Does China have the right idea with respect to kids and the internet? Should we effectively ban kids from social media and restrict their usage at the ISP level?
As parent, I think China may have the right idea. From my perspective, I think kids shouldn't have social media until late teens especially stuff like instagram. Go through an average 14 year old girls instagram feed and it is easy to see how eating disorders are increasing.
The other thing is if every other kid in the class has social media, I will allow it because it important to be involved in the social aspect of school. So, China has the right idea because it is forced to be a social norm of not having social media and I think the whole community and individuals will be healthier because of it.
They do something with limiting the amount of video games you can play, I think they are on to something there.
I never see anything like that happening here in the USA though
I think any blanket policy that just apply the same rule to everybody is just lazy policy. A less lazy approach is provide the capability (through e.g. ISP or device manufacturer) to do so to parents/guardians and let them make the choice on an individual level.
Even for education, its much better to have options for home school or special needs school, than it is to just blanketly say all children must go to a regular school like every other child.
Reading the threads here about parents trying to manage their kids' online usage something strikes me. It's a little hard to articulate, but I might call it the "assumption of normalcy" in regard to media/technology. People assume, to various degrees, that current forms of technology and levels of usage are "fine, just fine", yet if you think about it for a bit it seems really more like a "boiling frog" situation. What I mean is that we are engaged in a massive open-air social/psychological experiment of sorts, and we're more or less doing it on auto-pilot.
From that POV the policy changes that China has introduced seem like an attempt to opt-out, which would make Chinese kids into a kind of "control group" for our media/internet/phone/game mass experiment. The problem is that there are so many confounding variables that it seems unlikely that we can learn much from it after all. And it's moot anyway since there's no political way to enforce similar bans in the West.
FWIW, if I had kids I would ban the Internet, smart phones, and even cable TV. I've been on the Internet, there's no way I would expose my kids to it, even with ad-blockers. The Internet used to be Burning Man, now it's Bangkok. I wouldn't let my kids wander around the open Internet any more than around the back alleys of Bangkok. I feel for parents that are dealing with this.
The other thing is if every other kid in the class has social media, I will allow it because it important to be involved in the social aspect of school. So, China has the right idea because it is forced to be a social norm of not having social media and I think the whole community and individuals will be healthier because of it.
They do something with limiting the amount of video games you can play, I think they are on to something there.
I never see anything like that happening here in the USA though