This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.”
The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people think it’s fine. It’s shocking as for a lot of people it’s more like “CEO of cucumber farm limits cucumbers for their child!” As that’s how Google markets youtube for kids.
To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.
It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.
It's a responsibility, probably (definitely, I think, but minimally probably) the most important job and responsibility one can have. If you're on HN, then you likely recognize the brain rotting effect of social media without moderation, and if that's the case, your responsibility is to parent to the minimum amount that you moderate your kids' usage.
Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
Screen time features exist on most devices. Parents - please set them up. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. I limit my kids for 1/2 hr of screen time per day. I exclude apps like iMessage, phone and maps.
Yeah - they do ask for more time here and there. But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).
I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.
Personally (as parent of two high schoolers) I think leaving texting unmanaged is wild. We block social media apps (Snap, IG, etc) and also regular media (YT, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, etc). Social media because of toxic content and regular media because of distractions. We limit messaging app time to 30min/day, whether it's SMS/RCS, Whatsapp, Telegram, or something else.
By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.
Do you not find unrestricted iMessages to be problematic? Dont groups and content sharing in them end-up fomenting a similar doomscroll dynamic as access to other content rich apps?
Not a whole lot of doomscrolling. There is more engagement - but I’ve resigned to the fact that it’s how kids communicate. For example - if they need to discuss homework or projects or even something simple as plan for boba tea.
I’d rather they walk to their friends’ place. But now they make the plan and then walk to where they need to be.
Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.
I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.
Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.
On that note, I'm happy to let my daughter play switch, because it has the best system for limiting screentime that I've see to date. I can set a limit, and then I can increase that limit for the day or lock it down again, remotely from the app. Very streamlined experience, clearly made by someone with user experience. In comparison, on iOS the system is janky and the Chromecast it's close to broken (and feels like abandonware).
Switch is an overall better choice for kids anyway, lots of kid friendly high quality games and they can even get some exercise in (switch sports, warioware, fitness boxing, Mario tennis)
All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.
I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.
I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).
I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.
3 things should be studied:
screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.
> I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids
Dangerous for different reasons. Unregulated screen time for young kids teaches their brain to expect stimulation at all times, and will usually increase their discomfort when they don't have it.
We try really hard to limit screen time to a couple times a week for max 30-45 minutes. Nothing saddens me more than seeing a totally content kid in public being sat down and handed a screen as the default (because it's 'easier' for the parent), depriving them of enjoying the world. Also see a lot of young kids who will cry and cry until they get it.
In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.
There has been for like 15 years. At least around here, well withouth the essay. I'm not sure what the essay would do, it would be written by a LLM anyway. Don't worry, LLM usage and risks is the next class we're beginning to teach as a society. Of course my own generation won't get that, so we're going to be fun "boomers" that way.
Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
I guess most parents try to limit screen time. But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
I try to do a total blockade of YT at home for kids. Watching other kids be hypnothized by the feed years ago was enough. The algorithm seems to converge to unboxing videos and surreal spam.
> But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
It's worse, iPads don't satisfy the simulation but instead create a harmful dependency on it. I'll go as far to say that giving young kids iPads is a form of abuse that doesn't get called out.
Significant emotional neglect will put you in the 1st or 2nd decile of emotional health. It can make you a total train wreck. I don’t think every bad thing needs to be abuse.
iPads are so easy to lockdown though, Apple did a good job on their parental controls. Roblox is the main brain stealer these days with a horrible social component, we only give our kid an hour a week now and even Thats probably too much.
In this occurrence I mean "distract the kids with something such that they don't hurt them self, fight or destroy stuff so the parent can do X" such as doing the disches or resting.
Not like, great at raising the kids in some moral sense. In which YT etc is terrible.
I cheat on fancy restaurants and might hand the kids some screen (not YT) to give us a chance to finnish the meal. Stuff like that, but overused.
Harm is a spectrum, but being able to sit still, and not harm yourself and destroy things, is a skill kids need to learn and using an iPad for that can stunt their growth.
> Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
I'd say it's closer to outright abuse. One of the better things you can do is a parent is seek out a community where this sort of thing is frowned upon. It's much harder to control when those around you think it's ok. I wish that were easier for people to find.
What they're saying is these folks don't trust the privacy of their hardware, they use a dud cable to block the microphone from listening.
I think what they're getting at is people close to the situation (not sure why Ye is in the privacy discussion, but Zuck certainly is) don't trust the controls in place.
A lot of parents also drug their kids A LOT to get them to behave the way they want, sleep the way they want. "Kids melatonin", Benadryl, essential oils (plenty of which DO have some drug effect though not often what is claimed)
An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.
YouTube Kids itself has a parental locked section where you can set a timer. The rest just don’t feel like they’re meant for kids at all. And that leaves adolescents in such a vulnerable spot.
