Parent of a 21 and 18 year old so I’m somewhat familiar about how to do parenting, thanks.
Yes, “no” is a tool that more parents can and should reach for. But if you’ve got any experience at all of kids you’ll know it’s really not as straight forward as this. The more responsibility you can push off to others, such as government or schools, the easier this is.
We brought ours up with pretty strong guidelines and lots of “no” but we’re fortunate in having some time and some money and some knowledge about how to block stuff on the network and so on - lots of parents aren’t as lucky. They need all the help they can get.
Describe three hypotheticals to me of what you think will happen in the following circumstances:
* Kid who is told "no" by his parents
* Kid who is told "yes" by his parents
* Kid who "can't" sign up for social media because it's illegal to do so at their age, who then signs up for it when it becomes legal.
I would really like to see what you believe the outcomes of these three scenarios would be, because I doubt any of them are truly catastrophic, considering we are, at best, merely delaying the onset of social media use by the kid by just 2-3 years.
Read literally anything about brain elasticity and then come back and tell me those “just” 2—3 years are unimportant. These are key, critical years for development. Pretty much all the studies are saying it’s fucking us, and particularly our kids.
Personally I want to do something about this, and IMO every move in the direction that helps even in a small way is a good one.
Yes, “no” is a tool that more parents can and should reach for. But if you’ve got any experience at all of kids you’ll know it’s really not as straight forward as this. The more responsibility you can push off to others, such as government or schools, the easier this is.
We brought ours up with pretty strong guidelines and lots of “no” but we’re fortunate in having some time and some money and some knowledge about how to block stuff on the network and so on - lots of parents aren’t as lucky. They need all the help they can get.