Harmful effects of social media notwithstanding, it's not just about the phones.
Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours. We look at screens so that we don't have to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions.
Sure, without a phone that person had no other choice but to face whatever they've been avoiding. But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.
A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything. The right thing to do is help them get there, not play whack-a-mole with their coping mechanisms.
> But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.
A thinly veiled pro-social media post. The quote highlighted alone is very dangerous. It's almost as if people have developed a form of Stockholm syndrome to appeal to social media addictions vs the boogie man that is a "different source of distraction".
Very true. My childhood friend and I were major computer nerds from 1991 to 2002. Then I left for college and he didn't somehow. We had such matched similar personalities for those 10 years.
By 2008 when I saw him he had totally fallen off from computers and couldn't care less.
I'm engrossed in tech still and I do waste wayyy to much time on HN, blogs, reading, YouTube, Twitter and the like. No doubt I have a problem..
My friend though died last year of heroin/fentanyl overdose. He had been struggling with it for 5+ years. Same as I have with modern phones. I wish he had gotten addicted to YouTube shorts instead.
Yea, verily. Nerddom is the best path. The true tao.
Divorce, drug addiction? Sorry; addicted to code, I no longer have time for relationships nor the ability to relate to normal people nor the brain cells to spare.
COVID lockdowns? Ha; I've been living under lockdown for the last ten years; it's my optimal lifestyle.
YouTube requiring brain scans with which to inject targeted ads directly into your videos? Too bad; I've already downloaded the Warcraft 3 and StarCraft playthroughs I watch over and over locally.
Microsoft integrating an AI into Windows which will predict the exact moment you're about to be racist and brick your machine? Nice try; I've already moved to Linux years ago.
A phone, a book, a movie, a show, hobbies, exercise… they’re all going to be parts of “avoidance behavior”.
Often though, some issues in life are not resolvable through some simple analysis and avoiding thinking about the issue might really be the best course of action.
Harmful effects of social media notwithstanding, it's not just about the phones. Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours
avoid what exactly?
that needs to be qualified. do they avoid talking to their friends in school? do they avoid facing the fact that they have no friends?
or are they using it because their friends are doing it as well? what are they avoiding then?
and and let's not brush aside those harmful effects. some kids may use the phone to avoid facing things that feel worse, but as others mentioned, so do people using drugs or alcohol. the problem is that the harmful effects of the phone/social media are much much less obvious, so many more kids are at risk. drugs and alcohol are so much easier to avoid.
Do you have any suggestions on how to help people achieve and maintain good mental health?
It's true that addiction is ultimately a psychological problem. It's true that people engage in addictive behaviors as a coping mechanism to avoid difficult emotions.
It's also true that the Internet has enabled a lot of deliberately addictive content. Phones keep that content constantly at hand. And it's difficult to avoid having a phone since they also provide utilities.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone had such great mental wellness that they were impervious to the temptations of their phones. What are some serious tactics to make that happen?
At the risk of it coming across like I’m boasting or virtue signalling (whatever that means), what keeps me going is the thought that I can use my time and money to help other people. Simple stuff like donating to charities and planting trees.
For parents, this could take the form of doubling a child’s pocket money/allowance on the condition that half of it is donated to charities - encourage the child to research charities and talk about them.
(The latter isn’t an original idea - I originally read about it in the form of tripling the pocket money with 1/3 to keep, 1/3 for charity, and 1/3 to invest. If your kid has to do some chores to get their pocket money, then this sets them up with a pattern for a good life (work, then give and save).
> A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything.
True. People doing well mentally should start heroin and meth right now since they have no need to avoid anything. Why should they miss out on that experience since they can just quit.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone disagree with the premise that phone and social media addiction is bad for kids (and probably adults too), and yet we still find ourselves in this position.
What are we to do? Banning phone use on an individual basis is a recipe for social suicide. Some kind of collective action is needed.
Legislation against phone use for minors is one option, but I wouldn’t expect it to receive widespread support. Banning social media for minors might be workable, but it wouldn’t fully resolve the issue.
Social media is both a tool and entertainment. It's not entertainment that's wrecking kids. It's being in a global and immutable social circle.
In the 90s, if you were a nerd in high-school, you get a chance to re-invent yourself in college, and another at your first job. Heck, you can re-invent yourself between different groups of friends. Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.
