I know this isn’t directly related to the article, but for what it’s worth Luddites weren’t anti technology at all[0] in fact they were quite adept at using technology. It was a labor movement that fought for worker rights in the face of new technologies.
Another vote for the book linked in the article. It gets into the history of how machines were introduced into the textile industry in England. Wealthy mill owners forced child laborers to run the machines while simultaneously making the artisan workers unable to sustain themselves or their families by producing shoddy low quality items in bulk.
As always the problem wasn't necessarily the machines but that they were controlled by wealthy mill owners who reaped all the profits and left the rest of society to starve. England really was patient zero for the toxic economic system still being used in the US.
This is at best misdirection. So, let's say England then had robust labor rights. Perhaps there's no child labor and instead, the same workers now use the machines, except most of them are fired and get 6 months of severance. Heck let's make it even better and say new skilled workers are needed for the machines and so the salaries for the remaining minority of workers are doubled.
Do you think the fired workers wouldn't have attacked the machines? I think they totally would have.
The only labor regime where they wouldn't is where they are maintained in perpetuity even though their labor is useless. Something like Soviet Union with "guaranteed jobs", or NYC construction unions with 5x staffing on the same jobs vs even the European companies... all great examples to emulate for "labor movements"!
I wouldn't expect any better given the source, but this is complete nonsense... what is the logic here?
If per-worker productivity increases, there are 3 options:
1) output increases;
2) under pretty much any labor rights some workers are going to lose jobs;
3) some former workers have to be maintained for free.
Is this supposed "labor" movement advocating for (3)? Because they are clearly against (2), seeing how they destroy the machines, and they are not considering (1) seeing how they don't plan to just get jobs working on the machines and not trying to compete with machines/go to other industries.
If it's (3) it's at best a "now-useless labor" movement. It's like throwing a tantrum because back in the days your parents gave you some cash to clean your room but at present that no longer obtains.
They were like, "this technology is pretty cool and all, but not so much if it means I'm going to lose my source of income and starve homeless in the streets".
A specific kind of worker not realizing that something else driving productivity doesn’t mean they won’t be able to still contribute to society and be compensated?
I mean I get the point and all, but the idea that 'don't worry because the capitalist economy has your back and would never let anyone starve in the streets' doesn't hold up too well, especially at that time.
Maybe so, but 50 years, a hundred years from now, do you want to be doing the same things as today?
And if it's not us, it's going to the developing world that picks up that mantle anyways. In a few decades you might find yourself in the same situation as former colonial states. Blocking creative destruction has been cited as one of the major factors in why nations fail.
>Maybe so, but 50 years, a hundred years from now, do you want to be doing the same things as today?
First, I want to survive the next working years, without me and my family starving. I could not give less f... what they'd be doing 100 years from now, if that means being unemployable now...
Then, to answer your question, in many cases, sure, I want to be doing the same things as today. Even better if we regress in some areas, and we do the same things as 20, 30 or even 50 years ago. I could live in a society without smartphones for example (and without even more addictive and worse replacements)...
No, I want to be doing the same things I was doing 30 years ago, and I want the same opportunity for my children.
I think it just as likely that social media-induced social discohesion tanks the country as lack of innovation (particularly since a large proportion of innovation seems to be taking us further and further from a world where normal human interaction doesn't involve a screen).
Ignoring the reasons why this happens is just as bad as ignoring the consequences.
The need for security is just as much a force of nature as the need for innovation. Unless you provide a solution for both, the cycle will keep repeating.
This is a simple and straightforward problem of self-interest. It’s the difference between being able to use ChatGPT in your work and ChatGPT replacing your job and any kind of job you could “re-skill” into.
The problem was then and has always been capitalism: the owners own the tech. which means that The House (owners) always wins in the end as we approach more and more automation. Meanwhile we bicker about “doing the same thing [like some old-fashioned has-been]” and “losing the competition to the developing world” as if that is relevant to anything.
Personally, I won't likely be alive in 50 and definitely not in 100 years. I have to pay mortgage and buy groceries right now or I end up starving and homeless.
I can't really agree with the author's outlook on a completely tech free childhood. As with most things, you need to strike a balance.
I'm reminded of stories in China where parents do similar things for gaming, then once college starts the kids swing in excess to the opposite. Some even die of a heart attack. It's much better if kids find their own limits under a safe environment with parents than alone where there is no one to stop them when things go to far. Plus there's going to be a huge social cost in being excluded from group chats or socializing through common interests.
