I see a lot, and I mean A LOT of people, including several of my friends, using mobile phones or tablets to show their 1-5 years old children animation videos to make them busy and stop whining while adults are doing or minding their own adult business. No wonder that those children became addicted to small screens.
The case for banning children from social media
431–440 of 593 posts
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% agree. Social media is as addictive as drugs but even more damaging with life long effects on that person. A big part of going through teenage years is the development of one's own personality and finding YOUR OWN identity. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be, building real relationships with real people to learn about social contracts, trust, bonds, friendships, mistakes, and most importantly it is…
>but even more damaging with life long effects on that person. I suspect heroin has led to considerably more felony convictions and fatal overdoses than any social media platform.
> I suspect heroin has led
Well, what else are you gonna do when all your "friends" are more beautiful than you, than shoot up and forget about life for a while?
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but even more damaging with life long effects on that person. I suspect heroin has led to considerably more felony convictions and fatal overdoses than any social media platform.
heroin would definitely lead social media in the "fatal overdoses" department...unless you categorize suicide as "fatal overdose".
About twice as many people die from drug overdoses as from suicide in the US. Not all of those ODs are heroin, but surely not all suicides are caused by social media.
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
18.. hell I’m close to 40 and I have trouble self regulating. YouTube needs an option to disable shorts. It’s just not healthy. TikTok I won’t even touch it. It’s virtualized crack.
It's your (our) generation who built all this stuff. We thought it would be "neat".
Millennials blame Boomers for the economy, housing now Gen Z will blame Millennials for inventing social media. :D
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like that’s a hyperbolic take. Outside forces injecting chaos into the internal workings of a family are about as bad as things can get for a growing child. What’s the problem with deferring sexual issues to adulthood when you’re more mature?
What makes you think that a marriage between two people gives them absolute knowledge how to raise a child in an optimal way?
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Re: The case for banning children from social media
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main goal of raising children, after keeping them alive, is teaching them the skills they need to survive and (hopefully) thrive in their world. These skills have changed over time and vary based on environment, society. Today, that means teaching kids how to cope with social media. It is in their world. It’s not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a…
Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.…
> Today that means teaching them how to cope with [nicotine | gambling | hand guns | fentanyl]. It is in their world. It is not going away. As a parent, I can understand the temptation to just want to ban it. I wish I could ban a lot of things I would rather my kids not have to deal with. But parenting just doesn’t work like that. They need to learn to deal with it, and it’s my job to try my best to help them do that.
Well yes. Once your child turns 21, they’ll have legal access to all of these things. A parent is still obligated to educate their children to make good choices, regardless of what the legal age is.
> Actually, we protect children from lots of things that they will need to confront as adults. My baby will need to learn how to safely navigate stairs eventually, but for now, the staircase is gated so she doesn't hurt herself before she's ready.
Fortunately, the government does not ban the usage of stairs by minors in an attempt to “protect the children”.
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered it might be their life's outlook? What do most of these girls have to look forward to after school? A well paying job? Most of them will have crap jobs barely scraping by, and most of them know it. A house? Most will pay absurd rates for an apartment and never build equity. Our school system is pretty trash too, depending on state. I think social media might be a scapegoat, because it's easy to, "…
Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history. Your statement would hold true for boys. But the rates of mental illnesses and suicide are growing faster among the former. So it's probably more complicated that economic success.
There could even be a positive correlation there - more career stress, etc.
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't want your children to become addicted to something, be a good parent and monitor them. It is not the government's or the society's responsibility to babysit your kids. I don't want my freedoms taken away from me (in this case, freedom to anonymously use social media) just because some people don't have the capability or the motivation to parent their kids properly. Also, this "what about the children" th…
Companies will only get better at creating addictive products for children. This represents an ever-increasing burden for parents. Also, there are some times when coordination would result in better outcomes than single disorganized actors. I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.
>Companies will only get better at creating addictive products for children. This represents an ever-increasing burden for parents.
True. Companies who prey upon children and use their lack of experience as a source of income should be punished.
>I talk to parents who say they WOULD prevent their kids from using social media, but it would have negative social impacts on their kids for them to be the only ones without it.
Complete prevention would of course have a negative impact on kids when all their friends are hanging out on social media instead of getting together physically. The "correct parenting" here would be to educate your children about the dangers, always keep communicating with them, limit their endless scrolling, monitor what they share as much as possible, act quick in case of cyber-bullying etc. Social media can be beneficial for children if used correctly, but detrimental to their mental and physical health if left alone to the devices of profit-driven corporations.
The main conflict here is, whether the state should be involved in any of this process. My argument is, as long as it doesn't restrict my personal freedoms, state should do as parents wish because as you said, collective action is more effective than individual action. However, if it would restrict my freedoms in any manner, state must leave it to parents. I shouldn't be punished because some people can't find the time for their kids.
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#439People keep suggesting stuff like that as though it were somehow easy to know who was a child. It isn't. Not if you want to serve the whole world, or even very much of the world. And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous. There are a bunch of sleazy "age verification" companies out there claim…
>And not if you don't want to create a panopticon where everything anybody does is associated with everything else that person does, and nothing is ever, ever anonymous.
I have a strong feeling this will be the future of internet.
Re: The case for banning children from social media
#440We not only need to ban kids from social media because it is effectively creating very short dopamine reward loops that are likely going to make it difficult for them to enact successful long term reward strategies, but we desperately need to figure out a way to make it less tempting to put toddlers in front of a tablet instead of normal human interactions.
I live in a developing nation, and education especially on child rearing is lacking in the extreme. Easily 75 percent of middle class babies, ages 2 and up, are glued to a screen basically at all times in public. Cellphone holders in strollers.
The kid just sits there watching random TikTok videos usually. In these cases, the “attentive” mothers make sure it’s in YouTube kids. But these kids are getting 8 hours a day plus of screen time under age 4.
I’ve seen the first wave of results and it is truly buzzard, 5 year olds that do not act like 5 year old children. They do not interact with other people in any normal manner, jump around with a degree of randomness and apparent purposelessness that is completely uncharacteristic of non neurodivergent children.
This is most definitely creating divergent developmental trajectories. It looks likely to me to create a “lost generation” at a time when humanity can least afford to lose its long term planning capacity. I can only hope the situation is better in other places.
IMHO social media is the new DDT^Pb when it comes to children under 7, and seems to have very bad effects in adolescents as well.
Because the upper class, for the most part have some inkling about developmental psychology and child rearing, and the lowest of the lower class cannot afford phones for babies, I’m concerned that this is going to create a much more deeply stratified society.