This is sad. As a parent of a grade-schooler, I feel helpless with a complete lack of awareness around this. It feels as if everyone is calming their kids with opiates and Xanax, and no one bats an eye because that's what everyone else is doing.
Even if you're aware of the mental health issues associated with social media use, you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
The only positive trend I've seen is school districts banning smartphones. That could relieve some of the social pressure to hook your kid up with a smartphone so early in their life.
> or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
I had plenty of friends when I was young that had restrictions on "TV time". My parents, in contrast, were very "hands-off". I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it. Some frame it as "my parents were strict" or "my parents were a little overbearing" but that's about it.
Obviously I understand that it's not the same thing since phones are a 2-way medium and can sometimes be a lynchpin for communication these days, but it's not that crazy or unprecedented either.
What's talked about less (and I suspect the cause of a lot of reluctance to take phones away) is how parents now track their kids' whereabouts using smartphones and apps[1].
"I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it."
I agree. It's surprising how few people make rules for thier kids to help direct them in life these days. Of course independent and unsupervised time is important for maturity too. But it's surprising how any sort of discipline seems to be viewed as a negative and many parents give up at the slightest resistance.
To be clear, I don't mean discipline as punishment. I mean it more like order and routine. Stuff like shining your shoes, going to church with your family, helping someone old or disabled in the store, etc. I guess being responsible and productive members of society in a more general sense. I know kids never really liked doing chores, but it seems like in the past we understood we were part of a household and we should do our share. Now it seems like many kids just whine and the parents let them out it. I'm not sure if it's just entitled kids, lazy parents, or something else.
> It's surprising how few people make rules for thier kids to help direct them in life these days.
Do they make rules for themselves? If not, I would not expect it for the kids. If the parents are scrolling, then they are not going to have much of a leg to stand on.
It is about being a good role model. There is nothing wrong with different people having different standards. Even a child understands that they cannot drive, but a taller adult can. Or myriad other things.
But you cannot preach discipline without exhibiting it yourself and still maintain credibility.
For example, you can scroll on your phone sometimes, but if you are doing it hour after hour at every empty moment, but expect your child to watch you and not want to constantly indulge themselves also, you are going to be disappointed.
Especially when everyone around them will be scrolling anyway. Parents are basically the only ones who kids might trust more than their eyes (thinking that scrolling all the time is OK because everyone does it), but it has to be a family effort.
I agree that it doesn't have to be 1-to-1. But there are many parents that don't seem to have discipline for themselves in many ways. Using your beer example, getting drunk, or drunk driving, or drinking instead of helping with homework or something. Having a couple beers is fine if it's done responsibly, and one can still be a good role model.
I grew up in a strict evangelical family with tv time limits, only the 4 major over the air stations (cable tv was a tool of satan etc), and overall very restricted access to media.
As a kid it definitely made me feel set apart in an uncomfortable way.
I still have this mildly as an adult. One example where I notice this most acutely is when I was doing a regular bar trivia night with friends in the neighborhood. I could help with science, history, etc, but with many of the pop culture questions I was the only person on our team that didn't immediately know the answer.
Again, not the most important thing in the world, but there is a feeling of separateness I've had as a result. I've felt like I was "catching up" to culture all my life. If I could flip a switch and change it I would.
I do think smartphones are a bit different than all that though. There's something psychologically unsettling about doomscrolling this new TikTok style content. A couple times now I've gotten sucked into Youtube Shorts and then realized I just spent a couple hours on it in a mental fog. I find the idea of kids as young as the headline getting sucked in like that unsettling. I'm not a parent but I can see how it's not a simple dilema.
Shared common culture doesn't seem to exist much now. Even popular movies are only watched by a small percentage of people. How many here watched the latest episode of XYZ on TV last night? Plays hardly exist, few people read books (or if they do, not much in common (time/genre/recency)).
Anyone who has lived in another country should be able to sympathise with what it feels like to lack shared common culture. I was in Spain and even if someone explained their reference to something from their childhood (like a TV program), it often made no sense to me.
A friend mentioned they served Count Homoginised a coffee the other day. Only people from my country at a similar age to me (and possibly my city) would understand who he was.
And the pipe dream of having personalized AI-generated coooontent to enjoy means that it will be nigh impossible to have "common interests" with anyone else.
I wasn’t allowed to play video games as a kid (in the 90s and early 00s). I don’t really care about it, but it has 100% been an occasional barrier to socializing. I don’t have any of the necessary coordination, so I’m not even fun to beat, because I just shoot myself or fall off the road immediately.
There’s definitely parties where people just play smash bros or inside jokes about water levels that I’ve literally missed out on, though I don’t especially care. If I were a more regretful person or one who experienced FOMO more, I could absolutely see feeling it about video games.
I don’t know that it’s 100% analogous to smart phones/social media (particularly because the required skills are probably lower), but kids are prone to social pressure.
being out of the loop of some video games, TV shows or any other entertainment can be awkward at times, for sure. But if you have a good groups of friends, they don't care one bit, and should embrace you for who you are, not for what popular things you have knowledge of.
How much of this is TV specifically and how much is social signalling about wealth and class? I know I resented that my parents made me buy clothes at "Zellers" (defunct Canadian WalMart) and "Value Village" (thrift store) because kids made fun of my "poor" clothes once in a while. By the time I was 20 I realized that my parents were right and none of those opinions from my peers mattered the least bit.
Phones for children are not (just) entertainment devices; they’re social spaces (i.e. where other kids are) and channels for absorbing social norms and cultural shibboleths (which used to be a role played by mainstream media — kids growing up knowing the same quotes from the same cartoons, etc — but now is almost exclusively played by p2p media.)
A child without access to (some of) the Internet, is in roughly the same position, in terms of “ability to enculturate”, as a new immigrant trying to attend a University by commuting rather than living in dorms is.
What social norms will you get from weird spiderman movies on youtube (that look like some sort of russian psy-ops) or from chinese tiktok algorhitm, that shows educational stuff for chinese children and complete utter garbage for those in the West?