On the flipside, of course that dosen't mean letting kids go online virtually unsupervised all day, but it's the same issue of parents taking the simple, "easy" route of parenting rather than a more nuanced approach.
> Looking ahead, I believe children will thrive if we teach them the life skills that set them apart from machines. I do not buy the argument that kids need to be exposed to tech from a young age in order to be professionally successful. The technology they use is designed to be intuitive (we all learned to use it later in life), and it won’t be the same in a decade. What matters more is teaching them how to be human—how to have conversations, make eye contact, be attentive and alert, be thoughtful and considerate, feel their emotions keenly, be insatiably curious about the real world. Training for that takes years and starts from birth. There is no time to lose.
Okay but this doesn’t mean anything. It’s fine and meaningful if it just means interacting with each other instead of everyone staring at their own tablets or the same TV.
But sometimes people get this idea that if they just remove something civilizational, they’ll get back to being human. But that’s never how it works. Either the mere exposure to it has tainted you forever or it was never that simple to begin with.
The problem with moving to another country in order to get away from your problems (or whatever) is the constant of you. To simplify a lot: your own habitual thoughts. There’s no modern veneer which is obfuscating the real you. The real you is already there. And that takes more than a vipassana retreat/keto diet/tech diet to unravel.
Yes, but there are tons of cases that go either way, and sometime it is neither the thing or the individual, but the combination of the two which lead to undesired outcomes.
In this case, I think it is reasonable to believe that training certain skills in the absence of distractions and impediments makes sense.
Provided these skills really stick, will the kid be able to activate them when they'll be in an environment full of distractions and impediments ?
How well will they deal with SNS, work notifications, scams, dark patterns and addictive stuff thrown at them at every corner ?
This reminds me of Mean Girls, where a kid raised with lions is thrown into the college environment. Except we now have so many other layers of complications to also deal with.
I would think it is easier to learn self control with a more fully developed brain than the other way around.
It isn't a perfect analogy, but it is similar to we don't give unlimited junk food to children either, as it can be easier to learn moderation starting with healthy habits than the other way around.
I fully agree with you, in that moderation is important. More precisely, teaching how to approach the "junk" stuff is IMO necessary, and better done when parental advice is well received, instead of waiting for the latest possible time.
We teach kids to not moderate junk food intake at the earlier age, they get to taste it but also learn about it in a friendly environment.
Forbidding it until they're on their own and discover it the wildest way is a recipe for disaster, the same way discovering alcohol for the first time in college during wild parties is one of the worst experience we can imagine.
I really appreciate their approach to 'free range' children but most kids with cell phones are not doing it just because they asked for one. It's because mom & pop want their kid to be able to communicate their every movement and be tracked by a mapping app.
To really get a handle on this we need to figure out what is going on with helicopter parents, a phenomenon that predates cell phones by decades.
It is simple - whenever something happens to a child, parents are blamed super hard. Every single issue child has is parents fault.
Parents spend more time and effort actively parenting kids, much more then previous generations did. And in a put 99% of discussions, there is majority throwing scorn on parents in general. It is simple, parents are internalizing those lessons and do what out current society want from them.
Plus parents are not allowed good time or something for themselves. They have only duties. Note even motivations in this article - parents ts are compassionate toward kids or want easy way for themselves. It is plan to engineer more competitive kid.
What doesn't help is now so many people are even moreso on the stranger danger train than even a few years ago because of doomscrolling social media posts. Even if you aren't a helicopter parent, if you don't keep your kid attached to you, you risk a Karen calling CPS on you and getting a visit.
My only problem with this is the good content on the internet like good YouTube videos explaining to you how the world and things work.
If i could have a good filter which really can control my internet usage without giving away my privacy that would be awesome.
But no first of, everything goes through chrome and i do not trust random addons, i can also circumvent it too easily. Then even services like YouTube introduced there shorts. Do i watch them? Sometimes. Do i want to watch them? no
Can i deactivate them? no..
I will continue paying for YouTube premium! But pls give me a personal pseudo budget and not some ass weak timer i can just click away...
The platform itself wants to shove Shorts and other mindless consumption content down your throat, because their interests are different than yours, even opposite one could say. So your only options are to find tools that allow pushing back (or just abandon the platform, but that's very difficult precisely because they have taken care to extinguish any practical chance of alternatives to sprout over the years).
