When she was in fifth grade, Scarlett Goddard Strahan started to worry about getting wrinkles.
By the time she turned 10, Scarlett and her friends were spending hours on TikTok and YouTube watching influencers tout products for achieving today’s beauty aesthetic: a dewy, “glowy,” flawless complexion. Scarlett developed an elaborate skin care routine with facial cleansers, mists, hydrating masks and moisturizers.
One night, Scarlett’s skin began to burn intensely and erupted in blisters. Heavy use of adult-strength products had wreaked havoc on her skin. Months later, patches of tiny bumps remain on Scarlett’s face, and her cheeks turn red in the sun.
“I didn’t want to get wrinkles and look old,” says Scarlett, who recently turned 11. “If I had known my life would be so affected by this, I never would have put these things on my face.”
The skin care obsession offers a window into the role social media plays in the lives of today’s youth and how it shapes the ideals and insecurities of girls in particular. Girls are experiencing high levels of sadness and hopelessness. Whether social media exposure causes or simply correlates with mental health problems is up for debate. But to older teens and young adults, it’s clear: Extended time on social media has been bad for them, period.
I don’t understand why parents (or guardians) let their children have a smartphone when everyone is aware of the many threats that can be encountered on these devices.
Oh get a grip. There’s repercussions to being socially isolated from your peers, as well. I’d argue the consequences to denying a child a fundemental means of social interaction is more harmful than tiktok, even with the latter’s long history of bastardry. The blame for these problems lies far more at the feet of absentee parenting than it does “children having smartphones”.
Oh, hard disagree. Tiktok isn’t used just to connect with peers and any child claiming it is is lying. It’s a global app tailored to feed you content that keeps you engaged and challenges your self worth until you start responding to the ads and sponsored content forced on you. If kids need to socialise they don’t need tiktok, they need messaging apps like whatsapp or imessage or signal. Ways to stay in touch exclusively with people who you actually do socialise with.
I’m sorry, I’m confused what you’re hard disagreeing about. So the existance of one predatory app means smartphones themselves must be avoided? Or just that parents should be restricting their kids access to tiktok? Because if it’s the latter than I very much agree, my point is that denying kids access to smartphones as a whole does more harm to them (by preventing them social interaction with their peers) than the harm done by possibly allowing them to also see tiktok.
Specifically this.
I think being socially isolated is better than exposing kids to tiktok or other social media designed to farm engagement from them.
Of course I said they should be allowed to access WhatsApp and other forms of communication so I’m not advocating for a blanket ban on phones. But it should also be stated:
(I swear to god I’m not trying to be antagonistic here, I just really like hearing myself talk: )
I think what you’re saying is that, taken in a vacuum, exposure to tiktok is a net negative vs. not having access to tiktok. And I think that from a certain perspective you could very well be correct. I also think you’ve misunderstood me; when I said ‘socially isolated’ I was referring to the near-total social isolation that comes with being unable to access the internet as a modern youth, not just ‘not being able to use tiktok’, which I should perhaps have caught on to and clarified earlier. I agree that tiktok is, on the whole, better for a person not to use. I think we’re broadly in agreement here, though I’m a advocate of the ‘all things in moderation’ school of thought, and a firm supporter of harm reduction (please don’t jeer too much…).
There’s two things I’d like to say, though. The first is that there is no possible way to objectively assess a means of socialization on a Best <> Worst scale, nor is there a way to identify what a ‘personal element’ is. I’m going to assume, hopefully correctly, that you’re in the 20+ age bracket here, and that you did not grow up with digital communication as a particularly large segment of your childhood social interaction. Assuming this lets me point to it as a very reasonable explanation of why you’ve wound up at the conclusion that human interaction has anything built-in, because alternative forms of communication were extremely niche until the “digital revolution” that the millennials and zoomers have experienced growing up.
Human interaction is a wholly learned behavior, one that we get the foundations for during childhood and then find incredibly difficult (or nigh impossible) to re-learn as adults. The reality we are facing (haha) is that children who primarily communicate digitally have developed tone indicators and expressions wholly alien to people unused to the medium. They aren’t missing out on a chunk of human interaction, they’re just interacting differently than what used to be the norm. They may be worse at face to face communication, but that is getting less and less important as we transition to a more connected society. Wholly denying them experience with an entire segment of how people relate and communicate can, I hope you agree, be nothing but detrimental to them.
As a real world example:
I teach computer science (in my copious spare time…), and when I talk to my students I have to be very conscious of the background they have with a given medium. Many students, ones that did not grow up with the internet or older students especially, I have to be much more careful about communicating my meaning when sending them a message because the tone indicators I and my younger / digitally hipper students take for granted just aren’t noticed by people unfamiliar with them. By the same token, many in-person conversations I have require me to be very careful to ensure that body language cues are not missed by those less comfortable with them. It’s a careful line to walk, and overall the students who are familiar with both easily do the best in our courses.
The second thing is, predictably, that all things should be taken in moderation.
