Technology

What? You mean actually be a responsible parent?

Don't be silly.

Parent here, raising kids without smartphones until they're at least in high school.

I couldn't agree with you more.

There’s an all or nothing problem here.

It’s actually a good way to ostracize your child by making them be the only one without a phone.

I think the government should be going after service providers and advertiser's that knowing and deliberately target children with content that isn't curated by a suitable authority for the children's age group.

Previously we had librarians and TV channels to regulate children's media. Responsible people making reasonable judgements about the content a child should be targeted with.

That isn't the case anymore. Social media allows people and organisations direct access to children with no accountable authority in-between. Children are watching content that the child knows they shouldn't be watching. The producer and the service provider also knows this too. So children will place concert effort to avoid it being detected.

They all know that they are making content for children. Even when they're making content that the know isn't suitable for them. The people behind prime energy drink wanted to sell alcoholic drinks. They revealed in a podcast they didn't because they knew there was no market for it as their audience was far too young. Despite this they continue to make content that uses frequently sexual and violent humour. They also use and play with racism and sexism in their content.

Regulate the market and the problem will dwindle away. Their is entire businesses set up to pray on the attention of children.

Exactly. Some parts of my country are banning social media for kids without parental approval, which means they need to verify that I am an adult and my kid is not. That's a privacy violation imo, and I will use a VPN to get around it if needed.

I'm capable of monitoring what my kid has access to, and I'm capable of building trust with them so they don't feel the need to go behind my back. Laws like this don't allow for trust since the government is the one making the decisions, not the kids.

I'm not giving my kids a smartphone (except maybe a loaner phone here and there) until they prove to be they can be responsible, or they actually need one. I have a 10yo, and he's definitely not getting one yet.

They still exist! Most of them are designed to be extra durable too, perfect for kids.

Sure

There's no cure all solution. I consider homeschooled children taught to live their lives by regressive religious texts to be just as broken as the cult of Tate.

If any intervention will still yield roughly equivalent mixed results, I always err on the side of more access to information. A child can gravitate to Andrew Tate's toxicity, or they can look up facts about the confederacy their parents told them fought for "states rights and freedumb!"

In a perfect world, loving parents should be available to provide opinions and context, but I'd rather that child have the opportunity to seek out a rational, benevolent path if the parents attempt to indoctrinate them to their worldview with no other options.

The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that get mad at the schools for teaching children that genitals exist, the universe is billions of years old, and their country wasn't always perfect, stuff they need to know for life whether their parents like it or not.