On a desktop with a decent browser you should be able to use uBlock Origin (not a random addon by any reasonable measure) and the user-contributed rules from here:
(remember this is a fight against interests of the provider vs those of their users, so expect it being a cat-and-mouse game of rules that stop working).
On handheld devices, any system that respects user authority to do as they please (i.e. not an iPhone) can install a patched version of the YouTube {revanced.}app, which ironically attends better to its users' needs, and allows disabling Shorts altogether. Again, it's a bit of an antagonist position, so breakages can happen (VERY rarely, though).
Shorts are terrible, they suck you in and 15 mindless videos later you can't even remember what you've seen. I almost only want to search for videos or check subscriptions, the main page with recommendations is full of traps...
I was talking to my friend about this the other day. How you can watch video shorts for an hour and come away with no new knowledge at all. Nothing sticks.
It's like shorts are a brain glitch where you can artificially quench your desire to do stuff with empty filler.
As someone else said - your best bet is to just download videos you deem to be good and put them on a plex server for your children. You can even automate it to automatically download from a given channel when new videos are posted to it. Of course at some point you will have to let them browse the wide internet on their own, just make sure they know the importance of opsec and never ever writing their real info online.
I have YT premium and was so fed up with shorts on my home feed. If you click on the three stacked dots next to the shorts section on the home tab, you can select “don’t shot this” or “not interested”; can’t remember what the option was. But I haven’t had to deal with shorts since :)
Sure you can, just click the "x" on the top right of the shorts row and they will be gone. Though, you might have to re-hide them every x days, but still if you don't want to watch them you really don't have to.
I spend more time offline. I started downloading lists of videos I find interesting and consume those offline. Not being recommended videos when I'm not looking for recommendations feels like it I have a lot more control.
Yes you can. When I turned off search and watch history the shorts interface was deactivated. It just had a notice saying that I need to enable the haptics to use the feature.
You're never going to find an automated filter which can perfectly strip the bad away from the good and present an even remotely "better" internet than the one we have today. Time-based filters do not work, because the user's ability to override them will always outweigh any enforcement power the system might have, and a "nudge" isn't enough for most people. Even devices like the Litephone, or setting your phone's display to black & white, doesn't work in the long run; its more performative than minimalist, color is kinda important, the problem really isn't the phone, or the tools, or the filters, or the services; its you.
Saying "I just need a good piece of software to control my addiction to software" sounds insane when phrased like that; "I just need another cig to control my addiction to nicotine".
Devices like the litephone, or the recent frontpage post about the Apple Watch iPod case, are kind of missing the point; if you're going out to buy another device to address your problem with using devices, what you're participating in is performance art, not self-improvement. Did you see that the litephone 3 costs $800?! The most digitally minimalist people I know use full-featured smartphones; sometimes rather old, but still fully capable. They just use them far, far less. No one is telling you to get rid of Youtube, but maybe a homepage smattered with ludwig and asmongold videos indicates you have a problem.
I formerly had a problem about 2 years ago where I spent entire days flipping between Youtube and Reddit outside of work, and not really accomplishing anything productive or bettering myself in any way. I started cutting back and filling that time with other things, programming, language learning, or hanging out with my friends.
I deleted Reddit entirely during the API fiasco, but I still watch YouTube since it's basically what I treat as my TV. However, I have a caveat that I keep myself productive until it's dark outside aside from the occasional 10 minute mental break, and during meals. Once it's about 10pm, then I'll relax.
I don't let any kind of entertainment or news app send my phone notifications. I interact with them exclusively on my own terms.
With how algorthmic content feed is, you've got to be willing to set boundaries for your tech and yourself. Find things you like to do, and replace social media time with that. There's an entire world of information at your fingertips to learn absolutely anything you could ever want to, take advantage of it.
My problem are youtube videos which talk about science, diy, woodworking, metal working, history, math etc.
I'm not addicted to software, i'm addicted to entertainmened optimized for grabbing my attention.
And the comparision to cigs is not far away. They have also been designed to be addictive, a lot of people struggle for their whole live to get away from them.
My planning brain can easily see what i don't want to do or have, my doing brain is not strong enough to then just execute on this. Otherwise i would be a rich, supersporty, multilingual expert in multiply fields.
