but what is better parenting? i don't ask to try to score debate points: i don't know what that looks like, and any insight on what you think it is would guide me to better engage. calling all hubski parents: what do parents have to do? what do you do right now, at whatever age your kid is at? what do you think you should do, or could do better?

This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.

i don't know how to respond other than to say that the lack of comprehension among the elderly and the internet-elderly is cooking them as well, and that they are eating the slop and enjoying it more than young people. if you weren't part of the pre-eternal september vanguard, and you aren't tech-adjacent, and you didn't spend some part of your youth online, your base level of knowledge is "how do i print pdf" and "facebook said there are chemicals in the tapwater." i don't think it's absurd to talk about what-ought-to-be in this context when we can all see that what-actually-is is a mess.

all you need to be a parent is to have kids. think about the average person in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc - and extrapolate that knowledgeset to the average parent in the same age range. i think it's safe to say that for a really large chunk of people, the internet is incomprehensible beyond the lake that they skim the surface of. from what i see, people make themselves a range that they stick to: email, social media, a little youtube if you're getting spicy. they keep it shallow because they are conscious of their own ignorance, and develop skills to avoid showing it.

the continuing problem is the fact that young people are much, much more equipped to deal with all this than their parents. GenX begat GenZ, but the percentage of IRC-hopping andies and Cory Doctorows of that generation is still not very big. Now that Millennials are giving birth to GenAlpha, we see how ("more") internet-equipped parents are raising internet-accessing children, but those kids are still preteens at most.

There's no survive the internet class. there isn't even a be a parent class. instead we have the onslaught of "phone bad, screen bad" from every source read by the parent age brackets, and either you know nothing about it (aforementioned GenX and older beyond the Elite Percentage who could probably roll and smoke >90% of the world population on this), or you're a Millennial and you have extreme guilt over your own screen use and internet addiction, and project your own experiences on your Ipad kid.

I'm not at all equipped or qualified to solve any of this. I do think that I'm more capable of narrowing down the problem than the average OpEd writer of the world, or the average Haidt. Maybe that's egotistical, but I believe it.