[reayn]

While I agree with the sentiment that a determined kid would go to just about any length to get something, even if that something is bad for him, I will have to give a hard "no" to what you said afterwards. Pointlessly denying a child what he deems to be a necessity in his modern life without giving valid reasoning is a terrible idea and will just make the kid despise his parents.

A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings, and we, despite our age and frequent exposure to such things, naturally gravitate away from obsession. And this isn't just a niche case, there are many people, even in my generation, who are waking up to the reality and behaving in a similar manner, although it's hard to get that fact out there with all the stigma surrounding basically any teenager nowadays.

And saying that this strategy "doesn't work" or is "too hard" is usually just cope for parents with poor skills in my experience.

>Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to.

I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?

[LeifCarrotson]

I believe you should give valid reasoning, and also deny the harmful obsession.

Some stimulants are too addictive to trust a young child to mindfully avoid.

The people working in the social media and entertainment industries are extremely skilled at their jobs of increasing user engagement, they have huge budgets with which to accomplish that goal and little regulatory oversight.

People have a finite ability to resist obsession.

Sugar is tasty, it gives a surge of dopamine when you consume it, and fruits use that property to get animals like us to eat them so they can reproduce. But even kids can resist that with a little education and maybe a stomachache after Halloween.

Heroin is similarly addictive, in the way that a butter knife and similarly a hand grenade are dangerous to a small child.

These products are meticulously engineered to be maximally addictive and obsessive. Human nature is not necessarily up to the task of resisting them.

[Wowfunhappy]

> But even kids can resist that with a little education

Actually—are we sure about that?

It seems like an awful lot of adults die each year basically because they couldn’t stop themselves from eating too many sugary foods.

[LeifCarrotson]

No, I'm not. You're correct that fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves on it to fatal levels. At the very least, it has not historically been sufficiently available to cause people to succumb to heart disease or diabetes before, on average, they had >2 children per couple: Humanity has not yet gone extinct.

Whether Nestle's next concoction will be able to do that, composed of eye-catching, almost fluorescent colored dyes, unimaginably sweet high-fructose corn syrup, surreptitiously enhanced by most of your daily recommended dose of salt, tempered by delightfully tangy citric acid, all carried in a smooth, bouncy xanthan/guar gum matrix, no one knows yet. I'm pessimistic regardless of the engineering behind the treat: it seems likely that a sufficient number of people will always be able to make it through childbearing age before succumbing to diet-based problems, if that ever ceases to be the case, then the dwindling population will soon be unable to keep the global industries its manufacturing requires in operation.

[ineedasername]

fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves

The problems isn't just which foods are addictive, it's the economics of food costs too:

Fruits are expensive relative to much worse options. Fruits mostly are not very calorie dense, so you could gorge yourself completely on strawberries, eating an entire container in a sitting and paying (near me) $4 for it @ ~150 calories.

Or you could pay $2.59 for a 3-pack of microwave "movie theatre butter" popcorn for an effective price of $0.86 and consume around ~400 calories.

Calorie-dense junk foods are simply much cheaper to begin with. If you're on a budget and love, equally, strawberries & popcorn and want a few snacks for the week, you can spend $12 for 3lb of strawberries or $2.59 for the popcorn.

Or compare the cost of a 3-liter bottle of soda (about $1.10, or 1 penny/ounce) to the cost of 100% pure apple juice, which is about 3x the price per ounce. Yes both are sugar heavy, but the carbohydrates in pure juice aren't as bad and juice at least has other nutrients, and is sometimes fortified with more. enact a course-correction, it is always more expensive to

(There is at least one partial exception to the fruit issue: bananas. Compared to other fruits, they are massively cheaper on a price-per-calorie basis. But you can't live on bananas alone.)

[jokethrowaway]

Fruit (and no sugar added juice) consumption can make a difference in someone's diet.

I've seen people getting fat just by eating too much fruit because "fruit is healthy, it's not candy" and not having limits.

It's a infinitesimally small problem compared to processed sugar, though, so I completely agree with your point.

[bradford]

> "teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings"

Perhaps your situation is far from universal, and you are fallacious in assuming that it will work broadly?

I remember being younger, before kids, and I thought "ah, if my children ever misbehave, I'll just logically explain why they should behave differently". It was naïve of me then to assume this would work. I was biased by my own experiences.

It didn't occur to me how irrational any individual might be, and the situation is worse now, with corporations better adept at exploiting that irrationality as part of their business model.

[Prestoon]

I'm sure that works for a certain demographic, but on the other hand for a lot of kids after a certain point the advice provided by the parent falls on deaf ears. They have to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of them before they ever truly learn from them. You're not dealing with a rational adult, for many of them I'm sure it's more or less "there goes mom, lecturing me again." and at this period in their lives they're just about to begin their ascent into puberty, one of the most transformative periods that involves a lot of rebellion and a lot of risky behavior. Kids need to see that there's consequences to their actions and if their parents can provide that in a controlled environment, I don't think its poor skills.

