[bostonwalker]

Parenting. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare my kid to grow up around the internet, smartphones, and AI. Our technology often takes an indifferent or even cynical view of children, and I can’t understand why there aren’t better tools available (e.g. smartphone designs) that put their developmental needs ahead of the need to exploit them for immediate profit.

[jefc1111]

I am on this road too, with two children between 5 and 10. My conclusion is pretty much that if I don't want them to do those kinds of activities (social media, youtube, games, endless TV) then I have to put my money where my mouth is and proactively fill their time, either by giving up mine, facilitating time with friends, or by paying someone else (after school activities, lessons etc).

I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.

[sanderjd]

How old are your kids? My eldest is 5, and this is starting to be more and more top of mind. I felt like earlier on that it wasn't worth thinking much about it because it was too hard to predict what the issues would be as they became relevant to her. I think this turned out to be right, because if I'd thought about this a bunch a few years ago, I wouldn't have included generative AI in my thinking at all.

[bostonwalker]

Less than a year old, but I have been thinking about the issue proactively and there are things you can do for them even at this age. For instance, I set my son up with a Proton email account on the family domain name before we left the hospital (see my reply to sibling comment for reasons why).

[sanderjd]

Well, I understand the new-parent exuberance, but I'd just say that I think you may lose the energy for that kind of thing over time :) Sure, you can make an email address for a one year old, but it is not going to be useful for an extremely long time, and there is a non-zero chance it will never be useful at all, because email will no longer be a useful thing by the time it would have been. Seems like premature optimization!

But of course there's also nothing wrong with thinking about and doing this kind of stuff even if it never turns out to be very useful, if you enjoy it, that's enough :)

[nabusman]

I'm starting down this path soon as well. Any books/resources that you recommend?

[bostonwalker]

Congrats on that!

My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name.

It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency.

I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!

[protonmail]

Happy to hear this!