Damn, in the past the "history channel" showed actual history or you could discover things at discovery. Now discovery is psuedo-science about people building the biggest X and blowing it up.
I am not saying that children should not be given access to smartphones, but that tiktok (and modern youtube - especially with the new algorhitms) just feed them complete and utter crap. Worst of the worst.
Immigration doesn't drastically increase your chances for depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, insomnia, and executive dysfunction.
The analogy is between what happens afterward, due to missing the enculturative influence: failing to make friends at school due to lack of primary enculturation; vs. failing to get a job related to your degree due to lack of tertiary enculturation (a.k.a. "lack of culture fit.") Both situations can result in environmentally-induced mental illness.
Many things can induce mental illness, but few can so reliably and universally increase such a broad swath of mental illnesses, and they usually aren't literally engineered to be addictive.
My parents didn't let me watch much TV/movies at all growing up. This was never a problem when I was a kid — books and the Internet filled the TV-role perfectly well — but as a teenager and young adult I often found myself confused by things that everyone my age was "supposed" to know from TV/movies.
On the other hand, I would probably have felt like a social outcast anyway, and whatever mild unpleasantness I experienced sounds a lot milder than some of the effects of social media on kids.
Like I tell my parents, taking away "The love boat" rerun away from ME on channel 4 when I was eight, IS NOT LIKE taking away a phone from a kid today that is playing Roblox. Roblox is NOT a rerun of a horrible 70s show. It is a fully immersive, awesome and a complete social network. I view it closer to cocaine.
Only downside I've seen is my wife doesn't get cultural references, and doesn't do anything without a TV show on, after having grown up without TV. And god help you if you're talking to her while she's watching it; she may as well have noise cancelling headphones on turned to 11, even if the volume is low from her laptop speakers.
> I've never heard people who are now adults who had "TV time" restrictions express a lot of FOMO or regret about it
I grew up adjacent to a pretty wealthy area where every kid I went to school with had cable TV. My parents just flat out refused to get cable saying it was a waste of money.
It was a really alienating thing as a kid to not be able to talk about what was on TV.
My parents are nice enough people but their stubbornness over this is something that for the life of me I'll never understand. I don't really interact w/ them much anymore so who knows. My general take on family is that they're just people you were introduced to.
One person's waste is another person's value. Both stances are correct.
But you would have hated having me as a parent. My kids didn't get to watch TV as a habit at all when they were young. They did get to watch TV, but only selected programs and only as a family activity.
As adults, they have all expressed that while it may have angered them sometimes when they were young, they came to appreciate my stance as adults.
If smartphones existed then, there's exactly zero chance that I would have allowed them to have one.
I grew up cable, my parents stopped paying for it all through middle and high school, missed it, grew up and got my own money, paid for cable, and… my parents were right. 200 channels of nothing to watch. Cable is a waste of money.
Based on your previous posts, it seems like you are fully invested in advertising for some reason. Don't know why you'd pay to watch it as well, but hey... different strokes.
They bloat webpages, take time from what you're actually looking for, and are a huge vector for malware delivery & social engineering. They literally take away from the programming you're watching if it's television, sometimes are even detrimental to the product that consuming.
Who cares if they “bloat webpages”? It’s 2024 our phones and computers can handle it lol. Either don’t go to the site again or deal with it. Websites aren’t free.
Some apples have worms in them. Some ads have malware in them. We don’t cry and whine about how terrible apples are as a result.
TV shows arent free. You’re welcome to turn it off if you hate the ads enough.
(I'll preface this by saying I'm not a parent, and I don't raise children. I imagine it's not an easy endeavor. But...)
> you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
Are these really the only 2 options you see? No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"?
Edit: People replying to this comment seem to have forgotten the role of parents.
When I was a kid, all drugs were illegal, at least to me as a minor. My parents had the alcohol is bad and cigarettes are bad talks with me but even if I wanted to drink and smoke, it was hard to access until I got closer to the age where it was allowed anyway.
When I was a kid, all drugs were illegal to me too. Yet my parents had cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, and weed in the house. Me and my siblings didn't touch them.
Kids will mostly do what they see others do. This makes drugs less difficult to dissuade. It makes phones and screens particularly pernicious. "do as I say, not as I do" is not always good enough.
I have kids. They watch movies with us, and the nanny gives them more screen time than I'd like. I don't have to talk to them about drugs because nobody is handing my kids drugs. But screens are everywhere and I use them all the time, sadly.
You're talking about a medium that's been explicitly designed to be addictive and young children, who don't reason in the same way that an adult does. You may as well say to little Timmy "here are your smokes, just remember that this could cause lung cancer one day and consider it before blowing through a pack a day."
It's not so much that people are too dumb to do this or don't understand the danger, it's that doing this well is tedious and time-consuming and expensive. Setting up parental controls and monitoring them is a chore, you have to sign up for a bunch of apps you don't want and read outdated docs and troubleshoot random error messages and crap. Most of the good stuff costs money, all of the shitty stuff is free. Finding educational apps that aren't terrible requires research, whereas the worst garbage imaginable is heavily advertised.
So, I'm not saying you're wrong, but that this is a problem with incentives as opposed to a moral failing. I think there's a direct parallel to the rise of highly processed foods. The people 2-3 generations ago understood that junk food was unhealthy, and very few people fed their kids 100% soda and hot pockets, but junk food was so much cheaper and easier that people gradually allowed more and more into their diets, and now here we are with an adult obesity rate 3x that of 1960.
> "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day"
Edit to add, it seems most of your other responders are responding to this bit, which I agree is not realistic (children aren't rational to reliably refrain from something just because you can explain why it's bad) but I can see why you're frustrated that they're zeroing in on that part and not the part I responded to.
> Edit to add, it seems most of your other responders are responding to this bit, which I agree is not realistic (children aren't rational to reliably refrain from something just because you can explain why it's bad) but I can see why you're frustrated that they're zeroing in on that part and not the part I responded to.
