One downside of having an unusual childhood -- even if it is by most metrics a good childhood -- is that it might make it much harder for the kids to relate to other kids as they get older.
> “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one.
It's easy for parents to completely misjudge how the child will be affected by being the only one in their class who has to live by different rules. In some ways, this feels more like a sociological experiment the parent is interested in doing, when really, the parent should be setting up the children for success in adulthood.
> For instance, my son cannot participate in any classroom activity that involves a QR code, a fact I’ve had to point out to his teachers. Sometimes it’s hard for my kids to find information about group projects or extracurricular activities when social media is used to communicate with students, as opposed to updating a website or sending an email.
The older you get the wider the range of people you're able/expected to relate to. When you're young, a 1 or 2 year age difference is a big deal. By the time you're middle age, a decade difference makes little difference.
Basically, what you're talking about isn't a long term problem.
If the kids turn out alright then of course it won't be a problem. But that's question-begging. My argument is that parental dogmatism is dangerous. When you set out like "we're right about technology and all other parents are wrong" it's very hard to change your mind later when evidence to the contrary accumulates.
Maybe 2 of out 3 kids will have a happy "digitally minimalist" childhood and the 3rd one will be absolutely miserable. Could easily happen. Kids have their own personalities after all. How will these parents respond? My bet is the unhappy child will get blamed for being unhappy and the happy siblings will be used as proof that the parents are right.
If you don't learn how to build and keep those relationships in childhood and your teenage years, you will have hard time to relate later. Also, there is huge difference between 11 years old and 13 years old. There is no meaningful difference between 40 years old and 45 years old. And as your circle shrink to primary colleagues of the same profession, you end up living in much bigger bubble then kids do.
Lack of social engagement in childhood damages those skills forever. You may learn to get along and answer politely, but learn ing to belong, to know when and how ask for what is your right and when and how step back is massively harder in adulthood.
My son is starting to get the comments. “You don’t play Minecraft?!” is the chorus of park chatter.
But the thing is, we’ve replaced the time he would spend on the iPad with social activities. Minecraft becomes nights at the playground. Amongus becomes fishing at the pier.
And as you would suspect, he has no social problems. He’s constantly socializing. You don’t get good at talking to people by turning your personality into just the right shade of beige or by getting the true neutral human experience. You get good by practice.
You can do both. My nephew is an absolute extrovert and socialises non-stop at school and afternoons in the park, but he looks forward to his 30 minutes to an hour on the PlayStation to decompress.
I'm not a parent so don't have much of a saying on how to educate kids. But I wholeheartedly agree on pushing back against wrong usages of technologies.
My bar for "wrong" is using a private, foreign, unofficial platform like a social network to communicate official stuff. Schools should have or buy access to a custom platform that is concerned only with teacher-student communications, and not with harvesting everybody's personal information.
Some people consider that Instagram is a fine way to convey group projects or activities. But that's because they already got used to using it. How about TikTok then? let's move to a school that requires children to use TikTok or Snapchat because that's where they decided to publish their info! Sounds ridiculous to me, well, because it is. Same for requiring other networks.
My kid went through a phase in Middle School where she believed that in order to fit in she had to make sure her grades were not "too good". So she sabotaged herself for a few months. Once we got wind of what was going on there was family uproar for too long, but eventually we got through to her.
So thenceforth she stuck out and was hard to relate to I suppose all the way through high school. No, our family wasn't a crammer family, and she didn't seem too psychologically damaged then or now, working on a food science PhD (why? asks her overly practical father) at UCD.
Fitting in to the giant mode of the mediocre self damaging but socially favored crowd has costs too.
I didn't have a dumb phone when everyone else did, and when I finally did get one (I think senior year of high school) I didn't have texting. It never really caused me issues.
In adulthood, the only thing I really need the phone for is Duo, and my work offers to provide yubikeys as an alternative. I've just been too lazy to get one. It's also nice to have a crappy camera on hand when I don't have the real camera with me. That's about it.