Make a shell script that runs yt-dlp for the channels that have worthwhile information. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that videos which "talk about" math and science are educational, when they are in fact entertainment. e.g. [0] is education. [1] is education. [2] is entertainment.
One downside of having an unusual childhood -- even if it is by most metrics a good childhood -- is that it might make it much harder for the kids to relate to other kids as they get older.
> “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one.
It's easy for parents to completely misjudge how the child will be affected by being the only one in their class who has to live by different rules. In some ways, this feels more like a sociological experiment the parent is interested in doing, when really, the parent should be setting up the children for success in adulthood.
> For instance, my son cannot participate in any classroom activity that involves a QR code, a fact I’ve had to point out to his teachers. Sometimes it’s hard for my kids to find information about group projects or extracurricular activities when social media is used to communicate with students, as opposed to updating a website or sending an email.
The older you get the wider the range of people you're able/expected to relate to. When you're young, a 1 or 2 year age difference is a big deal. By the time you're middle age, a decade difference makes little difference.
Basically, what you're talking about isn't a long term problem.
If the kids turn out alright then of course it won't be a problem. But that's question-begging. My argument is that parental dogmatism is dangerous. When you set out like "we're right about technology and all other parents are wrong" it's very hard to change your mind later when evidence to the contrary accumulates.
Maybe 2 of out 3 kids will have a happy "digitally minimalist" childhood and the 3rd one will be absolutely miserable. Could easily happen. Kids have their own personalities after all. How will these parents respond? My bet is the unhappy child will get blamed for being unhappy and the happy siblings will be used as proof that the parents are right.
If you don't learn how to build and keep those relationships in childhood and your teenage years, you will have hard time to relate later. Also, there is huge difference between 11 years old and 13 years old. There is no meaningful difference between 40 years old and 45 years old. And as your circle shrink to primary colleagues of the same profession, you end up living in much bigger bubble then kids do.
Lack of social engagement in childhood damages those skills forever. You may learn to get along and answer politely, but learn ing to belong, to know when and how ask for what is your right and when and how step back is massively harder in adulthood.
My son is starting to get the comments. “You don’t play Minecraft?!” is the chorus of park chatter.
But the thing is, we’ve replaced the time he would spend on the iPad with social activities. Minecraft becomes nights at the playground. Amongus becomes fishing at the pier.
And as you would suspect, he has no social problems. He’s constantly socializing. You don’t get good at talking to people by turning your personality into just the right shade of beige or by getting the true neutral human experience. You get good by practice.
You can do both. My nephew is an absolute extrovert and socialises non-stop at school and afternoons in the park, but he looks forward to his 30 minutes to an hour on the PlayStation to decompress.
I'm not a parent so don't have much of a saying on how to educate kids. But I wholeheartedly agree on pushing back against wrong usages of technologies.
My bar for "wrong" is using a private, foreign, unofficial platform like a social network to communicate official stuff. Schools should have or buy access to a custom platform that is concerned only with teacher-student communications, and not with harvesting everybody's personal information.
Some people consider that Instagram is a fine way to convey group projects or activities. But that's because they already got used to using it. How about TikTok then? let's move to a school that requires children to use TikTok or Snapchat because that's where they decided to publish their info! Sounds ridiculous to me, well, because it is. Same for requiring other networks.
My kid went through a phase in Middle School where she believed that in order to fit in she had to make sure her grades were not "too good". So she sabotaged herself for a few months. Once we got wind of what was going on there was family uproar for too long, but eventually we got through to her.
So thenceforth she stuck out and was hard to relate to I suppose all the way through high school. No, our family wasn't a crammer family, and she didn't seem too psychologically damaged then or now, working on a food science PhD (why? asks her overly practical father) at UCD.
Fitting in to the giant mode of the mediocre self damaging but socially favored crowd has costs too.
I didn't have a dumb phone when everyone else did, and when I finally did get one (I think senior year of high school) I didn't have texting. It never really caused me issues.
In adulthood, the only thing I really need the phone for is Duo, and my work offers to provide yubikeys as an alternative. I've just been too lazy to get one. It's also nice to have a crappy camera on hand when I don't have the real camera with me. That's about it.
"Come on" seems like a crazy reaction to me to schools making it mandatory to use services that spy on kids and show them ads. That's actually a huge motivator for me to want to home school my kids. It is completely unacceptable to require kids be exposed to that. It's unacceptable to allow them to be exposed to that while they're in the school's care.