The kids or non kids distinction is irrelevant. It’ll be clear once most of the world implements child block (which I personally disagree with). They’re gonna get decimated.
My kid found work arounds for that. For example she reset the ipad's clock to give herself more time. It really is like a drug to these children and they will lash out at you if you take it away.
Just throw it out of the window. I'm not going to give my 6y son access to a smart phone until he is much older, ideally when he is in senior high school. The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Fortunately we have a mobile ban in the school, so at least they know this is not a good thing.
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.
Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
The problem with this approach is their peers. Prohibition culture does not work if it’s so easy to access it elsewhere. My parents learned this when they tried to restrict video games strictly to the weekends when I was a kid haha!
I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just seems to make things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.
For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.
Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.
Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying.
Yeah we are doing that now. But I don’t know what to do if all his peers are on social media. I already know some of his friends have extensive screen time — their parents don’t care.
The planet doesn’t operate under the same time zone and that’d be easy to bypass. Just take your kids phone away or set up parental screen time or network controls.
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.
Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.
I don’t think this idea is that controversial? Most (?) people would agree watching YouTube 16 hrs a day is bad, but agree there is also a benefit to some of the content available.
It's almost as if ... being able to download specific content for offline viewing ... might be a far preferable option in terms of selection, control, and not getting sucked into an algorithmic wormhole.
Somehow we've not had the problem (yet). They get bored quickly and self-limit themselves, though we reserve the right to look at what they're up to whenever we see fit. Having lots of extracurricular activities might be helping, but my introverted, nerdy self spent way more time glued to a CRT as a teen. Hmm, maybe that's the secret.. having a nerd for a dad makes tech look uncool! :-D
Does it really matter? Even if a billionaire’s kid gets hooked on Coca-Cola or social media, they still have vastly more resources (therapy, education, support) to overcome it. Meanwhile, kids in underprivileged communities don’t get that safety net. For CEOs like Zuckerberg or Coca-Cola’s leadership, that disparity is just a small price to pay for the profits their products generate.
It's part of the parental responsibility to provide enough structure and instill enough discipline to your kids so that they grow to be complete persons. Sure it will be nice if social media was restricted like tobacco, and I am sure one day it will, but you can't relegate all responsibility for everything to the state. I don't want to live in a bubble wrapped society for the sake of the children.
This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.”
The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people think it’s fine. It’s shocking as for a lot of people it’s more like “CEO of cucumber farm limits cucumbers for their child!” As that’s how Google markets youtube for kids.
To me it seems like basic parenting to limit access to tech.
It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either. But that also doesn’t mean they should never have had a PlayStation or all gaming is bad.
Hacker News is not representative of the average person in often very bad ways.
It's also person after person telling people to parent harder.
It's a responsibility, probably (definitely, I think, but minimally probably) the most important job and responsibility one can have. If you're on HN, then you likely recognize the brain rotting effect of social media without moderation, and if that's the case, your responsibility is to parent to the minimum amount that you moderate your kids' usage.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's parenting.
Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
Screen time features exist on most devices. Parents - please set them up. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. I limit my kids for 1/2 hr of screen time per day. I exclude apps like iMessage, phone and maps.
Yeah - they do ask for more time here and there. But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it
Apple’s screen time parental settings are some of the most obtuse and frustrating features I’ve had to navigate on their devices (so much, that I honestly wonder if the people behind it even have kids).
I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.
Personally (as parent of two high schoolers) I think leaving texting unmanaged is wild. We block social media apps (Snap, IG, etc) and also regular media (YT, Netflix, Disney+, Tubi, etc). Social media because of toxic content and regular media because of distractions. We limit messaging app time to 30min/day, whether it's SMS/RCS, Whatsapp, Telegram, or something else.
By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.
Do you not find unrestricted iMessages to be problematic? Dont groups and content sharing in them end-up fomenting a similar doomscroll dynamic as access to other content rich apps?
Not a whole lot of doomscrolling. There is more engagement - but I’ve resigned to the fact that it’s how kids communicate. For example - if they need to discuss homework or projects or even something simple as plan for boba tea.
I’d rather they walk to their friends’ place. But now they make the plan and then walk to where they need to be.
“BREAKING: Rich people can purchase adequate childcare”
Dig a little deeper CNBC.
Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on YouTube.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMAFnTANx6A / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXxGWD_dtL0 / https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michio+kaku+3i+...
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
Youtube Kids has this. You can turn on a whitelisted content only mode. Then only content you share with the kids account shows up.
Approved content only mode.
Thanks, good to know. Either it didn't exist when I last tried to research it, or I just couldn't find it.
At which point I might as well put it on plex, same effort for tech savvy people.
Plex + archive.org is the best. So many great kids shows on there to grab.
Then you'd be giving money to the Google company as well. You can also look up the content creators and donate directly.
Will creators also serve you their content directly?
