291–300 of 405 posts
They have never had unmonitored access to the internet. Now that they're older, the 18yo daughter has an older iPhone she only uses for comms and directions. They have also not ever had access to drugs, alcohol, or modern cinematic fiction, because that would have similarly negative effects on their development as compassionate human beings. They have also not hung out with children raised in this compassionless medi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder what the dumb hammer of a blanket school ban is going to do. A bunch of states are trying that.
People are incredible inquisitive and intelligent about finding ways around bans. Kids are this, intensified. They literally have nothing but time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing. Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from gett…
The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.
Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.
You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.
There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.
Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.
And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'd say you have little to actually worry about as the landscape will be completely different in a decade. Could be a lot worse though. Imagine if VR/AR does take off and your social media feed is in your eyes 24/7 rather than just when you take out your phone.
VR/AR won't take off. It'll get better, if only in that our moral panic about it will evaporate as it did for comic books and video games. Kids prefer being IRL with other kids w/ or w/o screens.
I don't think this is a good place to go in with hard and fast rules. Every kid is different, everything change. What your kid wants and needs may be different from everyone else. Having said that, my broad rule is to keep my kid from any social media where their peers rank them and give feedback. No FB, no Instagram, they can't host their own youtube channel, etc. That is where self-esteem goes to die. I don't think…
I feel like a YouTube channel is different. They might learn to create stuff and be self directed
They have never had unmonitored access to the internet. Now that they're older, the 18yo daughter has an older iPhone she only uses for comms and directions. They have also not ever had access to drugs, alcohol, or modern cinematic fiction, because that would have similarly negative effects on their development as compassionate human beings. They have also not hung out with children raised in this compassionless medi…
What do you mean by modern cinematic fiction?
We watch some older movies, occasionally, but no TV, except for the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 80's and 90's.
They haven't been inundated with adult shows with their sexy content/jokes and/or violence and bad folks of various degrees. They have gotten the flavor of the kinds of bad people can be from the Sherlock Holmes bad guys and women. They don't need Hannibal Lecter or his ilk and those kinds of movies that I grew up with.
Our daughter works on her crafts and our son on his chess. And we watch European football (soccer) highlights, where they get plenty of over-acting from those guys ;-) We also watch some select YouTube videos from time-to-time.
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 par…
Very easy to set up and you can then turn off general purpose internet without ostracizing them from their friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bruh we have a decade of Research on this. Go type some words in to Google Scholar.
The closest thing I can find is in the floods cause rain sense, so please post the links To put this in perspective, people said the same moral panic about tv and that has also been rigorously proven false yet disagreed with by laymen.
Social media reel scrolling creates a "potato chip" kind of flow state... it seems to satisfy you in the moment, but even after you've consumed more than you thought you would, you're still unsatisfied. The introduction of a new medium is not novel, but the magnitude of the effect is.
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…
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 par…
We have an iMessages WiFi AP that only allows iMessage and FaceTime. Very easy to set up and you can then turn off general purpose internet without ostracizing them from their friends.