I don’t use TikTok, but I’ve heard anecdotes from users that it’s currently the least-terrible of the social media services, and this doesn’t sound totally implausible to me, given what the competition is.
It seems more productive to focus on the enriching activities that we want more of rather than trying eliminate distracting ones - there are so many of those it’s easy to imagine one distraction just being replaced with another.
I grew up in the same era... and the solution to that was easy: my parents told me to go outside and play.
In 2021, their phone goes with them everywhere, and if it doesn't one of their friend's phones does. There's almost no way, short of helicopter parenting 24/7, that you can insulate your children from Tik Tok, and I'd argue it is far, far, far more harmful than TV. Random kids at school didn't attack me for the TV shows I watched privately in my own home in high school.
And phones are hardly the worst thing friends can get your kid into... I remember the main concern being alcohol or drugs, which I think have since declined (at least among youth).
I have to say I am not familiar with the attacks based on browsing history you speak of though. How/why does this happen? Are you forced to make it public?
Defeatism short-circuits one's ability to grow and serves as an excellent excuse to do nothing.
No, most kids of the previous era never came within a million miles of pushing a mine cart up a shaft. We have very well documented historical records of what type of work young people were most commonly doing circa 1850-1950, mining was not one of the top activities (nor was any other type of very dangerous hard labor).
I don't much care about kids cloning lame faux dance routines on TikTok, I think it's mostly benign and unimportant. And it's definitely a temporary fad (these kids won't be spending lots of time learning and cloning lame dance routines in 10 second videos ten years from now). It's also exceptionally vapid. I grew up with MTV when it was becoming a thing, and it too was largely vapid garbage (although not entirely, as is true of TikTok), and it culturally melted away just as TikTok will recede with time, as the kids move on to something newer and cooler, as always happens.
The biggest shot against TikTok is that most of the young people on there aren't even producing their own content, they're directly copying other content and repeating it like brainless zombies. Maybe it's no worse than mediocre cultural cloning was in past decades, it's just considerably accelerated and pumped up in terms of projection / audience. It's nothing great to celebrate though, it's a high-fructose soda for the brain (which is why it's so addictive), an intravenous line of cheap validation for nacissists and young people with low self-esteem, not high quality sustenance. MTV didn't lead to an improved outcome for the generation reared on it, and TikTok won't either, there isn't actually much value being created with it. These types of platforms don't matter very much ultimately, in terms of consumption they're mostly just another way to pass the time for bored brains.
if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community.
a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).
And there has been a lot of progress, those kids would have had to push carts up mine shafts in the previous era.
In the era before that, most of them would have died from hunger or some disease