> This seems like a great idea. If all the kids are offline, there is much less peer pressure to be online.
As I read it it's not about transforming kids into luddite. I don't see where it's explained that, say, a 10 years old cannot play Fortnite at home or that a 8 y/o cannot play Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch.
It's specifically about preventing kids from wasting their lives on that inferior piece of mediocre turd that a smartphone is.
Yes, but the key takeaway from what you quoted is that they are creating an equal space where all kids are equally offline. The argument very much is not that all tech is bad, just that you should probably not give unfettered access to the internet to someone who's brain isn't fully formed
I heard some expert recently saying he backs this idea but thinks it should be 9th. Otherwise it’s in the middle school and that creates pressure for 7th and 6th graders. Makes sense to me to have the transition be middle school graduation.
Sounds like it'll be the new drivers license. Instead of waiting to take the test and get a car, which has fallen out of vogue in many circles, some will impatiently wait for their 13th birthday to join their friends in the forever-online world. Grand for those with early birthdays, less great for those born late in the year (assuming they weren't bumped one grade higher or lower based on birth date).
Our kids are not allowed to have their own phones, but they can use our phones for a limited amount of time every day, to communicate with their friends (under our supervision). There are middle grounds, it is not a all-or-none decision.
Friend's family have all Android phones and he told me directly in the OS there is an easy way to limit online time, I guess they have some parental account setup. Just allow them 30 mins now, or 20 minutes after some homework/chores are done etc. By default its off, as it should be.
TBH this tackles some of the worst attention traps for kids, but I consider screen time in general for kids as huge waste of time and their life, it doesn't matter how big screen is. Of course there is educational purpose, but it may not be easy keeping the device purely to that.
Life is about completely different things, if kids won't learn that early, they will face many struggles later. They can waste their life in front of their screens once they reach adulthood as much as they like, lets not mess them up even beforehand.
I strongly agree with almost everything I've read here, but I agree less-so that screen size doesn't matter.
We don't build computers to be used socially. I've seen... demos? Someone makes a table with touch input recognizing the entire space and installs an app that encourages collaborative investigation. This is a far cry from an app. If I were to go through a list of all tech developments in the last 10 years, I can't imagine more than 2 or 3 that did something to improve IO-level collaboration. We have LOTS of collaboration software, but none of it is on the human-interface level. You start with everyone having their own device.
Big screens are good IMO. The bigger the better, take the entire wall. One room should have 1 screen. It should be so big and unignorable that people stop taking the personal screen they carry in their pocket.
I know all the shows that my other family members watch. I don't love 'em, but I can have a conversation about a character (and we do!). On the other hand, I have no accurate sense what TikToks they watch. Yet, those TikTocks have been dramatically more impactful of people's views on various subjects from politics, to cleaning, to finance, to mental health. But there's no opportunity to say "hey, that's false".
They are only allowed to use Messenger Kids, which doesn't require them to create Facebook profiles (I have to have one, though). They can't delete their messages once sent, and we can also view their conversations on another parent's phone while they are chatting.
They can technically install another app and add random people as contacts, but it would be very hard to do that without our knowledge.
I would never let a kid touch a modern google or apple smartphone ecosystem. They can have one if they must when they are an independent adult capable of paying their own bills under a roof of their own.
I would however encourage laptops and desktops which require them to be offline periodically when they venture into the real world.
In fact this is a perfect example of mutual voluntary organization and governance.
Citizens looked around and saw a vacuum of righteous leadership on this issue. Notice that it always takes a leader (the principal in this case) and then people who actively and vocally follow (the health minister) to allow the social space for Laura Bourne to feel like they aren’t alone in doing the right thing.
This process is exactly what we need to be doing for all things. Everyone needs to be involved and yes it takes time and effort.
I find that dealing with peer pressure and understanding that you can go a different way when everyone is making some bad decision is an incredibly valuable lesson for teenagers, although also most difficult to take at that age.
You are 100% right, adults who use smart phones compulsively have little credibility to limit smart phone use for their kids. You have to start with yourself.
While it's still bad for adults it's not the same because their brains are fully developed. It's worse for a kid's brain that's still developing. "Hard-wiring" your brain during your developing years is far worse.
My kids worried about this as well when they got a smartphone. Turns out there is not much of an issue, some of their friends are on the phone a lot of the time, some of them not. Their friends get used to it and both kids don't have issues getting friends.
The fact every major phone OS manufacturer has implemented usage tracking and controls to limit it and companies like Instagram are having billboard campaigns about how to limit your usage of their app I think it's safe to stop pretending everything is fine at this point when even the people who build this things consider them bad for you.
> Stanford Medicine researchers did not find a connection between the age children acquired their first cell phone and their sleep patterns, depression symptoms or grades.
Can't remember where, but I read an article where it mentioned that by the age of 11 up to 20% of children with smartphones had viewed hardcore porn, and some were regular consumers.