"Come on" seems like a crazy reaction to me to schools making it mandatory to use services that spy on kids and show them ads. That's actually a huge motivator for me to want to home school my kids. It is completely unacceptable to require kids be exposed to that. It's unacceptable to allow them to be exposed to that while they're in the school's care.
It's a natural reaction, but I believe a losing battle to try to shelter your kids from these things. If you're going to home school you can displace some of it, or delay it long enough that they hopefuly build up some personal resilience, but ultimately this is the world they will venture into.
I don't use Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/any of that (I do still have an old Facebook account), so I can't relate to the idea that they're somehow just part of the life now. They seem completely irrelevant to me as an adult.
When I have checked my Facebook on occasion, it appears to be a ghost town with maybe ~3 people I know that use it. Or maybe Facebook simply does a poor job now of showing you your friends' posts so it only appears to be abandoned at a glance. Hard to tell without putting in a bunch of work to go mine my friends' profiles.
In any case, school business just like any government business should not require agreeing to a company's ToS. Especially not one in the spying/advertising business.
Ideologically I agree about the absurdity of school-mandated spy- and crapware. However, my fierce hatred of advertisements and trackers is merely a personality quirk. A quirk that, although mainstream on this forum, is shared only by a tiny percentage of the population. Should a parent force their eccentricities on a child? Preferably not. Children, once they reach a certain age, are their own people with their own preferences and aspirations. For many people (that includes adults) staying in touch with others through facebook or other social media is what they desire more than anything else. Isolating people like that from their friends and peers is cruel.
I don't find it to be a personality quirk any more than I find healthy eating and regular exercise to be a personality quirk. The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house. Part of my job is to guide my kids toward making wise choices and avoiding obviously poor ones, even if 80% of the population does it. I don't think that requires social isolation; I think that requires placing them in situations where the other 20% are wildly over-represented as peers.
I hope you'll take the time to teach your children to think independently, and when you do you'll discover that as they grow a bit older they'll have different values and draw different conclusions on issues you care about. I think it's fine to be a contrarian and opinionated parent but if you demand that your children share all (or even the majority) of your contrarian beliefs you're doing them a great disservice and you set them up for failure down the line.
The entire point of not accepting surveillance and advertising is to help them develop to be independent, have a strong internal sense of self-worth, and derive happiness from within. The surveillance/ad industry has exactly the opposite goal: make them feel judged at all times, base their self-worth on the perceived opinion of others (including people they've never even met), and have that perceived opinion be that if they buy X they will reacquire their stolen happiness.
The beautiful thing about being a contrarian is you can only win: either they agree with you, so you must've gotten through to them, or they don't, so you must've gotten through to them.
It is funny, because over focus on healthy eating and exercise can be a quirk ... or grow entirely into full on eating disorder. And that one is rather massive fck up.
> The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house.
And then the nutritionist and psychologist will beat into you that there is no such thing as junk food, it is just a food, and drinking coke wont harm you or your kid.
Such a nutritionist or psychologist would be an incompetent fool, of course. Sugary beverages are horrible for you, and are associated with a variety of poor health outcomes (obviously T2D and tooth decay, but also e.g. heart disease and liver disease). If a nutritionist can't identify that a can of literal sugar water is a worse calorie source than e.g. a potato in pretty much all scenarios (perhaps except during the act of running an ultra-marathon), then I can't imagine what use consulting them could possibly have.
You don't have to give a kid an eating disorder to explain that candy for breakfast isn't acceptable, and we don't drink dissolved sugar (except perhaps as an extremely rare treat, like cake). Just set an example of a normal life where we don't do those things. Let them see the results speak for themselves as they observe society, and let them eventually ponder if everyone is wrong about something so obvious, how good could society (including, apparently, credentialed 'experts') possibly be at other judgements it makes?
