this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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206
The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
71 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've been dreading this and it saddens me to hear from you that my worst fears were correct.

I'll just take solace in the fact that I had 30 year head start and that my tech-fu will hopefully stay one step ahead of my 1-year-old

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Yeah, the technical problems are also pretty frustrating. I've been an IT guy for a long time, and I knew that I a second hand iMac would be a great machine for him, so that's what I got. But unfortunately apple has abandoned their support for 32bit applications, seriously slashing their library of software. So I've stuck to an older Mac OS that does still support it. Steam has a "family view" mode and with that I can easily curate my own huge steam library and allow him to play appropriate games. Except of course, that about 2/3 of that library will be unavailable soon, as with future steam updates they will not be supporting the last macOS version that still runs 32 bit programs. Sigh.

I already tried installing Linux mint on that Mac and it was a nightmare. Linux doesn't really do parental controls, at least not out of the box. The only silver lining was that at least when he clicked on every single web link he found, the dozens of malicious .exe files he downloaded won't run on Linux.

But I guess to reassure you, the tech can be hard, but the kid doesn't have to be. Our situation is a bit extreme, probably atypical. We adopted a 6 year old, so we have a lot of problematic behaviors, distrust, and defiance to train him out of. That shit is hard. But if you can build love and trust right from the start, you can set norms for tech usage and behavior. It'll be ok.

But I do fear social media, it looms in our future...