It's a natural reaction, but I believe a losing battle to try to shelter your kids from these things. If you're going to home school you can displace some of it, or delay it long enough that they hopefuly build up some personal resilience, but ultimately this is the world they will venture into.
I don't use Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/any of that (I do still have an old Facebook account), so I can't relate to the idea that they're somehow just part of the life now. They seem completely irrelevant to me as an adult.
When I have checked my Facebook on occasion, it appears to be a ghost town with maybe ~3 people I know that use it. Or maybe Facebook simply does a poor job now of showing you your friends' posts so it only appears to be abandoned at a glance. Hard to tell without putting in a bunch of work to go mine my friends' profiles.
In any case, school business just like any government business should not require agreeing to a company's ToS. Especially not one in the spying/advertising business.
Ideologically I agree about the absurdity of school-mandated spy- and crapware. However, my fierce hatred of advertisements and trackers is merely a personality quirk. A quirk that, although mainstream on this forum, is shared only by a tiny percentage of the population. Should a parent force their eccentricities on a child? Preferably not. Children, once they reach a certain age, are their own people with their own preferences and aspirations. For many people (that includes adults) staying in touch with others through facebook or other social media is what they desire more than anything else. Isolating people like that from their friends and peers is cruel.
I don't find it to be a personality quirk any more than I find healthy eating and regular exercise to be a personality quirk. The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house. Part of my job is to guide my kids toward making wise choices and avoiding obviously poor ones, even if 80% of the population does it. I don't think that requires social isolation; I think that requires placing them in situations where the other 20% are wildly over-represented as peers.
I hope you'll take the time to teach your children to think independently, and when you do you'll discover that as they grow a bit older they'll have different values and draw different conclusions on issues you care about. I think it's fine to be a contrarian and opinionated parent but if you demand that your children share all (or even the majority) of your contrarian beliefs you're doing them a great disservice and you set them up for failure down the line.
The entire point of not accepting surveillance and advertising is to help them develop to be independent, have a strong internal sense of self-worth, and derive happiness from within. The surveillance/ad industry has exactly the opposite goal: make them feel judged at all times, base their self-worth on the perceived opinion of others (including people they've never even met), and have that perceived opinion be that if they buy X they will reacquire their stolen happiness.
The beautiful thing about being a contrarian is you can only win: either they agree with you, so you must've gotten through to them, or they don't, so you must've gotten through to them.
It is funny, because over focus on healthy eating and exercise can be a quirk ... or grow entirely into full on eating disorder. And that one is rather massive fck up.
> The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house.
And then the nutritionist and psychologist will beat into you that there is no such thing as junk food, it is just a food, and drinking coke wont harm you or your kid.
Such a nutritionist or psychologist would be an incompetent fool, of course. Sugary beverages are horrible for you, and are associated with a variety of poor health outcomes (obviously T2D and tooth decay, but also e.g. heart disease and liver disease). If a nutritionist can't identify that a can of literal sugar water is a worse calorie source than e.g. a potato in pretty much all scenarios (perhaps except during the act of running an ultra-marathon), then I can't imagine what use consulting them could possibly have.
You don't have to give a kid an eating disorder to explain that candy for breakfast isn't acceptable, and we don't drink dissolved sugar (except perhaps as an extremely rare treat, like cake). Just set an example of a normal life where we don't do those things. Let them see the results speak for themselves as they observe society, and let them eventually ponder if everyone is wrong about something so obvious, how good could society (including, apparently, credentialed 'experts') possibly be at other judgements it makes?
No, that is standard today. With rising eating disorders, the fear based nutrition advice that simply does not even say the truth is avoided.
A can of coke won't harm you in the slightest.
Especially for teenagers, they would had to eat super massive amount of potatoes, so actually getting calories only from that would be spectacularly bad idea.
Currently nutritionists work really hard to undo damage the sort of things you are saying are causing.
So the standard today is incompetence. An excellent lesson to learn early.
A can of Coke will not harm you in any meaningful way, but people do not have a can of Coke. They have 1+ cans of Coke every day. That absolutely will harm you.
I don't know how you took me to suggest someone eat only potatoes. I said a potato (anything, really) is a better source of calories than a Coke for pretty much all purposes. Pretty much no person anywhere needs an extra 39 g sugar with no nutrients at all in their diet.