What's frustrating to me is that people are taking this so literally and not reading into at all. I'm not suggesting parents be like, "Okay Tommy, here's why phones are bad, now here you go!" and never talk about it again. That's utterly absurd, and isn't how anyone should expect a parent to teach a child life skills. It's a constant battle - as you say, tedious, time-consuming, and expensive - to raise a child with good principles. Why is this thread acting as though teaching our children self-control is somehow a different lesson?
> Why is this thread acting as though teaching our children self-control is somehow a different lesson?
Because some things require more self-control than others.
Imagine if the drinking fountains in public parks had non-alcoholic beer instead of water. Installed and maintained by Budweiser, totally free of charge, guaranteed ice-cold. Responsible parents would avoid the beer fountains and bring a thermos of water, but a lot of parents would just let their kids drink from them, right? And even very responsible parents would probably let their kids drink from them occasionally, because we forgot the thermos, and it's right there and it's free.
Raising non-drinking kids in that world would be harder than in this one. Everything you said about "teaching self-control" and the importance of parental effort would still be true, but it would also be true that when kids in that world start drinking earlier than in ours, it's not solely the parents' fault.
That probably sounds like a ridiculous example, but I think it's pretty analogous to schools showing Youtube videos. My kids had never heard of youtube before they saw it in their second grade classroom, and I'm not thrilled about it, but I get it, because it's right there and it's free. Raising kids is hard no matter what, but the fact that the world's biggest and best source of good educational content also happens to be riddled with crap makes it harder.
Not everything is like that. The library doesn't have Stephen King mixed in with the picture books. The Disney channel isn't also Pornhub. The parks don't have beer fountains. That's the difference.
> No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"?
Probably works for some but I imagine it being really hard to do, especially if they're at school. Our brains take a while to mature and I don't see many 5-7 year olds being able to make long term good choices on their own at that point. I think that's too much to ask.
> Are these really the only 2 options you see? No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"?
It starts from no to progressively more access while teaching your growing kid to self regulate. There is no way you can treat your 7-17 year old the same when they are getting full access whether you like it or not when they turn 18.
"OK, honey, this is called cocaine. I'm going to let you try it, but only in a safe and reasonable manner. We'll discuss reasonable limits on how much you can use and when."
This is exactly how it went with my ex neighbour. Her dad offered her cigarettes on her 18th birthday to "use responsibly". She's been smoking since that day. She's retired now and a heavy smoker most of her life. I'm not sure how she avoided cancer but I guess she was lucky.
> No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"?
The capitalist solution is always to move all the responsibility to the most vulnerable members of society. Your food is infected with a novel bacteria resistant to all antibiotics? Should have chosen your food better! Sorry, not sorry, it's you by yourself vs deception of a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Also, while you are at it, we made it a crime to photograph the farm, so you will never know the condition animals were raised in!
I'm about as far from a capitalist as one might imagine. But hey, let's let the corporations and lobbyists legislate more of what we can and can't do, instead of relying on our own willpower to do so. Certainly that will show those pesky capitalists!
Yes and no. If you keep your kid off of these social media sites (a) you're going to fight about it Every. Single. Day. For. Years. and (b) they're going to get on them with burner accounts/devices anyway. Where will they get a burner phone? From any other kid at school that gets a new phone, and wants $20. The whole situation is psychotic. Even without social media there's horror stories from the "local media" of AirDrop and group texts.
I discovered that my kid's peer group shares screen recordings via imessage chats to get around being offline or running out of time limit on the source apps (youtube, etc.). I kind of like the resourcefulness tbh.
This is another good point that seems to fly under the radar - putting aside the implications for free society for a moment, even if we were to implement legislation regarding the use of social media, rest assured, kids will find a way around it if they want to - much like with drugs.
Yeah, there's no winning. I think there's a happy medium, like Fail Whale Twitter, where you can have social media that doesn't drag you into a short video loop for an hour or more, but that model doesn't seem to be commercially viable.
I have a 9 and a 13 yr old. Neither has TikTok. 9 yr old doesn’t have a phone. 13 yr old has one but I’m not approving TikTok on it. I’ve had no protests around it. Most of the 9 yr olds friends don’t have phones either. Same with the 13 yrs old - most of her friends don’t have TikTok access. In general, social media messes with a kids mind. I’d rather have my kids not be friends with folks too addicted to social media.
My child's school bans smartphones and smart watches until 5th grade, but on top of that the majority of patents have plegded [1] to wait until 8th grade. The best defense we have as parents is through collective discussion and action.
A lot of this enforced waiting seems to be motivated by the negative behavior of children and early teens towards each other. And since you can't control how other parents raise their kids, a few bad apples have to spoil it for everyone. And, truth be told, when I recollect how bad junior high was before the Internet or smartphones existed, the capability of smartphones to magnify the negative as well as the positive certainly seems terrifying.
This just makes me want to home-school my kid if possible.
(My son, my only kid, is about to turn 3 and I have been carefully watching this ongoing conversation/debate/research.)
According to "Screen Damage: The Dangers of Digital Media for Children", which I recommend, there is no scientific evidence of kids without access to phones being more sad, depressive, etc. But there is evidence of the opposite.
Yes: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it still makes your decision easier.
Jonathan Haidt has assembled a very strong body of evidence demonstrating the mental health harms of allowing access to smart phones and social media for young children.
Very easily: the book does not get moral at all. It just claims that there is scientific consensus about the damage that leisure screens make. This is quite easy to debunk, if false.
Know that you're not alone! I have young kids to and there are many of us who are trying our damndest to make sure that our kids have a normal childhood.
Our kids basically get 1 hour on Saturday, 1 hour on Sunday (sometimes a bit more), and only shared screen time (like we watch shows as a family, not individualized) on weeknights at most. And they definitely want more, but we have pushed hard enough for them to play outside so they are able to do that with a couple other neighborhood kids and they love it. Neither are teenagers yet so I'm expecting things to get a lot harder in coming years.
And our kids won't get smartphones until they're older (we've said 14 but my wish is for 16. I'm hoping there will be an under-16 social media ban as law). This is going to be the toughest nut to crack, because it requires many parents to agree on the same norms.
