My daughter is still very young but I'm seeing other families give their kids tablets and phones to play with at as young as five years old. We don't allow any screen time but I know that as time passes it will be increasingly hard to hold her back.
My nieces and nephew had iPads at 4
My nephew plays COD. He is 8. He sleeps with his iPad.
The nieces are are 6 and 11. They are obsessed with tiktok.
My son is 7 and goes to school with kids that have iPhones.
And my son only watches screens when we are supervising. He watches a lot of TV and plays Switch games though. Never phones and we don't have a tablet or any of the streaming stuff.
It is very hard not to give in.
I dont think giving kids access to technology is inherently bad and having a smartphone/tablet/laptop/etc can be a good learning experience. I'm a bit of a nerd who grew up on message boards, uses linux, and enjoys his gaming pc. At the same time I then think about the websites I went to and the things that influenced me when I was younger and I get anxious over how I'm supposed to handle this with my future kids.
Abrasive big message board culture made me into a bit of an edgy jerk and then I found 4chan. I was already 16 when this happened, but even before then I'd already spent my tween years cutting my teeth on edgy and(when parents and family were out erotic) newgrounds content. I'd seen gore stuff on sites like rotten. The porn side of the internet was way sketchier than it was now. A casual search would lead you down malware infested rabbit holes of popups where next thing you know your softcore centerfold pose is next to something illegal like bestiality or worse.
There are tools to fix this, but I worry that these tools would lead to an internet so devoid of content I might as well give them a dumbphone, or it may be loose enough for them to find ways around it. (and if they arent getting their porn from big names like pornhub then their next stop is probably something sketchy and less moderated). As the article mentions as well there's also the "normal" internet and social media are also toxic with algorithms pushing boys and young men to get red pilled, and girls and young women towards eating disorders.
My child isnt even born yet, and I know all I can do is my best. At the end of it all I turned out alright even in spite of what I encountered online, and that was with two parents who had no idea what I was looking at or didnt really think much about the internet.
A community for parenting and parenthood.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.