Tons of kids grew up glued to their Nintendos. I played an _insane_ amount of Starcraft. Our generation did not have the same negative effects that the current generation is having with social media.
What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.
Nerd dad here. This is hard. You can lead a horse to water but can't make them drink. Meta Quest is the only tech that's being used as a tool in my house. Everything else are used as toys. I've even tried to restrict games heavily and it still was tough. Basically, some kids will not seek out education things even if they are installed. This was not my upbringing. I would eventually bore of games and looked for educational things like Dangerous Creatures, Microsoft Bob, Encarta, etc. But I am not seeing the same in my kids.
I think in order for parents to do this, they must themselves use their phones as tools and not entertainment.
Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if parents are seen zombie-scrolling through Instagram for hours, and then they tell their kids not to zombie-scroll because it's bad for you, well the kids will know their parents are totally full of shit.
It's impossible for parents who are themselves addicted to smartphones to tell their kids not to be addicted to smartphones. The parents need to cure their own addiction first.
Fussellian middle class in a suburban school: will call your kid poor and bully them if they don’t have a recent phone by 6th grade (often much earlier)
Fussellian upper-middle in expensive private school: may not have a phone themselves until high school (handy for keeping in touch when at college-application-building extra curriculars), won’t make fun of kids whose parents don’t give them phone.
Like the other commenter in this thread who says "... not social suicide ..." I would suggest just implementing the rules yourself regardless of what society is doing. The trend (as you can imagine) is definitely still going younger and younger. And unless you have the funds to fight off the marketing teams of Google and Apple, I imagine that will continue.
My kids are fine. Even with their parents fighting tooth and nail to keep them off devices as much as possible, they will still be on them sometimes (in your home or out of it). Maybe my kids are just weird to not be craving social media - just being able to send text messages to her friends seems to be enough for my 14 year old currently. Is that the same thing? My observations say "definitely not".
They complain about it sometimes, (and I complain about their usage sometimes) but nobody is really angry and everybody is really reasonable. Your mileage may vary.
My social life suffered greatly being one of the only kids in my highschool without a cellphone. This was the early 2010s in the United States.
Imagine being a teenager and trying to include someone lacking a cellphone to your social group. It adds a huge amount of friction.
Including someone without a cellphone means you give up the ability to be spontaneous (assuming the kid needs to adhere to an agreed-upon schedule to be picked up by a parent), and trivial things become a literal telephone-game ordeal.
It also means almost invariably that the kid is relying on a friend's phone to communicate parents / a ride, unless that kid is so privileged as to own their own car.
Could you imagine if every time you hung out with a friend, they asked to borrow your phone, open Facebook Messenger (or whatever sensitive messaging app you use), and to contact a parent?
It also means the kid isn't included in group chats, which means they just aren't part of conversations other kids are having. You can't have a rich social life with someone you can only talk to in classes you share and for 20 minutes during lunch break.
The "green bubble" phenomenon is bad enough as it is. I don't like it, but for all practical reasons, owning a cellphone is necessary for a kids social life in the United States.
'social suicide' is a vague term but my daughter has been spending a fair amount of this summer break texting groups of friends and/or playing online multi-player games with friends. Nothing good would come of my taking away her phone.
I would spend long hours talking to my friends on the landline growing up. These helped form deep relationships that were pretty much (atleast for me) impossible to make in the limited amount of time you met them at school. I presume something similar happens around cellphones where you miss out on a lot of discussions and have no context for a lot of the conversations that happen the next day. They really need to be collectively banned, it’s not possible to solve this at an individual level.
That is nonsense, I was at school with mobile phones before the iPhone (before touchscreens, non-Java-applet apps, 3G, etc.) and it absolutely would've been even then. I mean maybe you'd have gotten away with it being active on MSN, but it'd have been a problem for sure (you arrange to meet someone and then just go there and hope they show up at the right time and don't want to change plans?) and I think far more so today without even considering social media like Instagram & TikTok & whatever that 'everyone' is using.
(They weren't allowed actually at school though, weren't even supposed to be in your locker, so I always think it's a bit weird when it occasionally pops up debate about banning them from schools or that X school has banned them - curious when and why they allowed them, or maybe they were just always allowed to begin with?)
It's practically considered child abuse these days to not give them a smartphone. I'm only slightly exaggerating. I think kids would be better off without them altogether.
