I’m 22 years old, not in a relationship and I don’t have any kids yet so I’m just asking out of curiosity.
I still haven’t met a family that has successfully done this. My friends came very close with their first-born. Then they started letting their kids use an educational game thing with their iPad. They never once mentioned any challenges prior to that.
Did they manage to keep their child’s iPad usage time under reasonable limit though?
Oh yes, even today. The iPads really only come out during long plane rides or when the parents have guests over. They are 8 and 12 and prefer reading now.
My mother tried that. Her challenge was, that around age 12 or so I became smart enough to bypass her methods.
She would hide the router, I would find it, she would change settings in the router, I would change them back. She would hide cables etc for the computer, I would find them or even buy new ones.
She would hide my consoles or games, I would find them and then hide them from her in turn.
She tried to enforce TV limits, so I would wait until she slept to watch without sound and subtitles. She would put parental controls on TV, I would spend hours until I brute forced the PIN.
She even took my phone and I went and got myself a cheap one by saving up money.
What she never really tried was talking to me about it and asking me why I want this so much, then maybe I could have told her it is cause I don‘t have any friends and we don‘t have money to do anything else, she was at work and I was sat around alone bored out of my mind, so I want entertainment at least.
So my advice is, try talking to your kid and together find other activities they might enjoy and that you approve of, then probably the usage of tech would go down naturally.
I couldnt get a phone until i started highschool (i had very limited access to a tablet at home). This resulted in me being unable to participate in any of the group chats that my peers were using, and missing the necessary context to understand a significant amount of topics they discussed even in person. Up to the point smartphones started to spread in my class i was strongly involved in the community, and i would say i had sufficient social skills. After that i started to get socially isolated, and this i would say severely affected my social development for many years.
Nowadays im happy that i spent most of my free time reading and learning extracurricular topics while many other were binging youtube, but its only because in the last couple of years i successfully started to develop my social side and engage more with others, while keeping the benefits of being left alone with my thoughts for extended periods. However i wouldnt have been able to do this on my own (i convinced myself that my isolation is a good thing, and as a coping mechanism i looked down on others socialising, smalltalk, etc.), and was very lucky with a couple of people that got me out of this isolation. That said i still have to undo a lot of damage on this area.
I dont know how a parent could balance these things, but i would assume that the most important thing is to help the kid find hobbies that engage them, so that scrolling endlessly is not that enticing, while giving them time on their phone to nurture their relationships online (this could be restricted with scheduling wifi access on the router, etc), and of course educating them on the potential harms of the internet.
Also i dont really have a solution to this, but i noticed on myself that when i had restricted access to something (for example the wifi turned off at 8pm) that meant the restricted activities value went way up in my head and i maxed out on it, often even though i would have enjoyed doing something else more.
its hard to say how much of the issues i experience today is really because of modern tech
i got into gaming at a very young age, and i spent most of my time just by myself playing singleplayer stuff as opposed to going out with the other kids. im not sure whether that was really a result of getting into pc gaming though, as i wasnt all that social even before that and had trouble making friends
not getting a phone until high school added to the issue because the other kids would be talking about things i flat out didnt know about, leading to further isolation
nowadays i just dont really make friends in person, all of my friendships and the like are online and based on common interests in video games and such
i dont know whether spending too much time on devices is to blame for that, or whether spending too much time on devices allowed me to find friends and people i care about regardless of the trouble i have engaging with people in person
I think its easy to get into a cycle where one finds it hard to socialise in person, starts to live that aspect out more online, and then offline interactions feel even harder relative to that.
Online relationships can be really helpful, but at the same time it doesnt really fulfill some of our basic social needs. When i found a friendgroup where i could finally be completely open and where physical affection was encouraged it was like an enlightenment. Up to that point i was kind of miserable, but couldnt even realise why, only afterwards did i realise how socially deprived i was. I think nowadays to some degree most people are that way to some degree, especially males.
Hope you will find good relationships in person and never give up on it, i would have never thought that i will be able to until it happened.
My daughter is going into high school and she’s already getting involved with one of the extracurriculars… yeah it’s not really possible without her already having a cell. This is band and yet they expect the kids to have Microsoft Teams because that’s the official method for disseminating information.
F’n Teams… shudder…
It’s tough because you don’t want them to be technically inept in this day and age. There is also peer pressure amongst friends and a certain social status that for better or worse matters to them.
It’s a balance between unrestricted access and a reasonable amount. We keep them busy enough that it’s never a question. They really only come out on long car rides and trips. We don’t use them in the home at all.
Very rarely at a restaurant, only when it’s large family affair at a place we won’t normally go. I used to judge people throwing screens in front of kids at restaurants but let me tell you it’s better than chasing them around. They get a treat, the screen, for behaving and I get to enjoy a nice meal.