Once a child of that age has a smartphone, they pretty much have _unfettered_ access to everything the internet has, or they will quickly find a way to. It only takes one peer (e.g. with older brothers) to turn the whole barrel rotten.
As a parent already coming under pressure with an 11 year old, I'm not going to just blindly trust that one Stanford study, and instead listen to fellow parents, their experience and ideas, and above all wait for as long as possible before bowing to the inevitable.
Digital drugs? Either you are unserious or you have fallen victim to hysteria. That very notion makes no goddamned sense. Do we call decks of cards paper drugs? Actual digital drugs would be literal magic.
Not the parent, but quite serious. Social media apps have been carefully engineered to hijack evolutionary reward systems and quickly lead to addiction in most users. This is not idle speculation, and it’s been known for quite some time that these companies employ researchers and experts who maximize the addictive pull of these products through an understanding of human psychology.
I’d argue that the analogy to drugs here is really an analogy to addiction, and there’s no magic involved in addiction: just exploitation of reward pathways leading to maladaptive behaviors.
And we don’t see an increasing percentage of people walking across busy and dangerous intersections, driving on highways at high speed, walking through dangerous neighborhoods, etc. while looking down at a deck of cards, oblivious to the world around them.
My community discourages smartphones for all ages, and strongly discourages them through primary and high school. The next community over has no such attitude, and I live on the border. My two cents:
1. It's a great idea. Good luck to the Irish.
2. Anecdotally, the kids without smartphones really are much more socially connected, better problem solvers, less lazy, more respectful of others, and more focused. They exercise more, they hike more, they build more.
3. Most of the technical complaints are easily solved. Communication can be done excellently with dumb phones (or smart watches that have a phone built in). Education tasks can be solved with a desktop computer. eInk book readers without an internet connection is fine and encourages reading.
If that is too hard, a large tablet is a good compromise - annoying enough not to be impulsive (especially if you use a separate modem) but otherwise with all the benefits of a phone.
4. There is a strong tendency in our community for the kids to learn programming. Not sure if that is related, but the lack of smartphones is clearly not an impediment.
5. That said, there are things you miss, and it is a price to pay. For me as an adult, probably the lack of WhatsApp is the biggest issue. However, the price is WELL worth it.
Does it has anything to do with smartphones though?
It looks like it is simply a case of caring for your kids. Smartphones are an easy solution for parents, give them one and it keep your kid occupied while you are doing your stuff. Having your kids "socially connected" typically involve getting them into clubs and the like. For hiking, they probably need someone to get them to the hiking place and at a younger age, accompany them. Even more complicated now that leaving your kids live their live outside without constant physical supervision is more and more frowned upon.
Kids learn A LOT from being left alone, if them being left alone results in TikTok daily binge.. well it is time to do something about that. Parents can not supervise their kids 24/7 they need some time to themselves and making a living.
The "frowned upon" part is why you really need to be picky about where you live. Having kids spend time with friends roaming the neighbourhood without morons calling cops or child services is a priceless benefit to them.
We have absolutely failed with any kinds parental controls.
I honestly don't care if its instagram or tiktok or snapchat or whatever app, or its generative ai app that generates the most personalized and addictive content possible.
We have gotten more 'surveillance' kind of control, monitor where the kids are, which app they are using and for how long, when they go to sleep, when they wake up etc.
We can limit which app is used how long, but not what content is consumed, you are what you eat, watch toxic and depressing shit and become toxic and depressed person. The same way a parent can make sure they are buying the right nutrients for their kids, they should be able to make sure they are consuming valuable content. Instead this is left to an extremely greedy algorithm with the only goal of extracting as much attention as it can from the user.
The reality is that the recommendation algorithm, the company developing it, the content creators and everyone in that chain, has completely different goals (usually: how to get more money) than the parents of the child, or the child consuming the content.
> The same way a parent can make sure they are buying the right nutrients for their kids, they should be able to make sure they are consuming valuable content
It's an interesting parallel, because after a certain age you really can't control everything a child eats. At some point they can make their own decisions, and you have to hope you've explained well enough that eating garbage for every meal will make you feel lousy. It's similar to technology/social media.
The difficulty is that "lots of fries = bad because it makes you fat which kills you" is kind of easy to explain, and also fairly intuitive.
"lots of Instagram = bad because subtle effects on your psyche" is much harder to understand, never mind explain. Never mind it's of course not quite that simple either.
Very true, and also no (legal) food would be _that_ bad for you in a single serving. Compared to what you might see on social media, which could be quite damaging with no warning.
You can’t actually limit anything. Kids that don’t have even a shred of technical know-how will walk to the ends of the earth to figure out how to get around it. My kid figuring out how to beat iPhone parental controls is my proudest moment as a parent.
The kid that hits puberty is going to figure out a way to watch porn on their phone if they have a phone. The phone has to practically be useless for them to not figure this out.
Parents are just in denial because the whole subject is so uncomfortable.
