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> Can't parents acknowledge they have some responsibility towards their own children and not give just blindly give them laptops and phones and expect someone e

by tharne 5y ago

> Can't parents acknowledge they have some responsibility towards their own children and not give just blindly give them laptops and phones and expect someone else to clean up the mess after them. This point is academic at best and hopelessly naïve. Practically speaking parents have significantly less control than you think. I exercise extreme restriction and thoughtfulness around tech and social media in my home. However, my kids' school hands out mandatory chromebooks (despite my protests). When my children go to a friends house, I have very little control over the content they see or the devices they can get their hands on. And it only gets harder from there. I have some friends with older children, and there's really no controlling what they access. Sure, you can refuse to give them a smartphone, for instance. That's not going to stop one of their buddies from giving them an old smartphone when their parents get them a new one. It also won't stop them from picking up a cheap prepaid android from the nearest Walmart for $40. So to your original point, I don't think too many of us are "blindly giving them laptops and expecting someone else to clean up the mess". We're trying to hold back a tsunami of social media trash for the sake of our kids' wellbeing, and we're losing.

Loic 5y ago
> tsunami of [...] trash [...] and we're losing. We have 3 sons (they turned 9, 13 and 15). We are controlling a lot what they can access with their mobiles (the youngest one has no mobile phone) and tablet. We use family link and NextDNS to remove access to pornography, gambling, dating, etc. But leave quite some freedom outside of these stuff. Discussing with them, especially the oldest one, I was pretty shocked to learn what the friends are looking at. Most of the 12+ year old kids have now mobile phones without any restrictions and are regularly accessing all the pornographic websites you can imagine. Some can spend up to 10h per "school" day in front of the screen, 18h during the weekend. We are lucky to have kids doing a lot of sport, we control relatively well what they access without "whitelisting before" and try to get them to learn the environment they are navigating in, but this is really hard work. This is hard work against companies spending billions to make our hard work ineffective. <-- this is what annoy me the most.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
The problem is that you are treating it as a thing to forbid. No, that never works. Kids are bound to rebel against some ultimatim of "you can't do X because it's bad or you!". That's not a satisfactory explanation for an ineivtably inquisitive adolescent. Use it as an opportunity to communicate and teach them t self-moderate. Definitely enforce it at home as well, but if you can't trust your kid outside your watch you're missing the point. Moreover, they spend a lot of time at school, but not all of it. If teachers can't keep kids of social media for hours on end that's a problem with the school, not the social media. They banned access to phones in my school outside of emergencies and kids passed times playing video games on a TI-84. No way in heck any kid in my school back in the day would get more than a few messages between teachers peeking in

by tharne 5y ago

Loic 5y ago

> tsunami of [...] trash [...] and we're losing. We have 3 sons (they turned 9, 13 and 15). We are controlling a lot what they can access with their mobiles (the youngest one has no mobile phone) and tablet. We use family link and NextDNS to remove access to pornography, gambling, dating, etc. But leave quite some freedom outside of these stuff. Discussing with them, especially the oldest one, I was pretty shocked to learn what the friends are looking at. Most of the 12+ year old kids have now mobile phones without any restrictions and are regularly accessing all the pornographic websites you can imagine. Some can spend up to 10h per "school" day in front of the screen, 18h during the weekend. We are lucky to have kids doing a lot of sport, we control relatively well what they access without "whitelisting before" and try to get them to learn the environment they are navigating in, but this is really hard work. This is hard work against companies spending billions to make our hard work ineffective. <-- this is what annoy me the most.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

The problem is that you are treating it as a thing to forbid. No, that never works. Kids are bound to rebel against some ultimatim of "you can't do X because it's bad or you!". That's not a satisfactory explanation for an ineivtably inquisitive adolescent. Use it as an opportunity to communicate and teach them t self-moderate. Definitely enforce it at home as well, but if you can't trust your kid outside your watch you're missing the point. Moreover, they spend a lot of time at school, but not all of it. If teachers can't keep kids of social media for hours on end that's a problem with the school, not the social media. They banned access to phones in my school outside of emergencies and kids passed times playing video games on a TI-84. No way in heck any kid in my school back in the day would get more than a few messages between teachers peeking in