We're also holding out hope for proper and official smartphone bans in schools. Many staff in schools are sick of it, so I think it's just a matter of time.
It is also going to depend a lot on each of your kids. Some kids have more FOMO, others don't. Probably worse for girls than boys too at a population level (there's plenty of data supporting that).
Good luck and I hope that parents like us eventually prevail.
I have a 12 and 10 y/o. Neither has a phone, but both have access to plenty of approved apps (games, etc.) via their iPads, and now also group chats via iMessage where we can choose read everything (we spot check) and know the contacts. This seems like a reasonable amount of connectivity, without the full wrath of social media just yet. They occasionally complain their friend has an iPhone 15 XL blah blah, but then they move on.
I have a 14 year old boy who has a phone. He has a pretty large imessage group of about 20 kids from his school named 'dumbasses united' (which is pretty freaking funny IMO) he also has another smaller imessage group with his close friends. He isn't interested in social media like tiktok or instagram and in fact is pretty anti-social media platform beyond imessage. He does have a discord with some kids from school to play games with however.
I don't bother him too much about it as long as his grades are good and responsibilities around the house are met. Every so often i'll scroll through his phone but haven't found anything you wouldn't expect from a typical 8th grader. I don't come down on him for language or crude jokes or anything like that, i'm looking for actual danger and not 14 year olds being 14. He knows I have the pin to his phone and he could change it to make it a bigger issue between us but he never has and in return i won't confront him unless i feel like it's a very serious issue.
There is a gradient only a few years long with the end point being they can do whatever they want, basically. Based on chats with other parents who have older kids, I think the model will transition to ever more access, with more severe consequences for breaking whatever rules we end up setting (behavior, content, etc). For example, a neighbor's 16-year-old had a strict rule of leaving location tracking on for his parents to know where he was. He turned it off to sneak about, they found out, so he lost the phone for two weeks. But tbh with kids it all changes so quickly, we will take it day by day.
Kids who are not part of the cool in-group getting drunk and doing coke after school are the ones who read more and study more and become successful.
Data point: everyone in my HS's class of 1200 who was "cool" is now more or less a bagger in a grocery store, or dead from drug overdose. Everyone who was ostracized and a "loser" is successful.
Do you want your kids to have a happy high school time (4 years) or a happy life being able to afford fun things(~60 years)?
> Don't give a digital device to a small child, period.
I like how we've accepted that a device that can be used to call for help, and is the greatest innovation of the last 20 years, is toxic and dangerous and exploits you. Even if you are a child. And we just accept that.
But it is toxic and dangerous and exploits you. It's also a very valuable tool. As with all things, there's a cost/benefit calculation to be done here.
I think that the cost/benefit ratio is hugely unfavorable when we're talking about very young children.
Many of us work, or have worked (for me, thankfully, past tense) at the companies turning phones and tablets into exploitation devices. The data is clear. And here, so is the personal experience.
If you want something that can "call for help," there are many options other than smartphones.
"Even if you're aware of the mental health issues associated with social media use, you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone."
I absolutely choose "FOMO complexes". Just because other parents let their teens do pot and alcohol doesn't mean it's right for my kid. That same logic can extend to less harmful (or more legal or socially acceptable) things like TikTok brain rot.
I don't think it's comparable, for several reasons:
1. With pot and alcohol, the law is on your side. Any kid will understand that you don't let them do pot and alcohol, it isn't even legal. They may find workarounds if they are rebel enough, but at least they will understand your point of view just fine. With phones, even a normal, properly-raised kid can struggle to understand why you are depriving them from what their peers have, is commonly seen as normal and other parents may be actively validating.
2. If social media become the primary means of communication for the class, not using them means being marginalized. It's not even a matter of "they laugh at me because I don't drink", which can be overcome with self-esteem and self-confidence, even if it's difficult. It's a simple matter of people making plans and your kid not even finding out because they can't communicate.
3. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon and the network effect. I can imagine that if your kid were in a class where 90% did pot, it would be very difficult if not impossible to stop them (other than by just sending them to a different school). But that kind of prevalence is common with social media...
I was saying the same type of thing can extend to the others. Yes, pot and alcohol are extreme examples. However there are still kids who would question it if others are allowed to and they aren't, especially if maybe they know their parents do pot in a state where it isn't legal. Event the network effects and marginalization can happen with substances. How many sober people do you see at college parties? There's some of that presenting in the high school crowds too.
I'm wondering if there are any messenger clients that can basically strip out the other portions of social media if you really want to use it just for communication.
I suppose with the mention of what is legal and what is not, we could start passing age laws on social media usage. Although many places have laws about the age needed for an email account. Seems to be generally ignored.
There are social media that almost only have messaging (e.g. in my country everyone has Whatsapp) but I think the problem is once you give a kid a smartphone, it's going to be enormously difficult to effective control what they use. Most social media have web versions, you don't even need to install anything, and good luck putting some web filter once the kid is outside the home connecting to some WiFi...
For similar reasons, legal age limits on social media wouldn't be very effective - age limits on smartphones probably would.
Banning phones is necessary. Otherwise, if you want to be a responsible parent and keep your kid away from smartphones or social media, it’s not going to work. They’ll get exposed to it through others around them, which will make things difficult, but they’ll also be exposed to the culture, trends and mental health issues that social media creates from other kids.
I have a 5 year old - I’ve deemed TikTok way too addicting for myself. There’s no way the kids will go on there to scroll through industrial strength entertaining nonsense for hours. Even with my somewhat adult impulse control I would mindlessly look at that app for hours
However the no-smartphone policy in schools is far from perfect, since a lot of parents are so busy in their phones, that they give their children pretty unrestricted access at home.
It’s certainly not a new phenomenon - except maybe it’s at scale now. The early internet was very extreme. Things like goatse were the main memes and everyone at my school knew rotten.com, etc.
Not to even mention the file sharing sites and apps where you never really knew what you were getting until you play it
The fact that you're concerned about FOMO is disappointing. Your job is to parent and make hard choices for the betterment of your kid and sometimes saying, " no you can't have a smartphone at 7/go to a concert on a school night/smoke pot/drink/party/ do whatever else kids do because it's not the healthy thing to do."
