Yeah, how about no. Parent your kids to balance their screen time, and please keep them off social media as long as possible (or very supervised).
But pledges like this are ridiculous, and remind me of how parents in the 80s thought the C64 or NES was going to rot kids brains, just like TV in the 70s.
Phones are incredibly addictive to both adults and kids. They are very damaging to relationships and social development. It’s fascinating that you think the answer is “do better”. This is literally that. Why are you so in favor of giving children something they have no need for and something that causes enormous stress anxiety and harm?
Kids who are online have been shown to be much more anxious, more depressed and less socially adjusted vs kids who are in peer groups that are kept offline for as long as possible.
Because I fundamentally disagree with your statements, that have no basis in fact. The studies on this topic are completely inconsistent and show conflicting information, with no clear correlation of harm.
ultimately it depends on the child's psychology and the content that they consume. some kids should be parented to be steered away from social media. others have no problems.
Lots of things are addicting. I'm addicted to coffee. So what? Life is about managing your emotions towards moderation. Offline pledges are about as effective as abstinence pledges.
Is this something you are currently doing? Or more a theory?
I know one parent, a software developer, whose kid goes to a school that strongly encouraged this and so they signed up for it. It seems to work fine for them. In contrast, I know other parents who have given their kids phones and it is quite hard to completely monitor their usage of it. Around the house, parents develop a background sense for where their kids are and what they're doing. If you hear a kid go into the kitchen, your ears perk up to make sure they're, say, getting cereal rather than playing with knives and fire. But a kid doing perfectly safe things on a phone looks about like a kid doing dangerous things on their phone. And a phone is portable enough that you can't really directly supervise them all the time.
It's something I'm currently doing with my 14 year old.
the phone requires approval for app installs, so no social media. I have the phone unlock code and track browser history both at the phone and the router. He can and does use incognito mode, and the router mostly catches the porn URLs if any (thankfully not a lot - more gross out sites which we have chats about).
I track Youtube history as he uses my premium account to avoid ads + usually can see that stuff at the router.
Next step i've been meaning to do is setup a forwarding proxy so that even cell data use is tracked.
Generally if he does things I get concerned about, we have a conversation about what worries me, and how i want him to adjust his habits. this sometimes works, sometimes reverts back and requires a reminder.
all of this can blow up into full on blocking and acrimony eventually, I guess. i am working on his coping and judgement so that when he does branch out he has tools to handle what he runs into. I grew up in the late 80s "very online" with BBS's and internet in the early 90s... and got into a lot of dangerous things without my parents really knowing. I have a sense of how to protect against that but yes there are limits.
We are also recently fostering a 16 year old girl with terrible social media dependency and a history of self harm, and that is a much different set of strategies. taking the phone away there also doesn't IMO solve problems , it just creates new ones, especially given she is almost an adult. so this one is about cognitive behavior therapy, psychiatric therapy, building coping skills and executive functions, and building stable in person activities and relationships that are preferable to the online relationships. and trying to lower the social media usage to close friends + humour only rather than flirting with boys in remote countries.
Thanks! This is a very interesting comment. It definitely stands in contrast to the people suggesting here that monitoring technology usage is easy-peasy.
> it is quite hard to completely monitor their usage of it
I disagree.
Google Parent Link[0] and YouTube parental controls[1] are very advanced. But most parents just don't care setting it up and them complains they don't know what their kids are watching online.
True, but I personally feel it's just as potentially damaging to the psyche, if not more so, in certain ways. Your kid starts watching minecraft let plays and next thing you know one of the lets players grifts for some neo-nazi or mysogynist and your kid has a bunch of bad ideas flowing into their head...
My kid watches youtube but i track his history. it's generally harmless gaming stuff from creators i don't worry about too much. he doesn't use any social media otherwise (a bit of discord for gaming, that's it).
Yeah, but "easy" is relative. A lot of people out there really only know how to use their phone to browse social media. This doesn't stop them from becoming parents.
well, organizing an educational campaign and using activism to pressure the industry shouldn't be much harder than organizing this campaign for what is essentially a temperance pledge.
There was an insurrection a couple of years ago because people raised on too much TV got riled up by the Internet on their phones. TV and phones are a destructive force (regardless of political affiliation).
But pledges like this are ridiculous, and remind me of how parents in the 80s thought the C64 or NES was going to rot kids brains, just like TV in the 70s.