Hi, I’m asking a few adult simblrs a similar question because it’s something that hits close to home and I feel it needs to be discussed. What are your thoughts on adults and minors in this community interacting? Is it okay for an adult to befriend a minor and vice versa? Your insight will be appreciated, thanks.
So this is a tricky subject. I have a feeling this may spark another simblr discourse, but oh well. There's a lot of subjects I stay away from, but this one I do feel pretty strongly about, so.
I, personally, as an adult, am against befriending minors. I just don't think it's a good idea, or appropriate, even if it's a totally innoccent thing. I don't mind minors following my blog and interacting with my posts, but I would not exchance DMs with them, nor would I join discord servers to make friends with them. And as a general rule of thumb, I also don't myself follow minors' simblrs. I think I might follow a few unknowingly (or at least, I have for sure) because they don't all disclose their age in their bios, and I've unfollowed some after finding out said age. But again, I'm not that strict about it.
But I'd like to add, though, that there's a very big difference between an 18yo and a 16yo becoming friends, and a 30yo and a 16yo becoming friends? I don't know what age gap is like... ok, no, that's a line crossed. But I know that again, I, as a 29yo, do not feel comfortable talking to minors.
I won't soft-block them, I don't ignore their existence. I've seen people say: 'there's nsfw content on my blog' or 'my stories have adult content' and that's why they don't allow minors to follow them, and that's entirely fair. I just think I won't go through that hassle because... well, frankly I remember being 12 and lying about my age so I could access content I... maybe shouldn't have had access to (like, 100% shouldn't have had) and I would resort to all sorts of tricks if I wanted access to it. If they wanna see your blog and your content, they will. But I also don't think that means we should censor ourselves and our stories on the off-chance that a minor sees it because... Well, frankly, tumblr isn't a site just for minors, and adults are allowed to use this space, as adults, as well, no matter the nip ban. What we can do is tag properly, warn about adult content, and hope minors do the smart thing and block this sort of content from their dash.
However, I will not befriend minors nor talk to them in private, and the older I get, the stronger I feel about this. The very, veeery few times I ended up somehow interacting with minors, it turned into me giving life advice, and even this made me highly uncomfortable, because we are complete strangers, and I do not know this kid enough to be giving advices like this, and I've cut it short every single time. I get that some minors maybe don't have any good, nurturing, role-model-types of adults in their private lives, but an internet stranger is not the answer to this problem. And being friends with a minor, especially if the age gap is very big, is just weird. Let them interact with peers their age, there's plenty of simblrs that are minors and can befriend each other, we adults don't need to insert ourselves in those dynamics. It's not a matter of being mean to minors, it's a matter of: we know better on this, and we should not encourage them to seek out complete strangers on the internet who are much older than them.
So yeah. Those are my two cents on this subject.