I'm not so sure. I see my 10-year-old daughter use her iPad and its very constructive, she's on screen sharing/video with her friends quite a lot, its healthy socialization. I imagine it becomes a problem when the child can't regulate their usage. But that's where we can use screentime and parental controls.
> ... it becomes a problem when the child can't regulate their usage.
That's now every child. Also, that was very much an intentionally designed effect -- it's no secret. Let that sink in.
Your 10 year old is up against multi billion dollar companies who control the very tools you want to use to curb her addiction? (No, she is... We all are.)
Doing math on Matific is great (or similar activities). It's the exposure to Social Media that is the cesspool of the internet, where the kids are open to receive messages from anyone and everyone, and have the algorithm showing them every garbage under the sun.
People forget that the purpose of Social Media is to spend more and more time. "User Engagement" is the key.
Yes, I really wish the law made it so that anyone under at least 16 (but ideally 18) is banned from using a smartphone. There’s no reason parents should have to be the “bad guy” in millions of homes across the US, we should just be able to say it’s against the law.
The parents that actually care need to get together and decide collectively on timeframes for phone use so the kids can text/social with time limits. Then enforce it with on-device parental controls.
Maybe 45 minutes before school each morning and 1 hour the evening or something.
Consider what those who aren't glued to the phone are actually missing out on. More than ever, kids are choosing not to go out and spend time with friends, instead doomscrolling, binge-watch tv and chat on instagram or whatever. That's not a bristling social life, but it does behave as a surrogate for one.
When kids hang outside of school, as was always the case, they usually live nearby. Notwithstanding that dumbphones and managed social media use are options, unless you think teens are all monsters (which would not be solved by phones anyway), it's not a lord of the flies situation of shunning people without phones.
I think there's a culture of inactive shut ins and we're acting like this should be cause for FOMO. I expect kids would be happier if they actually physically see some friends more regularly anyway.
If we're to pass any sort of legislation, it shouldn't be against the kids, they're the victims of exploitation by greedy monopoly/oligopoly algorithms, we should legislate against companies like Meta, Snapchat, etc. the TikTok ban unless they sold off to an American firm that could be subject to US legislation was actually not the worst idea in the world (albeit I highly doubt the current Congress would've actually done anything constructive after the theoretical sale)
I asked this question in a thread a few days ago and got downvoted. I’d probably have better luck preaching sobriety in a bar ha but I really think society needs to wake up to the toxicity of technology much like we did cigarettes.
> I really think society needs to wake up to the toxicity of technology much like we did cigarettes.
That's why I'm pretty wary of some other comments along the lines of "you just need to teach your children to think of phones as tools and regulate their screen time". I feel that's like telling kids "You just need to keep it to 3 or 4 cigarettes a day."
Sure, some kids may do OK with this (I happen to think they're really in the minority), but social media is fundamentally designed to addict people. That is literally the goal of social media companies. So I'm just a bit dubious that kids, especially young kids e.g. in middle school, have the ability to regulate that.
If all the kids in the peer group have no cell phones, solving the mental health crisis would be easy. As long as some kids have access, the others will feel like they are being deprived of something fundamental, will resent their parents and will look for any opportunity to get on social media.
A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.
Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.
It's not just that. Some kids live in unsafe or car-centric areas, with parents who are uncaring or unable to take them to places where they can socialize in-person. Every kid goes to school, but maybe the kids at school bully them, or maybe the school is too focused on coursework and doesn't dedicate enough time for socialization, or maybe the kid is home-schooled. Especially if a ban were enacted today, some kids spent most of their life on social media, so they might have trouble adapting and socializing in-person.
Personally, I think the most likely and best solution is better social media. Currently, social media is regulated to shield kids from explicit content and predators, but it should also be regulated to shield them from negativity and mindless engagement, and to promote positivity and healthy behaviors (including not spending too much time on it). Recommendation algorithms for kids should be strictly controlled by the government; keep in mind that the government already strictly controls what kids learn in school, and it doesn't have to outright ban "non-explicit harmful" content, just down-weight it enough that kids don't find it without intentionally looking. Plus, a social media with healthier recommendations and discourse may become popular for adults as well, even though they wouldn't be locked into this version like minors (I can imagine a system that requires consent like adult ID but then lets adults stay anonymous, which could be bypassed by dedicated minors, but most wouldn't care enough to do so).