I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the expectation for not only what they might run into out there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should combine the two approaches.

[ashtonkem]

> They have to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of them before they ever truly learn from them.

This seems to be a good strategy for things with obvious and immediate consequences. Eat too much ice cream, feel sick, etc. It seems like social media seems to have a much more slow burning, pernicious impact on your quality of life. Adults struggle to accurately diagnose this, expecting a child to do so seems unwise.

[mixmastamyk]

Also, "the internet never forgets."

[grvdrm]

>I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the expectation for not only what they might run into out there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should combine the two approaches.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. Well said.

I think you see this in kids of almost any age. Saying no can backfire. I do my best with my own kids to explain why I'm allowing or disallowing something, and find it works better than hard and fast restrictions. My hope is to translate this frequent conversation into the same conversation when they're older, opinionated, and rebellious. It will not work perfectly, but I think that a lifetime of deliver no answers won't work in my favor.

[reayn]

Yes, this, 100% agreed.

Having the kids learn on their own and experience things (and their consequences) firsthand is the right way to do things, I didn't get that far in my comment but yours sums it up fantastically.

The parent comments' take of just brainlessly shielding them from everything is the absolute worst thing you can do in such a scenario.

[jtc331]

It seems clear you must not believe social media is as harmful to kids as the commenter you’re responding to does. If so, disallowing it (even when the kid desperately wants it) wouldn’t seem excessive.

By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.

[reayn]

Trust me as a teenager who has seen the effect of social media on dozens of his peers and even close friends I can assure you I know far more than both you and the parent comment how dangerous it is for us, but I'm also aware of the possibility of using it and the internet as a whole in a responsible manner as opposed to completely abstaining from it.

>By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.

??

Vodka, or any hard alchohol in general is far harder to get your hands on than social media and has immediate, physical consequences relatively soon after consumption, it's a terrible comparison in this case.

[sorenn111]

Social media has immediate, physical (dopamine levels while presenting a mental phenomenon are also a physical reality) consequences immediately upon consumption. There are no great comparisons to social media because of its novelty, but social media cannot be shielded from comparisons to all vices.

[Cederfjard]

> I can assure you I know far more than both you and the parent comment how dangerous it is

Where does the confidence to make such an assertion come from? Simply by virtue of being a teenager yourself?

[burnished]

Don't you remember being that age? Even without ascribing personal traits like arrogance, its just hard to have had enough experience to understand the potential depths of your ignorance.

[silisili]

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, attributed to Twain but surely not -

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

[jtc331]

Calling it a terrible comparison to avoid the obvious point by analogy is effectively just a way to avoid the discussion.

If you want to engage seriously with it feel free to comment with that.

[midev]

They explained why they felt it was a bad comparison. Why did you ignore that part?

If an analogy is bad, it's bad. The parent explained why they felt it was bad. If you want to "engage seriously", you should address why their points about the analogy are wrong.

[mixmastamyk]

It may not be obvious, but some of the folks most negatively affected by social media are the older set.

[tzamora]

Over stimulation is the problem. You think you can drink one beer or two, but at the end you can't control the need to drink a third more. You know that you can only have one or two cigarrete a day but at the end you can't. Sometimes handling addiction is not about reasoning. And is even worse if you are a kid which don't have the maturity to understand addiction. I think the same about the parent post. Teach them about addiction, explain to them "you see this phone? You will be addicted by it, so until you are an adult I will protect you from this."

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I agree.

It is interesting to speculate of what will be the end result in terms of learned behaviors. I was born without computers near me so I and I became obsessed with them as I was starting teenage years. Because of this, I can handle excessive boredom and I can find something amusing for myself without relying on someone force feeding me content they deem appropriate for me. I am not sure future adults will be able to sit still without a screen.

To be fair, my parents were about as worried as I am today, but they still purchased Pentium 120, which I promptly OC'ed and let me and my siblings to go nuts for a while until we we overboard ( I forgot the details now, but dad took PC to his shop after that incident and they couldn't just password protect it, because by then we learned how to remove password in BIOS and rely on 'keys pressed marked' trick to guess it ). It is not that different now. The face of it changed though.

Point is.. kids are kids. They don't understand addiction. Best you can do is to attempt to explain it. Even knowing that, I am still planning to severely limit phone use.

[ars]

> A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance.

That can work - until they fall in with a bad friend, once that happens they lose their ability to self regulate (the bad friend does it for them instead), and the parent must do it for them.

So as long as you are lucky enough that you kids never fall in with the wrong group you will have success.

[analognoise]

"The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online"

I know we're big on the tech bubble, but this is not only not the case, but we as parents should make it actively not the case. There's grass - touch it.

It turns out "online" is mostly a bunch of garbage - useless scrolling and dopamine hits from nothing. We need to turn it off. It's worse for us than smoking. I'd argue it was worse than leaded gasoline, and while we used it for a while, we finally got proper and banned it. Hopefully all "social media" gets that treatment, one day.

