The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.

If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.

The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.

The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.

If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.

I don’t have kids, but I can see how one parent banning their kid from social media could create issues when the others are on it. I was a quirky kid that already struggled to make friends and any additional imposed quirkiness would have been devastating.

That said, and I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but what about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the point where you have shared moments laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I’m a few multiples of the age in question and I haven’t used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the main issues is people only showing the doctored up highlight reel of their life. If that’s still the issue then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that’s also part of real life and a teachable moment. Granted I wasn’t bombarded with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI Edition”, but the concept of someone being ‘fake’ isn’t new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it and mentally deal with it. That is the world they’re going into, whether it’s a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex, or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.