[TideAd]

And if they did complain, what then?

Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

[ahoya]

That’s the point. you want them to miss out. Missing out means they don’t have to be depressed and have their attention spans attacked. This online social life is unhealthy and bad for them and they will grow up retarded socially if you don’t protect them from it.

[noobermin]

Socially stunting your children in order to "save them" is the height of helicopter parental abuse.

[sibeliuss]

Saving them from TikTok crack is hardly helicopter child abuse. It's responsible parenting. But it's also more than that. Simply not giving them a smartphone when they're 10 isn't enough. Parents have to also embody what they preach.

[noobermin]

There is a range here, I'm not talking about 10 year olds or 5 year olds. The article discusses young teenagers, and by that point many of their friends will be on social media, and keeping them off it will stunt their social growth and make them outcasts.

[bart_spoon]

I would strongly contest the idea that depriving a child of social media is “socially stunting” them. It isn’t as if children today are more socially adept after social media than children were for all of the millennia prior to social media, and if anything, there is evidence to the contrary. All of the options for socialization from pre-social media still widely available and applicable.

[irrational]

Then nothing. I am not worried about these things at all. We have a 25 year old, a 23 year old, and a 21 year old and their social lives were never impacted. And the 25 year old has thanked us for keeping her off of social media until she was older and more mature.

[HDThoreaun]

> their social lives were never impacted.

This is hard to believe to the point of me thinking your kids were in a plato's cave. It was not possible to have a normal social life without social media as a teenager over the last 10 years. Full stop. You will miss out on events because you can not be invited the normal way. Whether that's a big deal or not is certainly debatable, but claiming that it doesn't exist is ostrich behavior.

[bart_spoon]

Perhaps you are the one in Plato’s cave, unable to imagine that a life without social media can be viable and normal?

[irrational]

Well, that has not been our experience. Sorry to burst your bubble.

[HDThoreaun]

The people in the cave weren't experiencing reality either.

[logifail]

> About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

A lot of things are said (and done) - often in haste - online, which one would simply never experience in a face-to-face interaction.

We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.

[satvikpendem]

> We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.

This is the way to do it. People forget that while some teenage social life occurs online, not all of it does, and the part that can be done in-person is a lot healthier than what's online. In real life, are people going to be comparing themselves to Instagram posts? Unlikely, but even then, there will be a lot more nuance of something like, say, going on an international trip, where a friend can tell you the good and bad rather than showing only the good on an IG photo and making the viewer feel bad because they didn't go on such a trip.

Real life interaction simply has less ability to lack nuance, which I think is a good thing.

[bcrosby95]

What about the social lives they might be missing out on by being obsessed with Snapchat?

[est31]

It depends really whether you as a kid can have a social life at all without being on social media. If your school is one of those no-digital-devices places where tech workers send their kids to, then you'll manage. But most schools aren't like that. Instead, there, children heavily rely on online services to communicate. I'm a late millenial, so I didn't have 100% the same experience as a kid growing up now has, but even for me, I felt it on my own skin. A lot of social interaction was inaccessible to me due to me not being on Facebook by choice. When some event was planned, I didn't immediately know about it.

Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.

[logifail]

> Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition

Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11.

Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school.

> [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS.

Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.

[sweettea]

It's not a matter of not trusting the child to go for a walk unsupervised -- it's not trusting CPS to consider it acceptable.

[est31]

I was exaggerating a little, but the issue still exists. There has been a change in general societal mindset around deeming the outsides as dangerous for children, even during the day. This mindset might not exist everywhere, but where it is prevailing, it is forced onto parents who let their kids out in the sense that they are looked negatively upon.

[bcrosby95]

I've lived in several places and never had this problem. My instinct is that this is just another moral panic - not any different than fearing of child abduction when letting your kid walk to school.

Yes, it happens, but its exceedingly rare.

[est31]

Btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625907

[type-r]

> A lot of social life for kids happens online.

I think that's a big part of the problem. I want to encourage more of that social life to happen in person. I would feel bad if I was causing them to miss out on IRL events.