There's no reason a child that young "needs" to read either, but we tend to think it's a good idea to let them experience the modern world and get ready to live in it.
I predict these children will have more social issues in adulthood and thrive less well than those who had smartphones when they were younger.
Playing video games (mid 80s) from primary school, chatting online (mid 90s), relatively low mother tongue langage but still better than people 10year younger than me, totally failed studies and career far from my potential, but still not too chubby.
People thinking that an electronic device is good for a kid and it's just a matter of self control or parenting has a fairly strong biais and never spent time with a kid or forgot what is it to be one.
On the contrary, my experience of being a kid is exactly why I'm convinced this is good for them. As a bullied kid I'm pretty sure computer access literally saved my life, and I've consistently seen that the younger someone got on the internet the healthier their relationship with it is.
An escape from reality is far from a good solution. Although I also think that computer access is much better than a cellphone, I strongly believe that parental control is not the correct way, and need several layers of protections.
First one being, is your kid feeling safe enough with you to discuss any topics? I know I couldn't.
I have seen way too many kids having already social media pressure, including my own kid with a fairly low level of screen time across the board (I'd say 4h-8h a week maximum including a movie on Sunday morning, depending if she wants to play around with python or some GT7) this allows also some interesting discussions.
It's great that tech helped you when you were young, but one can't extrapolate here and apply personal experience more generally. The circumstances are vastly different. In some cases there will be kids that suffer from a lack of phone, but there's still computers, there's still video games, etc, etc. There's just no 24/7 cellphone addiction consuming every aspect of their waking day (and night, under the covers) to the exclusion of all else, and to the great detriment of their mental health.
Most adults seem to forget all their memories of their childhood, particularly if they become parents at which point they forget everything instantly.
I'm not sure why this is, what this phenomenon is called (if it has a name), and I would sincerely appreciate a scientific explanation if there is one. I still remember my childhood from about 4 years old onward as a guy in his mid 30s, so I simply can't relate to it.
Computers pre-social media were different. You could do a lot offline. Today, social media has been proven to be extremely toxic. There was a paper submitted to HN that mentions how much worse mental health is the earlier a child gets a cell phone[1].
Today children have unrestricted access to God knows what is on the internet and social media. This is not a recipe for success. Parents need to get involved.
Had no internet access until 18 (mid-90s), No mobile phone until 22.
My physical and mental health has declined significantly since I've been 'always online'. Learning new skills in an age of endless distractions is harder too, despite the amount of educational resources online that should make it easier.
When I got hooked on WoW in my 30s, it was very obvious that there were a lot of students sacrificing their education to their gaming habits. And this was before social media really took off, with its 24/7 narcissism and tribal warfare.
Computers we had access to did not have ML generated crack being served by every app on them. Even so I had addiction issues, thank god this was before ML.
And no I did not have access to my parent's bar to drink vodka and brandy whenever I felt like as a 12 year old to "prepare me to real world".
Do you think these kids are going to get access to laptops?
But to answer the question: patterns of socialization that their peers will follow. How to work around surveillance and filtering. How (and why) to jailbreak locked hardware.
People outside the no-smartphone group will develop specific ways of interacting, which you only "get" when you participate
Stuff you can't even know you're missing out, because you don't know what you don't know
Maybe calling someone without a heads up is considered rude, or ending sentences with a period is considered passive aggressive, maybe responding to someone right away is considered desperate or using certain words is okay IRL but not online
I agree that kids having smartphones is not good, but isolating an individual or small group from ostensibly the rest of the world in inconsistent ways that may interact in even worse ways is something you should be careful with, you might just be marking them for life
Everyone in the room is laughing. „What is it?“ - „Oh, Jimmy just sent a meme. You wouldn’t get it“. How does that feel like?
Trouble is, you’re way too old to understand the implications of not being in touch with your social group. If everyone else is in the loop but you’re not, your dead, socially. If you’re especially unlucky, you’ll be treated as the weirdo outcast with Luddite parents. You cannot imagine how mean kids are.
This problem is bigger than you think. Having to live through years of shaming and being alone causes trouble later in life.
Kids are cruel and if they have a mind to it will make fun of literally anything. I was a social outcast in school, where favorite jokes of the other kids were that I was overweight, that I was inept at sports, that I wore glasses, that my shirts had collars, that my only shoes were cleats, that my socks were black instead of white, that I wore briefs instead of boxers.
Funnily enough, though I grew up in the ’90s–’00s with parents who disliked TV and popular movies and heavily restricted media consumption in the household, nobody at school ever made fun of the fact that I’d never seen Friends or The Matrix. Later when I was in college I often saw people who’d grown up with access to popular media saying they’d feel socially deprived if they didn’t watch the latest new show. Personally I didn’t feel deprived, either at the time or in retrospect, even though today I greatly enjoy catching up on movies I never watched. I think there’s something to the idea that some restriction, particularly in childhood, can be healthy.
