That's a very well-argued response, congratulations. I will only take issue with the last sentence. I don't know the studies, but most of my friends from school who were smoking in moderation back then, ended up as heavy smokers as adults. Those who avoided it completely (partly due to stricter parenting) largely seem to stay smoking-free in later life.

To be fair, you're bringing in the element of physical addiction.

I think smartphones, social media, and video games are the smoking of the next generation.

The smoking of the next generation is still smoking.

I love the way she saved her killer point for the end. She will go far.

I enjoyed thinking about this more than I thought I would.

> First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot (3-5+ hours a day)

This is an excellent, solid point.

> Another thing that the article mentioned is that people these days who do not have social media may feel excluded or left out, and may even miss things because they don’t have social media, which can lead to a decline in their mental health as well.

Not convincing unless it can be demonstrated that the expected harm from being isolated from social media is greater than the expected harm caused by being exposed to social media.

> Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there [...] I don’t usually compare myself to them

This is not well reasoned in my opinion: this is described as a consequence of social media usage. It hasn't been shown to be a preexisting personality trait that, combined with social media usage, causes the mental health issues. That is, you may not compare yourself to others precisely because you do not use social media regularly.

All that said, however, the first point (moderate usage) combined with the last point (excessive usage later in life) is fairly persuasive for a strategy of allowing small doses of social media.

>First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental

I believe this is akin to "people who drink x% a day have no problems", it's _static_. What it totally ignores is that the addictive substance subtly changes behavior over time and x% of those people go on to become full blown addicts.

> I believe this is akin to "people who drink x% a day have no problems", it's _static_. What it totally ignores is that the addictive substance subtly changes behavior over time and x% of those people go on to become full blown addicts.

Great point, I had not heard that before.

Addictive substance in such tiny uses (a sip, the equivalent to 30 minutes of social media time/day), does not cause behavior changes over time. There is not a substantial study that demonstrates this. Remember, behavior changes are exceptionally hard to create.

Of course, alcohol guidance levels have been way too high for decades now, most modern orgs suggest less than 2 a week, and even use verbiage that states anything near or above 2/week increases health risks of all types - with zero upside. A dramatic difference from alcohol guidelines of yesteryear proclaiming a glass a day will improve your heart or whatever BS.

So this idea that full blown addicts are created by people who take a glass per week (the actual recommendation, not the alcohol industry funded one) or whatever is absurdity. Why were they using the substance in the first place? This will be a much bigger determining factor to their outcome - much like you can tell who social media is going to drastically affect by whether or not their support system embraces them.

That's a pretty nice rebuttal!

It would be interesting to have her comment on "Why Nerds are Unpopular - Paul Graham" [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Gosh, your daughter is impressively eloquent and literate. I've come across rhetoric like that from a 12-year-old, but not very often. You should both be proud.

Just wanted to chime in and say that my wife is due to give birth to our first child imminently, and if at 12 he can reason and communicate in this fashion, I will consider myself to have totally crushed it as a parent.

Keep up the good work.

Yeah I was definitely not even half as articulate when I was 12.

Maybe she got that good by reading tons of discussions on social media

Thank you for the kind words

>and with the limit on my phone, I would be using it minimally, especially because I use a lot of my phone time daily to listen to music (like 5 [REDACTED], which I am listening to right now) and to text my friends, so I would only use it for 20 or so minutes a day, which is very low.

This is a recipe for frustrating yourself. Social media is very addictive. You're currently unhappy and you're _not_ allowed to use it, imagine how much more unhappy you'll be after having only 20 minutes. You'll only want to use it more and more once you're allowed to use it. You'll be thinking about those 20 minutes and what you'll do all day, you'll get mad when the 20 minutes is up etc.

>Another thing that the article mentioned is that people these days who do not have social media may feel excluded or left out,

That's a much easier problem to treat than social media addiction. The amount of harm you can experience on social media is unbounded, and also not readily anticipated. You don't really know how much it can harm you, and you are asking to allow it to harm you a little bit so that you can then later argue that amount didn't _significantly_ harm you so more access is fine.

>In case you hadn’t already noticed, I don’t really do that. I do find people pretty, but I don’t usually compare myself to them.

Have you considered other people "didn't do that" too, and that social media changed them? What if it changes you too? Do you _want_ to end up like them? "It won't happen to me" is a really common trope when dealing with addictive things.

>Also, studies have shown that when people don’t get to do something as a child/teenager isn’t allowed to do or have something in moderation, they are more likely to do or have it in excess as an adult.

Perhaps, but have you considered that adults shouldn't be using these platforms either? It's not as simple as "when you're old enough, you can now jump off a cliff", maybe... don't jump off the cliff? It's a silly metaphor but still, the default position shouldn't be to use these things.

>I believe that using social media could actually have greater benefits for me, such as being able to record Tiktok dances with my friends, or messaging people on Snapchat.

