> ... and not give just blindly give them laptops and phones

The problem is there's no "give them laptops and phones in a non-blind way".

It's either "don't give them neither a phone nor a laptop" or needing some safeguards to be in place.

My 7 years daughter can only watch, under my watch, Netflix / Disney / etc. (not that these don't have their own issues / political agenda). The other day I went to pick her at a friend's place: they were watching a video on YouTube, elsa-gate style, where one blonde was making another blonde binge-drink a 2 liters bottle of coke in one go. What the heck? Videos upon videos on YouTube of people ingesting insane amount of sugary drinks and sweets.

And, surely enough, her friend she's already obese.

I don't know who makes these videos. I don't know why they "auto play" to kids in YouTube. I don't know why nothing is done about it. But this is evil in its purest form, messing up kids for life.

It's under a different form but the Elsagate is alive and well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

We’ll put and thank you for this. We have the same situation here. Thankfully (luckily) they have picked friends with mindful parents but that could change on a whim. Our goal, and I’m sure yours as well, is to try and give them tools and information so they can, hopefully, make good decisions when we’re not around.

So much this, give the children tools and information and hope for the best is more or less all you can do.

Yes, you can monitor/supervise the child but it will have the opposite effect before you know it.

Being a parent is never going to be easy.

kids are a massive, easily swayed demographic so there will always be some company somewhere trying to market to them. That's why there are so many restrictions when it comes to making kid-focused content.

COPPA tried to get Youtube to comply but as you see, it just becomes about pushing the envelope as close as it can without getting fined. given the copious amounts of media in the past that had the obligatory "sugar is bad for you" message, there probably wouldn't be much that the FCC or whoever can do for content like that.

I imagine it ended like "and then she puked. see? Sugar is bad for you!". So they get "good morals" and even get to put in the gross-out humor to engage kids.

> Can't parents acknowledge they have some responsibility towards their own children and not give just blindly give them laptops and phones and expect someone else to clean up the mess after them.

This point is academic at best and hopelessly naïve. Practically speaking parents have significantly less control than you think.

I exercise extreme restriction and thoughtfulness around tech and social media in my home. However, my kids' school hands out mandatory chromebooks (despite my protests). When my children go to a friends house, I have very little control over the content they see or the devices they can get their hands on.

And it only gets harder from there. I have some friends with older children, and there's really no controlling what they access. Sure, you can refuse to give them a smartphone, for instance. That's not going to stop one of their buddies from giving them an old smartphone when their parents get them a new one. It also won't stop them from picking up a cheap prepaid android from the nearest Walmart for $40.

So to your original point, I don't think too many of us are "blindly giving them laptops and expecting someone else to clean up the mess". We're trying to hold back a tsunami of social media trash for the sake of our kids' wellbeing, and we're losing.

> tsunami of [...] trash [...] and we're losing.

We have 3 sons (they turned 9, 13 and 15). We are controlling a lot what they can access with their mobiles (the youngest one has no mobile phone) and tablet. We use family link and NextDNS to remove access to pornography, gambling, dating, etc. But leave quite some freedom outside of these stuff.

Discussing with them, especially the oldest one, I was pretty shocked to learn what the friends are looking at. Most of the 12+ year old kids have now mobile phones without any restrictions and are regularly accessing all the pornographic websites you can imagine. Some can spend up to 10h per "school" day in front of the screen, 18h during the weekend.

We are lucky to have kids doing a lot of sport, we control relatively well what they access without "whitelisting before" and try to get them to learn the environment they are navigating in, but this is really hard work.

This is hard work against companies spending billions to make our hard work ineffective. <-- this is what annoy me the most.

The problem is that you are treating it as a thing to forbid. No, that never works. Kids are bound to rebel against some ultimatim of "you can't do X because it's bad or you!". That's not a satisfactory explanation for an ineivtably inquisitive adolescent. Use it as an opportunity to communicate and teach them t self-moderate. Definitely enforce it at home as well, but if you can't trust your kid outside your watch you're missing the point.

Moreover, they spend a lot of time at school, but not all of it. If teachers can't keep kids of social media for hours on end that's a problem with the school, not the social media. They banned access to phones in my school outside of emergencies and kids passed times playing video games on a TI-84. No way in heck any kid in my school back in the day would get more than a few messages between teachers peeking in

So should tabacco and alcohol manufacturers be allowed to advertise specifically to kids? After all, it's just the parents responsiblity for their children. The fact that a media giant is spending literally billions of dollars per year to get kids and teenagers glued to their service to drive up engagement has nothing to do with the problem, right? It's all on parents?

