It doesn't have to make them weird, especially if you're in a school district where there are no-phone policies. Otherwise it can be difficult, for sure.

Learning how to stand on your own in school is good practice for doing the same thing in life. By which I’m absolutely not saying “don’t have friends” but rather, you don’t have to be like everyone else.

My kids won’t be on social media until they’re not kids anymore. If none of us take a stand, nothing ever changes.

Your kids will create hidden social media accounts that you don't know about. That's what I would have done in their situation.

Their exposure will still be much less than someone who gives them free reign and lets them sit in the livingroom staring at a phone. They won't be staring at the phone distracted while they're hanging out with the family.

Hiding things from parents is a far bigger problem than staring at a phone in a living room.

No it’s not. Everyone hid things from their parents. I hid soooo much from my parents. It’s fine. It’s normal. It’s far more important to have limited exposure to modern smart phones.

The people who say things like this inevitably are the ones who spend ten minutes with a therapist and the therapist’s eyes go wide

What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents that you smoke weed with your friends before playing video games? What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents who are dangerously religious, that you had sex with your high school girlfriend? These are all normal, innocuous activities of teenagers. A therapist would not think twice about hearing them.

Indeed, I might have done the same. At least that will be a challenge, lacking smart phones.

Being an outlier when the in-group is actively having their brains turned to mush seems like the better of the two outcomes.

This argument is popular but doesn't hold water. If we suppose for the sake of argument that social media is bad for kids, then it is a parent's duty to keep them off it even if that makes the kid unpopular. As an analogy, consider a kid whose social circle is all shooting heroin. Would it then become acceptable to let your kid do heroin? Of course not. Similarly, even if all the other kids are on social media, it doesn't become acceptable to let your kid use social media (going with the assumed premise that it's bad for them).