I believe your example lacks something important, the isolation will go way deeper than just media, maybe you won't develop the same cultural marks, maybe your humor will be significantly different, maybe you won't get to participate in the 3AM shit talking where the group strengthened bonds, maybe people won't know how to give you directions to places (Because they're reliant in maps to get to a general zone), maybe you won't get to participate in online events like gaming sessions or esports
This might not being the kid that didn't watch popular stuff, this might be making a kid alien to an enviroment they will have to deal with for the rest of their life; They might adapt well, or maybe they'll develop a "mark", an "accent" of sorts, which distinguishes them from the rest of the group
I agree that restriction or adversity might be healthy, but paraphrasing House
"Then why stop there? Poke a stick in her eye, imagine how healthy they'll be then"
Wouldn’t you agree that suffering as a child has effects on your adult life? I’m absolutely convinced that some restrictions are good, and not blindly following what the cool kids are doing too. But some people here seem to be blissfully unaware of the consequences harassment has on children.
My point is that if bullies weren’t making life hell for kids without smartphones, they’d be making kids’ life hell for some other irrelevant reason. I see no reason to believe that the bullying situation will be made worse by removing phones from the equation.
If I had a time machine, maybe I’d give my seventh‐grade self white socks and boxer shorts and see if that made any difference.
Path A: you’re shown the meme; “lmfao, nice” — now you’ve broken ice or strengthened a bond
Path B: “nah” — “whatever”
——
Don’t send your kids to a run of the mill public school — which is infested with children of asshats, jackasses, and assholes. Don’t live in in that sort of community. If you can help it, these will be some of the biggest factors in how your kid turns out.
I’ve been to a lot of schools. Kids from parents that just don’t give a shit will turn out like them: vampires, parasites, and people that generally drag others down for their own benefit (unless they’re lucky and get out).
Mean kids come from mean families. Usually people are mean because they don’t have the resources to fill whatever hole they have in them — and have to use maladaptions to get their fix. I.e. money problems and never taught the skills or given the resources to ease them.
I.e. send your kid to a private school that is recommended by people you trust. Just like you would a dentist, or a mechanic, and so on.
Easier said than done, but not an unsolvable problem.
> Don’t send your kids to a run of the mill public school — which is infested with children of asshats, jackasses, and assholes.
This is so obvious to me(from reading, observation and my own experience in public school) that I don't understand why smart, educated people don't realize this.
No way I'm going to send my kids to the cesspool that is public school if I can help it. People can call me and my family privileged all they want. What should I do, downgrade my child's education and life because it's not fair I have the resources others don't?
If you're getting bullied for that you'd be getting bullied anyway. Bullies don't find a reason like that then bully you. They get the impulse to bully you then find the reasons to attack you.
No, they have the impulse to bully someone and then go find someone to pick on. Much of what teens do is about desperately trying to avoid being the obvious target.
There are lots and lots of different social groups.
There are mean kids, and kind kids, and good schools and bad schools. There's a variety of experience here to take into account.
There are good families and bad families.
There are... variables. Yes, being a social outcast is hard. I would argue that being a social outcast involves _a lot more_ than not having access to the latest memes. That's where the misunderstanding lies.
It’s not just the latest memes, that was merely an example. Just consider that huge parts of the social life of children and teenagers happens on social media platforms now. Take that away, and you made it a lot harder for your child to be accepted by their peers.
No matter the other variables, that is a pretty common theme for teens nowadays, no matter the community they live in or school they go to.
My solution is to find a community for our family that share the same values, one of them being no smartphones for children. Another one is being nice to others regardless of what they look like and what they have or don't have. These communities are rare, but exist.
The whole point of this agreement is that nobody in the kid's social group would have phones. That's what makes this a good thing. It definitely would be a bad thing if only one family did this.
Maybe... though with a growing trends of the most affluent / best educated families in SF Bay Area not allowing smartphone use I find your prediction unlikely.
In most jurisdictions, cities have no say in this question. Schools can ban cell phones on school grounds, during business hours, that's it. Everything else is mostly a question of at least state if not national legislation. So, no, it's not gonna happen.
The US might be different, the amount of stuff a school board, for one single school, HOAs or city councils can legislate is just mind boggling sometimes.
It’s a horrible move. When it comes to technology, the kids affected by this will be illiterate compared to their peers.
I graduated college in 2018. Some of my classmates weren’t allowed to use “screens” growing up, and you could tell instantly. They struggled to use google to do basic research, struggled to collaborate in group projects, and were generally a burden to others, constantly needing help with technology.
Counterpoint, I grew up without any screens, and am more tech savvy than both of my kids put together. When the technology arrived, I learned programming, word processing, the web, google, and collaboration, with no effort at all. Likewise my siblings and my mom. That stuff just isn't all that hard. It doesn't require an entire childhood spent learning it.
Kids don't even know what a folder is. Hell, college students don't know what folders are. [1]
Smartphones don't teach you anything technical in the slightest, most of them are extremely dumbed down black boxes engineered specifically so the lowest common denominator won't get lost on them.