Breaking: Willy Wonka execs don’t let their kids eat unlimited amount of candy.
See how uninteresting and obvious that is?
Only if your mental model equates youtube to junk food.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Personally haven’t met any parents who don’t know this already.
The problem is childcare not knowledge.
I would expect an x-ray technician to limit their kid's time in x-rays.
It doesn't mean kids should never get an x-ray.
Sometimes moderation means complete abstinence but generally not.
You cannot be serious with this comparison.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
They prevent their kids from having unlimited time with YouTube. Does YouTube ever suggest that kids should be able to use it asich as they want?
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
‘He stressed “everything in moderation”’
> Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework?
I bet toy manufacturers have never had to think: "is this toy bad for my child's development?"
Is any YouTube bad for their child's development? Or just spending large amounts of time on it with no adult supervision?
Really?
Social media is not a substitute for child care
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.
I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
This is a cop out.
You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.
Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.
Giving your kids the attention and protection they need is not just something to be "purchased".
I know this is HN and the everything-as-a-service mentality is prevalent, but come on.
On that note, I'm happy to let my daughter play switch, because it has the best system for limiting screentime that I've see to date. I can set a limit, and then I can increase that limit for the day or lock it down again, remotely from the app. Very streamlined experience, clearly made by someone with user experience. In comparison, on iOS the system is janky and the Chromecast it's close to broken (and feels like abandonware).
Switch is an overall better choice for kids anyway, lots of kid friendly high quality games and they can even get some exercise in (switch sports, warioware, fitness boxing, Mario tennis)
All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.
I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.
I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).
I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.
3 things should be studied: screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.
> I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids
Dangerous for different reasons. Unregulated screen time for young kids teaches their brain to expect stimulation at all times, and will usually increase their discomfort when they don't have it.
We try really hard to limit screen time to a couple times a week for max 30-45 minutes. Nothing saddens me more than seeing a totally content kid in public being sat down and handed a screen as the default (because it's 'easier' for the parent), depriving them of enjoying the world. Also see a lot of young kids who will cry and cry until they get it.
In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.
There has been for like 15 years. At least around here, well withouth the essay. I'm not sure what the essay would do, it would be written by a LLM anyway. Don't worry, LLM usage and risks is the next class we're beginning to teach as a society. Of course my own generation won't get that, so we're going to be fun "boomers" that way.
>All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media.
As compared to what? To no exposure? Or to unlimited exposure?
As opposed to unlimited exposure. There are also many adults that spend several hours per day on social media. It’s not good for society.
Unlimited.
"brainrot" is not used that way
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brainrot
The best definition I see is
> the crippling addiction to low effort content
But also have seen it used plenty to refer to the low effort content itself
Brainrot is a small portion of social media
I have seen it used plenty by younger people even in a positive sense as a genre label for the aesthetics and humor of their generation.
Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
I guess most parents try to limit screen time. But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
I try to do a total blockade of YT at home for kids. Watching other kids be hypnothized by the feed years ago was enough. The algorithm seems to converge to unboxing videos and surreal spam.
> But some have a hard time doing it since it is a great babysitter.
We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
It's worse, iPads don't satisfy the simulation but instead create a harmful dependency on it. I'll go as far to say that giving young kids iPads is a form of abuse that doesn't get called out.
Significant emotional neglect will put you in the 1st or 2nd decile of emotional health. It can make you a total train wreck. I don’t think every bad thing needs to be abuse.
iPads are so easy to lockdown though, Apple did a good job on their parental controls. Roblox is the main brain stealer these days with a horrible social component, we only give our kid an hour a week now and even Thats probably too much.
> We should be clearer on what it means.
In this occurrence I mean "distract the kids with something such that they don't hurt them self, fight or destroy stuff so the parent can do X" such as doing the disches or resting.
Not like, great at raising the kids in some moral sense. In which YT etc is terrible.
I cheat on fancy restaurants and might hand the kids some screen (not YT) to give us a chance to finnish the meal. Stuff like that, but overused.
Harm is a spectrum, but being able to sit still, and not harm yourself and destroy things, is a skill kids need to learn and using an iPad for that can stunt their growth.
> Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.
I'd say it's closer to outright abuse. One of the better things you can do is a parent is seek out a community where this sort of thing is frowned upon. It's much harder to control when those around you think it's ok. I wish that were easier for people to find.
> Ye and Zuckerberg plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable.
Are you talking about Kanye West ? also can you expand what this means? "plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable"
What they're saying is these folks don't trust the privacy of their hardware, they use a dud cable to block the microphone from listening.
I think what they're getting at is people close to the situation (not sure why Ye is in the privacy discussion, but Zuck certainly is) don't trust the controls in place.
