with someone who is 100% certain you're the bad guy because they've been brainwashed for 8 hours a day on an app?
What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up? For me it was music, slang and haircuts. These days it's self harm, coordinated vandalism, pornified ideas of bodies and sex. I know a lady who has a 16yo daughter who is bulimic... so are her whole clique.
Why does a 13 years old have access to social media?
As you mention, we don't let kids drink alcohol at 13.
My kids can call me a bigot and hate me as much as they want, it won't change the fact I am the parent and I decide what's right for them until they're of age.
When I was growing up there was already vandalism, porn, unrealistic body image (bodybuilders for guys, anorexic models for girls), heavy underage drinking and goth cutting themselves.
The only difference in today's world is that we celebrate people with mental illnesses for political purposes.
Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
> Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
1. Adults have pretty bad impulse control.
2. But kids or teenagers have even worse impulse control.
3. The prefrontal cortex, in charge of risk evaluation and decision making, matures when you're 25 years old (+/-).
4. These huge companies are built around addiction and getting network effects to set it. They have huge marketing budgets and a lot of money to lobby governments.
What's I'm saying is: good luck getting the average kid to break a habit even many adults can't. And when the human brain, on average, fails ("don't drink and drive!"), we introduce laws to fix that. Personal responsibility only takes us so far, because we're human and fallible.
The war on drugs have done much more harm than good - at least in the “inner city”. When drug use started spiking in “rural America” - despite laws that make it damn near impossible for me to get enough psuedophredrine for my family - it started being treated “as a disease”.
“Effective”, or “perfect”? Because almost everything every government does, good and ill, is not the second but it is the first. Totally ineffective bans certainly exist, but they are much rarer — even in the case of drugs, unless your pharmacy is currently selling cocaine 'Toothache Drops', or heroin or morphine cough syrup.
Almost everything the government does is “effective”? Have you been paying attention to the government? I can’t find it right now, but there was a survey done that no matter which side is in power, the policies that the government want is rarely aligned to the policies that most people want.
“Effective” is a separate axis to “what J. Average wants”.
For example, a government may want to circumvent encryption: if they tried to do this by requiring the SQL tables to be mauve “because that has the most RAM”, that would be ineffective; conversely if they passed a law requiring backdoors in everything, while this would be bad for many reasons, it would definitely have an effect.
That's the point. those are all not allowed, some kids do it anyway. Hard restrictions don't actually protect kids but make them more curious.
>Ever tried using logic with someone who is 100% certain you're the bad guy because they've been brainwashed for 8 hours a day on an app?
it sucks yea. But if it wasn't facebook, it'd be any other form of ad made in the past century. including "news" channels
>What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up?
TV and Video games were the new hotness, but all those were common too. cutting yourself as some perverted idea of "goth culture", body image issues from magazine and mannequins, graffiti, and yes, sex (that's a factor as old as time).
> We don't let 13 year old kids drink alcohol, have sex, take drugs,
Yes because we passed laws, we stopped drug use and alcohol use by children and they aren’t having sex…
> What happens when your kids is sent home from school because they assaulted someone or vandalized the school because it's a new cool thing on TikTok?
Yes because fighting in school and vandalizing property was never a thing before TikTok.
> What was the big "social contagion" when you were growing up?
Yes because before the internet there wasn’t mass hysteria like the Salem witch trials or within my parents lifetime @running all of the Black people out of the city to protect our wome
You are presumably an adult. Are your friends only within one year of age? Unlikely. That this happens for children is a consequence of our morally-bankrupt "education" system which isolates children away from the community and only with people the same age for socialization (of which teenagers are known to be poor at). The same way you can't blame an individual for not walking places in, say, Atlanta, because the path between two locations is interrupted by a highway; or you stop all fires from burning in a forest which has had fires for thousands of years then wonder why the fires are so intense; it's silly to point to social media being the primary issue why teens are bad at socializing when it's a direct consequence of your society to concentrate together people with wild hormones without a moderating influence.
You realize peer pressure has always been a thing right? We should have a “War on Social Media”, have the First Lady head a “Just Say No” campaign, and have commercials about “this is your brain on FaceBook”. Because that worked so well last time.
So let children make a choice around fire or knives? I guess evolution will weed out the stupid ones right?
Good parenting is partly about guiding our children to make good choices. This thread is discussing how we do that, and what good choices might look like.
And regarding power to a few companies: that's how it's always been.