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Calls for smartphone-free childhood grow in Britain
(www.straitstimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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No, children deserve to be able to fact check their parent's biased narrative, too.
It's a conservative mindset to demand you get to monopolize the information your child receives until they're 18.
Many children are being radicalised by online content, like the criminal Andrew Tate becoming popular among teenagers.
Most people aren't fact checking anything online. They are far more likely to start believing conspiracy theories or outright false narratives.
There's no cure all solution. I consider homeschooled children taught to live their lives by regressive religious texts to be just as broken as the cult of Tate.
If any intervention will still yield roughly equivalent mixed results, I always err on the side of more access to information. A child can gravitate to Andrew Tate's toxicity, or they can look up facts about the confederacy their parents told them fought for "states rights and freedumb!"
In a perfect world, loving parents should be available to provide opinions and context, but I'd rather that child have the opportunity to seek out a rational, benevolent path if the parents attempt to indoctrinate them to their worldview with no other options.
The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that get mad at the schools for teaching children that genitals exist, the universe is billions of years old, and their country wasn't always perfect, stuff they need to know for life whether their parents like it or not.
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
i agree that parents should not have a monopoly over the information that their children get, but i think that well-educated school teachers are a better solution to this than the internet. (although this would require the US to put some kind of emphasis on improving its education system, so it’s probably unlikely)
Critical thinking and reasoning must be taught, and in the US largely doesn't until the college level unfortunately. Many adults, many parents have no logical reasoning faculties and never will. Some are very proud of this, declaring the whims and opinions that pop into their heads "common sense." I refer you to my fellow Americans who see salvation in a slumlord game show host nepo baby. There's a reason humanity spent 180+ thousand years wandering in the dirt before stumbling upon a less brutal way to live 10-20 thousand years ago.
Again, some like myself may seek out such information if they are starved of it at home, if they have access. If anything, getting multiple conflicting opinions tends to make a new mind seek out ways to parse the true from the false, and that chance is better than no chance at all.
There's some of that too.
My policy is to always answer every question my kids have, ideally with some reputable online source. It's not "because I said so," but more "let's find out together."
But I'm also not going to be giving my kids a smartphone or allowing them to use social media until they prove to me that they're responsible. I want them to learn how to fact check misinformation, call out bullying, and demonstrate empathy over a text medium (so they don't become bullies). If they're mature enough to show that, I'll slowly introduce things to them.
That said, I'm convinced social media can have a huge negative impact on mental health. Lack of access has an impact too, so it's important to help them establish boundaries. I'm not going to be monitoring what they do (that's a privacy violation), but I will be slowly loosening what services I allow them to access on family devices.
Thats how parenting works. Kids dont fact check, they dont know how to. Everyone has a biased narritive and will pass it off to their kids, thats not an issue.