I don't know from where came this idea that not having a certain thing will inevitably ruin child's relationship with the parent and cause a collapse of at least some part of their life, but if it was implanted - someone somewhere should have a pure gold Marketer of The Century award on their table.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
You can use Newpipe (it's open source), and there you may simply subscribe to the channels you want the kid to watch and they'll only watch those channels. There's nothing as home screen there but the kid can still search for a video using a query so it might just be the solution you are looking for.
Well, I didn't read the whole article, but I can confirm that I like my daughter (14) better once her allocated phone time is up each day. She only just got the phone 6 months ago, and we limit screen time pretty severely with Google Family Link, so we think we're doing ok. We have discussed trimming the screen time down even more, since school finished up. Also, she's not doing any social media at all. Still, kids are more fun when they aren't staring at a screen (in my opinion and possibly contrary to what many believe).
I think this is obvious to any parent, right? Too much screen time bad. I know it's bad for me as well, though my current bias is heavily against technology in general - I will admit that.
Youtube has been a problem and we have had many discussions about what's worth her time and what definitely isn't. We limit the app specifically to 1 hr. per day, and just kinda keep tabs on what she's watching and talk to her about it.
Putting faith in any app to curate or restrict content in Youtube and the like; for this one I think doing the human thing of talking to her regularly and even making it clear that we will be checking out what she's doing is preferable.
There should be a way of limiting your kids' YouTube viewing to only certain channels, so they can watch Kurzgesagt and music instruction videos (for instance), but not all the other crap. Perhaps a third-party app could offer this feature for parents.
So I was one of the first generation to have access to instant messaging when I was less than 11. (I'm pushing 40)
I am despite what the media says, a digital native.
that being said, I don't think kids should be on social media. By that I mean instagram/tiktok/snapchat
I have been talking to my kids (10/7) about "the internet". The normal stuff: no real names, no photos, no giving away details to anyone. They have a shared iPad, but it has time limits, and it stays in the living room.
and as an adult leader for a "uniformed organisation" for kids, one of the badges is about staying safe online. Some of the shit that I hear from them leaves me a bit worried. Roblox is a fucking nest of paedophiles. Instgram isn't a place for kids, and neither is youtube.
But, the biggest issue, apart from google and facebook not having any commercial incentive to stop kids from using their stuff: is parents not talking to their kids to find out whats happening.
Who are they talking to?
How long are they spending online?
What are they watching?
You as a parent have to be involved. You can't let your kid wander alone on the internet. You need to set barriers.
You don't need to be a helicopter, but you do need to take an interest.
You also need to have a strong fucking password to stop the kids getting round the parental controls.
> The normal stuff: no real names, no photos, no giving away details to anyone.
For the record, none of this has been "normal" for 15+ years. Sharing personal details - either publicly on social media or "privately" online is absolutely normal now.
Roblox or any other specific thing isn't any different than anything else in terms of risk.
Where there are humans, there are problems. Where there are humans, there is crime. Where there are humans, there are pedophiles. The physical world is the same story.
After being sexually abused repeatedly as a kid and teen, both at school and online, don't get complacent in thinking background checks mean teachers aren't pedophiles—background checks and lists only tell you who has been caught so far.
Digital grooming is nasty, but the prioritized danger is anyone physically close.
Passwords aren't stopping teenage determination and they never have, not now devices are cheap and easy to come by, and lots of peers have drawers full of unwanted yesteryear stuff. Twenty years ago, we were using proxies, hacking WiFi APs, giving people old devices and even buying each other phone credit.
I wholeheartedly agree that background checks don't survive contact with a conniving human hell bent on doing what they want. I've also never subscribed to technical solution to social problems. I perhaps should have been more clear in my post that I was aiming for social solutions rather than purely technical.
I know I can't protect either my kids, or the kids I look after for ever. I just want to give them enough of a heads up to stop the 95% attack. As in, if I've done my job well enough, they won't be sending photos of themselves[1], or giving out home addresses, or believing that the other person is someone to be feared or obeyed.
You're also spot on about passwords. As a reformed Sysadmin, who used to work in a place with airgapped networks, I will be more than a little proud when/if my kids break part of the security. (assuming its not just social engineering my partner) I'll also be worried.
