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Comment by JoeCianflone | Hacker News Reader

What a load of shit. I’m sorry I have an 11 year old who has an iPod touch the real problem here is lax parenting. My son cannot use his phone alone in his room alone, he doesn’t have TikTok or any social media apps. He cannot take it to school (not that there’s a school to go to at the moment) or take it out of the house unless he asks first and 95% of the time we don’t let him. Kids test—that’s like an iron law of childhood. It’s your job as a parent to set boundaries. Set the rules and set the consequences and then FOLLOW THROUGH on the consequences. This is the equivalent of lazy parents in the 80s blaming “death metal” for their children’s problems, or lazy parents in the 90s blaming video games, or 2000s parents blaming the internet. It’s you—all these problems are your fault.

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"What a load of shit", "all these problems are your fault."

Really? This comment just seems like ego-driven parental grandstanding rather than an actual attempt to understand how the first generation born into the era of smartphones and all-the-time internet access might have difficulty negotiating a healthy psyche against a multi-billions dollar oligarchy of companies intentionally seeking to monetize their attention.

Congratulations, your son doesn't seem addicted to their ipod. Cool anecdote; here's actual data about wether or not parental control of phone use has much of an affect on phone addiction (it doesn't): https://journals.lww.com/jan/fulltext/2018/04000/does_parent...

It’s not ego driven but there was anger on my side. I hate it when we blame technology first, which seems to be the point of this article. Kids can absolutely be addicted to phones that’s true. But it’s the job of the parent to set limits, this person admits in the article that her daughter wore her down and flaunted the limits and there were no consequences. So yeah she may be addicted now, which we can’t really diagnose, but that’s still the parents fault for setting limits and bending to the will of their kid.

I don't think the article made this differentiation specifically, but I don't see this as blaming technology, but ad-driven companies engineering skinner boxes. It is well understood that advertising companies wreak havoc on children's health (tobacco, body image, sugar, etc). We should hold these companies accountable.

While there were definitely lax restrictions here, there are more factors here (societal pressure, both cultural and literal; the article indicated that study groups and other activities were coordinated solely on social media) that affect one's proneness to phone addiction.

In addition, in the article linked above (and others), parenting is not _the_ bellwether preventative in terms of phone addiction - there are psychological factors, environmental factors, etc.

In addition, there are societal variations across gender that are documented as having an affect on proneness to phone addiction.

Don't let your individual experience override the reality of the situation. This is an issue that is going to require extensive research and potentially regulation.

I had parents sort of like you when I was younger, which is why I attempted suicide at 14.

Strict parenting puts weights on your kids' backs. Eventually they'll snap in half.

1 I’m sorry about your attempted suicide and I hope you’re ok now. 2 We are not that strict, my kids have limits but they are known and they know what happens if they break the rules. But you are right there is a balance and this parent seems to not be balanced at all and they’re blaming the phone. She said her daughter wore her down and she caved and allowed her TikTok—I’m sorry but as a parent that is on her. Limits do need to grow and change as the kid gets older but unfettered access to everything at 11 is not the phones fault.

Yes, but if you read the article you can see that much of the phone's interruption in their lives is their kid making videos. That kid is creating content. Children under the age of 13 certainly shouldn't be on TikTok but that's not the parent's fault, that's the platform's.

Preventing your children from accessing social media is taking away their support network. If you're as strict as you say - and refusing to let your son take his phone out of the house is strict - he's certainly not going to trust you because _you don't trust him_. Your job as a parent is to let your kids grow, not to put these kids of boundaries on them. Let them look up to you for advice, not look to you every five minutes to see if what they're doing is allowed. If you were parenting well you wouldn't need to put more than a couple rules on your kids because they'd be good people anyway. They won't have those kids of rules on them as adults.

There are two people I know in real life with parents more strict than mine (and my parents aren't as strict as you); one of them has grown to develop anger issues and the other has such little life experience that it's sometimes hard to talk to them ("what's X?", "what's Y?").

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