No, that is standard today. With rising eating disorders, the fear based nutrition advice that simply does not even say the truth is avoided.
A can of coke won't harm you in the slightest.
Especially for teenagers, they would had to eat super massive amount of potatoes, so actually getting calories only from that would be spectacularly bad idea.
Currently nutritionists work really hard to undo damage the sort of things you are saying are causing.
So the standard today is incompetence. An excellent lesson to learn early.
A can of Coke will not harm you in any meaningful way, but people do not have a can of Coke. They have 1+ cans of Coke every day. That absolutely will harm you.
I don't know how you took me to suggest someone eat only potatoes. I said a potato (anything, really) is a better source of calories than a Coke for pretty much all purposes. Pretty much no person anywhere needs an extra 39 g sugar with no nutrients at all in their diet.
Currently, 74% of the US is overweight or obese by BMI, which is likely an under-estimate of excess bodyfat: another 10% or so may have Normal Weight Obesity (i.e. skinnyfat), which is an understudied but increasingly recognized problem. Even without the issue of excess bodyfat, regularly creating large blood sugar spikes like that is not good for you. If nutritionists are working really hard to combat the idea that drinking literal sugar water is inappropriate for anyone to be doing with any regularity, then they are dropping the ball. In fact, you can find plenty of resources for the general public from the CDC about the deleterious effects of sugary beverages[0], and encouragement to reduce consumption of added sugars[1], specifically sugary beverages[2], the leading source of excess sugar in American diets.
Saying that candy is not food is not fear based nutrition. It is saying that candy is not food. We're not "afraid" of sugar or carbs; we just know "Skittles" aren't a food group, and have no purpose in any meal plan. Part of teaching kids how to be healthy is teaching them that we eat a variety of foods which each contribute different necessary nutrients with an appropriate calorie budget for our activity levels so that they understand how to one day develop their own plans. In that context, it ought to be obvious why our diet doesn't include pure sugar.
The competent thing to do is to teach people not to have emotional attachments to food. "This is not good for me (in fact injures me) and serves me no purpose, so I will not eat/drink it, and I will not buy it." That's it. The disorder is getting emotional about it and thinking it's somehow "damaging" to exclude junk food from one's diet.
I did not had it and buying one made massive difference. It made me reachable which made it possible for friends ... to reach me. It turned situation from "I am only listening about half stuff they do because even if they try to reach me they cant" to "I am not actual full member of the group".
Do you have children? One of the things I didn’t appreciate before becoming a parent is just how little my child actually knows about the world around him. There are so many situations where it’s actually neglectful parenting to just let him do what he wants. A really visceral example is that he likes chewing on things he finds around him. As you can imagine there are tons of things he can chew on that will make him really sick, and I can’t always remove him from public places to avoid those things, so I have to prevent him from putting his mouth on those things. How can you be so sure that using smartphones isn’t one of that class of harmful behaviors that a parent is neglectful for not preventing? As another example, teenagers are also wired by hormones to want to become sexually active. But this isn’t always in their best interest.
As a parent you have to make decisions with your child’s best interests at heart even when you know they conflict with the child’s desires. Doing this is not narcissistic it’s just good parenting.
This isn't about toddlers and nobody here has argued that the parent who parents least parents best.
The list of things that are conceivably harmful to a child or teenager is practically infinite. It includes almost all sports, most hobbies, travel, and most food and drink. If you're going to ban everything that might be harmful of out an abundance of caution you will do tremendous harm to your kid. Yes, a smartphone might harm your kid but so might the absence of a smartphone. That's why it's good to look at the actions of other dedicated and thoughtful parents. If they all decide to give their kid a smartphone despite the known downsides it's not neglect, but the result of a thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons. Demanding that a smartphone must be proven safe (impossible) is an absurd standard of evidence you don't apply to other areas of your life.
Having theories about how the world works isn’t narcissistic.