They'll still have access to laptops & computers and whatnot at home, but kids just don't need smartphones that early on, or at least not ones with unlimited bandwith and access to putrid entities like tiktok and instagram.
When it comes to technology, the kids affected by this will be illiterate compared to their peers.
My nephew could competently use a phone (use apps, update settings, understand installing things, etc) when he was 6. A 13 year old will be able to catch up in a week.
I’m curious what skills these pre-teens would miss out on by not having smartphones. They can still use computers, tablets, and dumbphones. And once they’re 14 their parents can decide to let them have a smartphone, so it’s not like they’ll go off to college never having touched a smartphone.
I don't think so. The Home PC generation is way more technically literate than the generation after that grew up with the smartphone, where the elementary interaction has been reduced to just three basic steps that always work: 1) lift and look at phone 2) swipe finger up 3) press the dopamine er - Instagram - button
Most people born in the nineties and before definitely struggle with computers - maybe not the academics in your circle, but anyone not exposed to or interested in technology.
I spent a while working in tech support for small to medium businesses, and boy, did those people have trouble to understand the basic interaction with their computers. Instead of learning the paradigms and applying them to general situations, they would memorise where on the screen to click, in which order.
You’re uncharitable view of generation Z is pretty much proven wrong if that is your assumption on what you can do on Instagram, though. Looks like a classic „my generation was the last good one, everyone else born after is stupid and lazy!“
Excluding people who are technical, whether by hobby or profession, everyone I know between 35 and 50 or so at least loosely understands things like the difference between a website and a locally executing program, the difference between local and cloud storage, the tradeoff between iOS-style walled gardens and relative openness of Android or PC (whichever side their own personal preferences happen to fall on), the difference between SMS and iMessage, and so on.
People under 30 -- again, excluding programmers, obviously there is no shortage of talented and knowledgeable young people in the industry -- overwhelmingly don't seem to be even capable of understanding any of these things.
Some medical devices like the Dexcom CGM and insulin pumps use smartphones to communicate and upload their data to the cloud where parents are able to follow their child’s readings. So, there are some reasons. The phone isn’t the problem. Social media is the real issue. For children who have a healthy relationship with their parents, and are able to correctly handle peer pressure, it can be fine.
Can't they just check it when the kids get home? Like what are they going to do from their work anyway.
Silly we have to throw all kids mental health and attention spans down the toilet just to satisfy some fringe cases like this that all existed before smartphones.
I wish people pushed for a more targeted approach. This seems like a baby-with-the-bathwater situation. I know it's easier to do that way, but you can do lots of things with your phone apart from social media. For example there's lots of books I read on the phone as a teenager just because of I could easily access them on the go. But on top of that, why limit 1:1 communication? Email? Maps access? Etc. I hate the "screen time" idea personally, because it's generalising way too much. We don't take away "reading time" just because kids could read the wrong thing.
I hope a few places that overreact this way will make it more popular to provide restricted tech experience rather than a full ban.
Kids - specially young ones cannot self regulate against billion dollars corporations that build features to keep people hooked
So please tell me a concrete applicable way that we can apply today to protect them.
I will not accept as solutions because is not applicable today by parents:
- retricting social media account (the ones over 7-8 years old will find ways to say yes to a screen that asks for age)
- saying Facebook or Tiktok should fix it - they will not
- saying we should give them restricted phones - does not work practically
- family should educate them - that works individually but it does not work society wise
So how do you protect the kids from this as a society?
> saying we should give them restricted phones - does not work practically
I'm not sure why you dismiss that one. Whitelisting apps works - that's the whole idea behind kiosk devices. There are guides available, but basically you enable only the allowed apps, uninstall webview, lock the account.
Yes, it's not trivial and not everyone will want to do it. (It's available though https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103340?hl=en#zip...) That's exactly why I wrote the last paragraph. Full access was one extreme. The ban is another extreme. (And is not exactly easy to implement either)
Once enough places overreact with the complete bans, the lockdown mode will get better documented, more popular, known by schools, finally (hopefully) easily available from the installation screen.
> because is not applicable today by parents
That's ok. This problem will still exist in a couple of years and this will be a bit easier to do each month. It was actually impossible to implement a few years ago, but we made progress.
I don't see it as an issue. The bad part of social networks is feeding you never ending crap. If kids want to talk to each other... what's the issue with that? We had phone calls and party lines and passing notes before. (Or letters for those who were into that) They were as much a social network as Google doc comments.
It's the feed that allows them access to public posts that is a big problem. Let's start with children accounts where the feed is restricted to friends / followed accounts and only in chronological order.
As I type this, I realize this is exactly what a lot of us have been saying should be done for adults too. And why is it that all social media either moves towards this nebulous endless feed or actively pushes it. Very telling.
I am dismissing it because I don't see if feasible to implement this. To keep this practical, please tell me how would you implement this for 10.000 kids.
