Why does a 13 years old have access to social media?
As you mention, we don't let kids drink alcohol at 13.
My kids can call me a bigot and hate me as much as they want, it won't change the fact I am the parent and I decide what's right for them until they're of age.
When I was growing up there was already vandalism, porn, unrealistic body image (bodybuilders for guys, anorexic models for girls), heavy underage drinking and goth cutting themselves.
The only difference in today's world is that we celebrate people with mental illnesses for political purposes.
Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
> Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.
1. Adults have pretty bad impulse control.
2. But kids or teenagers have even worse impulse control.
3. The prefrontal cortex, in charge of risk evaluation and decision making, matures when you're 25 years old (+/-).
4. These huge companies are built around addiction and getting network effects to set it. They have huge marketing budgets and a lot of money to lobby governments.
What's I'm saying is: good luck getting the average kid to break a habit even many adults can't. And when the human brain, on average, fails ("don't drink and drive!"), we introduce laws to fix that. Personal responsibility only takes us so far, because we're human and fallible.
The war on drugs have done much more harm than good - at least in the “inner city”. When drug use started spiking in “rural America” - despite laws that make it damn near impossible for me to get enough psuedophredrine for my family - it started being treated “as a disease”.
“Effective”, or “perfect”? Because almost everything every government does, good and ill, is not the second but it is the first. Totally ineffective bans certainly exist, but they are much rarer — even in the case of drugs, unless your pharmacy is currently selling cocaine 'Toothache Drops', or heroin or morphine cough syrup.
Almost everything the government does is “effective”? Have you been paying attention to the government? I can’t find it right now, but there was a survey done that no matter which side is in power, the policies that the government want is rarely aligned to the policies that most people want.
“Effective” is a separate axis to “what J. Average wants”.
For example, a government may want to circumvent encryption: if they tried to do this by requiring the SQL tables to be mauve “because that has the most RAM”, that would be ineffective; conversely if they passed a law requiring backdoors in everything, while this would be bad for many reasons, it would definitely have an effect.
As you mention, we don't let kids drink alcohol at 13.
My kids can call me a bigot and hate me as much as they want, it won't change the fact I am the parent and I decide what's right for them until they're of age.
When I was growing up there was already vandalism, porn, unrealistic body image (bodybuilders for guys, anorexic models for girls), heavy underage drinking and goth cutting themselves.
The only difference in today's world is that we celebrate people with mental illnesses for political purposes.
Teaching your kids what the media say is mostly biased BS and forbidding them from using social media is not too hard.