One of the teachers who I looked up to at school was acquitted of sexual misconduct with someone who I knew well. One of the worries is that someone who is a family friend(other other privileged position) does something like that to one of my children. Worse still either me missing it, or most painful of all them, not feeling able to talk to anyone about it to stop it.
Please read this as me casting judgment, minimising, solutionising, disputing or dismissing what happened to you. That is very much not my intention!
I clearly remember 12 year olds who were active on LiveJournal and a couple other less known social networking sites back in 2002-2003. The only difference it was done via a desktop computer rather than an iPhone.
Yep, millennial teenagers in my area were all over LiveJournal/Myspace/Xanga in the early aughts.
And if one considers messengers like ICQ/AIM (or even IRC) as a form of social media then teenagers were commonly (in my area) using social media in the late 90s.
I think the author is talking about scale. There were definitely kids with social medial accounts 15 years ago. But very few of them had personal smart phones that they could use in bed at 3am.
IMO the problem with phones for teens it that they have nothing to use them for except socialization. Adult phone addiction is a problem but phones are also tools for adults. Answering emails, calling the doctor's office, checking your credit card statement, etc. Teens have literally no use for phones except for communication/socialization. They also have abundant free time. One plan I've been thinking about for my own kid (currently 9mo old) is he's allowed to have a phone as long as he also has a job (or suitable job-like activity appropriate for a teen).
> Teens have literally no use for phones except for communication/socialization.
What do you think they're supposed to be using them for if not that? Socialization is the point. I was every bit the teenage girl annoyingly on her phone constantly but I was constantly talking to my friends / boyfriend.
So much of being a teenager is being dragged places you don't want to go and being forced to be around adults you don't care about talking about insurance or escrow or whatever. But online was a place that was mine, where my friends were.
I would disagree. While I was a bit of an outlier and would use my phone primarily for tinkering, I would also use it to go down rabbit holes on wikipedia, play video games, read books and watch shows. Phones are glorified consumption devices, at the end of the day.
Obviously someone doesn't remember the Game Boy, iPod, Walkman, pocket TVs, camcorders, Polaroids, digital cameras et al.
Just because modernity has social nonsense baked into it by default doesn't mean that they were social experiences to begin with. Entertainment, utility and creativity were valued over social e-peen points once upon a time. Shocking, I know.
Adding this kind of friction to be able to communicate with family and peers is a recipe for a teenage dropout that's more focused on chump change just to have a phone than further education.
I left school at sixteen, I was never given pocket money. You bet having a girlfriend, cool clothes, a phone, an iPod and video games was more important to me than anything my dad had to say, especially when what we were being taught was nothing I had any interest in.
The final straw was needing a new computer to run Boinx to make stop-motion animations (my hobby at the time before CG movies really took off). Having the things you want and need is a big deal to teenage brain, especially when they're attainable without much effort and make you happy.
If a parent isn't giving resources or nurturing interests and is instead adding friction to something a teen can actually have for themselves, that parent is losing all leverage over a teenager because they can't threaten to take away pocket money and thus their source of "cool" and pleasure in life.
Kids should focus on their studies if their parents can facilitate them being able to do so.
"I wouldn't allow my kids to leave school at sixteen", in the UK at the time, they were legally adults, but also didn't stop plenty of kids dropping out at fourteen to work and get the things their parents weren't giving them. Neither parent wanted me to leave, but neither parent was relevant in any way anymore to me, they were just obstacles between me and my teenage bullshit.
Readit News
Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours. We look at screens so that we don't have to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions.
Sure, without a phone that person had no other choice but to face whatever they've been avoiding. But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.
A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything. The right thing to do is help them get there, not play whack-a-mole with their coping mechanisms.
A thinly veiled pro-social media post. The quote highlighted alone is very dangerous. It's almost as if people have developed a form of Stockholm syndrome to appeal to social media addictions vs the boogie man that is a "different source of distraction".
By 2008 when I saw him he had totally fallen off from computers and couldn't care less.
I'm engrossed in tech still and I do waste wayyy to much time on HN, blogs, reading, YouTube, Twitter and the like. No doubt I have a problem..
My friend though died last year of heroin/fentanyl overdose. He had been struggling with it for 5+ years. Same as I have with modern phones. I wish he had gotten addicted to YouTube shorts instead.
Divorce, drug addiction? Sorry; addicted to code, I no longer have time for relationships nor the ability to relate to normal people nor the brain cells to spare.