Yes, society is transitioning how we primarily interact with each other. No, that doesn’t mean learning how to interact in person is no longer important. I primarily interact with my partner digitally, even though much of our time spent together is in the same room, but there certainly are discussions where it’s much easier to accurately communicate meaning face-to-face. Now admittedly she’s deeply autistic so perhaps she isn’t the best example I could use here, but still. Children spending 100% of their time on their phone or on their computer obviously isn’t healthy (I say, hypocritically), and I doubt you’d find a single person that would claim that it is. But by the same reasoning, they shouldn’t be spending 100% of their time in total digital abstinence. The times, they are a-changing, and neglecting to learn how to communicate effectively is bad no matter what the medium (I again say hypocritically, staring down a 724 word essay on a tiny lemmy thread maybe two people will ever read…)
Lol, I read it !
so you think it’s complicated, but also it’s just absentee parenting. have you always been this way, or were you ever a teenager? getting away from the parents is what kids want. some parents are super successful at avoiding this, so good on them. some parents are working all the damn time to feed their kids, so yeah. they’re absent.
Everything is complicated, but I’m not going to argue against the idea that the blame lies at least partially with the socioeconomic realities facing modern parents that result in absentee parenting. Its just, the way you presented this feels like you’re trying to argue against my point, but your argument is in agreement. I’m confused.
so what is it you are arguing for?
The negative results of denying a child acess to the most common means of modern social interaction (a smartphone) are much more severe than the potential harm caused by allowing them to also have possible access to predatory apps like tiktok, and that active parenting will mitigate even that potential harm.
you are still just arguing, but you don’t have any idea how to fix the known problem. neither do i.
I was answering your question, the one you asked about what my arguments were. The one you asked in response to me agreeing with you, and asking how we were disagreeing. Hence reiterating my arguments. Thus far this hasn’t been an argument so much as it has been an agreement.
I have plenty of solutions, too, they just havent come up yet. Most of them center around support for parents, either financially or emotionally, and increased education/awareness both for parents and children about online advertising, critical thinking and personal due diligence. Additionally, and this is wishful thinking I admit, an expansion of protections regulating advertising content that can be shown to children.
you should just say that. in a more compelling way. what you said is not going to do it, though I agree. no cares what we think about tiktok.
You can give a kid a smartphone and monitor their use of it. There’s even software that can help you out if you don’t want to just do it the old-fashioned way by looking with your eyes.
IMHO, this is a very sensitive topic, and I’m glad I don’t have kids for this to be a worry for me.
Smartphones became a big thing when I was already in high school, and social media at the time still wasn’t this aggressive, but my father did monitor my activity on the PC, mostly secretly, and it made me feel anxious. This violation of privacy damaged my already shit/barely existent relationship with him. It’s also why I’m so paranoid of secretly being monitored. You have to already have a pretty good relationship with your parents for this not to potentially mess you up, at least in my experience.
What the solution to this is, I don’t know. Better digital/tech education in schools and at home would be a good step in that direction, but strict ad and product regulations should also be implemented, which - unfortunately expectedly - is being fought against (at least in the USA, according to the article).
The secretly part is the issue. We did not make it a secret. When my daughter was 11, she got a cell phone because at that point all of her friends had them. But we told her that we would monitor her use. She knew about it, so she didn’t feel anxious about it (and she has major anxiety problems). At this point, at 14, we feel we can trust her to be responsible and don’t monitor anymore. But we do still talk to her about what she sees.
Were we able to block her from absolutely everything that might have been risky? Probably not. But I think we avoided most of it while trying to educate her on safe behavior.
It wasn’t just secretly, or that secretly at all, but it still stuck with me. When I was 10, I was texting a friend about having started periods, an extremely sensitive topic, and my father grabbed my phone to read who I was texting. It’s been very long since that happened, and I don’t have the best memory, but things like this I remember very vividly. Some kids are more sensitive, and you have to build a strong relationship with them for these things to potentially work. I think there is even a Black Mirror episode on this topic.
There’s also a problem that if the kid does know they’re being monitored, they can and some will figure out how to get past it. I can’t offer an immediate solution, because honestly, social media scape is severly fucked nowadays, but there’s no winning scenario I can think of that doesn’t require one to have an extremely good relationship with their kid. And even then, it might not be enough.
I’m glad I’m both old enough I didn’t grow up with tiktok and the likes, and that I don’t have kids to worry about. Being a parent in this day and age sounds absolutely exhausting and uncertain from multiple modern-world perspectives.
Kudos to any working parent who manages to handle it well and has a kid with a good head on their shoulders.
Exactly.
The internet is kind of like second world. You probably wouldn’t cut your children from the real world, but neither should you let them grow up in it unsupervised.
It’s part of the life nowdays, and you can adapt to it, not deny it. Just like with book reading in 18th century.
Because they are necessary in the modern world? From 14 onwards it’s an essential socialisation tool.
They think they are being nice. It was a long time ago, but my mum tried to give my kids smartphones when they were 6 and 4. She couldn’t understand why I made her take them back and wouldn’t talk to me for months.
How old is y?
Aight they fixed it
Corrected ta
Because they risk being bullied or left out. Denying their kid a phone only works if all the parents do it.
Edit: I don’t have a solution; maybe an anti-bullshit law that punishes people from spouting bullshit? (Good luck religious folks!)
But denying a phone may just replace one problem with another.