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Jen Koenig's avatar

This is such a great article, and timely. We actually moved to a different city and state largely for cultural reasons and I can't stress the difference it has made in our lives. Our former location was an upscale neighborhood of a blue city. Very suburban and great for kids. Parks, trails and such but also a very planned community. Kids were tightly controlled.

I remember my daughter doing a messy craft project with one of her 10 year old friends on the porch one day while I was in the kitchen making a meal. Her friend lived across the street and ran home to get something. I received an apoplectic call from the girl's mother as she had "crossed the street unsupervised". This was the same 10 year old girl whom my husband had taken to a skating rink with our kids and he had to buckle the girl into her seat in the car because apparently her parents were still doing that for her and she didn't know how. She was also an only child to older parents. This was common in that neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of kids but you never saw them. No kids in the streets. Nobody riding their bikes. Nobody for my kids to play with without my arranging a play date in advance and coordinating every second of their time or the other parent wouldn't green light it.

So we moved. We moved to a lake community in a red city in a red state. There aren't even sidewalks in our older and heavily wooded area and the streets are filled with kids. Packs of boys on bikes, girls zipping around on scooters, teenagers walking down the street holding hands, kids walking dogs, you name it. Kids stop by randomly asking if my kids can come out to play. Most families here have many children. Only children are rare.

My 10 year old and her sister use their phone to coordinate meet-ups in the neighborhood but neither are on social media. None of their friends are either. They head out after school and they come home for dinner or by dark, whichever comes first There's a lake park, dozens of friends, a small soda and snack stand near the golf course, and a wooded creek area where they built a fort all within a two mile radius of my house. My kids do love technology but they aren't hooked to their phones. They like watching gaming channels on YouTube and Fail Army videos. My oldest is an avid gamer and likes challenges with her friends. They often come over to the house and they game together.

I love our community. We are outside a lot and spend our summers on the lake. There are block parties. Karenesque mothers exist but they are rare and they are mocked. As are teens who preen on Instagram. They are seen as shallow and everyone wonders why they aren't with the other kids jumping off of the pier in the summers.

Where you choose to live makes a huge difference. We couldn't have done this in our last community. There just wasn't the support. You cannot make a culture on your own.

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Amy Sukwan's avatar

Amen to all of this. I have two daughters 10 and 16. My older daughter has wisely avoided all social media though she likes to play games anonymously as a usually male avatar. She has complained that some online games try to force her to sign up for a Facebook account to use them. She is the psychologist amongst all of her friends and seems to be the most well adjusted I could imagine in this current dystopian era. I don't think regulations are going to be necessary per say, as I think a perfect storm is brewing that will slice through the digital panopticon: first, safe and effective is already meeting safety first, and the sudden, unexplained dropping dead of even a small portion of young, invincible, never dies of friends, peers, celebrities can ultimately move the needle on what looks risky, especially if it really happened within the family. Second I agree that the technology was too new at first to really be evaluated and that is not the case anymore. Both of my girls are well aware of the potential for internet stalkers but also the more immediate threat of everyone knowing what they say and do at every moment. They are sensitive to issues of internet bullying, hacking data and deepfakes in ways that even I am sometimes impressed by. They may have a better intuitive sense of what is real on the internet than even I do, and they question it all. Third I think the very things that underpin the digital dystopia: that being reliable electricity and internet, are going to become increasingly wonky and unreliable, forcing alternate choices for even the most diehard zombie user. We shall see!

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