5 ms·

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

by gizmo 2y ago

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. Come on.

lupusreal 2y ago
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.
- gizmo 2y ago
  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.
- watwut 2y ago
  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.
dnpp123 2y ago
Came here to say this, would not surprise me to have the children post on r/raisedbynarcissists as soon as they turn 18.
- nostrebored 2y ago
  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?
  - throwaway173738 2y ago
    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.
  - dnpp123 2y ago
    They are not preventing their kids from drinking from lead pipes, they are preventing their kids from drinking at all. Using your kids as a social experiment to sell your blog posts while preventing them to access any online content seems quite narcissistic to me.
    - nostrebored 2y ago
      That’s a matter of perspective. 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.
downut 2y ago
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.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I know a doctor that didnt want their kids to do too well in school because they might stand out. I was flabbergasted
j1elo 2y ago
> Come on. 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.
ndriscoll 2y ago
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.
- watwut 2y ago
  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". It sux
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  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.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    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.
nostrebored 2y ago
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.
- pajamasam 2y ago
  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.
- AlexeyBelov 2y ago
  How old is he? Is he socializing with children his own age who are not outcasts themselves?

by gizmo 2y ago

lupusreal 2y ago

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.

gizmo 2y ago
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.
watwut 2y ago
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.

dnpp123 2y ago

Came here to say this, would not surprise me to have the children post on r/raisedbynarcissists as soon as they turn 18.

nostrebored 2y ago
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?
- throwaway173738 2y ago
  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.
- dnpp123 2y ago
  They are not preventing their kids from drinking from lead pipes, they are preventing their kids from drinking at all. Using your kids as a social experiment to sell your blog posts while preventing them to access any online content seems quite narcissistic to me.
  - nostrebored 2y ago
    That’s a matter of perspective. 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.

downut 2y ago

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.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
I know a doctor that didnt want their kids to do too well in school because they might stand out. I was flabbergasted

j1elo 2y ago

> Come on. 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.

ndriscoll 2y ago

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.

watwut 2y ago
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". It sux
skeeter2020 2y ago
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.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  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.

nostrebored 2y ago

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.

pajamasam 2y ago
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.
AlexeyBelov 2y ago
How old is he? Is he socializing with children his own age who are not outcasts themselves?