Appearantly there is a mixup risk using "ye" between "Kayne West" and "yeah" I wasn't aware of.
ah, yeah Kanye goes by "Ye"
I've never heard of "Ye" as meaning "Yeah" but I'm not as online as I once was (also from the US, maybe this is used elsewhere)
I can think of a lot of reasons why someone like Zuck would be targeted for surveillance but the rest of us are fine.
who has a dedicated mic input port in 2025? I doubt any CEOs do.
It is easy to limit at home, but what if all of his/her friends are on social media? It is so difficult nowadays because many parents DGAF.
A lot of parents also drug their kids A LOT to get them to behave the way they want, sleep the way they want. "Kids melatonin", Benadryl, essential oils (plenty of which DO have some drug effect though not often what is claimed)
An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.
It’s not just about limiting - why don’t these people make it easier on the apps themselves to do it? We know why.
YouTube Kids itself has a parental locked section where you can set a timer. The rest just don’t feel like they’re meant for kids at all. And that leaves adolescents in such a vulnerable spot.
The kids or non kids distinction is irrelevant. It’ll be clear once most of the world implements child block (which I personally disagree with). They’re gonna get decimated.
It’s more convenient to use Apple’s parental control feature because you can set limits in one place.
My kid found work arounds for that. For example she reset the ipad's clock to give herself more time. It really is like a drug to these children and they will lash out at you if you take it away.
If you are HN you know how to RTFM, I guess.
The Fix: Lock it Down:
Go to Settings > Screen Time.
Tap Turn On Screen Time (if not already on) and set it up for your child.
Tap Use Screen Time Passcode and create a passcode that the child doesn't know.
Go to Content & Privacy Restrictions (under Screen Time) and turn it on.
Tap Allowed Apps (to disable camera/other apps if needed) and Change Restrictions.
Under Content & Privacy Restrictions, find Date & Time Changes and set it to Don't Allow Changes or Require Password.
Just throw it out of the window. I'm not going to give my 6y son access to a smart phone until he is much older, ideally when he is in senior high school. The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Fortunately we have a mobile ban in the school, so at least they know this is not a good thing.
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older.
Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
What do you plan to do? Mine is in preschool but it's just a few years away...I feel pretty desperate.
The problem with this approach is their peers. Prohibition culture does not work if it’s so easy to access it elsewhere. My parents learned this when they tried to restrict video games strictly to the weekends when I was a kid haha!
I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just seems to make things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.
For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.
Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.
Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying.
Yeah we are doing that now. But I don’t know what to do if all his peers are on social media. I already know some of his friends have extensive screen time — their parents don’t care.
how about a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users under 18?
The planet doesn’t operate under the same time zone and that’d be easy to bypass. Just take your kids phone away or set up parental screen time or network controls.
Meanwhile “normal” (neglectful) parents give iPads or internet-connected computers to 5-year olds. They never stood a chance.
It’s rarely quite that simple and I would try being a little more charitable towards people.
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.
Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.
I don’t think this idea is that controversial? Most (?) people would agree watching YouTube 16 hrs a day is bad, but agree there is also a benefit to some of the content available.
It's almost as if ... being able to download specific content for offline viewing ... might be a far preferable option in terms of selection, control, and not getting sucked into an algorithmic wormhole.
Somehow we've not had the problem (yet). They get bored quickly and self-limit themselves, though we reserve the right to look at what they're up to whenever we see fit. Having lots of extracurricular activities might be helping, but my introverted, nerdy self spent way more time glued to a CRT as a teen. Hmm, maybe that's the secret.. having a nerd for a dad makes tech look uncool! :-D
Dealers and dope peddlers don't get high on their own supply.
This has been the case for a while. Look up Waldorf schools. Screen free.
I attended a screen free school, but back then we just called it a school.
Careful. Waldorf schools have some great ideas but they’re also rife with crackpottery and are somewhat cult-like in many ways.
But they do have great salads.
I am sure the coca-cola boss limits his kids soft drink consumption too.
Does it really matter? Even if a billionaire’s kid gets hooked on Coca-Cola or social media, they still have vastly more resources (therapy, education, support) to overcome it. Meanwhile, kids in underprivileged communities don’t get that safety net. For CEOs like Zuckerberg or Coca-Cola’s leadership, that disparity is just a small price to pay for the profits their products generate.
It's part of the parental responsibility to provide enough structure and instill enough discipline to your kids so that they grow to be complete persons. Sure it will be nice if social media was restricted like tobacco, and I am sure one day it will, but you can't relegate all responsibility for everything to the state. I don't want to live in a bubble wrapped society for the sake of the children.
I expect Sergey and Brin run ad-blockers as well.
What about Larry and Page?
Instead of teaching kids self control they snatch stuff from them left and right.
You clearly don't have children.
In other news: Philip Morris CEO limits his kids' cigarette use.
CEO of tobacco do the same. What’s your point? We sell things that are bad for humans. It’s a significant part of our global GDP