The nation’s second-largest teachers union said Thursday it was losing patience with social media apps that it says are contributing to mental health problems and misbehavior in classrooms nationwide, draining time and money from teachers and school systems.
I blocked social media sites at the router and on the phones for my kids and don’t feel bad about it at all.
Reason I don’t feel and about it is that as soon as we blocked everything my daughter’s mental health did a 180 from planning her suicide to having real life goals. And she tells all her friends how much happier she is without those stupid apps all the damn time.
I make an effort to talk to my kids about media and critical thinking. We have awesome communication and I’m super happy that my kids talk to me about things. They’re not ostracized for their lack of TikTok. They actively avoid the kids who are obsessed with socials because those kids are toxic and struggle in ways that make them not great friends. I truly don’t see a downside to implementing this boundary on behalf of my kids.
If your kid feels left out because they can’t wreck their mental health with their peers then there’s some serious values conversations that need to be had. It’s ok, and necessary to use tools for your kids when they can’t or won’t use them on their own. That’s what being a parent means.
I’m with you on this. I blocked them too and my kid knows why. The commenter above may mean more using/having a smart phone and internet access generally and I reluctantly agree for the most part. But yeah, fuck social media and it’s debilitating impact. Not just on youth, I don’t use that shit because five minutes makes my fairly successful ass feel terrible too! Just toxic all around.
My comment was clearly not written to give you advice for your specific child and her suite of issues.
I’m speaking a lot more generally and while I’m leaving room for parents like you to make your choices, I’m also still being direct that I think it’s not a good universal rule. Even if that is an outcome someone chooses, it’s no less true that engaging with the whole choice is necessary to do a good job of making it. Internet=bad is an incredibly simplistic old-person take at this stage in society, and some parents even to current generations can misunderstand or underestimate the significant role that the internet can play in their kids’ lives. No solution fits across all kids, that’s part of the challenge - but understanding the role that the internet plays in modern kids’ social world and peer networks is important to making decisions about their access to it with complete information and goal-oriented integrity.
The matched point in that comment you may have missed is that I’m not modelling my remarks around a binary of “unrestricted internet” vs “no internet.” If anything, I think I was clearly saying that absolute ‘solutions’ get progressively worse the wider they cast their net - as more and more unintended consequences are included in that broad-reaching choice.
Separately, you also shouldn’t expect that what you felt you needed to do in order to support your child in a relatively unusual situation - will also be a good foundation for broad-case parenting practices. What is good for one child is not good for all children - and the more unusual the child or their needs, the less applicable that solution would be to “average” kids. There are other kids in similar-looking situations where your solution would exacerbate the problem instead of reduce it - now not only are they depressed and bullied, but also isolated from their friends. The vast majority of kids aren’t in situations particularly similar to yours and using your solution in their cases risks putting them into worse places than they started, or putting a target on them where none existed prior. Sever the child from the internet isn’t something you necessarily should be treating as universally good for all parents and all kids with zero possible downsides.
There are always downsides. Especially in parenting, everything is a trade-off and nothing is clear-cut. If you can’t see what’s being traded off - in effectively anything - that’s a good cue to start hunting for blind spots. Especially when making rules for kids like cutting off parts of their world. As you said, being a parent requires making tough choices, and that requires engaging with the whole cost/benefit of the choice.
There’s nothing challenging or tough about firmly believing you are wholly, completely, and absolutely Correct in whatever option you pick. It’s easy to choose something and insist that it’s 100% totally and absolutely correct with zero room for discussion. That approach actively shuts down all the actually hard parts of making the choice. But that is a choice with it’s own downsides. It makes it hard to relate to those kids as they age enough to challenge you, or start leaving home, and it doesn’t model behavior that I - personally - think is producing functional adults down the road. At the very least, the kind of person who is never wrong is not the kind of person I want to raise.
So I think that commenting more specifically on what you’ve said here - it rings some bells and tints some flags. You’re proudly teaching your kids critical thinking, yet also say you cannot see any downsides to cutting off social media completely. You’re absolutely blase about deeming all kids who use social media “toxic” and “bad friends” with “struggles” as if it’s completely normal, healthy, and definitely non-toxic for an adult to be passing those kind of judgements about children on such a trivial basis, and to model that for their own kids. You talk about one child’s needs to justify the choice, but have more than that one affected by it. You reacted as if this is already a hot-button issue to you - and responded to remarks clearly speaking generally and not at all targeting to you as if it was a personal attack, returning fire with a bunch of spicy jibes about me as a person and as a parent. If this is how you experience and respond to an opinion you disagree with on the internet, I can certainly imagine how you deal with faintest hints of dispute from your own children. Of course they’re telling you what you want to hear.
The calls are coming from inside the house, friend.
