I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

Although I agree with OP, mostly, I probably won't be so strict on my children, I will educate them though, as I do on healthy food. But I can't stop them from getting some candy every now and then as they get more self-sufficient, and I just hope that my guidance will make them eat more than candy past age ~18.

A point of note though, I never really trust these "I have no accounts and then I get a video of my son!" It's the same as that story "I talked about product X and the next time I go online I see an ad!". I hear them so little that I think they can probably be completely explained by coincidence.

As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone when all of their peers do. Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah.

I do wish that more parents (and society in general) would be more sensible about a minimum age for smartphones; it just keeps creeping down. 10/11/12 would be somewhat manageable and it gives parents a chance to help guide their use.

And of course all the popular must have apps already have age limits they absolutely refuse to enforce. TikTok has 13 as the minimum age. WhatsApp (used by every Dutch teenager from 10 onwards) has a minimum age of 16 in the EU…

yep join the r/NoFapMovement time for r/NoTechMovement!

I think the idea of monitoring the network traffic of your children is an overreaction itself. Sure, internet content is a bit more buzzing these days, but older generations who accessed unfiltered content survived as well.

Normalizing being under surveillance for them is a lesson hard to understand to be honest. I don't know your kids, but at some point their technical abilities to circumvent the paternalism is likely to make such mechanisms futile anyway and there just remains a breach of privacy.

I agree that keeping tech out of childrens hands is a bit futile, but the surveillance ambitions of some parents look more unhealthy than the harm any internet content could cause.

I don't have kids yet but it is something that has been discussed about my nieces and nephews. As you say, you don't want your kids to become social pariahs but you also don't want to give them smart phones, in this day and age it looks like the two are intrinsically linked, which is disappointing.

I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.

In saying that, if you outright ban these sites in your house it just means that when it comes time for your kids to be more independent they could possibly have no knowledge of how to healthily use social media and then be worse off than if they had access early.

There is no easy answer here, at the end of the day it will be their decision, all you can do is teach them to navigate the digital world and then be there to help when they make mistakes.