I do know that I want my own children to stay off social media, and minimize their ownership and use of smart phones, for as long as they possibly can. And that I intend to spend quite a lot of my available points, if needed, to fight for this. And that if I was running a school I’d do my best to shut the phones down during school hours.
(...)
We can also help this along by improving alternatives to phone use. If children aren’t allowed to go places without adults knowing, or worse adults driving them and coming along and watching them, what do you think they are going to do all day? What choices do they have?
I’m not certain whether my intuition should be trusted here, since this is definitely the kind of thing my brain would form a habit of rationalizing about. But my guess is that I would’ve been way worse off without phones/social media/stuff. I didn’t really have any great alternatives to socializing on the internet—the only people I ever interacted with in person were devout Christians.
So I tentatively think it might be better to really focus on the improving alternatives part first? I’m sure I would’ve been much better off if I had good in-person friends, but I don’t think not having access to social media would have really helped with that, it’d just have meant I wouldn’t have any good friends at all.
(I would expect Zvi in particular has good enough parenting skills to not run into that. But I know a lot of people with terrible parents who think they can fix the problem just by monitoring their children’s access to technology, which seems terrible for them to me? So I worry about how good it is as general advice.)
I’m not certain whether my intuition should be trusted here, since this is definitely the kind of thing my brain would form a habit of rationalizing about. But my guess is that I would’ve been way worse off without phones/social media/stuff. I didn’t really have any great alternatives to socializing on the internet—the only people I ever interacted with in person were devout Christians.
So I tentatively think it might be better to really focus on the improving alternatives part first? I’m sure I would’ve been much better off if I had good in-person friends, but I don’t think not having access to social media would have really helped with that, it’d just have meant I wouldn’t have any good friends at all.
(I would expect Zvi in particular has good enough parenting skills to not run into that. But I know a lot of people with terrible parents who think they can fix the problem just by monitoring their children’s access to technology, which seems terrible for them to me? So I worry about how good it is as general advice.)