There's billions of silly dance videos on tik tok, your life isn't any worse for you not making number 9,999,234,255. Snapchat is for old people (zoomer-boomers) now, so you're also not missing much there anyways.

I'm with dad on this one, social media won't make you any happier and it's scientifically proven to make a lot of people less happy over time. If I could go back to a world where social media never happened I would choose that in a heart beat.

>Perhaps, but have you considered that adults shouldn't be using these platforms either? It's not as simple as "when you're old enough, you can now jump off a cliff", maybe... don't jump off the cliff? It's a silly metaphor but still, the default position shouldn't be to use these things.

I've noticed in my life when I was a teenager, I had this view of phases of myself. There was my current teenager self and then there was my future adult self. My view was that my adult self would be completely different than my teenaged self. I'd be an "Adult" with a capital A. Nothing can stop me then!

Then I learned that I am still very similar as an adult to my teenaged self. The things my teenage self would get addicted to and obsess over, my adult self also has those qualities.

My grandmother was quoted as saying (on her 64th birthday) "I'm beginning to not feel 16 anymore."

>This is a recipe for frustrating yourself. Social media is very addictive. You're currently unhappy and you're _not_ allowed to use it, imagine how much more unhappy you'll be after having only 20 minutes. You'll only want to use it more and more once you're allowed to use it. You'll be thinking about those 20 minutes and what you'll do all day, you'll get mad when the 20 minutes is up etc.

This rings pretty true for me. I grew up in the 90's and my parents heavily policed how much television I was allowed to watch. I was allowed 5 hours of TV a week. I'd borderline obsess over how I was going to spent those 5 hours each week. I would pour over the TV guide plan out exactly what I'd watch. I ended up angry and resenting my parents as a result.

I had a lot of the same complaints, "All my friends at school are going to be discussing what they watched, I'm going to be left out and excluded etc."

At the time a lot of the same arguments being levied against social media today were being made about television, it's addictive, it's bad for children's development etc.

I was the oldest child my parents had some very strict ideas on how they wanted to raise me, by the time my younger siblings were teenagers my parents had more or less given up or relaxed all of the restrictions I had.

I've seen that pattern too. A kid at a birthday party I had had, spent the entire time playing grand theft auto vice city; sleep be damned. He had never watched a violent movie, so the quests were uninteresting. That ~22hr game session was dedicated to roaming free, and what that afforded (simulated violence, prostitution, etc). I didn't see that happen with drugs at least - adderall, xanax, klonopin abound, but the sheltered kids I knew never dove into them the same way.

We're around the same age and my parents had pretty heavy restrictions on tv and videogames, I also got ticked off at the time, but I was certainly happy for it even by the end of my teen years. I imagine if your goal is to make your kid happy while they're still a kid, there's a good chance you'll screw up your kid. What makes a kid happy half the time is stuff they'll regret in short order. And yeah, more rules went out the window as each of my successive siblings were born, too. I also seem to remember kids who had NO tv whatsoever (or just PBS, which was arguably worse than nothing), and I don't seem to remember them being too bothered by it. As much as we teased them for not getting the simpsons etc jokes. In fact they seemed to develop, at a much earlier age, some independence from the crowd.

Yeah I have no doubt the way I was raised had an influence on my life as a result of I suppose boredom and the huge amount of free time due to TV restrictions I became heavily invested in electronics and technology, as a 13/14 year old I would buy computer and electronics magazines and read them cover to cover, I'd spend hours pulling apart and reassembling electronics. I would go to swap meets buy old broken second hand computers and upgrade/repair them and then resell them. My room used to be filled with old motherboards, keyboards etc stacked up to near the ceiling. I think it drove my parents nuts I had so much junk parts hoarded all over my room.

All of this led me to studying Engineering.

It's not really about spending at most the specific number of hours. Parents want their children (and maybe the children themselves too) to be the type of person that only spends that number of hours.

> people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot

this is at least in part because the type of person that spends 1.5 hours on social media vs the type of person that spends 5 is a different type of person that probably cares less about what's on there, i.e. selection bias.

Asian parents wouldn't have this debate. Why?

Any problem with a complexity level that has an answer - I don't know - gets to be thought about only after you have earned your black belt not before.

Is black belt a metaphor ?

Haha, no - way to stereotype. If you follow that it just leads to non-independent children.

That she was prepared to eloquently argue her case and demonstrate how much metacognition she has is a demonstration she'll probably be resilient to a lot of potentially negative influences in life. I'm less interested in the actual arguments than her thinking process and I would be impressed if my kids showed this level of self awareness.

Reverse it and write "Why I think it is reasonable for me to NOT have social media"

Honestly some good points. Knowing only what I can know about her from the response, I'd trust her to use social media. But I'd still keep limits in things ;p

Also good use of the 5 paragraph format lol. Brings me back.