Yeah I went through the same thing as a kid. I didn't have any video game systems until I was 13. Did I get FOMO? Absolutely, did I die from it? Hell no. Instead when I got my own money I bought an n64 and was able to enjoy it later on. In the meantime, my education and professional career thanked me.
FFS, there is an epidemic of bad parents and kids are suffering for it.
> It feels as if everyone is calming their kids with opiates and Xanax, and no one bats an eye because that's what everyone else is doing.
Hot take: as a millennial, I feel like our entire generation is overall failing as parents. The average parent is incredibly conflict-averse but also thoroughly wired for paranoia. So the end result is that children often have no discipline/structure in their lives, but they also have no freedoms.
Their parents give them a phone with unlimited Youtube, but they aren't allowed to have friends. They never get spanked but they are always grounded. They don't sit down and eat meals as a family, but they follow a strict allergen-controlled diet because of a weird rash they had once in third grade.
Not to say that this generation of kids is going to turn out any worse than any other, but the way that Millenials blame Baby Boomers for all of their problems as adults is going to look cute in comparison.
Prohibition is the laziest "solution" I can think of. It doesn't work, and we can do better anyway.
If you want to change a behavior, replace it! After all, given time awake, a human will always have to do something. Give your kid something healthy and productive to do; or at the very least, something neutral. Get them excited about it.
This isn't a war of "do" vs "don't". This is a war of engagement. If you are losing, then the best strategy is "more do".
My partner and I kid sat for a family of 3 brothers, while the parents were out of town.
The youngest, about 7 I think, would come home after school and just watch a TT-like show on TV where it was just endless "scrolling" through short videos that appeared as though they were straight off TT/Insta. He was literally addicted to it.
Imagine someone producing/moderating that in a way to get kids to just continue to watch it non-stop.
My point is, you don't even need an app and age verification... this stuff is just right there on regular old TV.
Video games are a very specific genre and in some ways, actually activate the brain. Not trying to defend gaming (I'm not a gamer), but my point is that we are regressing even further away from generations past. We get enough generations of this, and it becomes normal. This kid will grow up, have kids... and they will do same thing.
If both mom and dad are in the workforce, both are climbing the ladder, grinding everyday... commuting hours every day, always tired... and still not even making enough for a good mortgage... who's going to take care of the kids? I think maybe let's just buy a tablet or a phone to keep the kids quiet while we mull in the many ways we're not going anywhere in life.
I'd argue that the biggest difference between that kind of "dumb variety tv" and tiktok is that tiktok is essentially endless, and it suits the content to you. There's a big difference between the heads of a clip show deciding what gets shown on tv based off empathy and the occasional focus group test, and an inhuman algorithm which pays attention only to "engagement" - whether that engagement be positive or negative.
America's Funniest Home Videos was a 30-minute show that was on once a week. Now with a million streaming "channels" it's presumably available 24/7, except without Bob Saget commenting.
TV is very predictable and is moderated a lot more than online platforms where any random person can decide they want to make a mental illness or a dangerous challenge into a "cool" trend.
Is the 'TT-like' show on one of the thousand Rakuten channels Samsung bother me with? I've seen some what seems like to be endless loops of short TT like videos there of like dogs doing dances and stuff.
We're a homeschooling family with a single Pinwheel phone shared among our three kids. It has no browser and no way to access social media. But it does have basic smartphone functionality, like phone, texting, photos/videos, music, etc.
In contrast, our kids tell us all the time that their peers in various extracurricular activities almost all have unrestricted phone and technology use.
I would like to hope that if we raise our kids with "healthy" technology use, then they will ultimately be better off.
But my fear is that unhealthy technology use is so pervasive that they'll end up in the same sort of unfortunate situation as being the only humans left after a zombie outbreak.
I fear it will be difficult for me to do this and not make them social outcasts. Part of being a parent is also helping your kids fit in and be successful "socially". I think what you're doing is good. Hopefully enough parents do this that it doesn't seem weird when a little one doesn't have a phone.
My one year old can already steal my phone, hold it, and scroll/mess with buttons with her thumbs, open camera to look at herself... so I try not to use it around her anymore.
I’d argue that the US puts far too much weight on “social success”. Our culture will consider someone who is not some extreme extrovert or constantly seeking attention a social failure.
The older you get, the more important family becomes and your group of close friends is typically small.
Maintaining a large number of superficial friendships is typically some you grow out of anyway, so maybe we should be teaching kids to skip that step.
I think there's a difference between just being introverted and being bullied or excluded. I don't care of my child is an introvert. I do care of they want to make friends and can't.
At some point we somehow decided being an outcast is bad all around. However, looking into the past, a lot of people who used to be loners became artists later in live, or scientists, or tinkerers. I know how this sounds at first, but having the time to drill down to the absolute core of something, uninterrupted by a big social circle or crushes yields its own merits.
My wife and I also have three kids that share a simple flip phone, with no real access to social media, or the internet. A good number of their peer's do have unrestricted access to smart phone's, and as they have gotten older I think they have started to turn the corner seeing how destructive it is. My son lamented about his neighborhood friends never wanting to play because they are addicted to TikTok, and even thought there are still times he begs us for a smart phone so he can fit in, its starting to sink in that unregulated screen time is a huge problem.
We have also slowly increased his freedom to regulate his own screen time, both TV and Computer, and have seen him self-regulating, and commenting how easy it is to get sucked into being a screen zombie.
I'd be worried about the opposite effect. The sheltered kids were always the ones to party the hardest when they got to college and had their first glimpse of freedom. I'm sure there is a happy balance somewhere, but finding it is certainly the trick.
I will add something overlooked, the children might not be on tiktok but they might be on youtube watching videos made of chained tiktok videos.
Based on my personal observation the rapid, repeated change of scene (5 to 8 seconds) trigger some sort of addiction combined with not understanding what's going on, as well as inability to talk with friends about the scene (too little time).
i observed one of my daughter's friends completely shutdown and forgetting we were even there. We kept calling her, she didn't even respond. I'm still shocked. Granted there is way more than the tv problem, this is just the last of a long chain.