Perhaps you can't read. I said "...some responsibility..." That's because I don't believe it's "...all on parents". You can win any argument by misquoting the other person but nothing actually gets resolved that way.

Straight question: why did you misrepresent what I said?

Two reasons I read your top-level comment the same way gambiting did:

Idiomatically, "some responsibility" unfortunately isn't unambiguous. Yeah, you could mean it like how you clarified now, but if you tell someone "hey, take some responsibility for this!", that could just as well be equivalent to "hey, take responsibility for this!". It wasn't crystal clear to what degree you wanted to put it solely on the parents.

But more importantly, you ended your comment by referring to this as "stupid shit", which seems to indicate that you _don't_ think parents should be able to sue social media companies for addicting kids, that you might not even think it's worth considering, and because of that I think bringing up the comparison to tobacco and alcohol was relevant.

> Straight question: why did you misrepresent what I said?

Seeing as everyone here has interpreted your comment in the more or less the same way, as an obvious lack of understanding around the realities of raising children, maybe it's not them misinterpreting you.

might have something to do with the fact that you misrepresented the entire other side of the argument, and in such gratingly hyperbolic fashion... the doublethink is unreal.

literally no one would disagree that "parents have some responsibility towards their children."

He almost certainly got his opinion from media that also argued against those things and for the same reason, because they are morally bankrupt propagandists for hire.

Yeah, where are the lawsuits against fast food and the junk food industry? Disney puts their toys in happy meals so lets sue them too. They have caused an obesity epidemic amongst children.

Don't even get me started on Lay-Z-Boy chairs and Sony TVs. How many years have sedentary activities taken off our lives!?

I assume you are being ironic but that's happening and is a good thing:

https://www.foxnews.com/story/suit-targets-kellogg-viacoms-j...

> A consumer group wants to keep Tony the Tiger from promoting sugary cereals on the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon show, or anywhere else kids are watching.

> The Center for Science in the Public Interest Wednesday announced legal action to try to stop the Kellogg Co. (K), maker of cereals like Frosted Flakes, and Nickelodeon cable network Viacom Inc., (VIA) from marketing junk food to children.

This is about advertising services to kids tho. Cereal and its pretty logos still appear in stores, in actual ads (just not during Spongebob), on billboards, and more.

This story is more like forbidding kellogs from using mascots on cereal boxes. Which seems both nonsensical and ineffective. Seems like a huge climb to prove that web design is specifically addicting children. It's also a slightly moot point because most social media TOS require a user to be 13 years old anyway.

While other people have pointed out that this is already happening, but even if it wasn't, inability to solve one problem should not stop you from solving another.

"Yeah, where are the lawsuits against fast food and the junk food industry?"

about 15 years ago... the fast food companies won. Seems like all they can succeed on is skimping out on straws.

But yea, I agree on the same line of reasoning. There's a lotta bad stuff out there, it's up to parents to navigate their kids to have them actually understand why it is bad and limit consumption. Not treat it as some forbidden fruit to dine on behind your back. suing companies for providing services that aren't inherently harmful is a slippery slope I'd rather not take.

My parents worked their ass off but they still cooked dinner. With actual vegetables. Remember those? And we weren't rich or anything.

Funny thing is that parents are the boss in the house. No coca cola we drink water in this household and that's final.

We can, but those system are optimized to negate our efforts. Peer pressure among kids is also extremely hard to overcome.

"Letting parent sue" is a very American way to go about it, but exploiting kids underdeveloped brain should be illegal.

> "Letting parent sue" is a very American way to go about it, but exploiting kids underdeveloped brain should be illegal.

Giving people cause of action to sue you for something is making the thing illegal. Civil law is law. And it is law that can be enforced even when the police and prosecutors are hostile or indifferent to you as a victim and sympathetic to the perpetrator, which is something that is not true of criminal law, much to the detriment of marginalized communities.

Of course, it also costs money to enforce it, which makes it harder for marginalized communities, so it's not all sunlight and roses.

