this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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My kid is almost 12, iPad only. I do worry about her overall time but most of her time is spent in this huge group chat with all her friends on Discord. We had landlines pre-voicemail when I was growing up and our chat time was limited by that. Her grades are good, room stays clean, and she’s in two extracurricular activities. 4 hours of chatting with her friends is ok by me, it’s at least social interaction, not spending hours sucked into YT or TikTok algorithms. She also has kids messenger. Nothing else.
That's the problem that everyone shouting "parents need to parent better" here is ignoring.
If you cut off access to the group chat, her friends are not going to call her daily on your landline (that maybe you don't have) to exchange gossips. What will happen is that she'll be out of the loop, isolated from the group. When they're planning an afternoon out they might forget to tell her.
You can't make your kids live in a 90's bubble, because when we were kids in the 90's we had friends living like us. Cut off your kid from messenging and you cut them from their friends and isolate to them from their age class.
That's absolutely not good for them, and it's not good parenting.
(Not talking about you comment parent BTW, your parenting is fine, I'm just responding to your comment to address all those saying it's just parents' fault)
Yes this is the fine line you have to walk. I've cut off tik tok, limited many others to 1h a day, but you can't cut them off completely or you cut off their access to their friends.
I guess the one thing that could be better is actually seeing her friends, but that depends a lot on where you live. Being French, all my friends lived within 10 minutes walking distance so we would see each other basically every single day after school ! I think that was a lot better than being on discord, I wish everyone had the opportunity to do that too. It was a lot of fun !
( Also, we played video games like constantly 😆 so I wouldn’t be shocked if our screen time went over 4 hours quite regularly, but at least everyone was in the same room and we also could go play in the garden and stuff. Walkable cities are real, and they’re real awesome, having always lived in one myself. )
We need better urbanism for the kid's sake
Honestly, walking to and back from primary school with my friends was my favorite part of the day. It’s sad to know it’s such a rare experience.