Anecdotally speaking, this is kind of true. Most parents just give up and instead of disciplining and raising their child. It’s just easier to give them a tablet loaded to the tits with “YouTube kids”, parental controlled Netflix, TikTok, and other short form video services. Have even seen children get access to unfiltered YT, TT, IG.
Putting kids into a technology induced coma can be useful in specific situations... such as on an airplane. But it should generally be a last resort, and avoided. Many parents use it too quickly.
i'd wonder with #3 if you're slowly training your child to misbehave? i'm sure you're aware of this, i ask more to start the convo if you have observations
YouTube clearly quickly became the world's biggest nanny. I don't think there's any way to undo that one anyways so I'm interested to see what will be the long term impacts of that in the future.
Not quite. There was 1 TV in the median household in the 80s and 90s, which made TV a contested common resource from one point of view and a focal point of social gathering from another point of view.
The median American household today has >1 internet-enabled screens, many children from the age of 5-7 have their own "personal device".
90s TV at least had physical boundaries on its use. Most people couldn't watch TV in the bathroom for example. Phones and the Internet can be used anywhere at this point.
Very troubling. In my opinion social media in general is like smoking. It's a generally negative thing that's addictive... but also pleasurable. Adults should be allowed to made decisions on what they do to themselves, but children should be protected. At the same time, society should make an effort to ensure everyone knows the risks.
How old were you when you gained access to the family computer?
How old were you when you gained access to the internet?
Personally I think the educational advantage that a tablet or phone can provide is too quickly overlooked. People assume phone or tablet equals bad with black/white thinking. Sure it can be used to scroll junk mindlessly (although this would be blocked from a child account).
It also can be used to playback educational content with subtitles enabled. Kids can learn languages, math, puzzle solving, all sorts of things. A time limit can be enforced on it too.
TikTok at its core is a mechanism to share information directly between parties. If you allow your kids on there, and what they are allowed to do there, is up to you as a parent. I will say there is a STEM section that can be enabled, and I'm not personally opposed to it.
I had my own computer in my room when I was 9 or 10 or so.
Internet access was mostly restricted as it made the single phone line busy and for a long time the ISP plan my father had was limited with only a few hours allowance.
There were absolutely no filters and my parents didn't watch what I was doing. They just hammered in my mind that nobody in the Internet should be trusted, and absolutely no real names, no photos and no addresses. Stranger danger.
By the time I had access to a broadband always-on connection, this was already set in my mind. Only years later that people thought that putting their real names and pictures on the book of faces would be cool.
Am the anomaly here? No. one in my kids class is on TikTok and my kids don't use phones except to steal ours and take pictures or occasionally watch a shared family video. I'm not virtue signaling, I'm saying that I am surprised that this 30% is true.
I thought about that -- but I know the school doesn't allow phones and I see the kids in the neighborhood / after school. Noone is on phones except the parents.
> so facebook or instagram or whatever else is fine?
says who? they shouldn't be using social media full stop. handing a 5 year old a device is the cheapest and laziest way to parent, akin to feeding them mcdonalds
Yeah. Suppose Big Bad Chinese TikTok were banned in USA. What is stopping someone from ripping a compilation of TikToks and uploading them to YouTube? How is that any different?
It's good that TikTok is bringing attention to this issue but don't let anyone tell you for a second that it is the sole problem.
I don't think the TikTok ban is an adjudication of the TikTok scrolling behavior or addictive feedback loop. It's an adjudication on the idea that a company that controls those technologies could be help accountable by the United States.
I think the current US stance is: we are allowing the crop dusting of american high schools with digital heroine, however, we demand the right to potentially regulate it in the future. A Chinese owned TikTok sits outside that potential regulation where a Facebook or YouTube exists within that potential regulation.
China themselves ban TikTok for kids, and only have an educational version available.
For all the people fretting over whether they should let their own children use these platforms, fearing that keeping them off will alienate them from their peers, I'd suggest considering the following quote:
> The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. - Huxley
It will likely make them a social outcast, to a degree. The question is whether that's a good thing or not.
(a) 5-7 year olds are "on" tiktok producing content.
(b) 5-7 year olds are watching funny videos of cats on TikTok.
My 7 year old son will sometimes watch pet and food shorts with my wife on her phone with Douyin (TikTok China). He isn't really "on" TikTok, he is just consuming some of the content while waiting for his Nasi Goreng at the Indonesian restaurant.
I seriously wonder if the vast majority of of that 30% are just watching funny dance videos or something like that on the web or on a phone as some form of screen time (damaging because it is screen time, but no more damaging than watching YouTube kids). I think it is crazy for a kid to have phone at that age, but a tablet with screen time limits is much more reasonable. Especially on Sunday when there aren't so many activities scheduled and they've already done their homework.
I'm 34 now. When I was a kid, I'd spend hours daily on a Windows 3.1 computer at home and an Atari with those old 5 1/4-inch floppy game disks at my grandpa's place.
Then the internet and cable TV came to our house, and I was glued to that for most of my time. Faster internet followed, giving us access to all sorts of unfiltered online content (sites like Ogrish were the norm with my friend group). Smartphones and apps hit the scene not long after.
Nowadays, I have a 7-year-old son who's constantly on his tablet, playing Roblox or Minecraft on my computer, or watching YouTube videos about trains and tornado sirens on the TV (yep, he's autistic). He's been seeing me do similar stuff since he was born. No surprise he started mimicking that behavior. It doesn't really bother me, though.
Let's not forget that this begins earlier. Yes, you've seen them: The two or three year-olds in a stroller staring at a device and never once looking up. And quite often paired with one or more parents also on a device "out for a walk".
I looked for the methodology for this study, I found it and it it seems well thought out, but there is not enough detail on how they removed selection bias to know for sure if these numbers are solid. However, everything they do say about the methodology points to it being a competent and properly run study, it's just that it is extremely hard to gather this data online in a way that ends up being representative even if your methods are sound.