Concrete plans:
- Will you give parents those free phones?
- Will you control entering the schools by type of phones?
- Will this be a list of 2-3 phones allowed? Is this an intervention in the economy that other companies will do?
- What kind of timeline will be needed to implement this?
I do agree we should start implementing long-term solutions. But as a parent, I want a solution now, these years :) for the current generation
Those are not new phones. You can do most of those restrictions on modern phones right now.
I'm not sure why you're putting all those requirements on an idea that can be self enforced in a community. We're commenting on an article where a community implemented a phone ban (not even covering everyone if I understand correctly)
> Is this an intervention in the economy that other companies will do?
Relevant companies already did most of it. Don't wait for the industry to rescue you.
Search for "(your phone type) parental control" and you'll find how to do that right now. Write it down in simple words. Tell other parents. It starts with you.
My kid does not have a phone yet but he is still young.
I talk with parents of kids a bit older like 10 and it is very hard to keep these limits when most of their colleagues don't have these limits.
I agree with you that what we do now is that we are trying to educate other parents about this. But it is hard and the years are passing.
I think access to mobile phones for kids is a big problem and indeed there is no simple solution.
I don't say we should do what the article is describing but I empathise with the parents that want a total ban of mobile phones for kids. It is simpler to enforce and explain this rule than explain everyday why my colleague has access why don't I? And try to explain that without also expressing a judgement on those kids or their families.
So here is a situation: the kids that have access to mobile phones and games at home goes to kindergarten and they play there only with other kids that know those games. They talk about levels and characters from those games. They don't have mobile phones at kindergarten but the fact they use it at home already creates two groups of children: those with access to mobile phones and those without access. And this is kindergarten/pre-school (4-5 years old)
Please let's make a difference between what a parent can do (and what you propose is doable) and what a community can do.
I allow restricted access to my kid: no mobile phone access, limited time to watch cartoon, no tv, limited access to laptop only for scratch for example, limited access to some educational videos about nature... He can use command line or repl to play for example with math questions... While also getting used with keyboard, mouse... Trying to find a good balance.
But unless I plan to keep him at home he goes to community and socialize and I have to explain why we don't do this or why we don't do that and to explain why others are playing games or have phones. And I do explain.
But I am also concerned about the social groups they are all growing. The majority are not like this. So he will live in a society maybe with people hooked on screens. Maybe he will find a bubble maybe not.
True, which is why this will not be the only technique I'll use once my daughter comes of age.
Education and setting an example are two others I have in mind for now - the latter is of course easier said than done but honestly, if we truly believe something is healthy, why not do it ourselves?
There are people here that help build or aspire to build the things that are making kids and people sick. they'd rather do the damage and get the money playing devils advocate. you won't get much for ideas that are actually socially responsible.
Not to mention,this stuff is making adults insane, they're addicted too. Just read these comments. Addict caveates and excuses.
> So please tell me a concrete applicable way that we can apply today to protect them.
Don't allow corporations to build those features, and mandate that they build features that forcibly give children time away from their phones (e.g. caps on usage: no usage between 10PM and 7AM, no usage during school hours for entertainment products, maximum time to play games, mandatory labeling for all websites and products, etc.).
You can even go further (like China today, and the US during the Silver Age of comics) and enforce mandatory outcomes for creatives targeting children. For example the TikTok algorithm in China must output educational resources for children and perhaps children's entertainment could be forced to not glorify certain topics such as school shootings, revenge on bullies, sociopathy, etc.
Largely agreed, +1. However, a loosely related example: I think I have benefited quite a bit from never ever having seen neither of my parents drink vodka (aside the traditional shot for the deceased at funerals). Because of this, it is easy for me to avoid the mental and physical addiction of alcohol altogether in my adult life. It just wasn't part of my childhood culture, period.
Youtube algorithms and the most stupid smartphone games are obviously addictive, so it does make sense if parents step in with a well-considered "thou shalt not" at times. This is far from a perfect solution, but in the long run, it is very probably better than doing nothing at all. I've seen really horrible results of screen time overuse on a teen girl -- basically, a lively and clever 7yo developed into a 18yo with no social skills whatsoever, and the habit to even scroll her phone while brushing teeth!
It's like decidedly putting away those candies when you sense your child has had too much for today. The same thing. No need to punish the child's brain and coping mechanisms for the parent's inability to... parent.
Best solution, obviously, is simple parental role model: the entire family putting away smartphones for the evening. (In our case, for example, nobody in the family has a smartphone; only dumb phones here. So far, with our oldest child being 9yo, I don't notice this being a problem. He is clearly fine not having one.)
I have also observed that careful explanations of what gaming or smartphones do to the child's brain also make a lot of sense. Our son is clearly interested in these effects, so he is always setting himself timers to limit his gaming. (Doesn't always follow them, but often, nonetheless, does; I think it is the purpose that counts, not 100% execution.)
