Comment by WorldPeas
2 days ago
You probably figured, but I am likely the same age to your kids, I agree that the similar "shock and awe" nature with which my parents treated this stuff was warranted, and in fact I wish they went a little further, but even hiding the batteries to all devices and only allowing them out for a couple hours a day was progress. The problem I see coming my way is that the cultural monolith has degraded to the point where an online kid and offline kid can't coexist, it was already pretty strained when I was a high school student in the '10s, isolation isn't the answer, and in my own experience while one can tolerate being "weird", the lack of a shared culture is often dislocating. At this point I'm just hoping there's somewhere I could find with with like-minded parents
What you highlight here is a vexing modern problem. Today, my kids, between 20 and 27, actively socialize with friends through gaming. Seen in isolation gaming is a monumental waste of time. However, there's this social element that I think is pervasive today that cannot be ignored.
Dating myself, I fully experienced the negative side of gaming back around the time of games like Duke Nukem, etc. I worked nights for a few years. I'd get home at 2 AM fully awake from having driven home. I'd sit down and play for four hours, maybe more. No social element at all in those days. I quick when I started to have nightmares and realized it was because of the games. Decades later, with kids, there was no way I was going to let a ten year old destroy their brains with an addictive substance in the form of a game.
Going back to culture and socialization, I don't really know what the answer might be today, much less in the future. Maybe AI friends will be crucially important (I shudder to think this could be true). Some of it comes down to family structure and dynamics. Our cultural makeup means that we are very often in family-and-friends gathering with 20 to 50 people. That does help kids relate to humans more than keyboards, yet the danger is still there.
Maybe this is where schools might need to become far closer to community organizations than (sorry, I have to...) centers for indoctrination. I attended private school most of my young life. One of the interesting aspects of this is that the parents all knew each other and socialized. We would go to each others homes, throw parties, travel together, etc. This is very different from the (again, I'm sorry, I must...) typical US school-as-a-cattle-ranch approach where you have a high school with 4000 students. I know I am being very opinionated and maybe a bit elitist due to my young experience, it should be noted that this was in a third world country...so, when I say "private school" the reader should not imagine what that might mean in the US.
My point is that things are becoming very complex at a social level and we, as a society, need to make sure that kids grow up to be solid adults. Today there are so many opportunities for them get lost in screens that I truly don't know what social problems might come out of this mess. Games are but one part of it.
It's true, having gone to public school and seeing other public schools, you're basically either getting austerity curriculum forced on teachers served in a new deal skeleton with 50 coats of paint or you're at some cargo-cult charter school run like a private prison. I'm sure in a decade or so when I'm ready the answer will be more clear, especially as it seems we're in the middle of several paradigm shifts, but I appreciate your answers. I just hope by then we'll see an end to this pointless peacocking with extracurriculars and activities. I still remember the feeling of wanting to be treated more like an adult as a kid, to do adult things like own a cell phone or use power tools and being given facsimiles, if I could put my kids in a Montessori school maybe that'd be good but they feel like the kind of place that exposes are posted about on HN, maybe worth more research. As the role of college changes from one that makes taste to one that makes money, learning motivation and moderation will be the most important.