My kid is almost 12, iPad only. I do worry about her overall time but most of her time is spent in this huge group chat with all her friends on Discord. We had landlines pre-voicemail when I was growing up and our chat time was limited by that. Her grades are good, room stays clean, and she’s in two extracurricular activities. 4 hours of chatting with her friends is ok by me, it’s at least social interaction, not spending hours sucked into YT or TikTok algorithms. She also has kids messenger. Nothing else.
I guess the one thing that could be better is actually seeing her friends, but that depends a lot on where you live. Being French, all my friends lived within 10 minutes walking distance so we would see each other basically every single day after school ! I think that was a lot better than being on discord, I wish everyone had the opportunity to do that too. It was a lot of fun !
( Also, we played video games like constantly 😆 so I wouldn’t be shocked if our screen time went over 4 hours quite regularly, but at least everyone was in the same room and we also could go play in the garden and stuff. Walkable cities are real, and they’re real awesome, having always lived in one myself. )
We need better urbanism for the kid’s sake
Honestly, walking to and back from primary school with my friends was my favorite part of the day. It’s sad to know it’s such a rare experience.
That’s the problem that everyone shouting “parents need to parent better” here is ignoring.
If you cut off access to the group chat, her friends are not going to call her daily on your landline (that maybe you don’t have) to exchange gossips. What will happen is that she’ll be out of the loop, isolated from the group. When they’re planning an afternoon out they might forget to tell her.
You can’t make your kids live in a 90’s bubble, because when we were kids in the 90’s we had friends living like us. Cut off your kid from messenging and you cut them from their friends and isolate to them from their age class.
That’s absolutely not good for them, and it’s not good parenting.
(Not talking about you comment parent BTW, your parenting is fine, I’m just responding to your comment to address all those saying it’s just parents’ fault)
Good idea now do the same for adults
Parent your kids instead of constantly demanding the government do something. Obviously it’s hard, two parents working/single parent working full-time, everything is expensive, shit sucks. But you also signed up to have kids. At least try to do them a solid and raise them well, and stop asking the already too large government to try to come up with some more shit.
Just to remind ya’ll we had this moral panic over TV, Music even Books. Is “social media” bad? Yeah, it’s bad for everyone. Should kids be on social media? Probably not. Using a phone doesn’t melt your brain it’s what you do on it. I think it should be obvious playing for example Minecraft on your phone is a much different form of interaction than watching TikTok is. We need to ignore these people lumping all forms of phone use together as that’s objectively stupid.
This is true, but remember that this time there is data showing a significant rise in mental health issues among children and teenagers. That didn’t happen with TV, music or books.
It is too easy to blame the mental health decline on smartphones and social media though. We should look at the bigger underlying structural problems that are squeezing joy, dreams and hope for the future from our youngest.
So as a recent child depression/mental health issues are so much more common because the world we were born into is very obviously getting worse. As a little Elementary schooler we actually had like snow. Like snow days each year were expected. I remember playing outside in the snow, coming inside to some nice hot chocolate and grilled cheese. Do I even need to tell you how it’s changed? The snow we do get is more extreme (power goes out) and for shorter periods of time. This year I believe we got about a week of snow you could reasonably play in, however you wouldn’t want to do that cause everyones power was out or it was a fuckn blizzard.
We’ve got nowhere to go hangout. Malls are closing (not that you could walk to em) parks are okay but you STILL cannot walk to my neighborhoods closest park cause A: there literally isn’t sidewalks the whole way and B: you’d have to cross two busy roads. Basically in short the world we were born into wasn’t designed with us in mind, instead it was designed for the car. Course that brings up the fact that we aren’t getting drivers licenses as often as earlier generations. We can get deep into it but frankly I don’t care this comment is already too long. Instead I’ll just tell you my personal experience and choice to not get a license. It doesn’t provide me any meaningful benefits. I’d lived life up till 16 needing to be chauffeured around by my parents or a friend’s parents to go anywhere which like all kids was something I hated as I knew I was a burden. So, as you’d expect the internet became out meeting place. It avoided the burden of being chauffeured around. Once I was finally able to drive well, where would I even go? A friend’s house perhaps but well, we can just join a voice call and do it like that.
For all we know, it’s because of the micro plastics inside us.
Covid has already been proven to be a contributor as well: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16966
So long as our collective societies refuse to provide adequate care and civil priority for our kids, this will be a moral panic as serious as Satan in rock-and-roll. And we should make sure anyone who takes this seriously never lives it down, like the ones who insisted Marilyn Manson caused the Columnine shootings.
We still have parental advisory labels as a memorial to scared politicians and their naïve followers.
We also still have children going hungry at like 20% in the US. I call shenanigans.
Parents, do better ffs
Jonathan Haidt
Lmao, people are still taking this grifter seriously? Dude writes a book crying about trigger warnings, safe spaces, and statues of slavers being torn down and somehow I’m supposed to believe that actually he’s right this time?
It’s a pity I have a conscience because telling people what they want to hear seems to be lucrative.
I knew I was right not to trust him. Think hard about why a clown like him wants to restrict Kid’s access to information
Jonathan Haidt
And his theory of morality seems to be just an elaborate justification for how conservative viewpoints are equally valid (or even more valid, because it claims that conservatives care about all foundations equally, rather than some of them), or a long-winded “very fine people, on both sides”.
And the additional foundations that conservatives care about are all shitty reasons to support something (loyalty, authority, sanctity).
Yes… and “The Economist” is a red flag in itself.
