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.
