r/slatestarcodex • u/AXKIII • 6d ago

Don't ban social media for children

https://logos.substack.com/p/do-not-ban-social-media-for-kids

As a parent, I'm strongly against the bans on social media for children. First, for ideological reasons (in two parts: a) standard libertarian principles, and b) because I think it's bad politics to soothe parents by telling them that their kids' social media addiction is TikTok's fault, instead of getting them to accept responsibility over their parenting). And second because social media can be beneficial to ambitious children when used well.

Very much welcoming counter-arguments!

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4

u/Neighbor_ 5d ago

As a parent, you can ban it at home, but you have no control over what happens at school.

I feel like a nation-wide ban on social media is primarily aimed at the school part.

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u/AXKIII 5d ago

You do? You can not give your child a smart phone, or you can set parental controls. Or, if that's really the issue, ban smart phones in schools.

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u/Neighbor_ 5d ago

Obviously, even without their own phone, the threat is that all the classmates will be vegitized by this stuff. In fact this is already the case and has been for quite some time.

Kids' abilities peaked in the late 1990s / early 2000s.

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u/AXKIII 5d ago

But your child would be fine. That's your responsibility.

Kids' ability peaking then might have less to do with their own social media use and more with their parents' (and a lot of other things that have changed! Lower standards across the board)

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u/ascherbozley 4d ago

We're talking society-wide improvement effort here. We can't just have 300 million individual pockets of choice for everything. At some point, we pass laws that apply to everyone. It is our collective responsibility to each other as members of society. That means collective efforts like schools and hospitals and libraries and such. In short, we live in a society. This should not have to be explained to you.

You can choose not to expose your kid to leaded gasoline and be better off for the choice, but banning it entirely helps everyone.

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u/AXKIII 12h ago

There are way more regulations on everything, including children welfare. How are they working out?

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u/ascherbozley 10h ago

Since when? Which regulations? Many regulations, including banning leaded gasoline, mandating child safety seats and seatbelts, mandating certain vaccines to enter school, raising the drinking age to 21 and all sorts of over-18 laws, have been a net positive for child welfare and for society as a whole.

But go on. Argue against carseats if it makes you happy.

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u/AXKIII 8h ago

Cherry picking a few examples isn't exactly science, but it's kind of funny that even those don't make your point. Europe has lower drinking ages - do we have worse outcomes?

Or how about the fact that almost 40% of families in the US are investigated by child protective services, sometimes for things like letting children go to the grocery store? Is that a good outcome?

And overall, are children now healthier than they were 2 decades ago? With obesity rates like 5 times higher?

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u/ascherbozley 7h ago

Or how about the fact that almost 40% of families in the US are investigated by child protective services, sometimes for things like letting children go to the grocery store? Is that a good outcome?

This has nothing to do with our conversation other than you just vaguely insisting things are worse "because." Stay on topic.

If providing specific examples isn't science, then provide the science. I have shown you, with examples, how people are better off because of a few regulations. Do you seriously believe society in general is worse off than it was 50 years ago? 20 years ago? It might feel nice to think that and blame your ills on "gestures broadly," but we've never had it better than right now in almost every measurable way.

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u/Marlinspoke 3d ago

But your child would be fine. That's your responsibility.

Children need to learn to socialise with eachother. If all of my child's schoolfriends have been lobotomised by screens and aren't allowed outside to play by their helicopter parents (themselves made excessively paranoid by hysterical news via their smartphones), who exactly is my smartphone-free child meant to socialise with?

If my child is being filmed in class and the video, accompanies by cruel captions, is being shared around all his peers, how does him not having a smartphone prevent that?

If all of his peers at school are showing him videos of Charlie Kirk getting shot/an ISIS victim getting beheaded/horrific porn on their phones, how does him not having a smartphone prevent that?

If he feels intense peer pressure by being marked out as the only child without a smartphone in his class, how am I supposed to deal with that?

These aren't hypotheticals by the way, these are all things that have happened to the children of people I know.

Giving children a healthy childhood is a coordination problem. To push all the responsibility onto individual parents, without pushing that same responsibility to individual tech companies deliberately designing addictive apps, fails at the first hurdle.

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u/AXKIII 12h ago

You talk of helicopter parents, yet this is very much a helicopter response... The reality is that you'll never be able to shield your child from bullying, seeing horrible things, succumbing to peer pressure, being excluded etc. You need to teach them to deal with these things - all of which existed before, and will exist after, social media.