TLDR:
Making your kids go without smartphones could be difficult because their friends will most likely have phones and will most likely leave your kid out of events and conversations.
TLDR:
Making your kids go without smartphones could be difficult because their friends will most likely have phones and will most likely leave your kid out of events and conversations.
This could be solved significantly better with parental controls and parents’ unions (idk what else to call these). Not all social media has negative effects on mental health. But kids could be provided with alternatives so long as their friends were on the same ones and it could be a really positive experience instead of this liberal approach of all or nothing because everything has to be an individual solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the sentiment the mother in the article is getting across. You see the horrifying impacts of smart phones all day and you don’t want your kids to go through that. But by isolating yourself in enforcing this rule, you’re also isolating your kids.
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The idea that I’ve been toying with is if you can get a group of maybe half a dozen parents to buy into the idea, you could set up a Friendica instance, a Minecraft server, and some kind of chat server and have those be the primary spaces that those kids interacted with each other. Restrict the corporate social media apps and get them in the habit of actually using social media socially with people they know irl. Kind of like how home schooled kids will enroll their kids in extracurriculars together
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I think it’s an idea with legs
You've reinvented neighborhood BBSes
If I were a kid I wouldn't want to use software my parents set up to talk to my friends. Maybe I just had shittier than average parents but imo having private space is super important.
You'd need to designate one of the kids as sysadmin, but then you're in an Omelas situation where you've got a bunch of happy ten-year-olds and one who's aged 30 years with a dead-eyed stare and a coffee addiction muttering to themselves about database backups
in fact my paranoia about my parents seeing what i did online is what ended up with me going into the highly lucrative field of work im doing now :thonk:
Oh yeah absolutely same, one day I'm 12 doing dumb javascript snippets for an Internet forum full of other dumb kids, suddenly im thirty-mumble trying to untangle someone else's Gordian knot of a kubernetes cluster
There's probably something to zoomers being less adept with computers than millennials. We grew up with computers that were fairly easy to use but still required some technical knowledge. It's all been abstracted away for ease of use now unless you really go digging or use :tux:
Yeah, that and spending more time with their phones than on devices with keyboards/terminal access/etc like a desktop or laptop
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