I would like to know more about the details of the study, but right now I would say it's reasonable to believe that there is a moderately high degree of certainty that these numbers are accurate (but of course the study was limited to the UK).
I actually thought about that recently. Not about kids, but overall platform addiction. I don't think there is anything as addicted as binge-watching short video content.
After Snapchat, and not TikTok nailed it - all other platforms (including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc) are trying to not improve their platforms, but keep you on their platforms for a longer period of time by switching to that binge-watching short video content.
There is nothing good about it. It does not teach you anything, just a very dump spend of your time. Maybe that sounds like an old man speaking in me. But that is how I feel about myself spending time watching shorts on YouTube, FB or Instagram.
As a parent, that's crazy to me. I'm hoping to keep mine away from social media for as long as possible. It seems to create all kinds of mental issues.
How is this possible? Where is the parenting? I can understand maybe at the age of 13, you can let your kid go on Tiktok. Otherwise, this is pretty insane.
The problem is not TikTok, is social media aimed at children in general. Singling out TikTok is just China bashing. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Discord, all of them can be equally harmful or worse. Banning TikTok only is just the US government protecting Meta and Google businesses.
So in other words, the TikTok recommendation algorithm controls the collective conscious of 30% of 5-7 year olds which propagates to the other 70% and other age groups.
Maybe banning TikTok is not a bad idea especially when you consider who owns TikTok.
That is really alarming from a mental health perspective. Even adults have trouble dealing with the addiction loops social media and smartphones in general create. But apart from this, I think it’s a serious national security issue to have children propagandized by a CCP controlled social media platform. As legislators have discussed in hearings, TikTok seems to have highly skewed coverage of different topics and views compared to other platforms, in a way that makes its entire operation seem curated for political chaos, rather than organic.
This is blatant misinformation, and the legislators "discussing" this clearly barely know what the technology is, let alone the political and social ramifications for its use or misuse. Not even to mention that all the major social media platforms have similar invasions of privacy and skewed messaging on them - not at all unique to tiktok. There has been zero evidence of the CCP influencing what American citizens see on tiktok, it's pure speculation based on Bytedance being a Chinese company. And besides, if they wanted to, meta/YT/etc. make it trivially easy for them to do anyway - you don't even need tiktok or control of it.
Unless your point is literally "The united states should be the only one spewing blatant propaganda to its citizens," what you're saying lacks any real substance and is just parroting talking heads on stations like fox and cnn.
> There has been zero evidence of the CCP influencing what American citizens see on tiktok, it's pure speculation based on Bytedance being a Chinese company
What sort of evidence could exist when it is a black box? Bytedance / TikTok are not transparent about any of it, and given that they are willing to lie under oath, why should anything they say be trusted at all? All we have is what people have studied in terms of the prevalence of certain messages and hashtags, and it is very clear from various evaluations of this, that TikTok is very skewed. And it seems to be skewed in the very ways that would create political chaos.
> Unless your point is literally "The united states should be the only one spewing blatant propaganda to its citizens," what you're saying lacks any real substance and is just parroting talking heads on stations like fox and cnn.
I wonder why TikTok’s parent company said they prefer to shut it down rather than sell it. It only makes it more clear that it is mainly a tool of the CCP. I am not sure what “blatant propaganda” you’re referring to, but creating any kind of equivalence between the US and the CCP is ridiculous.
> Really? Other social media platforms are exfiltrating US data to China after claiming it doesn’t happen under oath?
This wasn't what your parent comment claimed - you claimed that the CCP was propagandizing people through the Tiktok platform. The "exfiltrating us data to china" is still a disputed claim as far as I'm aware, and even if true still doesn't support your original extraordinary claim.
> What sort of evidence could exist when it is a black box? Bytedance / TikTok are not transparent about any of it, and given that they are willing to lie under oath, why should anything they say be trusted at all? All we have is what people have studied in terms of the prevalence of certain messages and hashtags, and it is very clear from various evaluations of this, that TikTok is very skewed. And it seems to be skewed in the very ways that would create political chaos.
I guess then you can speculate and make wild claim you want about it then - why stop there?
> I wonder why TikTok’s parent company said they prefer to shut it down rather than sell it. It only makes it more clear that it is mainly a tool of the CCP. I am not sure what “blatant propaganda” you’re referring to, but creating any kind of equivalence between the US and the CCP is ridiculous.
Nothing you've said makes anything "clear," and again, is pure speculation and regurgitating of actual propaganda on this topic. Now that I understand you're completely unserious, I can move on with my day. Have a good one
I was responding to your comment, not my own parent comment. You used the word “privacy”. TikTok is clearly worse on privacy, and the link I shared is an example of that.
> I guess then you can speculate and make wild claim you want about it then - why stop there?
If your argument is nothing should be done because a company controlled by an adversarial government is hard to examine, then that’s not very convincing. Like I said, with what evidence is possible to collect, it shows that TikTok is highly skewed in an artificial and likely malicious way.
> Now that I understand you're completely unserious, I can move on with my day
I’m not making any argument. I’m purely responding to what you said, which is blatant misinformation not backed by any evidence.
> Like I said, with what evidence is possible to collect, it shows that TikTok is highly skewed in an artificial and likely malicious way.
Can you show such evidence? I’m genuinely curious. Such evidence would make top headlines, so I’m a little skeptical, but maybe you know something more than I do other than “China is bad.”
I think that the basis of these is that parents, especially mothers, do not pay enough attention to their children. The entry of mothers into business life left children without love, indifference and defenseless. As a result of this incident, children try to take this attention from external attention centers, such as TikTok.
just maybe 5-6 years ago, attempts to regulate the time spent online by ones kids was met (on forums like *eddit and hackernews) with a sarcasm filled 'WiLl nO oNe tHinK oF tHe Kids' mockery and then pointing to the advent of books/newspapers/ipods etc having similar effects on society. Lol, techies are probably worse than the average person when it comes to figuring out how a society should function
This seems to generate disgust in me, but it isn't much better than sitting in front of the television for hours which older generations normalised to be honest. I feel like the early internet was a little more intellectual than tiktok but essentially television returned just in a more purified dopamine releasing form. Perhaps the sense of disgust is due to comparison of what could have been?
