I linked to this thread, only because it's what got me thinking about this topic again. Me and my SO talk about phones occasionally, regarding our kids. Neither of them are anywhere close to an age where they might have one. However, as time goes on, we find ourselves so repelled by the idea of the kids having a fully fledged smartphone.
Given the reality that all social media apps are effectively skinner boxes, training you to use them more, the idea of allowing kids on them feels like offering a 10-year-old a cigarette. I have to remind myself that the internet I grew up on is dead and gone. I may have been exposed to some weird ass shit in AOL chat rooms, but there wasn't any kind of algorithmic content feed keeping me itching and scratching.
So far, the only time the oldest uses an iPad is when they use mine, and the only apps they use are Procreate for drawing, and an app that helps kids learn to write letters and words. Watching TV is probably the worst thing we get into at home when it comes to just pure content consumption, but we keep the list of watchable stuff pretty small, and regularly axe shows we feel don't meet our standards when we venture off that list.
I guess this has evolved into a larger discussion about media consumption as I have typed this out, but at the end of the day, that's what's happening on these phones, right?
I don't think kids can be kept off what passes for the net, but you can make them paranoidn distrustful, and weird about it. Install a pi hole and teach them how ad blockers work and that they'll get a dollar for installing ublock origin on unmonitored school pcs. There's probably some "baby's first guide to how marketing demons weaponized bf skinner" out there. Line their crib with old copies of adbusters. Maybe you can scour the torrents, someone must have archived hundreds of hours of sesame street, old soviet media, lectures on mkultra, and other age appropriate content. You can set up your very own walled garden system for them with local content. Teach them tradecraft from a early age so they can do osint on their schoolmates.
Critically - kick them outside with no supervision as soon as they can walk. I don't think there's any way to really protect kids from the mind dissolving effects of social media but you can at least lock them out of the house until dinner equipped only with a pocket knife, a library card, a bus card, a bicycle, 10$, and a liter of water. Maybe a lighter, too.
Kids don't just get to be latchkey kids anymore, the world is too unkind. Gotta sort of kick them out in to the wilds to learn survival, Fremen style.
I know you're joking a bit, but there's such a degree of
with existing in public that not all parents can take this advice.
I mean, I've seen stories of white families running into this issue. The racial factor is obviously a lot stronger, but there is a general vibe of "the world is unsafe, and you should NEVER let your kid outside by themselves" and people have had DCF called on them for letting their kid, for example, play at a park across the street from the house.
It happens, and it's certainly cause for concern, but having child services called because your kids were outside unsupervized is extremely rare. Those cases make the news because they're shocking and dramatic for millenial parents who remember a time when it would have been unthinkable.
I know it sucks these days, that it's vaslty safer in the sense that your kid is much less likely to experience criminal violence but much harder in the sense that they're being constantly surveilled by neighbors and cops, that all the cool places to hang out have shut down, and like you said
.
But if you can, man, set them up with a bike and snacks and a flashlight and a knife and a lighter and a box to keep frogs in and tell them to come back with their shield or on it. Social media isn't addictive. Social media is the way out for kids who are trapped in a world where they can't explore, can't wander, can't get out of the world of beige walls that consumes so many of them. It's like that ancient rat park experiment: the rats in the cage did tons of smack. The rats in the big open enclosure with lots of friends and stuff to play with did a little heroin but just a little. Our kids are trapped in their cages with no where to go so they turn to the socials to escape. What do the socials offer? Adveture, danger, companionship, novelty, excitement, confrontation. All shit we (30 and older) got out in the world. But there's a lot less world for them now, fewer places to go, more cops and nextdoor nazis. If you can help them get out, explore, run around, break stuff and make messes, do as much as you can.