[eddiewithzato]

With hindsight today, the internet was indeed a mistake. Any good it did is compounded by so much bad. Honestly the advent of the iPhone/smartphones really accelerated this toxic nature. Facebook/twitter/instagram/etc are probably the biggest drivers of human misery today.

[eddiewithzato]

> A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance.

This only works for those kids who were not already exposed to social media addiction on their brain. So for everyone else, they do need to deal with the tantrums from removing their addiction.

> I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?

Which is a really bad thing, they will be missing out on social development from interacting with their peers in real life.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

"I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time? "

I don't know about others and I can't speak for the parent post, but I am planning home schooling, which will be harder, but I think the removal of 'constantly online' feature will be well worth it.

[minusf]

i was computer obsessed as a kid and my parents could do little about it, though hard they tried. i did all the chores they came up with in exchange for hours on front of a 286 with a monochromo crt. but i had to leave it in the room, so i survived it.

i shudder to think how my life would look like if there were smartphones back then.

no reasoning is strong enough with this kind of brain candy.

i also shudder how i will proceed when my kids are "phone age". this planet is doomed.

[croutonwagon]

even older...kids struggle to understand reasoning sometimes. It happens with our children and frankly, we provide them with a LOT less tech/crutches than most parents. We always limited TV/tech time and encouraged them to find other sources of entertainment.

Take example this weekend. We went on a family trip to a theme park. Got home really late (for them) and they were exhausted. The younger we carried to bed.

The next morning we didnt immediately make my youngest take a bath to wash off the residual sunscreen etc. Rather we did our morning routine. Morning got away from us and we see by about 9:30 hes playing in the play room (boy loves building things with blocks, legos, whatever he can ) but is itching like crazy. We see a splotches developing.

"Hey son, lets go take a shower, then you can get back to playing"

"No i want to play"

"You are really itching (and whining about it), lets wash off everything from yesterday and you can get right back to it"

"no i want to play"

And a standoff ensued. In the end he complied and I had to put my foot down, and he cried most of the time. We tried to explain. Calmly tried to reason and get him to calm down.

Eventually during the shower I had to raise my voice, threaten punishment to get him to snap out of his own feedback loop, collect himself and stop. There was no reasoning involved. It was, if you dont stop, punishment will be had.

This also happens to a larger degree with our older (pre-teen) kid. Shes a little more reasonable (clearly she can see 5 minutes out) but a week, a month, years? Nope.

Its always funny when people just say kids are smart and to reason with them. Its true to a degree. But making sacrifices in the short term for a better long term outcome is not natural, its a learned trait and there are many adults that cant manage that (just look at the CC debt rates in the US). Kids of any age tend to live in the short term, wanting short term rewards and not teaching them long term rewards does them a disservice into adult hood.

Managing tech is a part of that. Very few are going to be "reasonable" about moderating their usage especially as many peers will have unfettered access to the same. Hell *I* sometimes struggle with it and I dont really have any social media (short of here and a waning use of reddit).

And before you go there. My relationship with my kids is pretty solid. Moreso than most, we tend to keep lines of communcations open and they dont generally keep things from us because they know we will be judicious with what they tell us. But at the end of the day they are still kids and we are their parents, not their friends.

[aaroninsf]

I'm going to echo what others are also saying, which is the unpalatable core of the crisis we face wrt Facebook and in particular Instagram and its ilk:

They are by their own admission and indeed nature, optimizing addiction.

The headline passed this week, Is this Facebook's Big Tobacco moment?, and it's a good one to take seriously.

Social media, particularly Facebook and its ecosystem, pursues "engagement" as the only ultimate KPM.

Let's say the ugly part outloud: "engagement" is the word we use in shareholder reports for "addiction."

What does that mean?

It means that a $billion company has Sauron-like focus of will on ensuring that its user base grow and are as addicted to its services as possible.

Setting aside the societal costs of the surveillance panopticon that results for another rant,

the personal consequences are that we have 21st c. data-mined constantly-tuned machinery with one purpose only: bypass and circumventing any cognitive or behavioral or social or regulatory/legal constraints,

on intensifying that addiction.

This is exactly the playbook of Big Tobacco.

We need to take seriously as a society that what Facebook et al are selling (to the consumer... who they aren't "charging"... again, a rant for another day...),

is digital nicotine.

The presumption that individual kids can "make good choices" or that activist engaged non-exhausted tech-savvy parents can "educate" their kids out addiction,

is preposterous on the face of it.

Abstinence education does not work.

There is no "just the tip" for Instagram.

Instagram is digital fentanyl.

We need to start talking about, reasoning about, and regulating it as such.

It's not enough to break up the company. Social media based on engagement would best be reasoned about as a threat to individual and societal help on par with say biological weapons.

If you think that's hyperbolic, review the WSJ Facebook files again, and the endless whistle-blowing, and look at where we are a culture wrt consensus reality around the pandemic and fair elections.

We are close to civil war, and it's a predictable outcome of the KPM Facebook uses.

[bpodgursky]

Do you have kids?

Respectfully, I don't really put any weight on opinions on this topic from those who do not.