| As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems. Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate... Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure. But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them. Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea. |
Our teens are living through a changing time: peak unregulated social media, that I personally belive is approaching heroin level addiction and damage; covid lockdowns testing the very limits of Piagetian theory; AI in school and outsourcing understanding; very uncertain job market to enter into; possibly the collapse of AMOC; reaching Peloponnesian war level of unstable democracy; the true collapse of idealism, the birth of the mechanical man and the first total spiritual crisis
Our institutions absolutely can not react with the accelerated change, so I think the only thing a parent can do is act as individuals, teach their children, and position their families in the best way they can to weather the storm.
AI romantic partners are coming.