Fundamentally it seems like building products designed to target children with harmful content, or content that substitutes for educational material, should not be accepted by society.
So yes parents are responsible but maybe we should stop building The Torment Nexus but for children.
I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).
Every assertion of personal responsibility (sic) in the face of billion to trillion dollar industry spending is bad faith, zero exceptions.
British Petroleum invented the concept of personal climate footprint. That was bad faith and to put a point on it, evil.
Tech industry claims that engagement farming and addition manufacture should be opposed by "parenting" are even less credible.
I can count many such parents, way too many that I know. Kids before 5-6 should not access internet and should not watch TV. Don't trust me, trust children psychologists. Its toxic to their developing brains and personalities. Let them fuck up their lives on their own later if they must, don't give them hard addiction from the literal start of life, just because 'oh daddy has this super important work so doesn't have time to be a parent' syndrome, especially when its mostly empty pathetic soul draining white collar work with 0 added value to humanity.
And if one is truly changing the world for the better (as in 1 out of those maybe 10 humans actually currently doing it) and can't spare time for some kids, then don't have them, its not some freakin' checkbox ticked and moving to next challenge and achievement unlocked. Its by far the hardest effort one can make in one's life, spans over 2+ decades, be never 100% successful, while facing many real risks of failure completely outside of one's powers (no I don't mean peer pressure phones in school, rather ie health issues)
Like, parents shouldn’t give cigarettes to their children, BUT ALSO it is both illegal and immoral for tobacco companies to target children.
This is a huge part of it. Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if you tell them to put down the screens, yet you yourself are scrolling Instagram all day, the kid is going to know you are full of shit! It's like smoking a cigarette while telling your kid that smoking is bad for you.
There are finite fucks anyone can give, and if someone is working all day keeping a roof over their head, what else is it going to happen?
This is just the logical conclusion of consumerism.
Consumerism produces careerism. Careerism produces the two income household. A two income household cannot devote the needed time to raising children during their early years. Day care and school and after school activities has been used to keep children busy while parents were hunting for that next promotion and the bigger paycheck to get the better car to get the better "status" in the eyes of their neighbors.
The zombie is the perfect symbol for consumerism, because it involves a mindless, indiscriminate, beastly, and insatiable hunger that would sell his own grandmother for that next disposable morsel.
I think we really need to reshape things to conform to biological and human reality instead of working against it. In the case of women, our culture as well as our political and economic structures must support the ability of women to have children earlier and to be able to raise them themselves during their early years. Many women do actually want this, but the culture pressures them to do otherwise or convinces them that the consumerist lifestyle is more attractive, causing them to defer having children (constraining their fertile years) and to pursue careers that increasingly make it difficult to choose to relinquish for at least some time as they raise their children.