It wasn’t just secretly, or that secretly at all, but it still stuck with me. When I was 10, I was texting a friend about having started periods, an extremely sensitive topic, and my father grabbed my phone to read who I was texting. It’s been very long since that happened, and I don’t have the best memory, but things like this I remember very vividly. Some kids are more sensitive, and you have to build a strong relationship with them for these things to potentially work. I think there is even a Black Mirror episode on this topic.

There’s also a problem that if the kid does know they’re being monitored, they can and some will figure out how to get past it. I can’t offer an immediate solution, because honestly, social media scape is severly fucked nowadays, but there’s no winning scenario I can think of that doesn’t require one to have an extremely good relationship with their kid. And even then, it might not be enough.

I’m glad I’m both old enough I didn’t grow up with tiktok and the likes, and that I don’t have kids to worry about. Being a parent in this day and age sounds absolutely exhausting and uncertain from multiple modern-world perspectives.

Kudos to any working parent who manages to handle it well and has a kid with a good head on their shoulders.

Not in detail, but it actually does:

“Often the mothers are saying exactly what I am but need their child to hear it from an expert,” says Dr. Dendy Engelman, a Manhattan dermatologist. “They’re like, ‘Maybe she’ll listen to you because she certainly doesn’t listen to me.’”

While younger kids may be reasoned with, teenagers aren’t as easy to handle as some say. Puberty is a hell of a drug.

IMHO, this is a very sensitive topic, and I’m glad I don’t have kids for this to be a worry for me.

Smartphones became a big thing when I was already in high school, and social media at the time still wasn’t this aggressive, but my father did monitor my activity on the PC, mostly secretly, and it made me feel anxious. This violation of privacy damaged my already shit/barely existent relationship with him. It’s also why I’m so paranoid of secretly being monitored. You have to already have a pretty good relationship with your parents for this not to potentially mess you up, at least in my experience.

What the solution to this is, I don’t know. Better digital/tech education in schools and at home would be a good step in that direction, but strict ad and product regulations should also be implemented, which - unfortunately expectedly - is being fought against (at least in the USA, according to the article).

Not a theist, so I’m not defending the potential existence of “my god”.

Lack of evidence, however, doesn’t always mean something doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened. If John killed Jake and destroyed or hid the evidence, and based on that wasn’t found guilty, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t do it. It simply means no substantial evidence has been found to prove it (yet).

If you want to take your example further, it’s quite possible to find out years or decades later that drug is in fact harmful, it just took time for the side-effects to show, or rather we simply didn’t have the right technology to come to that conclusion earlier. (Though far less likely for this scenario to happen with modern science.)

Also, the existence of science or established set of natural laws, and absence of supernatural does not rule out existence of an uninvolved or uncaring creator.