Currently, 74% of the US is overweight or obese by BMI, which is likely an under-estimate of excess bodyfat: another 10% or so may have Normal Weight Obesity (i.e. skinnyfat), which is an understudied but increasingly recognized problem. Even without the issue of excess bodyfat, regularly creating large blood sugar spikes like that is not good for you. If nutritionists are working really hard to combat the idea that drinking literal sugar water is inappropriate for anyone to be doing with any regularity, then they are dropping the ball. In fact, you can find plenty of resources for the general public from the CDC about the deleterious effects of sugary beverages[0], and encouragement to reduce consumption of added sugars[1], specifically sugary beverages[2], the leading source of excess sugar in American diets.
Saying that candy is not food is not fear based nutrition. It is saying that candy is not food. We're not "afraid" of sugar or carbs; we just know "Skittles" aren't a food group, and have no purpose in any meal plan. Part of teaching kids how to be healthy is teaching them that we eat a variety of foods which each contribute different necessary nutrients with an appropriate calorie budget for our activity levels so that they understand how to one day develop their own plans. In that context, it ought to be obvious why our diet doesn't include pure sugar.
The competent thing to do is to teach people not to have emotional attachments to food. "This is not good for me (in fact injures me) and serves me no purpose, so I will not eat/drink it, and I will not buy it." That's it. The disorder is getting emotional about it and thinking it's somehow "damaging" to exclude junk food from one's diet.
I did not had it and buying one made massive difference. It made me reachable which made it possible for friends ... to reach me. It turned situation from "I am only listening about half stuff they do because even if they try to reach me they cant" to "I am not actual full member of the group".
Do you have children? One of the things I didn’t appreciate before becoming a parent is just how little my child actually knows about the world around him. There are so many situations where it’s actually neglectful parenting to just let him do what he wants. A really visceral example is that he likes chewing on things he finds around him. As you can imagine there are tons of things he can chew on that will make him really sick, and I can’t always remove him from public places to avoid those things, so I have to prevent him from putting his mouth on those things. How can you be so sure that using smartphones isn’t one of that class of harmful behaviors that a parent is neglectful for not preventing? As another example, teenagers are also wired by hormones to want to become sexually active. But this isn’t always in their best interest.
As a parent you have to make decisions with your child’s best interests at heart even when you know they conflict with the child’s desires. Doing this is not narcissistic it’s just good parenting.
This isn't about toddlers and nobody here has argued that the parent who parents least parents best.
The list of things that are conceivably harmful to a child or teenager is practically infinite. It includes almost all sports, most hobbies, travel, and most food and drink. If you're going to ban everything that might be harmful of out an abundance of caution you will do tremendous harm to your kid. Yes, a smartphone might harm your kid but so might the absence of a smartphone. That's why it's good to look at the actions of other dedicated and thoughtful parents. If they all decide to give their kid a smartphone despite the known downsides it's not neglect, but the result of a thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons. Demanding that a smartphone must be proven safe (impossible) is an absurd standard of evidence you don't apply to other areas of your life.
Having theories about how the world works isn’t narcissistic.
Suspecting drinking from lead pipes was bad would make you look crazy to your contemporaries fifty years ago. Avoiding them would require huge amounts of behavioral change and investigation. But with perfect information very few parents would consciously choose to let their children damage their brains.
When it’s technology, and we’re starting to see the indicators, why is it different?
Or asbestos or lead based paint. Social media is the asbestos tile of the early 21st century. Widespread, beloved by all who use it, and insidiously dangerous.
Allowing your kids in-pocket access to adversarial forms of entertainment, each competing to maximize time on platform, seems like a riskier bet to me. The experiment is forced. We’re all a part of this brave new world.
Most people against device use that I’ve talked to have a distinction between consumption and creation. Writing a blog is a creative activity. Consuming TikTok is not, even if you are a “creator” on the platform. Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
Thankfully learning how to use these tools is easy. It’s made to be. There are teams of people focused on making it as easy to use as possible.
Much like you don’t need to have any experience with computers to become a programmer, you don’t need experience with TikTok to swipe or messenger to text.
But avoiding making these behaviors entrenched from a young age is important. I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes, so does having a phone, social media, etc.
So far the data seems to pan out. Time will tell. But at this point there’s mainly intuition and critical thought. Mine has led me here and yours has led you somewhere else.