Suspecting drinking from lead pipes was bad would make you look crazy to your contemporaries fifty years ago. Avoiding them would require huge amounts of behavioral change and investigation. But with perfect information very few parents would consciously choose to let their children damage their brains.
When it’s technology, and we’re starting to see the indicators, why is it different?
Or asbestos or lead based paint. Social media is the asbestos tile of the early 21st century. Widespread, beloved by all who use it, and insidiously dangerous.
Allowing your kids in-pocket access to adversarial forms of entertainment, each competing to maximize time on platform, seems like a riskier bet to me. The experiment is forced. We’re all a part of this brave new world.
Most people against device use that I’ve talked to have a distinction between consumption and creation. Writing a blog is a creative activity. Consuming TikTok is not, even if you are a “creator” on the platform. Kids are not responsible enough to care about the difference or think about the long term impacts.
Thankfully learning how to use these tools is easy. It’s made to be. There are teams of people focused on making it as easy to use as possible.
Much like you don’t need to have any experience with computers to become a programmer, you don’t need experience with TikTok to swipe or messenger to text.
But avoiding making these behaviors entrenched from a young age is important. I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes, so does having a phone, social media, etc.
So far the data seems to pan out. Time will tell. But at this point there’s mainly intuition and critical thought. Mine has led me here and yours has led you somewhere else.
I’m not going to judge you for it. I just don’t agree with you.
> I suspect that like starting to drink young had bad average outcomes
That's a good analogy. In my experience, most alcoholics/gamblers/dangerous substance abusers never had parents which taught them how to deal with a given addiction - they just brush off the subject strictly forbidding their kids to do any of them.
That world does still exist though: just don't engage with those platforms. If everyone were on heroin all the time, it doesn't mean you can't exist in the world without doing heroin yourself. You can just... not do it.
My 3 year old daughter picks up my guitar and strums it and makes up a song about not wanting to do bed time. She doesn't need exposure to consumer culture to create; it's innate. In fact she's already got some Wesley Willis vibes going without ever having heard him.
She goes to parks, library story hour, gymnastics, soccer, and pre-school/playgroup. None of it involves Meta/X/TikTok/Google, and all of them have other kids. People still do things in the real world. I see older kids in some of those places too. I suspect that doing things has a natural tendency to select yourself into a social group that does things. Want to not be part of crowd that sits in a room shooting up? Go outside and you'll find your like-minded group.
Obviously she's not going to go through life having never heard any music, but I don't think you'd really need to hear someone else to be able to walk up to a piano, press some keys (perhaps even simultaneously), and think "hey, that sounds nice". It's pretty easy to discover a bunch of chords by accident. Rhythm is even easier to make up your own thing. Whether no one has ever heard it is irrelevant to whether you need to have heard someone else to make it up.
She doesn't need to make an album for you. She can create for her and for us. You and the people in your life can create for you. That's kind of the point of not buying into consumer culture.
Okay, but modern "social" media is designed to do nothing but funnel you into mass consumption, both on that platform and in the sense of pushing products on you to buy (their actual goal). They are not centered around enabling you to share with your friends, family, and community. They're an entirely vacuous experience, and you don't need them (indeed, you'd probably benefit from not interacting with them) to be creative or social.
> “Conformity is overrated,” I tell them jokingly, but that is small consolation when you are the only kid going into tenth grade without a smartphone. My oldest son wants a phone badly because everyone else has one, but that’s not a compelling enough reason to buy him one.
It's easy for parents to completely misjudge how the child will be affected by being the only one in their class who has to live by different rules. In some ways, this feels more like a sociological experiment the parent is interested in doing, when really, the parent should be setting up the children for success in adulthood.
> For instance, my son cannot participate in any classroom activity that involves a QR code, a fact I’ve had to point out to his teachers. Sometimes it’s hard for my kids to find information about group projects or extracurricular activities when social media is used to communicate with students, as opposed to updating a website or sending an email.
Come on.