depends on how close you are with your kids and how much they actually listen to/trust you.
whenever their classmates start having phones. Not much you can do as a parent after that.
Not having social media when their classmates have social media is social suicide.
1 Like
ime, its very easy to create an âus vs themâ kids vs parents dynamic. Where parents limit media as a punishment, overly treat it as a privilege, or overly monitor/restrict it⌠Then when kid gets access, they use it to distance themselves from parents even more, which just promotes the cycle.
If you can stay on your kidâs team, I was actually able to talk to them about what they were seeing, what to expect, what to avoid. Then when they got into weird shit, they came to me to talk about how they felt about it. Instead of being scared to approach me since they really were not supposed to do that to start with.
by giving them access to everything at an early age, it made it easier i thought. at an early age they are more trusting of parents still (think 7 yr old vs 12 yr old). Then they could go through all the BS of the internet with a guide.
the real toxic bullying is when they get into the age of sending nudes, and then people use nudes as a means to bully.
itâs really up to your kids at that point. just telling your kids to not send nudes is not going to work.
But was it an accident? Is that like one of those murder mysteries where there are at least 20 people with incentive to commit the murder?
dunno. i found out via internet stalking. he was a professional skydiver. well, apparently, not so great a professional! (SPLAT!!!)
seems like a bully, guy was always looking down on people
2 Likes
I wonder if a large % of actuaries were bullied as a kid and that contributes to our perceived lack of human compassion.
Nah itâs everyone else who sucks. They complain about health insurance companies but then buy insurance anyway.
1 Like
Must have been pretty high up to SPLAT.
I dont hate other people. I am just mostly indifferent to the outcomes of society.
chaotic neutral to the core.
but i might think like that from my experience in school and getting to see the raw nature of so many shitty people so early in life.
yap!
Even at terminal velocity I donât think humans technically splat, our volume to surface area ratio isnât big enough. Now an elephant would splat, I believe.
So you donât want to be late to the social media adoption game, which starts when people get phones⌠so when do they get phones?! Seems like the most challenging part of teenage years to navigate, particularly for daughters.
Thatâs something youâd have to investigate. Most likely, your kids will ask for phones when they deem it necessary. Especially when the popular kids at school have phones.
Your best bet to prevent that is to talk to other parents and tell them that you need to form an alliance to not give kids phones.
Yes it seems like phone adoption is just inevitably going to result in unhappiness, particularly for a daughter. But then if they donât have a phone and their peers do does that result in extra unhappiness? Tough to say.
I think itâs safe to sayâŚyes.
I mean, certainly youâll never be popular if you donât have a phone. At best youâll be irrelevant. At worst, youâll be left defenseless when people bully you.
Not to mention the internal struggle of being left out of every news and story, not getting invited to events, etc.
Rather than forbid phones altogether I think you have to guide your kid on how to use them responsibly. Easier said than done of course. But banning stuff that they will inevitably encounter in adulthood will leave them unprepared to handle those things as adults when they do encounter them without your supervision, like alcohol, driving, relationships, etc.
Just to add my two cents, if no one mentioned this yet cyber bullying is much crueler than playground bullying of days of yore. Back then you could got a break when school was over and you had a safe space at home. With social media it goes on non-stop, day/night and school year/summer vacation. It can be relentless which often leads to teen suicides such as one recently in NJ
Warning: link is about teen suicide and rather upsetting.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/09/new-jersey-girl-14-takes-her-own-life-after-latest-attack/
Not true. Bullies could call you and still harass you at home.
Also the bullies are often in your neighborhood when you go out, not just in school