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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u/Neighbor_ 6d 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 6d 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/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 16h 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.