I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that "over-coddling" metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can't get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.

You don't necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don't want to overcorrect so hard that you're causing other problems.

As toxic as it is, as much as there's space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content ... the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an 'outsider' role in their peer group. In the first, it's a lost cause and all you're doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can't talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it "better" for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?

The kid restricted to "dumb phone only, no internet, no apps" is the current generations' equivalent of that one kid that wasn't allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it's never been great for the kid whose parents won't let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.

It's far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You're either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you're simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they're jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they're likely to fall into .

I’ve heard this before about a billion things, it’s not a particularly useful take.

It wasn't really intended to be, as that is a larger conversation. But I didn't mean it the way I suspect you thought I did, in a boomer "tight pants and rock music are all of society's ills" way.

My take on it is that ever since corporations got away with prioritizing shareholder profits over everything else, the safety nets that kept families strong started to crumble. Parents had to work more hours, people were more stressed, neighborhoods became more distant, urban spread increased. Add that to hysteria over crime and we get parents that aren't able to raise kids and think schools can do it. No sense of community responsibility and no safety net of a village helping to raise the kids because everyone's at work and scared that someone's going to shoot or kidnap them. So you get generational radicalization with acting out behavior getting worse and worse.

Social media makes all this worse because it optimizes for engagement, and nothing gets engagement like misery and jealousy all while giving an illusion of actual socialization. COVID was gas added to this fire that has been burning for decades.

Break the problems down into their pieces and attack those things; IMO, like solving any big problem, that’s how we get through this.

I definitely agree there. Which is a challenge in and of itself. Like I said, this is a multi-pronged issue. It didn't get to where it is quickly and it won't get fixed quickly either. It will be a generational effort. And I don't think all the fix actions needed are agreed on or even known.

I think part of it will be strengthening neighborhoods and creating a sense of community and pride in it. Another part is allowing parents to actually parent and giving them the tools that their parents didn't pass on to them because they probably didn't have them either.

It's a large conversation to have.

There have been multiple times that my daughter has had emergencies at school that she was able to solve by calling us. I'm glad she has a phone. But she also uses it responsibly.

You're aware that students aren't the only people in schools, right?

My take on this is my take on school in general: it's manipulative, coercive, and overall bad for you. I say this having considered becoming a teacher, and having chosen to become a librarian instead precisely because I refused to lend my energy to the school system.

Teachers have a disproportionate influence over the lives of basically everyone. School being compulsory, and most people* not even understanding that alternatives exist let alone having the resources or wherewithal to pursue them, the influence of teachers is very nearly inescapable, and yet they always demand more. More hours, more days, more ceaseless undivided attention (regardless of the quality of their content or the interests of their captive audience), all in direct contradiction to mounting evidence that all of those things are bad for you.

Studies from Europe indicate that homework, for example, at best does nothing at all, and more likely is actively bad for you. (This doesn't really require modern science -- John Holt and John Gatto were writing about this in the 80s -- but modern science confirms it.) Students nowadays are subjected to levels of anxiety that would've gotten their grandparents hospitalized. The pandemic largely disbanding in-person schooling resulted in a noteworthy drop in student suicide rates. And still, the school system demands more control, more influence, more access to more of young people's waking lives, seemingly not content until every conscious breath is scheduled and supervised.

And then there are teachers' unions. Considering how badly teachers are paid and what utter trash their benefits are, it can be observed that the only significant function teachers' unions serve is to keep bad teachers from being fired. I know it's only anecdotal, but I have in my own experience observed teachers who re-use the same test papers for literally decades without changing a thing. This might be acceptable in math -- math doesn't change much -- but I've seen history teachers do this. Fuck's sake, man. Unions certainly do little enough to guarantee the quality-of-life of teachers making any effort to do their best.

The combination of artificially insatiable demand and utterly dogwater compensation means that the system has an incentive to churn out an unholy number of mediocre teachers, and then never let them be removed no matter how mediocre their service is. This is leaving aside the problem of teachers forgetting that the people across the desks from them are their employers, not their subjects, and the authoritarian attitudes that comes with that.

(I have to include an asterisk * above because when I say "most people" I mostly mean "most parents" -- the people actually affected by the failures of the school system are routinely denied any voice whatsoever in the management of that system, and as a matter of course denied any choice about their own education, so we can only talk about the knowledge and ability of people who are at least one step removed from even being involved in the situation, which is it's own problem, as you might imagine. In no other aspect of life does leaving decision-making in the hands of people unaffected by the consequences of their own decisions lead to good outcomes...)

There's more I could go into here. The failures of 'zero tolerance,' for instance; the root causes of school violence; the almost comedically cruel euphemism that is 'bullying'; the entire concept of the school-to-prison and school-to-military pipelines. There's a lot wrong with the idea of giving teachers more influence over people.

I am explicitly not saying that social media is the answer, but I am saying that I can very easily understand the desire -- the need -- of young people to claw back a few minutes at a time of their own waking lives for themselves.