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(I'll preface this by saying I'm not a parent, and I don't raise children. I imagine it's not an easy endeavor. But...) > you have the option of either giving

• gaze 3y ago
  I don't think the personal responsibility of someone with a developing mind is any match for 10-20 years of extensive AB testing.
  • squigz 3y ago
    Well... no, but neither is it a match for, say, thousands of years of drug abuse. And yet... Perhaps our parents have something to do with that?
    • barbazoo 3y ago
      When I was a kid, all drugs were illegal, at least to me as a minor. My parents had the alcohol is bad and cigarettes are bad talks with me but even if I wanted to drink and smoke, it was hard to access until I got closer to the age where it was allowed anyway.
      • squigz 3y ago
        When I was a kid, all drugs were illegal to me too. Yet my parents had cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, and weed in the house. Me and my siblings didn't touch them. That has something to do with the law?
        • sickofparadox 3y ago
          Likely not the law of the government, but I'm certain the law of your parents had something to do with it.
          • squigz 3y ago
            That's, uh, sort of my point here :)
    • jvanderbot 3y ago
      Kids will mostly do what they see others do. This makes drugs less difficult to dissuade. It makes phones and screens particularly pernicious. "do as I say, not as I do" is not always good enough. I have kids. They watch movies with us, and the nanny gives them more screen time than I'd like. I don't have to talk to them about drugs because nobody is handing my kids drugs. But screens are everywhere and I use them all the time, sadly.
    • jimbokun 3y ago
      And yet...we don't recommend parents allowing their middle school children to try addictive drugs.
  • htrp 3y ago
    More like 10mn-20mn subjective years of AB testing (horizontally across the population/user pool)
• barbazoo 3y ago
  > No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"? Probably works for some but I imagine it being really hard to do, especially if they're at school. Our brains take a while to mature and I don't see many 5-7 year olds being able to make long term good choices on their own at that point. I think that's too much to ask.
• drivebyhooting 3y ago
  You’re applying adult logic to children who haven’t developed a prefrontal cortex. Child psychology is very different than what you think.
  • babyshake 3y ago
    Even adult psychology is not what we think. We don't really understand the implications of computing untrusted information in our brains every day.
• cjohnson318 3y ago
  Yes and no. If you keep your kid off of these social media sites (a) you're going to fight about it Every. Single. Day. For. Years. and (b) they're going to get on them with burner accounts/devices anyway. Where will they get a burner phone? From any other kid at school that gets a new phone, and wants $20. The whole situation is psychotic. Even without social media there's horror stories from the "local media" of AirDrop and group texts.
  • foobarian 3y ago
    I discovered that my kid's peer group shares screen recordings via imessage chats to get around being offline or running out of time limit on the source apps (youtube, etc.). I kind of like the resourcefulness tbh.
    • squigz 3y ago
      This is another good point that seems to fly under the radar - putting aside the implications for free society for a moment, even if we were to implement legislation regarding the use of social media, rest assured, kids will find a way around it if they want to - much like with drugs.
      • cjohnson318 3y ago
        Yeah, there's no winning. I think there's a happy medium, like Fail Whale Twitter, where you can have social media that doesn't drag you into a short video loop for an hour or more, but that model doesn't seem to be commercially viable.
    • rescbr 3y ago
      Hah! That's ingenious. Back in the middle school days, decades ago, I was running proxies on free PHP hosting services to avoid content restriction on school computers. Learned more from my shenanigans than from the computer lab classes :)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• rpcope1 3y ago
  You're talking about a medium that's been explicitly designed to be addictive and young children, who don't reason in the same way that an adult does. You may as well say to little Timmy "here are your smokes, just remember that this could cause lung cancer one day and consider it before blowing through a pack a day."
• jimbokun 3y ago
  Parent to middle schooler: "OK, honey, this is called cocaine. I'm going to let you try it, but only in a safe and reasonable manner. We'll discuss reasonable limits on how much you can use and when."
  • squigz 3y ago
    This is a sane and reasonable comparison to what I was talking about. Thank you for the constructive addition.
  • jq-r 3y ago
    This is exactly how it went with my ex neighbour. Her dad offered her cigarettes on her 18th birthday to "use responsibly". She's been smoking since that day. She's retired now and a heavy smoker most of her life. I'm not sure how she avoided cancer but I guess she was lucky.
• ineptech 3y ago
  > "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"? It's not so much that people are too dumb to do this or don't understand the danger, it's that doing this well is tedious and time-consuming and expensive. Setting up parental controls and monitoring them is a chore, you have to sign up for a bunch of apps you don't want and read outdated docs and troubleshoot random error messages and crap. Most of the good stuff costs money, all of the shitty stuff is free. Finding educational apps that aren't terrible requires research, whereas the worst garbage imaginable is heavily advertised. So, I'm not saying you're wrong, but that this is a problem with incentives as opposed to a moral failing. I think there's a direct parallel to the rise of highly processed foods. The people 2-3 generations ago understood that junk food was unhealthy, and very few people fed their kids 100% soda and hot pockets, but junk food was so much cheaper and easier that people gradually allowed more and more into their diets, and now here we are with an adult obesity rate 3x that of 1960. > "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" Edit to add, it seems most of your other responders are responding to this bit, which I agree is not realistic (children aren't rational to reliably refrain from something just because you can explain why it's bad) but I can see why you're frustrated that they're zeroing in on that part and not the part I responded to.
  • squigz 3y ago
    > doing this well is tedious and time-consuming and expensive. Doesn't this sum up being a parent in general? :P You raise a fair enough point, though.
  • squigz 3y ago
    > Edit to add, it seems most of your other responders are responding to this bit, which I agree is not realistic (children aren't rational to reliably refrain from something just because you can explain why it's bad) but I can see why you're frustrated that they're zeroing in on that part and not the part I responded to. What's frustrating to me is that people are taking this so literally and not reading into at all. I'm not suggesting parents be like, "Okay Tommy, here's why phones are bad, now here you go!" and never talk about it again. That's utterly absurd, and isn't how anyone should expect a parent to teach a child life skills. It's a constant battle - as you say, tedious, time-consuming, and expensive - to raise a child with good principles. Why is this thread acting as though teaching our children self-control is somehow a different lesson?
• ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"? The capitalist solution is always to move all the responsibility to the most vulnerable members of society. Your food is infected with a novel bacteria resistant to all antibiotics? Should have chosen your food better! Sorry, not sorry, it's you by yourself vs deception of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Also, while you are at it, we made it a crime to photograph the farm, so you will never know the condition animals were raised in! https://sentientmedia.org/ag-gag-laws/ https://sentientmedia.org/ag-gag-laws/ Maybe a common sense solution would criminalise exploitation of children under 10 for profit, but that's too socialist these days.
  • squigz 3y ago
    I'm about as far from a capitalist as one might imagine. But hey, let's let the corporations and lobbyists legislate more of what we can and can't do, instead of relying on our own willpower to do so. Certainly that will show those pesky capitalists!
• seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Are these really the only 2 options you see? No "teach your child about the issues with being on a phone all day" or "set reasonable restrictions on phone usage"? It starts from no to progressively more access while teaching your growing kid to self regulate. There is no way you can treat your 7-17 year old the same when they are getting full access whether you like it or not when they turn 18.