6 ms·

HOT TAKE: I think the parents are responsible for regulating the social media hours of their kids, not Mark Zuckerberg. Even If facebook changes, kids will find

by shivaraj1996 5y ago

HOT TAKE: I think the parents are responsible for regulating the social media hours of their kids, not Mark Zuckerberg. Even If facebook changes, kids will find something else to hook onto, leading to more mental health problems.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
How effective are parents at regulation? I feel like at some point, it becomes hard, and kids will find ways to circumvent limits.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  My kids aren't getting a smart phone and no screens except within sight of other members of the household. The house router shuts down internet during the night. Welcome to North Korea. I will win.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    That effectively deals with the problem of your kids accessing screens right now, but you have no idea what the impact of denying access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term. Maybe it'll work out and they'll develop a healthy relationship with tech, or maybe they'll be traumatized by that denial and be far more susceptible to screen addiction in later life because there's no one there to regulate it for them and they haven't had the opportunity to learn how to self-regulate. There's no way to know. This stuff hasn't been around long enough to study it properly.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      > you have no idea what the impact of denying access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term you have no idea what the impact of allowing access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term Its all a massive guessing game.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Your kids are teenagers?
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    last time my parents tried this to my brother. It backfired badly because my brother used mobile data wasting our money. He wasted like 20 usd in mobile data in 1 week and our monthly fiber internet costs was only 15 usd. And the sad thing is he wasted that money which was supposed to be his tiffin for school. After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      > After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children. Is your example a smart child or a stupid child?
  - conductr 5y ago
    I agree with this approach but there’s more to it. It’s a process. You coach them along the way over a period of years. You offer other outlets for boredom and opportunity for IRL socializing. I feel like this is the real root cause. Our society has largely 1) outsourced all parent responsibilities (too hard, over worked, etc. are just excuses for being lazy, my observation is most parents are glad to throw a iPad in little Jimmy’s face if he’ll leave them alone) and 2) kids are not playing enough outside with other kids in unstructured ways (when they do, they care not about what’s happening on TikTok). I like to take my son fishing because it teaches him it’s ok to be bored, silence is ok too, also our talks and bonding is deeper in these moments, and it gets us out in nature.
wussboy 5y ago
No. No no no. Parents already have thousands of commercial and social interests trying to steal a child’s attention. You can’t possibly expect an overworked and criminally exhausted parent to come home from work and “fight the good fight” against a multi billion dollar company with huge teams of engineers and psychologists working day and night to capture your child’s head. I say this every time this comment comes up and I always get downvoted but I just don’t care. I love my kids and I fight every day to keep them safe and healthy and I DO NOT NEED to fight a super villain with direct access to my child’s mind. Social media is evil. It will be banned. Wait and see.
- themihai 5y ago
  Aren't there programs restricting social media? Why parent's don't just ban the social media for their kids?
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Network effects. As long as the other kids socialize on social media, not using social media becomes a drastic socialization penalty. The problem cannot be solved individually, only by collective action. Most parents must ban social media (and electronics in general) for their kids. Which indicates a need to pass laws to ban social media for minors. Bans and teens don't usually work as intended, we probably also need a wide campaign of stigmatization of said social media, akin to anti-smoking campaigns.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    plus many schools etc are using facebook etc to disseminate news... and many kids friend prefers to communicate in facebook groups. Many teachers are also available in facebook. In short: Network effect.
- tabulatouch 5y ago
  It all boils down to fighting the distopic capitalism. Which, at the end of the day, we all like and worship.
- xwdv 5y ago
0x77x66 5y ago
Parents have no time. Shouldn't people without children play a role as well? Especially given they have much more time.
- f6v 5y ago
  > Shouldn't people without children play a role as well? Especially given they have much more time. That’s exactly the reason people without children have no children: they want to have free time.
devwastaken 5y ago