"I believe that using social media could actually have greater benefits for me, such as being able to record Tiktok dances with my friends"

It was believable until the agenda was revealed :)

See, dinosaur me would insist that young girls should enjoy dancing together. Without a camera and without sharing this with the entire world. I do not even want to think about the legions of creepy old men watching that.

Nicely written !

Now, did she use chatGPT ? ;)

My opinion is: Give her anonymous social media (& general internet safety tips), i.e. reddit or maybe some special-interest discords. Sounds like interacting with strangers on the internet is a lot better than your friends. Help her decide what to subscribe to based on her interests. I was about that age when I started posting on anonymous boards, and I wrote terrible group fanfictions, talked about how great the Lord of the Rings soundtracks were, predicted what would happen in my favorite webcomics were, etc. Communities like this still exist, they're just in different places now.

This is interesting to me (I'm also a PhD student with research interests related to privacy and anonymity). Yesterday I was thinking something similar about the distinction, in terms of negative mental health effects, between places like HN where most of us are pseudonymous (if not anonymous) and places like Facebook, Instagram, etc. where your real persona is more of a factor and is usually tied to real photos of yourself, your friends, your home, etc. Like you, I also grew up on pseudonymous forums starting around age 12. I've always found forums like this to be somewhat addictive, but I think not nearly as addictive as Facebook and Instagram are for many people. I think it helps that I don't suffer in-real-life social consequences for what "warner25" writes on here, nor for who does and doesn't see it, and I could easily abandon this pseudonym tomorrow. So maybe that's healthier?

I'm just struggling with the idea because it runs counter to a couple other ideas: First, that social networking with people you actually know is the good part while broadcasting to the world through social media to collect likes and followers is the bad part. Second, that anonymity and pseudonymity bring out the most toxic behavior in people, so things like "real name" policies are better.

Personally I see real name policies as a 'simple, easy, and wrong' solution to a complex problem. It was relatively reasonable thing to try, it seemed like it is a straightforward way to get people to behave. But in practice people quadruple-down and toxicity becomes a part of their identity instead of blowing off steam or a side hobby, and openly changing their mind means losing face.

> people these days who do not have social media may feel excluded or left out, and may even miss things

Text-centric social media might be a good middle ground here. I only login to the FB web site a few times a year (mostly to add/accept new friends), because I realized that I was envious of everybody in my feed living the life I wished I were living but have been unable to acquire. (Over 35 yro when I did this, for context) But I have FB Messenger on my phone, so I can still communicate with people who use FB. I have missed events, mostly general-purpose/last-minute everyone-is-invited events of a large group I was part of. But friends would often forward events to me, and obviously if it were a party that they specifically wanted me, they would notify me.

Ultimately people want to be known and valued, and being part of a general, everyone-is-invited group does not provide that. It does provide an opportunity to find the people you want to know and value, but school already provides that opportunity (and the social groups online are going to mostly be the in-person groups anyway). So I'm not sure that the value of missing general events is outweighed by the risk, and like I said, your friends will tell you about things they know you would not have seen.

"It won't happen to me" said everybody who it happened to.

People always underestimate/overestimate their ability to deal with things. Your kid is very mature, but they're dealing with forces way beyond them nonetheless.

These services are built by people who know how to hook you. Young children and even teenagers cannot fully comprehend the long term damage social media can do, and are still in a stage of development in which the effects of social media can have long term, even life-long consequences.

These studies are honestly incredibly hard to do, because as the author points out, social media is simply part of the lives of the majority of people in the western world. It's impossible to isolate social media from the rest of the changes that happened in society. The attempts at doing "social media cures" and measuring the effects are cute, but since they only lasted a few weeks, are hardly good indicators of something (habits that don't stick are quite pointless to measure). Teenagers are increasingly under more and more stress with high stake testing, an increasingly competitive college admission process and increasingly grim prospects for economic mobility and long term environmental sustainability. Plus, the "smartphone revolution" lands bull's-eye on the aftermath of the 2007 Great Recession, which impacted a lot of families (was the teen depressed because of the smartphone or his house getting foreclosed?). To me, social media sounds like an incredibly convenient scapegoat to ignore all these deeper issues.

Now, your daughter drives a good point and is extremely eloquent.

There's two points where I feel like expanding what she said.

> First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot (3-5+ hours a day)

I don't know how they measure time spent using social media (to me that's vague, is having iMessage running on my Mac "using social media"? If so I'm at at least 7 hours...). But if they measure "active use" (so let's say scrolling) 5+ hours is a lot. 35h/week, almost a full time job.

I'm wondering if the causality isn't reversed here (unhappy and depressed people in an environment where they aren't stimulated enough do end up scrolling 5+ hours a day as a consequence of their mental state).

To me, a kid that ends up on social media 5+ hours a day reeks of bad parenting. He/She should have hobbies and activities to fill that time.

> Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

This is an excellent free response. I wish my colleagues could write this well (I am being serious).