I think children need to see cause and effect of smartphone overuse already at early ages. They need to understand and feel that by reasonable, down-to-earth limiting, parents are actually protecting them and their brain.
This is the tactic we are using: set a good example in front of our kid. If you don’t want your kid glued to phones and tablets, don’t be glued to phones and tablets yourself. I deliberately keep my phone off when the kid is around—don’t be seen using it. Set a positive example for her to follow. Lots of her friends are already addicted to phones, and if you go meet their parents, lo and behold, the parents are addicted too.
I doubt kids ever took much notice of smoking parents, with a cigarette in their mouth all day long, telling them they shouldn't smoke; first, heal thyself. It was that thought process that influenced my 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' cartoon.
> I think I have benefited quite a bit from never ever having seen neither of my parents drink vodka
Counterpoint: my partner's father was an alcoholic who abandoned her after her mother died and ended up homeless for two decades, her aunt was also an alcoholic. She didn't grow up to be an alcoholic and doesn't drink alcohol. I don't drink alcohol. Most adults are capable of managing themselves.
> I've seen really horrible results of screen time overuse on a teen girl -- basically, a lively and clever 7yo developed into a 18yo with no social skills whatsoever, and the habit to even scroll her phone while brushing teeth!
Could equally be undiagnosed autism and/or ADHD, which is infamously underdiagnosed in women.
Adults are children in first place, and children model themselves a lot from parents.
There's certainly a significant randomness at play, and it's admirable when adults manage to deviate from problems of their parents, but exposure to them ultimately presents a high risk factor, if one wants to put in mathematical terms.
Screen time is actually a very concrete problem in the context of parenting. There's again significant randomness at play (I myself grew up watching lots of TV), but at the end of the day - literally, what happened during a given day - the difference in educational quality between households with and without¹ screens, is night and day².
¹=with "without" I mean extremely limited quantities of screen (no tvs, no internet, not checking out smartphones etc.etc.).
²=there is certainly a spectrum of screen time content in terms of quality, but the vast majority is garbage.
Yet having family who smoke leads to kids who take up smoking. It's not guaranteed on the individual level, but statistically very significant for the population. The same goes for domestic violence, excessive drinking, and, of course, smartphone use.
Anecdotal observations of exceptions don't really make a counterpoint to the general (and well documented) trend.
Inhaling second-hand smoke is an entirely different mechanism of exposure than just witnessing something. I loved the smell and effect of my grandmother's Marlboro Reds, and I loved the smell and effect of my father's Golden Virginia tobacco. I'd shut the windows as a kid and teen and hotbox the room so I got some, and sure enough, I ended up smoking for many years.
> I think I have benefited quite a bit from never ever having seen neither of my parents drink vodka (aside the traditional shot for the deceased at funerals).
Seeing your parents get drunk while partying and feel embarassed for them act ing stupid rather then it being super fun makes alcohol seem a lot less cooler.
They're banning smartphones, not (say) laptops. Presumably the latter are less of an issue since you're not tempted to be using them constantly at all times.
For many people the only computer they have is their phone, I’d say well over half the people I work with have only their phone, and especially young people.
I’ve got one, two, thr… I don’t, maybe nine computers, and have read zero on any but the phones.
I don't think we should kill more trees and require that kids continue lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks when we have a better alternatives. (To be fair, an e-reader without constant internet access would fit the bill, at least for this particular example.)
Kids aren't addicted to phones. They're addicted to certain types of apps on phones.
My dad brought home an old, destined-for-the-trash computer from work when I was 8 years old, and that was my first introduction to computing, an event that changed the course of my life. If he'd decided "no, I'm not going to let my son use this because he might play a violent video game or download pixelated porn from some BBS", I would not be the curious technologist I am today.
Don't ban the neutral, multi-use technology. Ban the specific thing on it that does harm.
> I don't think we should kill more trees and require that kids continue lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks when we have a better alternatives. (To be fair, an e-reader without constant internet access would fit the bill, at least for this particular example.)
Those dead trees can survive up to 50 years in the hands of children, mobile devices tend to break down significantly faster and create considerably more waste. Just have a copy of the books for school and one for home and you would probably get rid of 90% of the pointless book carrying I did as a kid.
I don't have the sources available, so the following is a short summary from memory:
Paper is produced using a mix of recycled paper and newly harvested trees. Overall, paper is usually recycled up to 7 times, and it really is due to the need of recycled paper for each production. Actually, paper manufacturers have whole departments responsible for the sourcing of recycled paper.
Trees come from, most of time, dedicated tree farms. Those are, by virtue of being needed, operated in a sustainable manner, meaning new trees are constantly planted to replace the harvested ones. Due to the growth periods of trees, there are a lot more trees in those forest than are needed for harvesting (fun fact, the term sustainability comes from 19th (?) century book about wood and forest cultivation).