I know a teacher that tried this. Daughter is struggling to be included in social circles with her peers and can't include themselves because online happenings and lingo have become apart of conversation and language. It's funny watching parents be surprised by things like cursing, saying "don't hang out with those kids". Not realizing that's all of them. Like it or not YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the internet in general has taken up the place of parenting and social interaction because parents are worked to death for the 1% and social media is designed the same way as casinos. They're designed to prey upon your instincts and are demonstrated to be quite effective at it. I wouldn't mind if tomorrow Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, etc, all disappeared overnight. Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that. It’s interesting to watch Australia navigate this. Murdoch is rather powerful there and has some leverage. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-strikes-deal-as-facebook-agrees-to-pay-for-australian-content https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...
agumonkey 5y ago
Slightly lesser hot take: it's a bit too much of a systemic problem which would make it hard for parents to take care of. Methinks .. covid not helping for sure .. but local communities should revamp/revive group things. More sport, more craft, more culture (paint, play, music) .. to suck attention away from the web a bit.
cute_boi 5y ago
Hmm in many cases both parents goes to work so its tedious to police their children. And as you have mentioned bypassing parents is too easy because kids are smart these days and know how to use vpn. And ppl like mark is obviously responsible because they are using dopamine tricks to make content more addicting. Like whats the point of showing me nonsense news because one of the people I added liked some nonsense? Why to show nonsense ads that says me "She looks beautiful and if you want try this cream"? (mark because he is the own who has ultimate control over facebook and insta) China tackled this by banning and making sure tiktok etc returns more science content for children instead of dopamine addicting content. (China because I don't know if other country has regulated social media like this)
georgebarnett 5y ago
HOT TAKE: I think parents should prevent their kids from smoking and tobacco companies bear no responsibility for their addictive product. The opioid crisis is also the fault of all those pesky addicts who chose to get themselves addicted and it’s not at all on Purdue. Right?! /s
- Veen 5y ago
  Yes, right. It is parents' responsibility to ensure their kids don't smoke cigrettes and take opioid tablets. It's also their responsibility to ensure they themselves don't smoke or take opioid tablets. I suppose my "hot take" is that adults are responsible for their actions, including how they parent their children. We should also prevent the supply of these things and regulate harmful corporate behavior, but that doesn't absolve parents of their responsibility.
  - georgebarnett 5y ago
    Your response indicates two things: 1. You have no idea about teenagers. 2. You have no idea about the causes of the opioid crisis. Also, I did not conflate the two which you appear to think I have done.
    - Veen 5y ago
      Either you're conflating the two or your second sentence is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. In the spirit of charitable interpretation, I assumed you included a remark about opioids because you thought it relevant. I apologise for that assumption, and thank you for sharing your irrelevant thoughts about the opioid epidemic.
jevoten 5y ago
> regulating the social media hours of their kids Parents can regulate the hours, but unless they regulate them down to zero, they cannot affect the adictiveness engineered into the product. Yes, the dose makes the poison, but I guarantee you Facebook has a team of psychologists making sure the dose needed to get kids hooked is as low as possible.
lapinot 5y ago
I disagree, corporations which manufacture damaging and offensive products against their users should be accountable. Yet obviously in this state of things, parents should try and do something. Personal story: to situate, when i was teenager facebook was starting to be a thing and myspace started fading. My parents did something i find to be very sensible: they responsabilised me and introduced me to computers. I had restricted "freetime" computer hours and slightly less restricted "working" computer hours (doing school work etc), which eventually led me to programming since it somehow passed as working (my mom's a programmer so there's that). I wasn't allowed to have a facebook account and it was explained to me why that was so. Reasons where mostly not putting random private stuff online somewhere i wouldn't control it, addiction wasn't too important but i think it was implicitly said that these stuff eat you time and that now your time doing constructive things vanishes. OTOH my computer was clean of any spyware and i was trusted (had admin password and all). I surely was an outsider from this pov, but i quickly managed to own it and be proud of not having that account. For me this is the key: you cannot protect your kid against his will, you must (and surely can, kids are smart) convince them that they have more to loose than to gain. Maybe at that time it was simpler since it was the golden age of xmpp and gtalk was something i had access to (Adium for the win!).
fortran77 5y ago
If "online" socialization is here to stay, then learning to navigate them is an important social skill. Keeping young people off social media won't help them later in life. One of the oft-touted figures was that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” My hot take is: "That's probably about right." Given the sorry state of physical education, fitness, and the fact that 60%+ of adults are obese or overweight, the fact that 1/3 of people on Instagram look at other people and feel their appearance needs improvement is probably about right -- if not a little low. There are probably another 1/3 that _should_ feel bad but don't. (And boys too!)

