Social media is not a requirement for hobbies, building skills, or maintaining skills. It wasn’t before social media, and it still isn’t. Can information in support of such things be found in social media? Yes. But it requires effort, focus, and yes, maturity, to sort through it all and ignore the massive amount of garbage thrown your way. For many, the payoff simply isn’t worth the effort, and for many parents, it isn’t worth the risks. This should hot be hard to understand. If social media works for you, great. Knock yourself out.
I’ll ignore the presumptuous dig (something you have shown a penchant for here in MR) about my child’s education for the time being.
Everything you say I should be doing as a parent is more easily done by curtailing social media and providing the child with safe sources for whatever interests they have.
The suggestion that a child would miss out on something vital for their development by not being on social media is ridiculous.
Ironically, you’re doing obviously a straw-man fallacy a typical and 7th/8th grade student and teens (especially on debate teams) can easily weed out:
You’re arguing I didn’t make. I never said what’s easier as far as proving kids with “safe” sources. I mention the lack of exceptions and safeguards teens have to challenge, supersede, and have exceptions to sweeping restrictions for their age group.
Also you cannot either-or whether kids would/will miss something vital for their development: There is an abundance of kids who have benefit from social media—again especially top performing kids in educational, performative arts, and sports.
Also most adults fail to continuously learn to maintain the level of math and education a typical kids is expected to be proficient in and have mastered—and when it comes to tech, kids typically likely have far more understanding of the utility of tech with the rampant amount of tech illiteracy throughout society.
Parents consistently aren’t great at teaching, entertaining, and enlightening/inspiring in the matter media and education provides especially as their cognitive health deteriorates—that’s especially the case in modern society as couples prolong having kids thanks to modern health tech enabling this for women.
Accordingly, Parents making sweeping changing on a teen’s use of social media who are likely tech illiterate about its use with no ways to veto/pushback during that important stage of self-actualization can easily be argued being ridiculous.
It’s a draconian means of control of teens in general supported by many years of research regarding Gifted & Talented children.
It’s also ethnocentric with people of US teen age being globally responsibly using social media effectively and substantially better off than their parents ever were their age and in the present as well as their US peers.
Kids who are Gifted & Talented have monetized from social media in the hundreds of thousands to their aspirations (including scholarships and free edu help like free passes to conferences), discovered opportunities/rivals through social media, and so on.
Heck I was one of them, and mentor kids that have done the same. Anecdotal of course