COVID lockdowns? Ha; I've been living under lockdown for the last ten years; it's my optimal lifestyle.
YouTube requiring brain scans with which to inject targeted ads directly into your videos? Too bad; I've already downloaded the Warcraft 3 and StarCraft playthroughs I watch over and over locally.
Microsoft integrating an AI into Windows which will predict the exact moment you're about to be racist and brick your machine? Nice try; I've already moved to Linux years ago.
It is the gift that keeps on giving.
Often though, some issues in life are not resolvable through some simple analysis and avoiding thinking about the issue might really be the best course of action.
avoid what exactly?
that needs to be qualified. do they avoid talking to their friends in school? do they avoid facing the fact that they have no friends?
or are they using it because their friends are doing it as well? what are they avoiding then?
and and let's not brush aside those harmful effects. some kids may use the phone to avoid facing things that feel worse, but as others mentioned, so do people using drugs or alcohol. the problem is that the harmful effects of the phone/social media are much much less obvious, so many more kids are at risk. drugs and alcohol are so much easier to avoid.
I said it already: difficult thoughts and emotions. Teenagers naturally have a lot of that and little to no ability to process them on their own.
It's true that addiction is ultimately a psychological problem. It's true that people engage in addictive behaviors as a coping mechanism to avoid difficult emotions.
It's also true that the Internet has enabled a lot of deliberately addictive content. Phones keep that content constantly at hand. And it's difficult to avoid having a phone since they also provide utilities.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone had such great mental wellness that they were impervious to the temptations of their phones. What are some serious tactics to make that happen?
For parents, this could take the form of doubling a child’s pocket money/allowance on the condition that half of it is donated to charities - encourage the child to research charities and talk about them.
(The latter isn’t an original idea - I originally read about it in the form of tripling the pocket money with 1/3 to keep, 1/3 for charity, and 1/3 to invest. If your kid has to do some chores to get their pocket money, then this sets them up with a pattern for a good life (work, then give and save).
True. People doing well mentally should start heroin and meth right now since they have no need to avoid anything. Why should they miss out on that experience since they can just quit.
What are we to do? Banning phone use on an individual basis is a recipe for social suicide. Some kind of collective action is needed.
Legislation against phone use for minors is one option, but I wouldn’t expect it to receive widespread support. Banning social media for minors might be workable, but it wouldn’t fully resolve the issue.
As I quoted elsewhere, any extremist or reductionist position makes things worse for them.
In the 90s, if you were a nerd in high-school, you get a chance to re-invent yourself in college, and another at your first job. Heck, you can re-invent yourself between different groups of friends. Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.
Tons of kids grew up glued to their Nintendos. I played an _insane_ amount of Starcraft. Our generation did not have the same negative effects that the current generation is having with social media.
What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.
Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if parents are seen zombie-scrolling through Instagram for hours, and then they tell their kids not to zombie-scroll because it's bad for you, well the kids will know their parents are totally full of shit.
It's impossible for parents who are themselves addicted to smartphones to tell their kids not to be addicted to smartphones. The parents need to cure their own addiction first.
Fussellian middle class in a suburban school: will call your kid poor and bully them if they don’t have a recent phone by 6th grade (often much earlier)
Fussellian upper-middle in expensive private school: may not have a phone themselves until high school (handy for keeping in touch when at college-application-building extra curriculars), won’t make fun of kids whose parents don’t give them phone.
In fact, you'll likely have to deal with this as early as elementary school.
My kids are fine. Even with their parents fighting tooth and nail to keep them off devices as much as possible, they will still be on them sometimes (in your home or out of it). Maybe my kids are just weird to not be craving social media - just being able to send text messages to her friends seems to be enough for my 14 year old currently. Is that the same thing? My observations say "definitely not".
They complain about it sometimes, (and I complain about their usage sometimes) but nobody is really angry and everybody is really reasonable. Your mileage may vary.
Imagine being a teenager and trying to include someone lacking a cellphone to your social group. It adds a huge amount of friction.
Including someone without a cellphone means you give up the ability to be spontaneous (assuming the kid needs to adhere to an agreed-upon schedule to be picked up by a parent), and trivial things become a literal telephone-game ordeal.
It also means almost invariably that the kid is relying on a friend's phone to communicate parents / a ride, unless that kid is so privileged as to own their own car.
