I'm not a parent, but I have siblings. Screen addiction is a failure of parenting above all else, so is drug abuse and other kind of issues that are rooted in addiction, barring mental illness and bad luck of course.
EDIT: Of course parenting is very difficult, and I don't believe that any of it is easy. I wouldn't blame parents for bad parenting, I would blame a system that creates parents that have no time or energy left to spare.
I don't know what the solution is, but it probably doesn't help when kids are uneducated, being failed by a system that is supposed to educate them, that maybe the parents trust SHOULD educate them. Ultimately those kids grow up to have kids. Aaaand that's the plot of Idiocracy.
I feel like - I dunno, people hate that there are just incentives.
I’m moderately disciplined and yet - my level of athleticism is directly related to how far away the trail is from my house. When it was 15 minutes away, I had to drive so my run was 45 minutes. Now I don’t so my run is 1:14. Same discipline, better athleticism.
30 years ago both a good and bad parent could kick their kids out of the house and they’d go get in a bike with the neighborhood kids and explore. Now. It’s soooo much more work to get your kid focused on an activity that’s not a screen, because if you kick them out of the house changes are they’ll just got find a screen (if it’s even legal or socially legitimate to do so anymore). The idea that you can “educate your kids” to ignore all those incentives is bananas. Part of educating your kids should be finding a way to put them in environments to learn themselves, and those ways are increasingly gone. Parents don’t understand the new world as well as their kids. It’s probably illogical for most kids to listen to their parents too much anyways. Which also ignores the fact that kids are inclined to do the opposite of what their parents say. I have no idea what my parent do could have done to keep me from smoking. Educate me on the dangers? They did.
To say that all parents got worse in the age of social media and YouTube, and ignoring that the environment fundamentally changed to put so much more ownus on the parents to constantly fight incentives.
I don’t know what the solution is, but to call it bad parenting is, I dunno.
EDIT: Of course parenting is very difficult, and I don't believe that any of it is easy. I wouldn't blame parents for bad parenting, I would blame a system that creates parents that have no time or energy left to spare.
I don't know what the solution is, but it probably doesn't help when kids are uneducated, being failed by a system that is supposed to educate them, that maybe the parents trust SHOULD educate them. Ultimately those kids grow up to have kids. Aaaand that's the plot of Idiocracy.