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

Yeah, I have tried it out, and that's why I am confident that 11-year-olds are happily sending each other every sort of bad thing that exists on the internet!

I can tell my own kid, hey it's really inappropriate to send out thing X to a group chat. But I can't really police all the other kids.

I can at least say, hey I saw this stupid rumor. You'd have to be a complete idiot to actually believe that story is true. But, you know, it feels like I am trying to shovel back the tide.

It should worry you. There are dreadful things happening in these spaces, and they are of such sophistication that children, and even many adults cannot fully ascertain.

The problem you describe is a cursed problem. You have so many malign influences being exposed that the only rational approach is to teach them as much as you can early to recognize and appropriately deal with these things.

That is easier said than done because at its core, you effectively have to teach your children how to lie, so they can recognize and discern the sophisticated lies.

There is also an element of biology, we call it the age of reason because there's a point where reason emerges, and prior to that point it isn't possible.

Prior to that age, they shouldn't be exposed. That will require a monumental amount of work because these influences are everywhere. Even in the Family movies (especially Pixar).

I would start following a classical education curricula (Trivium/Quadrivium) which includes philosophy, aristotle-in logic, Method, and reason.

Following that, there should also be education on perceptual blindspots, and its intrinsic link to communication, as well as how distorted reflected appraisal works (and its impacts). These are blindspot biases we all have as humans, and they will need to know and recognize the limits to defend themselves.

Robert Cialdini wrote a book on the levers of Influence. Communications should roughly follow an Intro course that you see in college with particular emphasis on perception, uniquely shared meaning, deceitful or manipulative structures, with guided exposure towards the end, relating to deceitful, misleading, and false narratives.

The basis requirements for torture should also be taught, so they can recognize it when it happens to them. Coercion should be fully understood so they are not helpless when its eventually applied to them. This should also include how you handle people who lie and how to case-build, and employ countermeasures in such areas.

Being capable of retaining rational thought under applied stress at higher amounts than others, will offer them the best chance at survival.

I have children, and I will never allow them to use social media while they are under my care. Once they are grown and independent, they can make their own choices. As a father, my responsibility is to protect them from harm, and I am fully committed to doing so until they reach adulthood. Here's an excerpt from an article titled “Facebook’s War on Free Will” by The Guardian.

> The many Facebook experiments add up. The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analysed to uncover the mother of all revelations, “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about”.

My kid didn't get access to Youtube until they were 12. It's fine otherwise now, but Youtube Shorts is a cesspool and it CANNOT be turned off in any way. There are no parental controls to limit or disable it.

Before that we did try Youtube Kids, but it's creepy AF. There's a ton of "this kid gets to buy EVERYTHING he wants!" -shit in there.

I decided I'd rather pay for _every_ streaming service, give the kid a child account in there and let them watch anything. It kinda worked. Their ability to tolerate the basic screaming jump-cutting Youtuber is close to zero.

I've had chats with them where they explicitly said that "X does interesting videos but they shout all the time so I don't want to watch them".

With Netflix, Disney+ and our local PBS equivalent I can sorta trust that the content is professionally made and even slightly educational.

The age limit for social media over here is 13 at the moment, we'll need to burn that bridge this summer. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and all that will be open after that. I'm not going to encourage that but we'll see what peer pressure does.

My experience from parenting two children to adulthood and being way too lax about devices led me to roughly the following rules for the rest of my kids:

1. Absolutely no phones in bed at any point of the day. Dpublecheck at bedtime that the phone is where it's supposed to be.

2. I vet every app on the phone.

3. Web browser is whitelisted.

4. I vet every contact on signal/whatsapp. No other messaging apps.

5. When they get access to a computer, I let them know that I can know everything they do with it. Also, the computer is stationary in a central place in the house.

When they complain that their friends have more rights, I will lament the unfortunate situation where I cannot dictate the rules of other families.

I'll obviously revise these rules as they grow and I get the feeling that they can handle it. The default mode for parents must always be that they can not.