Could you imagine if every time you hung out with a friend, they asked to borrow your phone, open Facebook Messenger (or whatever sensitive messaging app you use), and to contact a parent?
It also means the kid isn't included in group chats, which means they just aren't part of conversations other kids are having. You can't have a rich social life with someone you can only talk to in classes you share and for 20 minutes during lunch break.
The "green bubble" phenomenon is bad enough as it is. I don't like it, but for all practical reasons, owning a cellphone is necessary for a kids social life in the United States.
(They weren't allowed actually at school though, weren't even supposed to be in your locker, so I always think it's a bit weird when it occasionally pops up debate about banning them from schools or that X school has banned them - curious when and why they allowed them, or maybe they were just always allowed to begin with?)
...Seriously I have a hard time seeing it your way. Can you elaborate on your rational? Change my mind?
That's now every child. Also, that was very much an intentionally designed effect -- it's no secret. Let that sink in. Your 10 year old is up against multi billion dollar companies who control the very tools you want to use to curb her addiction? (No, she is... We all are.)
People forget that the purpose of Social Media is to spend more and more time. "User Engagement" is the key.
I already forbid my kids from using any social network.
They can use youtube with supervision.
Social media is poison for young minds. Older minds too but thats another issue.
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Everybody I've spoken to thinks its a great idea. Even the kids. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-06/mobile-phone-ban-canb...
Maybe 45 minutes before school each morning and 1 hour the evening or something.
When kids hang outside of school, as was always the case, they usually live nearby. Notwithstanding that dumbphones and managed social media use are options, unless you think teens are all monsters (which would not be solved by phones anyway), it's not a lord of the flies situation of shunning people without phones.
I think there's a culture of inactive shut ins and we're acting like this should be cause for FOMO. I expect kids would be happier if they actually physically see some friends more regularly anyway.
Learn safety, responsible usage and set limits. Let them demonstrate they can handle it before unattended use.
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Is it really? Or is this one of those irrational fears?
That's why I'm pretty wary of some other comments along the lines of "you just need to teach your children to think of phones as tools and regulate their screen time". I feel that's like telling kids "You just need to keep it to 3 or 4 cigarettes a day."
Sure, some kids may do OK with this (I happen to think they're really in the minority), but social media is fundamentally designed to addict people. That is literally the goal of social media companies. So I'm just a bit dubious that kids, especially young kids e.g. in middle school, have the ability to regulate that.
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If you have both, your friends are always there to let you know how much you are loved.
A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.
Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.
Personally, I think the most likely and best solution is better social media. Currently, social media is regulated to shield kids from explicit content and predators, but it should also be regulated to shield them from negativity and mindless engagement, and to promote positivity and healthy behaviors (including not spending too much time on it). Recommendation algorithms for kids should be strictly controlled by the government; keep in mind that the government already strictly controls what kids learn in school, and it doesn't have to outright ban "non-explicit harmful" content, just down-weight it enough that kids don't find it without intentionally looking. Plus, a social media with healthier recommendations and discourse may become popular for adults as well, even though they wouldn't be locked into this version like minors (I can imagine a system that requires consent like adult ID but then lets adults stay anonymous, which could be bypassed by dedicated minors, but most wouldn't care enough to do so).
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
Another option might be a custom Youtube frontend or browser extension for filtering.
I think this is obvious to any parent, right? Too much screen time bad. I know it's bad for me as well, though my current bias is heavily against technology in general - I will admit that.
Watching YouTube? Reading blogs about favorite subjects?
YouTube is basically as bad as any social media IMO since it has an endless stream of stimulus that's artificially easy to consume.
Putting faith in any app to curate or restrict content in Youtube and the like; for this one I think doing the human thing of talking to her regularly and even making it clear that we will be checking out what she's doing is preferable.
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I am despite what the media says, a digital native.
that being said, I don't think kids should be on social media. By that I mean instagram/tiktok/snapchat
I have been talking to my kids (10/7) about "the internet". The normal stuff: no real names, no photos, no giving away details to anyone. They have a shared iPad, but it has time limits, and it stays in the living room.
and as an adult leader for a "uniformed organisation" for kids, one of the badges is about staying safe online. Some of the shit that I hear from them leaves me a bit worried. Roblox is a fucking nest of paedophiles. Instgram isn't a place for kids, and neither is youtube.