I personally agree. But I've also seen quite a few parents who use ipads as nannies, so it also wouldn't surprise me if it were accurate.
I've come around to the screen-free childhood plan, but most people who I know that have implemented it are affluent enough to have a stay-at-home parent or a high quality daycare.
Not using screens as a babysitter requires a significant amount of a parent's time and energy, so I also won't condemn any parents who use that strategy.
I like the kids version of the Kindle Fire as a way for giving kids screen time. I don't think it's perfect but it offers a fairly large library of applications, games, and videos for a few bucks a month with out allowing internet access. Not all the content is educational but I haven't found anything inappropriate yet. It also offers pretty good options for setting limits. I'm sure you could do something similar on the iPad but I think it would require more effort to set up.
I condemn them wholeheartedly. If you don't have the time and energy to raise your kids without regularly hypnotizing them via chinese doomscrolling then please just don't have kids.
Respectfully, with as flippant as employers can be with employees lives, a "good" parenting situation can become a bad situation in a matter of months. And that doesn't even cover scenarios where someone can become an only parent.
Ideally, it's a place our social safety nets would be better, but they're pretty bad when it comes to helping children right now in the US.
Fair point and I realize not everyone has the resources to raise their kids the way they want to, but I get the impression most parents don't even want to keep their kids away from this stuff, regardless of their financial situation. There's a lot more awareness and concern in tech-related places like this, but the majority of the general population does not seem to have a problem with putting an iPad in front of a toddler, I see it all the time- in fact probably more commonly with middle-class families than working-class ones.
i guess you're being sarcastic but i literally spent some part of my youth running around in corn fields socializing with other children. not as old fashioned as my dad who made some pocket change shucking corn as a kid. it wouldn't be a bad thing for kids these days to get out of the house and touch maize.
Your examples are decades old. People have been worrying about technology spoiling their children since we've had writing. Are you arguing you were ruined by TVs and computers growing up? Or satanic music?
The difference is that those other technologies weren't fine tuned to individuals to literally short-circuit their brains to get the most perfect amount of dopamine at the right time to keep them addicted.
People aren't getting addicted as a side-effect. Addiction is the primary-effect of the way the companies have designed these experiences, and addition (or the more harmless term "customer engagement") is a direct measure of success at these companies.
So the analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
They're more like Slot machines, which are highly regulated and age-gated.
Are you arguing that TVs and computers are not capable of ruining lives? There are a legion of washed up WoW addicts that would indicate they can, to name one example
Instagram's Tik Tok rip off, Youtube's Tik Tok rip off, the original to some extent etc are way worse than whatever we grew up with.
At least I believe so. It is just a gut feeling though.
Like, it is poison due to the manipulative algorithmic feeds, or something. Like how Facebook turned into a genocide enabler in 2013 something when they added their crappy non chronological feed.
The format in it self is probably OK, as in, short amusing videos.
Parents have been complaining about books, tv, radio... If your an American of a certain age Tipper gore was complaining about music corrupting children....
Moving the goal posts all the time is a terrible means to form an argument.
When your kid is reading a book, watching TV, radio, playing a video game, etc you still have a -general- idea of what the kid is into. When it comes to something like TikTok, YouTube, etc they are one swipe away from literally anything. I don't think a kid 5-7 years of age can truly grasp it. I've been very online for a long time, but I don't think that really started until I was 15 or so. A 5-7 year old kid having access to certain thing is just awful parenting.
> "Explicit material is available in a variety of forums - from popular music to television to the Internet." Tipper Gore
The more things change the more they stay the same.
> A 5-7 year old kid having access to certain thing is just awful parenting.
Sure is, but what do you want a system where we have to license people before the can have kids? Because there have been quite a few dumb, irresponsible parents that have birth brilliance.
> The more things change the more they stay the same.
Comparing this to Tipper Gore is so ridiculous. It's as to write off potential concerns because she was against video games and rap music, then applying that logic to an algorithm that is specifically designed to draw you in and make you consume. Forums and Newsgroups were also much harder to find. Google didn't even exist at that point (or at the very least wasn't popularized); it took minutes to get a single "explicit" image to load. Not only that, but the idea of a "filter bubble" didn't exist, because generally speaking information was harder to find, but also more diverse once you found it. That isn't true once you're sucked into an algorithm. I said in another post, I think you could let a kid explore around the age of 13 on these platforms. It's still probably not healthy, but 5 years old? That's insanity, and for the numbers to be near 30% is outrageous.
>but what do you want a system where we have to license people before the can have kids?
Weird jump in logic here. I was never suggesting this. You can be concerned about something and not want such drastic measures. That is usually how adults operate. Teenager logic deals in absolutes like this.
And I'm sure all those parents bitching about video games and dungeons and dragons were patting themselves on the back over how they weren't as ridiculous as their parents thinking that the problem with the youth was rock and roll music and dancing which includes moving your hips. They finally had it figured out for real this time. Not like the hundreds of generations before panicking over basically nothing.
The question was, in all earnestness, do you really believe children reading books has the same detrimental effect on a child's development as social media and phones do?
Just because it is in xkcd doesn't make the argument valid, correct and smart.
A book doesn't give you access to the content produced by billions of people instantly, neither music, refined apps where people that earn more than six figures work daily to ensure you spend more and more time on them. Neither does a TV.
You realize that we went from mass illiteracy to over 50 percent in less than 200 years. From town criers to printed papers.
Candidly the current landscape is a drop in a long full bucket, printing press, papers, radio, film, television, music, the internet, video games all of these things were going to "destroy the children" and yet somehow we managed to survive.
You like all those before you a prognosticating our doom because the world is not the one you grew up in.
Even if you're aware of the mental health issues associated with social media use, you have the option of either giving up and losing your kid to the phenomenon, or giving them FOMO and complexes by depriving them of a phone.
The only positive trend I've seen is school districts banning smartphones. That could relieve some of the social pressure to hook your kid up with a smartphone so early in their life.