this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Meh...it's a terrible article full of conjecture and frankly shitty casual causation.
The reason kids these days have higher rates of self harm and suicide isn't digital. They're getting fucking shot at when they go to school.
The parents are hyper aware of this and are overly protective. The kids aren't going out after dark to cause havoc or just hang out with their friends any more.
There's also a severe culture war going on between liberals and conservatives across the globe that's distinctly split previous social groups.
None of this is due to a kid holding a smart phone. It's down to really shitty adults doing really shitty things and then blaming the phone for exposing kids to said shittiness.
This article sucked.
I have to disagree with most of that.
Raising a kid right now is weird, the way they interact with tech is nothing like when we were kids. I was lucky growing up in the 90s with a computer, I could play with it all day and never get into any kind trouble it was just video games and poking around, seeing what it could do. I think having access to a computer at such a young age was transformative and wonderful.
But today, there's so much trouble to get into, it's crazy. I need to lock down that computer for my kid, there's not enough parental control software in the world to make it safe for a defiant child, so I just can't give him free access to the computer. I log him in for every session and make sure he's monitored the whole time (which is exhausting).
He had access to some public Minecraft server for a while and initially I was like "this is fine", but it was like 5 days before he was telling people to kill themselves in the chat and yelling ethnic slurs into his headset... he's 7.
I truly dread having to deal with him interacting on social media. It's going to be ugly.
Edit: I should clarify, this article is garbage, I'm not sticking up for it. The problem is not kids these days or bad parenting, it's just a more complicated world. Social media, predatory tech companies, consumerism, polarized politics, all this crap adds up to a more complicated world, more riddled with potential landmines than ever before.
I've been dreading this and it saddens me to hear from you that my worst fears were correct.
I'll just take solace in the fact that I had 30 year head start and that my tech-fu will hopefully stay one step ahead of my 1-year-old
Yeah, the technical problems are also pretty frustrating. I've been an IT guy for a long time, and I knew that I a second hand iMac would be a great machine for him, so that's what I got. But unfortunately apple has abandoned their support for 32bit applications, seriously slashing their library of software. So I've stuck to an older Mac OS that does still support it. Steam has a "family view" mode and with that I can easily curate my own huge steam library and allow him to play appropriate games. Except of course, that about 2/3 of that library will be unavailable soon, as with future steam updates they will not be supporting the last macOS version that still runs 32 bit programs. Sigh.
I already tried installing Linux mint on that Mac and it was a nightmare. Linux doesn't really do parental controls, at least not out of the box. The only silver lining was that at least when he clicked on every single web link he found, the dozens of malicious .exe files he downloaded won't run on Linux.
But I guess to reassure you, the tech can be hard, but the kid doesn't have to be. Our situation is a bit extreme, probably atypical. We adopted a 6 year old, so we have a lot of problematic behaviors, distrust, and defiance to train him out of. That shit is hard. But if you can build love and trust right from the start, you can set norms for tech usage and behavior. It'll be ok.
But I do fear social media, it looms in our future...