Nate's Really Bad Takes 🇺🇸

This is why you just have to be “extreme” about the screens as a parent. If you want your kid to have a personality and actual interests outside of mindlessly scrolling and passively consuming short form slop all day, you have to put very tight controls on the screens and you can’t give your kids a smartphone at all until at least high school at the absolute earliest. None of our kids have phones. The older ones have laptops for school work that they aren’t allowed to use in their rooms or for anything not school related. They can use tablets on long car rides (3+ hours or more). And that’s it. The result is that our kids love to read and write, they have hobbies, they spend lots of time outdoors, they’re artistic, they can hold a conversation, and they’re helpful around the house. Maybe you can be slightly more generous with the screen than we are and have similar results, but not much more generous. Allow the screen to consume them and eat their personalities, attention spans, interests, and conversational skills, and it will. And for anyone who says that you need to let the screen take over your child’s life and mind because that’s the only way they’ll learn how to use technology, that’s nonsense. The technology is extremely easy to pick up, and there are very few (if any) actual technological skills developed by scrolling your phone all day. The average brain rotting teenager isn’t any more skilled or adept in that department than my kids, who have spent 99.99 percent less time using it.