Serious suggestions
Give your kids a phone asap and train them to use it as a tool and a weapon. Let them call grandma or whatever, family friends, foreign heads of state. Give them a curated phone list. Call them. Send them pictures and stuff from your day. See if you can find them foreign penpals somehow. Help them learn to use it as a tool for community and communication
Fill their phone up with cool tools. I've got an astronomy program called stellarium, 9 different photo and video editing apps, a bunch of network analysis stuff, a radio scanner. There's tons and tons of weird, useful tools out there. Ai stuff that will id plants and bugs for you
teach them to hate. Kids understand right and wrong even if they're not always very good at it. Teach them how media is used by bad people to hurt workers. I think 8 or 9 is a good time to start in on behavioralism. Buy some rats, teach them to do tricks, show kids how there's no difference between making rats roll over for a yogurt drop and getting their schoolmates to sit for hours watching tiktoks. (Rats are also great for teaching kids about cancer and death. And definitely rats! Hamsters are insane little monsters. Mice are dumb. Guinea pigs are boring. Rats are very smart, very very social, more durable than most pocket pets, and i cannot stress this enough very social. They will love your kids and make them part of the rat social unit in a way other pocket pets cannot. They will genuinely enjoy playing with and engaging with your kids. I would advise getting all girls and looking for rescue rats than need homes). Teach them that it's a weapon and that the badguys want to use it to hurt them and show them how the weapon works.
Trust your kids omg trust your kids. The little bastards are smart, they know stuff, they'll cheat and figure out how to get their own access and lie to you about it. They'll go to school and look up how to root your locked down parental controlled iPad and then steal it and watch stuff all night. Just assume that they're smarter and more canny then you and extend trust, let them make safe mistakes, be a safe resource and not a jailor.
Give them the sex talk as soon as they can talk and keep giving them the sex talk their whole lives. They're going to encounter a whole lot of porn at a frighteningly young age and there isn't much you can do to stop that, so make sure they're well armed with knowledge about sex, sexuality, consent, feminism, before they encounter it so they don't get blindsided and they know right from wrong going in. Teach them about misogyny and man-o-sphere shit before the encounter it.
Let them play whatever games their friends are playing, especially if it's complex shit like minecraft or whatever where they can build stuff. The children yearn for the mines, so many games these days are unlimited fantastical lego boxes with infinite legos. Hell, if you find a good game with lots of building and no mtx bullshit talk their friend's parents in to getting the same game, set up a private server, let them go nuts with their friends. Host lan parties like the days of yor. And let them play the dumb violent stuff with innapropriate violence and sex too if they want to. Just, you know, give them tools to understand when they go in. If they want to play shooters teach them squad tactics, or the geopolitics or cultural history behind the setting in the game. Teach them how network latency works. Break the game in to pieces, make it a machine they understand and control.
Idk, i guess what i'm getting at; your kids are going to be at war from the moment they have color vision and can coordinate their hands. You can't shield them from that war, they're going to be exposed to it constantly. There are countless stories about parents who tried to raise their kids without violent media only to find them playing swords with sticks. Kids start to internalize gender roles and media depictions of beauty from like, idk, sixish? You can't shield them from the war, but you can train them, give them weapons and armor and knowledge. Make them warriors, help them be strong.
Also, please for the love of god (Hermes, Ogma, Hephasteus, Loki) don't be a Mac household. Google equipment sucks but there's at least things like f-droid that let you break out of the beautiful prison. Apple equipment is designed as an easy to use toy that traps people in the ecosystem and keeps them pliable and ignorant. Everything is soft and round so people can use it without ever having to learn how it works. It creates consumers, not users.
Computers are machines, tools that should be bent to the cause of easing the burden of labor. Get your kids going on a pc, on windows or linux if you can hack it. Give them shit that's badly designed with terrible ux so they have to learn how to take it apart, defeat it, break it in to a more pleasing shape. Apple products, android, game consoles, they're all lotus eater machines designed to be effortless to use so the users never have a chance to escape. Again, throw your kids in to the deserts of Arrakis, make them fight windows to get their shit working, teach them to assemble computers so they see them as a machine made of parts that can be manipulated and controlled. Don't fall for the smooth blobject that offers no resistance.