Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

I assume lucky for a moment.

The problem is less that conversations are more delayed or ad-hoc but more that they can potentially miss out on "group events". And that is where the problem starts. Because they also can't join in on conversations about that event, etc. This means while the rest of the group will frequently have situations where they emotionally bond you get are not included and in turn get subtle unintended socially isolated.

If you are a socially very adapted child you can probably compensate this just fine.

If you have other more important friend groups it probably also doesn't matter too much.

If there is a group of people (not just a small minority) in the same situation as you in the same social circle it also probably is fine.

but if not it really can hurt, and you likely only notice how damaging it was for your social life after the damage is already done and hard to recover even if you now convince your parents to give your more leeway

and that's under the assumption the social group in question is "nice" but you e.g. can't choose the people you go to school with and a not so nice social group can use this to intentionally exclude it or use it as a starting point for bullying which often is only addressed when it has gone out of hand to a point where a parent or teacher stepping in can't fix anything anymore

and sure above's arguments often matter much more for e.g. multiplayer computer games then for "having a phone", through not having a phone also means e.g. not having a camera and not being able to make and share group photos with your social group

instead of denying access to a phone, social media, etc. it's better to control it in a careful and reasonable way. E.g. don't forbid the playing of idk. Fortnight, but explain the problems with it and maybe limit the hours and similar a child can spend, but allow the child to decide when to spend them and allow some degree of saving up hours etc. Similar for social media, etc.

Same applies for going out etc. as far as I can tell it's best for you child to allows it a wide leeway just not unlimited and properly educate them about dangers.

EDIT: deleted the last paragraph it was off topic

I am not particularly confident what such rules should look like — I don't think there's an easy equivalent to drunk driving, but perhaps "smoking in a confined public area" might be close to "trolling on forums that people need to use to get normal life activities done"?

But they are their own thing, and need to be treated appropriately.

Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts? Hacker news?

If we can figure this out then we can have a productive talk about kids and phones and pros and cons. Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media? Can kids call and text? Can they access Wikipedia? Can they play Minecraft? Can they take photos? Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.

Whilst I do agree that it's a failure to parent to a large extent, locking things behind restrictions can also make people want it more without them understanding why they're being restricted from having something that clearly makes a lot of people happy.

I go back to my teenage self, and if instead of treating me like an idiot, people explained the pros and cons to it, and helped me to understand it, I might just not want it for myself. In the same way that I had teen pregnancy and accidental overdoses explained to me, I understood the risk-to-reward ratio and why people were concerned enough to try and educate about it.

FWIW, whilst I don't take drugs, I do believe in legalizing them because punishing users makes precious little sense instead of helping them kick the addiction and get their life on track. However, legalizing of drugs equally doesn't mean I think people should seek them out, but those who are going to take them are probably going to take them anyway, and that should be something we can deal with in an appropriate and compassionate manner.