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago

How effective are parents at regulation? I feel like at some point, it becomes hard, and kids will find ways to circumvent limits.

ldiracdelta 5y ago
My kids aren't getting a smart phone and no screens except within sight of other members of the household. The house router shuts down internet during the night. Welcome to North Korea. I will win.
- onion2k 5y ago
  That effectively deals with the problem of your kids accessing screens right now, but you have no idea what the impact of denying access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term. Maybe it'll work out and they'll develop a healthy relationship with tech, or maybe they'll be traumatized by that denial and be far more susceptible to screen addiction in later life because there's no one there to regulate it for them and they haven't had the opportunity to learn how to self-regulate. There's no way to know. This stuff hasn't been around long enough to study it properly.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > you have no idea what the impact of denying access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term you have no idea what the impact of allowing access to "social" tech will have on them in the long term Its all a massive guessing game.
- didibus 5y ago
  Your kids are teenagers?
- cute_boi 5y ago
  last time my parents tried this to my brother. It backfired badly because my brother used mobile data wasting our money. He wasted like 20 usd in mobile data in 1 week and our monthly fiber internet costs was only 15 usd. And the sad thing is he wasted that money which was supposed to be his tiffin for school. After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    > After that day we realized its not easy to control smart children. Is your example a smart child or a stupid child?
- conductr 5y ago
  I agree with this approach but there’s more to it. It’s a process. You coach them along the way over a period of years. You offer other outlets for boredom and opportunity for IRL socializing. I feel like this is the real root cause. Our society has largely 1) outsourced all parent responsibilities (too hard, over worked, etc. are just excuses for being lazy, my observation is most parents are glad to throw a iPad in little Jimmy’s face if he’ll leave them alone) and 2) kids are not playing enough outside with other kids in unstructured ways (when they do, they care not about what’s happening on TikTok). I like to take my son fishing because it teaches him it’s ok to be bored, silence is ok too, also our talks and bonding is deeper in these moments, and it gets us out in nature.

wussboy 5y ago

No. No no no. Parents already have thousands of commercial and social interests trying to steal a child’s attention. You can’t possibly expect an overworked and criminally exhausted parent to come home from work and “fight the good fight” against a multi billion dollar company with huge teams of engineers and psychologists working day and night to capture your child’s head. I say this every time this comment comes up and I always get downvoted but I just don’t care. I love my kids and I fight every day to keep them safe and healthy and I DO NOT NEED to fight a super villain with direct access to my child’s mind. Social media is evil. It will be banned. Wait and see.

themihai 5y ago
Aren't there programs restricting social media? Why parent's don't just ban the social media for their kids?
- angelzen 5y ago
  Network effects. As long as the other kids socialize on social media, not using social media becomes a drastic socialization penalty. The problem cannot be solved individually, only by collective action. Most parents must ban social media (and electronics in general) for their kids. Which indicates a need to pass laws to ban social media for minors. Bans and teens don't usually work as intended, we probably also need a wide campaign of stigmatization of said social media, akin to anti-smoking campaigns.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  plus many schools etc are using facebook etc to disseminate news... and many kids friend prefers to communicate in facebook groups. Many teachers are also available in facebook. In short: Network effect.
tabulatouch 5y ago
It all boils down to fighting the distopic capitalism. Which, at the end of the day, we all like and worship.
xwdv 5y ago

0x77x66 5y ago

Parents have no time. Shouldn't people without children play a role as well? Especially given they have much more time.

f6v 5y ago
> Shouldn't people without children play a role as well? Especially given they have much more time. That’s exactly the reason people without children have no children: they want to have free time.

devwastaken 5y ago

I know a teacher that tried this. Daughter is struggling to be included in social circles with her peers and can't include themselves because online happenings and lingo have become apart of conversation and language. It's funny watching parents be surprised by things like cursing, saying "don't hang out with those kids". Not realizing that's all of them. Like it or not YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the internet in general has taken up the place of parenting and social interaction because parents are worked to death for the 1% and social media is designed the same way as casinos. They're designed to prey upon your instincts and are demonstrated to be quite effective at it. I wouldn't mind if tomorrow Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, etc, all disappeared overnight. Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that.