I’m not going to judge you for it. I just don’t agree with you.
> I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes
That's a good analogy. In my experience, most alcoholics/gamblers/dangerous substance abusers never had parents which taught them how to deal with a given addiction - they just brush off the subject strictly forbidding their kids to do any of them.
That world does still exist though: just don't engage with those platforms. If everyone were on heroin all the time, it doesn't mean you can't exist in the world without doing heroin yourself. You can just... not do it.
My 3 year old daughter picks up my guitar and strums it and makes up a song about not wanting to do bed time. She doesn't need exposure to consumer culture to create; it's innate. In fact she's already got some Wesley Willis vibes going without ever having heard him.
She goes to parks, library story hour, gymnastics, soccer, and pre-school/playgroup. None of it involves Meta/X/TikTok/Google, and all of them have other kids. People still do things in the real world. I see older kids in some of those places too. I suspect that doing things has a natural tendency to select yourself into a social group that does things. Want to not be part of crowd that sits in a room shooting up? Go outside and you'll find your like-minded group.
Obviously she's not going to go through life having never heard any music, but I don't think you'd really need to hear someone else to be able to walk up to a piano, press some keys (perhaps even simultaneously), and think "hey, that sounds nice". It's pretty easy to discover a bunch of chords by accident. Rhythm is even easier to make up your own thing. Whether no one has ever heard it is irrelevant to whether you need to have heard someone else to make it up.
She doesn't need to make an album for you. She can create for her and for us. You and the people in your life can create for you. That's kind of the point of not buying into consumer culture.
Okay, but modern "social" media is designed to do nothing but funnel you into mass consumption, both on that platform and in the sense of pushing products on you to buy (their actual goal). They are not centered around enabling you to share with your friends, family, and community. They're an entirely vacuous experience, and you don't need them (indeed, you'd probably benefit from not interacting with them) to be creative or social.
> But great tools don’t automatically make great toys, and I want my kids to learn the difference.
Quote of the century. I couldn't agree more.
As someone who makes a living from tech, I want it less and less in my life in my spare time. That doesn't mean it's not important, useful and gives us boundless opportunities.
> By the end of it, I hope my sons have a rich repository of childhood memories that will someday make them smile, laugh, and possibly even cringe.
Playing video games on the TV during the afternoons in our summer holidays are some of my favourite memories. As an introvert and nerd, it gave me time to decompress and practice some skills, while it gave my parents some time to nap and have kid-free time after a morning of playing on the beach in the sun.
Video games were also one of the things I could bond over and practice some comptetition with my dad and much-older sibling.
It doesn’t. Facebook and Instagram are such a tiny part of everyone’s life. I don’t use any of those sites, and a brief stint on Nextdoor recently reminded me that they contribute nothing but anxiety and comparison to my life. I’ve never needed an Instagram account to get a job or find an apartment or my significant other. The lure of those sites is that they make you think they’re revealing the whole world to you when they’re barely scratching the surface like a magazine. There’s a whole world of people and places out there that aren’t on social media because they have better things to do with their lives.
It goes much further - social media is the new bread for the poor, rich folks travel, do expensive dining and adventuring and similar. Sure, its highly addictive due to short dopamine hits so even rich are not immune to it, but most rich / upper middle class I ever saw are smart enough and well off enough to stay the hell away from it.
Also, article makes it like that's almost an unique behavior, while where we live (Switzerland), its more like default of good parenting, definitely a majority of our peers do it similarly.
Doctors went through cancelling their FB accounts, we know number around us (wife is a doctor so I mean tens of various doctors mostly with smaller kids). Instagram was never a thing for them, neither for us. Raising their kids without digital screens either altogether or in a minimal fashion, till teenage years. It gets harder for parents, but anybody can see how much additional quality this brings into parenting.
But this goes with the example parents set - if they are half-present and glued to screens themselves, don't expect miracles from those poor kids which imitate everything they see, and are very vulnerable to addictive behavioral patterns. When I compare such parenting with allowing screens almost infinitely due to laziness/exhaustion of parents, its heartbreaking how kids often end up later in life.
I am a parent, youngest now 13. Could I do it all again, would absolutely have this approach.
Note she’s not anti-tech but pro childhood & the time & space & innocence you need to develop yourself.