Exactly. We don't live in a vacuum. So many people saying just take some personal responsibility. But when you see the effects on society at large, you have to acknowledge that maybe it's something about our genetics / psychology that's being exploited unfairly.

Add to that, that "personal responsibility" only helps when the fight is remotely fair.

I'm a reasonably diligent parent and think fairly highly of myself, but if the fight is me against a couple of trillion dollar tech companies who have very bright staff devoted to capturing my children's attention my any means necessary, well that's a fight I'm going to lose sooner or later.

>But when you see the effects on society at large, you have to acknowledge that maybe it's something about our genetics / psychology that's being exploited unfairly.

people wanting to talk to other people? Yes, that's the great benefit of social media. in the 2000's this was kids using cellphone minutes to chat around on flip phones. in the 90's it was some early online game chats. in the 80's it was kids stuck at an arcade.

I don't see anything inherently unethical about social media. You just gotta teach kids how to communicate to others and express themselves without putting down others. Not an easy feat (the bully trope goes back millenia), but this stopgap of just holding the courier accountable doesnt seem to solve anything,

The universe is not vast enough to contain a list of all the things we've brought to the brink of ruin to make parents' lives easier. This on top of an already massive pile of all sorts of benefits from taxation and the joy of children to longer life spans and having someone to chariot you between your bed and the toilet and wipe your royal cheeks.

Yes, yes, yes, we can't have a society without children etc etc etc. I understand it can't all be on the parents. But ffs, how about some of it?

Still, this is so much better than what the EU cooked up: saving the children by forcing websites to ask for your government issued ID to watch a video.

This is like saying parents should be responsible for the drug dealer on school playground. Its reasonable to expect going to school is a good thing, we can even argue about if someone should have kept an eye on them, but it should be undeniable that the drug dealer is for sure culpable.

It’s really not that simple. I just left my daughter at an established, reputable daycare.

Turns out they were short staffed, and so just gave the kids tons and tons of screen time.

Are you suggesting that the children should be monitored by parents 24/7? No day care? Homeschooling all kids? No babysitters?

are you suggesting that a few days of screen time at a bad day care is the screen's fault? Get another daycare that isn't shortstaffed. No kid is gonna be scarred for life over a few days of random youtube videos unless the day care is truly incompetent (which sounds like a good case to sue the day care over. Not Google).

My friend let his son play a free game but the ads on it were terrible. He diligently watched but yes he probably should have just paid to make the ads go away

On the other hand, they should not be advertising that stuff to kids in kid games

Some yes but probably not all.

I agree that's the only sustainable way of protecting kids.

But it requires a radical shift in society and culture. Parents need to spend a LOT more time with their kids. Specially mothers.

Some people will disagree and even downvote - I presume for ideological reasons - but I have the opinion that, for < 5 years-old children, spending time with the mother is more important than the father. So women should have a special safety net to dedicate more to their kids without worrying about their finances and career prospects. Men should also be taught since childhood to provide security to women.

I know, I know, lots of different types of families nowadays. I just don't know how they work, I only know "Mother, Father and children" families... Sorry, limitations of my personal experience.

"Mother, Father and children" is a relatively new phenomenon. The more common historical norm is "Mother, Father, some grandparent, maybe an aunt, and children". Under the latter scenario, there are a ton of different adults that can pay attention to the kids at any one time.

An arrangement of "mother stays home" is just as arbitrary as anything else in the grand scheme of things. There's nothing "traditional" or "normal" about it.

Yes, I would say over the last several thousand years, since agriculture, both parents stayed home (on the farm/lord's land) and the kids helped them work it. Having one or both parents gone any substantial amount of time is a completely new phenomenon outside death from disease or war or something like that. Industrialization over the past 150 years or so has gradually but completely changed how humans work and I think we're still getting accustomed to it as a species.

One of the nice things about remote working now is we're returning back to working at home / on the farm, which is more "natural" than both parents going to the office/factory.

You're misrepresenting my comment.

I didn't say it's old, common, traditional, or anything else. Just my personal experience. What you said is certainly on your mind, not mine.

> The more common historical norm

Source?

> ton of different adults

I don't think any other adult can perfectly replace a father and mother. It's not just about not letting kids get hurt. It's related to fatherhood and motherhood which shapes behavior in ways that an uncle, grandma, teacher, caretaker, whatever just can't have.