lostlogin 5y ago
> Obviously government can't have the power to do that because they'll go after everything but that. It’s interesting to watch Australia navigate this. Murdoch is rather powerful there and has some leverage. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-strikes-deal-as-facebook-agrees-to-pay-for-australian-content https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...

agumonkey 5y ago

Slightly lesser hot take: it's a bit too much of a systemic problem which would make it hard for parents to take care of. Methinks .. covid not helping for sure .. but local communities should revamp/revive group things. More sport, more craft, more culture (paint, play, music) .. to suck attention away from the web a bit.

cute_boi 5y ago

Hmm in many cases both parents goes to work so its tedious to police their children. And as you have mentioned bypassing parents is too easy because kids are smart these days and know how to use vpn. And ppl like mark is obviously responsible because they are using dopamine tricks to make content more addicting. Like whats the point of showing me nonsense news because one of the people I added liked some nonsense? Why to show nonsense ads that says me "She looks beautiful and if you want try this cream"? (mark because he is the own who has ultimate control over facebook and insta) China tackled this by banning and making sure tiktok etc returns more science content for children instead of dopamine addicting content. (China because I don't know if other country has regulated social media like this)

georgebarnett 5y ago

HOT TAKE: I think parents should prevent their kids from smoking and tobacco companies bear no responsibility for their addictive product. The opioid crisis is also the fault of all those pesky addicts who chose to get themselves addicted and it’s not at all on Purdue. Right?! /s

Veen 5y ago
Yes, right. It is parents' responsibility to ensure their kids don't smoke cigrettes and take opioid tablets. It's also their responsibility to ensure they themselves don't smoke or take opioid tablets. I suppose my "hot take" is that adults are responsible for their actions, including how they parent their children. We should also prevent the supply of these things and regulate harmful corporate behavior, but that doesn't absolve parents of their responsibility.
- georgebarnett 5y ago
  Your response indicates two things: 1. You have no idea about teenagers. 2. You have no idea about the causes of the opioid crisis. Also, I did not conflate the two which you appear to think I have done.
  - Veen 5y ago
    Either you're conflating the two or your second sentence is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. In the spirit of charitable interpretation, I assumed you included a remark about opioids because you thought it relevant. I apologise for that assumption, and thank you for sharing your irrelevant thoughts about the opioid epidemic.

jevoten 5y ago

> regulating the social media hours of their kids Parents can regulate the hours, but unless they regulate them down to zero, they cannot affect the adictiveness engineered into the product. Yes, the dose makes the poison, but I guarantee you Facebook has a team of psychologists making sure the dose needed to get kids hooked is as low as possible.

lapinot 5y ago

I disagree, corporations which manufacture damaging and offensive products against their users should be accountable. Yet obviously in this state of things, parents should try and do something. Personal story: to situate, when i was teenager facebook was starting to be a thing and myspace started fading. My parents did something i find to be very sensible: they responsabilised me and introduced me to computers. I had restricted "freetime" computer hours and slightly less restricted "working" computer hours (doing school work etc), which eventually led me to programming since it somehow passed as working (my mom's a programmer so there's that). I wasn't allowed to have a facebook account and it was explained to me why that was so. Reasons where mostly not putting random private stuff online somewhere i wouldn't control it, addiction wasn't too important but i think it was implicitly said that these stuff eat you time and that now your time doing constructive things vanishes. OTOH my computer was clean of any spyware and i was trusted (had admin password and all). I surely was an outsider from this pov, but i quickly managed to own it and be proud of not having that account. For me this is the key: you cannot protect your kid against his will, you must (and surely can, kids are smart) convince them that they have more to loose than to gain. Maybe at that time it was simpler since it was the golden age of xmpp and gtalk was something i had access to (Adium for the win!).

fortran77 5y ago

If "online" socialization is here to stay, then learning to navigate them is an important social skill. Keeping young people off social media won't help them later in life. One of the oft-touted figures was that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” My hot take is: "That's probably about right." Given the sorry state of physical education, fitness, and the fact that 60%+ of adults are obese or overweight, the fact that 1/3 of people on Instagram look at other people and feel their appearance needs improvement is probably about right -- if not a little low. There are probably another 1/3 that _should_ feel bad but don't. (And boys too!)