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

Like everything "parenting", I feel like it's a bit more subtle/situational than a simple list.

We have two daughters, the oldest of which is 14. We recently bought her a cheap pay-as-you-go Android phone to take with her when she's out at events and such. She's been great about taking it, but at the moment it's sitting on a shelf in her room with a dead battery and no service plan. She just isn't interested in "having" a phone.

On the other hand, she has an 11" 5G/LTE iPad Pro. Both her mother and grew up with unfettered Internet access from a relatively early age (~13, in 1997) and agree that it was a huge net benefit to us. That's the overall approach we've taken, with one modification: unlike _our_ parents, we're savvy to both the tech and social aspects.

They aren't allowed to have social media accounts tied to their names without them first coming to us and talking about it. They both have YouTube accounts (and post very frequently, with more followers than their parents), but they're under aliases and they don't show their faces. If they really wanted a Facebook account or something - they won't, because that's "for old people", but for the sake of argument - we'd figure out a way to satisfy both of us.

I require that they keep all of their passwords in Bitwarden, and I have access to the vault where they're stored. This serves multiple purposes: security, ease of access across devices, and access for us in an emergency. We let them know that we wouldn't access their accounts without them present except in an emergency, and they trust us to follow through with that.

Instead, "social monitoring" is done when we sit down, about once a week, and let them talk about what's going on in their digital lives.

Finally, we have fairly comprehensive logging set up on all of our devices and access points. I have a list of the top 5k or so "problematic" sites - including, obviously, porn - and a cron job that scans our logs for those hostnames. If something comes up that concerns me, I let my wife know and speak to our kids directly and privately. The theory here is if they're old enough to sit down and talk to their parents about a given piece of content, they're old enough to consume it if they choose to.

We've only felt the need to have those conversations a handful of times, and while sometimes awkward, it has had the effect we intended: they're spending their (prodigious) time online reading, watching mostly instructional YouTube videos, and creating content.

... and yes, before HN points this out, I'm well aware that there is no such thing as a system that cannot be compromised or bypassed. I'm not even trying that hard: the logs are written to a USB drive connected to our home router, and the router's admin password is written right there on a label. If they figure out how to SSH into the router, modify the logs, and cover their tracks... well, I don't think there is much that would make me happier to be honest. I'll take "hacker mentality" over "has never seen a porn video" every day of the week.

If you value convenience over the well-being of your children, you'll have a convenient life and children who are unwell.

Do what you think is best, but don't pretend it's impossible to live well without social media. It's laughable. It deserves snippiness.

I'd say they are "social media", but they aren't the most problematic sort. By default there is little or no interaction with their circle of "real life" friends, so the issues that tend to arise around social media are largely mitigated.

All that's really left is the safety concern, and we mitigate that by requiring that they not expose their real name, their face, or their geographic location at anything more specific than a regional level ("I'm in northern Arkansas").

> why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?

They're lousy parents who give their kids phones, not lousy parents because they give their kids phones.

> IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.

There are also parents who disagree with this ideology and would find this an invasion of their child's privacy. I'd caution against the thinking "we find this valuable and if people don't do it it's because they aren't willing to put as much work in as we do"

I don't have kids but I have been tutoring kids for the last 14 years, since I was basically a kid. I do individual tutoring for mostly high school, and occasionally middle school kids. Some of the have been with me from 7th through 12th grade, and a couple have even asked me to help them prep for finals even after starting college. They end up trusting me with things they wouldn't tell their parents, because I'm still someone they see as an authority figure. Because of cultural reasons, the kids I've tutor think of me and address me as an older brother. I've noticed covid catalyzed the shift to using digital platforms to keep in touch.

I don't have children, but empathize with the feeling of wanting to be protective. It took a lot of effort to make sure some of kids I tutored weren't taken advantage of by people like Andrew Tate. Telling them not to watch didn't help, pointing out the problems with Tate's message and taking time to dissect it did. Doing that also helped them learn how to identify similar manipulation tactics from other creators. It's important to separate the platform from the users.

I think we disagree on the importance of teaching kids how to use these tools. It feels sort similar to countries banning people from accessing AI tools like ChatGPT. The ban won't slow down AI development, those banned countries are simply left behind.