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Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#251

Post by iforgot22 »

juliusgeo wrote: post #248
iforgot22 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them. There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.

I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-exami…

Homeschooling is too far for my liking. Kids really need to be around other kids. If anything, my siblings and I needed a bit more of that, because our neighborhood had 0 kids and my parents kept forcing us to hang out with their adult friends. But it was still ok, we still had real enough childhoods.

I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#252

Post by glangdale »

lolinder wrote: post #150
ozim wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gorilla in the room are other f*ng parents. You can prevent as much as you want but then kids go to school nd everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.

The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead because we were 'better'. Other kids did drugs and drank, but we were better than that. Peer pressure didn't have much of an impact on me because I was raised to believe that I was better than 'that' for most values of 'that'. And my parents never had to force m…

I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#253

Post by lolinder »

superfrank wrote: post #243
worik wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Odd! It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them. Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.

Same. I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO. "I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a m…

> "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.

Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school.

The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to.

The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#254

Post by BytesAndGears »

superfrank wrote: post #243
worik wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Odd! It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them. Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.

Same. I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO. "I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a m…

What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but

“I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…”

It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#256

Post by glangdale »

dchichkov wrote: post #203
ozim wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gorilla in the room are other f*ng parents. You can prevent as much as you want but then kids go to school nd everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have and your kids are angry at you because now you are the bad guy.

Another Gorilla is the schools, teachers and state-approved recommendations, that extend their reach even into private schools. Imagine my frustration one day, when I've discovered that my kindergartner has full access to a brand-new, shiny iPad during class. Despite complaints from parents, the teacher refused to reduce iPad usage (or even activate Screen Distance and Screen Time controls on the iPad, or share usage…

100% this. Our kids were required to bring laptops to school for no particularly good reason, then allowed to zombie out on them in the library during lunch and free periods. Infuriating.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#258

Post by nicolas_t »

AlexandrB wrote: post #119
sznio wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your social status as a pre-adult doesn't really matter at all once you join the real world. Trauma stays.

No it doesn't. I was nerdy and "low status" in school. I laugh at most of the silly stuff I did or was done to me in school. I don't get the mentality of holding onto all that stuff forever.

As someone who was bullied in middle school (highlight includes being held down by 2 guys while someone else peed on me), trauma does stay.

I mean, I'm a relatively well balanced individual, I have a job, a family etc... But that doesn't mean that I didn't have to have therapy over it, that I didn't commit self harm and that I didn't experience trauma.

I'd rather my son not be a social outcast and experience that. And I do think that past a certain age, there's a need to conform a bit to society in order to integrate with it even if that means using social media at that age. That'll be with my guidance and strict limits but I don't think total abstinence is a solution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#259

Post by [deleted] »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #51

I've 4 kids, the youngest is 11. The rule in the house is; 1) no social media accounts until 13 and 2) one of your parents will be your 'friend' on that account. This is actually a pretty great expression of "kids keep you young." But, right now is right now and how kids communicate with each other is constantly changing - social media or not. So, if you're not a parent to a tween or teens now - I'd say you have litt…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you prevent the impact of social media on your children?

#260

Post by lacker »

As a parent of an 11-year-old, messaging is the hardest thing to handle. If you allow kids to message their friends, their friends will send all sorts of inappropriate content, exposing them to essentially everything bad on the internet. If you don't allow kids to message their friends, then they will miss out on fun events that all of their friends are doing.

At least at our local public school, when I talk with parents of high schoolers, 100% of them have given up and allowed messaging.

So by 14 I think you really can't "shield them" from internet content. What you can do is fight back against the human desire to waste lots of time, by limiting screen time. I think that's the best we're going to get.

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