"Parents Need To Parent"

“Parents need to parent. Get your kid off the device. That’s your responsibility as a parent. Don’t bring the government into this.”

So this is a sentiment that I saw written in the comments a fair amount in some videos I posted recently supporting legislation designed to help protect kids from predatory algorithms, AI chatbots.

And here’s the thing.

I agree.

I actually agree with this. I think parents should be stricter with their kids and their kids use of devices. I’ll caveat this by saying I’m a parent. I’ve been for 10 years.

I have a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a three-year-old.

One of the things I’ve learned about parenting is don’t give advice about parenting unless someone has asked you for that advice. Because we all are different. Every family is unique. And I really try to respect every parent’s choices about how they choose to raise their kids. With that said, yeah.

I feel sad when I see little kids staring at their iPads. If you take it away, they cry, cry, cry like an addict cries when you take away whatever it is they’re addicted to. It does make me sad. And then there’s the other side, right?

The parent is just like sitting there scrolling on their phone and their kids right here trying to get their attention and the parent’s just not giving it to them. And let me be honest, I’ve probably been that parent before. I try my best not to be, I do my best not to bring my phone out around my kids, but I’m not perfect at it. Not at all.

Because parenting, it’s something you’re doing 24-7, 365. You can never be completely perfect all the time at anything. So we do our best, right?

We try not to give our kids too much of these addictive tech products. But sometimes... It does happen, right? That doesn’t excuse it. We should be trying to limit screen time, right? Or even the word screen time, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I actually think screen time is a bit of a red herring.

It’s not the screens that are the problems, I don’t think.

It’s these predatory addictive algorithms. Screens can be great. There are some education apps that are good. Most of them suck. I will say that. Almost every educational app I’ve seen, I’m like, this is garbage. But there are some good ones. Beast Academy is good enough for math, if you’re interested. The internet’s amazing. Wikipedia is amazing.YouTube can be amazing.

If i want to like, show my kid how much bigger would a megalodon be than a person — a megalodon is like an ancient shark, one of my kids was like really into prehistoric animals for a while — you can just like show them. That’s amazing. My parents couldn’t do that for me. So, I actually don’t think the devices, the screens are necessarily the problem. The problem are predatory, addictive algorithms.

An algorithm is a piece of math, really. It’s a piece of code. It’s a piece of logic that takes a billion different data points that one of these big platforms has, and it uses all that data to calculate what is the exact thing that needs to get served up to this user next to keep them hooked, give them that next shot of dopamine.

It’s a much more complicated and expensive version of a slot machine. The people in Silicon Valley literally study the same psychological science that casinos and slot machine makers study to keep the gamblers addicted. And we’re letting our kids have that. That’s the stuff that I think is the most important to keep kids off of. It’s the recommendation engines. It’s the For You feed. Probably anything where there are in-game purchases, these things are all algorithmically driven to hook your kid and prey on them and squeeze as much money out of them as possible, whether it’s money directly from you or it’s money from advertisers that are paying for your kid’s attention. We should be doing all we can as parents to keep our kids off those predatory addictive algorithms. And yet, can all of the responsibility, 100% of the responsibility be put on parents? Or does it make sense to maybe also have some laws? Let me ask you this.

Why do we have laws that you need to be 21 years old to buy cigarettes? Or 21 years old to buy alcohol? You also need to be 21 going to a casino. Why? Why? Couldn’t that just be the parent’s responsibility? When your kid’s little, you can control them more. They’re probably not gonna walk down the street and walk into a 7-Eleven and try to buy some cigarettes or try to buy a lottery ticket, right? They’re little. They’re not going anywhere that you don’t have your eyes on them. But then they get a bit bigger and they are curious about cigarettes or playing the lottery. Well, when they walk into that 7-Eleven, don’t you want the guy behind the counter to be like, let me see your ID?

Well, why does he do that?

Because it’s against the law to sell cigarettes to a minor. Those are laws. That’s the government getting involved, helping parents, helping parents. There’s some degree to which it makes sense for the government to help parents. So I don’t resent or even disagree with the folks who wrote comments like parents need to parent. We parents do need to parent, but both things can be true. We can take responsibility as parents and part of taking responsibility as parents can be raising our voice in a democracy and saying we collectively feel that it’s not okay that these big bad businesses are preying on our kids and we all want it to stop.

That’s what democracy is about.

That’s why I’m here making these videos, saying like, hey, here’s a good piece of legislation. Here’s a lawmaker that was brave enough to stand up to the million, hundreds of millions of dollars that the tech lobby is throwing against lawmakers who try to regulate them.

They’re willing to spend a lot of money to keep your kids hooked because they are making a lot of money off of your kids’ eyeballs. They’re going to fight us. And we need to fight them back. And at the same time, set boundaries at home. Uphold those boundaries.

Both things.

We need to do both.

Thanks for listening. 🔴