141–150 of 278 posts
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It’s not the centerpiece if you are doing your job as a parent. > Extreme rejection and rebellion is a logical outcome from that. If that’s the result then you are failing as a parent.
I suspect you may be in for a rude awakening in your relationship with your kids, and probably your kids are doing things behind your back.
There was something very off before the pandemic. Girls were already diverging sharply from the historical norm and from boys over the last few years: https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme... "Sex- and Age-specific Increases in Suicide Attempts by Self-Poisoning in the United States among Youth and Young Adults from 2000 to 2018". It's disproportionately a specific method (poisoning) and it is…
Instagram kills, from Coddling: > U.S. hospitals going back to 2001 and were able to estimate self-harm rates for the entire country. They found that the rate for boys held steady at roughly 200 per hundred thousand boys in the age range of fifteen to nineteen. The rate for girls in that age range was much higher, but had also been relatively steady from 2001 to 2009, at around 420 per hundred thousand girls. Beginni…
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Because you're not a parent, here's a tip: kids are tougher than you give them credit for and they're tougher than they understand. Your responsibility as a parent is to figure out how to toughen them up without crushing their self-esteem. Instagram is not an essential part of any of this. If the worst thing your kid can say about you when they hit adulthood is "daddy didn't let me on Instagram," then you did a pheno…
You're missing the point. It's not "Dad didn't let me on Instagram". It's "Dad didn't let me have shared experiences to build relationships with my peers."
If you want children to have valid and engaging social experiences then encourage them to do so without a screen.
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I am not disagreeing but I am interested to know which specific factors make it so different from things in the past. I remember growing up and the boogeyman was sexualized videos on MTV and violent video games. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t quite believe it now. Not to say I don’t believe social media has negative impacts but this is a pretty sharp rise. It also coincided with the post-2009 financial crisis.…
I think the difference is that the MTV sexuality scare was predicated on the belief that sexualized videos would normalize sexualization in youth with negative consequences, whereas in social media applications create the incentive structures for that behavior to thrive. I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as w…
There's a reason that the execs at most of those social media companies don't let their kids use their own product. Something we've seen from tobacco execs in the past.
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When it comes to parenting, I think the soonest you can healthily get your children to functioning with the independence and maturity of an adult (or at least the upper end of their age group), the better. And by contrast, the further you hold them back, so much the worse. What you're describing sounds like it would hold back your child's social development. I wouldn't recommend it.
Freeing children from nonsense like drugs and social media isn’t holding them back. My children’s social development occurs in the real world where they participate in sports and educational activities and spend time with friends offline. Social media isn’t real socializing.
But surveilling on them will. You're using your own active involvement as a crutch to compensate for the fact that you can't leave them to their own devices and know they'll do the right thing.
But how can they do that if you don't teach them and you don't give them the right chance to show they can do it? You're not teaching them to independently use the technology responsibly (or not at all), but rather you're forcing a behavior into place.
It's a very short-term solution that will backfire when they're put out there on their own and you're not there to push them in the right direction. Sooner or later they'll need to figure out how to do things independently. Maybe some active handling is okay for a while, but eventually, you've got to take off the training wheels, no?
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The Clean Air Act provided a legal framework to fix air pollution. We need a similar approach to fix mind pollution. I don’t think this is impossible because Zuckerberg has managed to piss off apparently everyone across the political spectrum. If it was someone like Steve Jobs I would say the problem would be much harder.
I see regulation as a last resort. Bigger government is rarely the answer. Social media is certainly exacerbating the mental health crisis, but I believe the smarter play is to better prepare our children for social dynamics, healthy communication, and emotional intelligence. I prefer to improve the people than to restrict their freedoms.
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Bullying may not have a gender but in the aggregate it's different between boys and girls. Note the word "aggregate". There are invariably anecdotes the contradict the aggregate view but the point is that it's not an absolute, just an aggregate. There's lots of research on this topic. You see the ripples of this well into adulthood. You see it as the expectations placed on girls and women where they're held to a high…
> at least until male bullying graduates into violence My experience is that it mostly starts there. Most of male "bullying" is establishing physical dominance. It's almost all intimidation, physical threats, pushing/shoving, fighting. The psychological, gossipy, demeaning sort of bullying is more from the females.
There was something very off before the pandemic. Girls were already diverging sharply from the historical norm and from boys over the last few years: https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme... "Sex- and Age-specific Increases in Suicide Attempts by Self-Poisoning in the United States among Youth and Young Adults from 2000 to 2018". It's disproportionately a specific method (poisoning) and it is…
Those graphs only go back to 2000. Do we have older data?
And since someone may well ask, the enormous difference by sex in those two charts is because the first chart I linked is hospitalizations related to self-poisoning. The above CDC chart is completed suicides. Girls tend to choose techniques that are generally less fatal, like poisoning. Boys tend to hang or shoot themselves, while the latter of those is very rare with girls. It's rather fascinating, and disturbing, how intensely localized these things can be, and how they're driven by social factors and what's culturally familiar.
I have a theory I'd propose: The biggest cause of teen suicide is essentially feeling rejected in some way by your peers: being bullied, a breakup, "mean girl" switches from former friends, etc. When schools closed, the immediate pressure of any of these negative social interactions went to the background (or at least simmered on social media). When schools reopened, kids tried to figure out where they fit back in th…
or a result of kids figuring out where they fit in and not liking it
I have a theory I'd propose: The biggest cause of teen suicide is essentially feeling rejected in some way by your peers: being bullied, a breakup, "mean girl" switches from former friends, etc. When schools closed, the immediate pressure of any of these negative social interactions went to the background (or at least simmered on social media). When schools reopened, kids tried to figure out where they fit back in th…
Anecdotally: I was bullied a lot in school. When I became avoidant and just stayed at home, I was a lot happier because I didn't have those stressors.
I spent most of my time in front of TV and PC until I was 17.
The only thing that changed was getting Internet on the PC when I was 15. So, I could finally talk with people that had something in common with me.