But, the biggest issue, apart from google and facebook not having any commercial incentive to stop kids from using their stuff: is parents not talking to their kids to find out whats happening.
Who are they talking to?
How long are they spending online?
What are they watching?
You as a parent have to be involved. You can't let your kid wander alone on the internet. You need to set barriers.
You don't need to be a helicopter, but you do need to take an interest.
You also need to have a strong fucking password to stop the kids getting round the parental controls.
For the record, none of this has been "normal" for 15+ years. Sharing personal details - either publicly on social media or "privately" online is absolutely normal now.
Where there are humans, there are problems. Where there are humans, there is crime. Where there are humans, there are pedophiles. The physical world is the same story.
After being sexually abused repeatedly as a kid and teen, both at school and online, don't get complacent in thinking background checks mean teachers aren't pedophiles—background checks and lists only tell you who has been caught so far.
Digital grooming is nasty, but the prioritized danger is anyone physically close.
Passwords aren't stopping teenage determination and they never have, not now devices are cheap and easy to come by, and lots of peers have drawers full of unwanted yesteryear stuff. Twenty years ago, we were using proxies, hacking WiFi APs, giving people old devices and even buying each other phone credit.
I know I can't protect either my kids, or the kids I look after for ever. I just want to give them enough of a heads up to stop the 95% attack. As in, if I've done my job well enough, they won't be sending photos of themselves[1], or giving out home addresses, or believing that the other person is someone to be feared or obeyed.
You're also spot on about passwords. As a reformed Sysadmin, who used to work in a place with airgapped networks, I will be more than a little proud when/if my kids break part of the security. (assuming its not just social engineering my partner) I'll also be worried.
One of the teachers who I looked up to at school was acquitted of sexual misconduct with someone who I knew well. One of the worries is that someone who is a family friend(other other privileged position) does something like that to one of my children. Worse still either me missing it, or most painful of all them, not feeling able to talk to anyone about it to stop it.
Please read this as me casting judgment, minimising, solutionising, disputing or dismissing what happened to you. That is very much not my intention!
[1] perhaps a forlorn hope in the longrun
And I know a large number of teens that are honor role, on sports teams, and gesticulate, all while having a phone and actively use social media.
I also know teens with depression, insomnia, and poor grades, even though they don't have a phone or social media.
That's not to say phones aren't harmful, but clearly it's not everything.
> "It's literally impossible for me to influence my child's behavior, so we must enact legislation to ensure no kids can use these evil devices!"
This makes sense if her daughter is presently 25 years old
And if one considers messengers like ICQ/AIM (or even IRC) as a form of social media then teenagers were commonly (in my area) using social media in the late 90s.
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What do you think they're supposed to be using them for if not that? Socialization is the point. I was every bit the teenage girl annoyingly on her phone constantly but I was constantly talking to my friends / boyfriend.
So much of being a teenager is being dragged places you don't want to go and being forced to be around adults you don't care about talking about insurance or escrow or whatever. But online was a place that was mine, where my friends were.
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Just because modernity has social nonsense baked into it by default doesn't mean that they were social experiences to begin with. Entertainment, utility and creativity were valued over social e-peen points once upon a time. Shocking, I know.
Adding this kind of friction to be able to communicate with family and peers is a recipe for a teenage dropout that's more focused on chump change just to have a phone than further education.
I left school at sixteen, I was never given pocket money. You bet having a girlfriend, cool clothes, a phone, an iPod and video games was more important to me than anything my dad had to say, especially when what we were being taught was nothing I had any interest in.
The final straw was needing a new computer to run Boinx to make stop-motion animations (my hobby at the time before CG movies really took off). Having the things you want and need is a big deal to teenage brain, especially when they're attainable without much effort and make you happy.
If a parent isn't giving resources or nurturing interests and is instead adding friction to something a teen can actually have for themselves, that parent is losing all leverage over a teenager because they can't threaten to take away pocket money and thus their source of "cool" and pleasure in life.
Kids should focus on their studies if their parents can facilitate them being able to do so.
"I wouldn't allow my kids to leave school at sixteen", in the UK at the time, they were legally adults, but also didn't stop plenty of kids dropping out at fourteen to work and get the things their parents weren't giving them. Neither parent wanted me to leave, but neither parent was relevant in any way anymore to me, they were just obstacles between me and my teenage bullshit.