The device access my kiddos had was not an enrichment. I see that now. I like her compromise of tech in the common area but no individual social accounts until 18.
Everyone I know in the neighbourhood is reading or read the "The Anxious Generation". It looks like the tide is turning and there is very strong anti-tech sentiment everywhere.
And now that we have smartwatches with GPS/LTE connectivity, kids don't need cellphones to be in touch with their parents.
Is it actually an anti-tech sentiment, or are people recognizing that we have tended to incorporate tech into our lives in an unhealthy way and they are trying to rebalance things?
Yes, I can see some signs of that as well. Lots of street library bookcases with free books and 2 new actual bookstores popped up in my neighborhood. Yesterday I went to one and it was a great experience and couldn't resist buying an absolutely beautiful book on lichens [1] and a book for my kid. Reading this book feels different than reading an efemeral digital copy. I think we were to quick to dismiss paper books.
Well... Some have said that I'm a modern Luddite because I do not use a macrobug aka smartphone except for Google Maps navigation, very limited on the go phone usage, very rare personal feeds (tt-RSS on my home server). Actually I'm an architect (sysadmin who design and implement infra, I do not choose the title anyway) and I've built a new home, all electric with p.v. and integrated as much as possible anything via Home Assistant but for some being desktop-centric means being Luddite.
I tend to say that some are Luddite because even if they perfectly can they refuse to operate autonomously from their desktops, they choose not to care their digital life, they choose to stick with deprecated solutions, who cost them more money and trouble than choosing the current tech.
Long story short: I think we should describe a bit more the meaning of Luddite, because as a mere tag seems to be a bit too much versatile...
I wish we had better agreement on a society on the terminology we use to describe types of technology.
Even among HN readers on this thread, there seems to be a lot of conflating "technology" with the spyware and attention kidnapping products of surveillance capitalism.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s with plenty of technology for the era; sure, we had a lot less of it than the rich kids did, but that was mostly just jealousy that my friends could play "better" games than I could. Technology was a thing you used when you sat down and intended to use it. It wasn't a thing that told you that you were missing out every second you weren't using it, and it wasn't a thing that gatekept access to conversations with people you knew or even basic commercial needs like transportation or food delivery.
The problem isn't tech, it's carrying around dozens of corporations in your pocket.
The author talks about all the benefits of a "screen free" childhood and I remember my own fondly (although as an older millennial it was rapidly interrupted as technology spread). What I always wonder though, is if this kind of upbringing is so positive for kids, why are so many boomers so self-centered and spiteful? Surely, they should be happy, beautiful and kind?
I think its a very complex topic - what sort of average societal behavior then leads to some dominant trait X in given part of population. Its definitely not online vs park reduction.
Older generations experienced often very little emotional intelligence, men were told from very early age to man-up, men don't cry, you don't discuss your feelings because that would be / make you gay. Women were raised from small girls to be obedient wives and mothers and not strive for much else in lives, just shut up and listen.
I can see this massive EQ (or whatever is more appropriate term) difference myself, even me vs my dad, if you know what to look for its in plain sight and its massive. Now some folks from current generation didn't 'escape' this and are still like that, pushing this to their own kids, I somehow did and further I went away the clearer the picture was. I don't blame previous generation, this is how literally everybody functioned and how they were raised. But overall they had more freedom to play and also way more restriction and punishment.
Lets see how today's young will fare in retirement, I don't think it will be a nice picture, definitely not for new generation of young.
Boomers aren't any more self-centered and spiteful than any other generation, it seems to me. As to the younger generations, we don't know what they'll be like when they reach the age boomers are now.
Thus was Ned Ludd finally laid to rest, his name taken up by helicopter parents who chose to battle against screen time instead of autism-inducing vaccines or power lines.
Saying "tech is bad" or "screens are bad" sound very narrow-minded to me. Sure, there are issues in this "Tech-Saturated World" but I don't think avoiding Tech as much as possible is the answer.
I prefer a digital balance over digital minimalism.
I don't think that's what the author is saying. I think they're saying that over-use of tech from a very young age is damaging in later life and that the data from Gen Z is beginning to paint that picture.
she does not say "tech is bad" or "screens are bad"
> I’m not anti-tech. My entire career as a writer and editor has been enabled by the Internet, and I wouldn’t want to go back to a time without it. But great tools don’t automatically make great toys, and I want my kids to learn the difference.
[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...