In the end you don't want to be friends you want to set clear guidelines and expectations.
Venting f-bombs teaches them to vent f-bombs.. not great.
Your kids will be back for money regardless..
> This is the I better be my child's best friend or do what they want or they won't like me and will never talk to me again parenting style.
No, there's a great honking excluded middle there between the “fuck off” parenting style and the “I must be my kids best friend” style.
Social media is social interaction. It's an inextricable part, if not the centerpiece for many kids these days. This is the modern equivalent of saying "no friends allowed"/"you can only see and talk to your friends for a couple of minutes a day", as hyperbolic as that may seem. Extreme rejection and rebellion is a logical outcome from that.
Truth is they'd be better off without it, for as long as possible. Focusing on media instead of school is a great way to end up working at a gas station later in life.
Or in a ditch somewhere, when the pressure gets too much.
Here at my times kids were told they would be shoveling dirt if they had neglected school. It may be anegdotal but I know many of such school low performers who today own excavators, dumper trucks fleet, construction businesses. The point is they do much better than some of their now blue collar school peers burned out after years of studying and "career" often pushed to impress parents and social circle.
It’s a dead-end job with no fulfillment, low pay, low flexibility, and not much free time for intellectual growth.
> who today own excavators, dumper trucks fleet, construction businesses
Cool, those are great things that are explicitly not “working at a gas station”.
> Extreme rejection and rebellion is a logical outcome from that.
If that’s the result then you are failing as a parent.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the world would be a much better place if the big players in social media ceased to exist, but no single person can act as an island, and you need to understand the problem well enough to give your kids alternatives rather than just put your foot down and say “no” — even us adults have trouble staying off whichever social network our friends and family use.
This isn’t about being “socially inept” — if everyone simultaneously agreed to not use social media, we could and would all go back to what we did before[0] — but even knowing the nature of the beast, dismissing its power, its pull, its allure, is a Canute move.
[0] @iamstupidsimple was saying people not on the contact list would be more likely to be forgotten, and that’s true regardless of if the person not on the list is socially awkward or highly charismatic; before Facebook, the list was a piece of paper, but the same applies to that paper list.
When your kids’ friends send a request to all their social media contacts list, it takes extra effort for your kids’ friends to realise your kids are one of the few people who aren’t in that list and need to be contacted separately.
Is that fair? No.
Is it nice? No.
Is it fun? No.
Is it malicious? No.
Is it a lack of interest on the part of your kids’ friends? No.
Is it a reason for your kids to secretly make their own accounts without you knowing about it? Yes.
Of course, this is all judging just by the tone of your posts, so it might not be (and I hope it isn't) a true reflection of reality. Kids are smart, they just lack experience. But they still deserve respect from day 1, and if they have it then most of the usual parenting problems never surface.
> Of course, this is all judging just by the tone of your posts
That is quite the assumption. Perhaps I communicate less delicately than you are accustomed.
An enterprising teenager may earn money in undesirable ways.
I’m a parent and I’m thinking I’ll handle this as a clear you can have it or you can’t to avoid the grey and black market incentives.
What do you do when they mow some lawns and do just that?
What you're describing sounds like it would hold back your child's social development. I wouldn't recommend it.
But surveilling on them will. You're using your own active involvement as a crutch to compensate for the fact that you can't leave them to their own devices and know they'll do the right thing.
But how can they do that if you don't teach them and you don't give them the right chance to show they can do it? You're not teaching them to independently use the technology responsibly (or not at all), but rather you're forcing a behavior into place.
It's a very short-term solution that will backfire when they're put out there on their own and you're not there to push them in the right direction. Sooner or later they'll need to figure out how to do things independently. Maybe some active handling is okay for a while, but eventually, you've got to take off the training wheels, no?
They engage socially in the real world. They don’t need social media to fail and learn from failure. They have every opportunity to fail for real among real people.
When they get out on their own hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol. At that point they are free to make their own decisions and face all the consequences without the help of a parent.
Ah, but how would they have learned that? After all, they're not doing it because they "learned" it, they're doing it because you're forcing them to do it. You're never actually "unit testing" their ability to come to the right independent judgment on their own, because you don't trust them to. But because you don't trust them to, they may not develop the experience to independently come to probably the same conclusion you came to. And if they do, you certainly aren't helping them.
Rather, what they're learning is that they'll have to go and buy their own prepaid cell phone on their own and get better and better at hiding it because "Dad is an uptight Boomer so what he doesn't know about this prepaid cell phone won't hurt him" which is probably not the lesson you're trying to teach them. If that mentality gets to drugs, alcohol, and sex, you may be in for more than you bargained for -- whether you pick up on it or not.
Kids are very, very smart. They have much more time than you, the vigor of youth, the ability to see everything with fresh eyes and work things out from first principles -- and not just that, they have a whole network of /friends/ who have the exact same resources and who they can work with as a team.
You're not going to stop them from experimenting. You'll just stop them from being open about it with you.
NetNanny, which was basically a very visible firewall, automatically incentivized a search for more network access, and treating that access like a fat kid in a candy store for much longer than I’m happy with today.
The early “find my iPhone” tech that cell providers rolled out probably worked well until it sent me, a 16 y/o with angst issues, a text saying my cell phone was now enrolled and being tracked. Fairly enraging at the time.
The counter though is with some knowledge of silent firewalls and IAM, I could see considering something similar But significantly More silent, as a parent.
There is fairly shocking discussion around kids<>porn access<>serious issues with healthy sexuality. Screen time is turning young kids into zombies; there is just no planet where unrestricted tech access is good for the growing brain. The current Gen pop attitudes towards tech don’t offer much form of support - their kids are buried in an iPhone, my personal parenting policy will be a inherent critique of their parenting. PTAs see no issue with default Facebook use, thus enrolling my children in an data logging system I specifically work to avoid.
Add in disinfo campaigns and the young mind…
All this to say: invisible training wheels, or rather invisible walls and some tracking, seem to be the only way to raise a kid who must know tech, but won’t learn how to handle full exposure to it until well after 18 (bc adults are struggling too). Conversely, if that surveillance is discovered, it’s hell to pay as a parent. Tricky.