While paper production requires a lot of energy, the industry is by now really good in serving as a way to load balance grids. They sell and buy energy, mostly electricity but also heat / gas, on spot markets and through long term contracts. Bring to readily pull huge amounts of energy, and also being able to reduce energy consumption almost immediately (production and production planning just love that by the way), their overall impact on energy consumption is nowhere as bad as people think. Added benefit, the majority of theirbraw material actually are renewable, they even store CO2 while growing.
On the other side you have electronc devices: rare earths, needing internet and server farms, have to be charged all the time. Raw materials have to be reycled, and not at a reasonable rate. Recycling happens in poor countries and causes all kinds of health environmental problems.
The main reason why retail moves from mailed advertizing to apps is simple: data. Putting the ads in an app, connected to whatever benefit program people are part of, allows for much better data collection and analysis that paper based advertizing.
Books are similar, added benefit of books is basically unlimited storage capability.
> These strange papery things are also rather portable.
I remember having books transported through an ocean and paying half of my allowances every month to get two of them while I was in middle school. Same when my kid was born: pre-school kids' books are massively absent from ebooks, publisher assume they won't have a device and don't really care about accessiblity, and it's a real PITA to find books that are either out of publication or in foreign languages.
Portable they are not, at least compared to a few MO of data this days.
I think the underlying assumption in this thread is that "books" are a commodity and are purely interchangeable. You just give "books" to your kids and they'll like it. I'd disagree.
1. Books are portable, but they're much less portable than phones.
2. Not all books are available, or available locally, or available locally in the language you want.
3. Phone book readers don't normally have adverts, videos, or other distractions. If yours does, you should check other options.
Source: Read most of Patchett from my phone on the bus to school, it was not available locally and even if it was I would definitely not add any more books to my backpack.
Libraries are an odd artifact of history. They exist today because they are an undeniable public good.
If they didn't already exist they would never be allowed to come to exist in today's world. It would be considered wholesale IP theft and people would be arguing that the very notion of the idea would be the death of creativity.
Many of the problems of smartphones are not intrinsic to the technology but are a reflection of that modern world. Many people would call that late stage capitalism, but without much of that capitalism the technology wouldn't exist.
They frequently cost less than ebooks, particularly if you buy them second hand. I don’t think I’ve paid more than €1 for a book (apart from rare volumes) in years. Abebooks have it all.
Teenage back health is important. I remember filling my bag with books back then, I’m glad my son won’t have to. His posture should be better than mine.
I remember shoving a paperback in my pocket. Weighed about the same as a phone. Do textbooks no longer exist? I’ll confess I’m out of touch, as my kids aren’t yet of school age.
We have decided that we are not going to give smartphones to our younger children. Our oldest has, she got it already at age 7, and we have realised that it was a mistake. We have relatively strict regulations for it (only 1 hour per day - sometimes even less etc.) but still we have noticed how it is affecting and changing how she feels about the world around and herself.
One girl in her class doesn't have phone at all! The girl gets complaints from her parents because she reads too much books, spends time outside much more than our kid and does all kinds creative projects. It's same time inspiring and bit depressing to see in comparison how the smartphone free childhood looks like.
>> One girl in her class doesn't have phone at all! The girl gets complaints from her parents because she reads too much book
I would not beat myselfe up too much in this situation. I happen to have two children who were risen almost identically with little to none restriction of access to phones, tablets, streaming and computer games.
Older daughter just turned 10 years old and is reading more books than I (she even got her own library card made Matilda style), has quite good sport results (third place at schools olimpic running with older children), and even have time to do some group dancing, bringing handful of medals from competitions. And she is doing all this while spending lots of time with her friends outside.
My 7 years old son, on the other hand, is none of this. After two years of access to tablet he still have problems with letting it go. An he does not want to start reading anything, despite me reading him books for most of his life.
I think, we as parents, like to believe that we have some influence over "emerged" behaviours of our children, but somehow in the end it all comes down to their nature and is mostly accidental.
>> The girl gets complaints from her parents because she reads too much [many] books
> Do you mean complements?
I'm pretty sure they meant 'complaints', but maybe you meant 'compliments' ?
I sometimes complain about my son's reading - too fast. I recently bought a Dogman book for him that cost 7 GBP,
and he'd read it within 30 minutes. Pound for pound, not worth the money as it has basically zero re-use.
How much time do you spend outside doing stuff with your kid? How much time do you spend talking with your kid re stuff she's doing at school, or stuff she's seen on her phone? How do you moderate smartphone usage (apart from the time limitation)? How do you motivate her to go outside and explore nature? You want to see her spending more time outside? Try starting with getting out yourself, taking her with you.
Related: Japan offers these cute kid phones that are basically a clock and preset contacts list, that's it. I saw them quite regularly. Thought some here would find it interesting.
PHD tech developer here with an 11 year old daughter.
I wish this would happen in the US. Our family is the odd one out, because most parents are not yet aware of the harms of social media and FOMO (esp. for girls).
Of course, our daughter is extremely annoyed at us all the time because of peer pressure...
Keep in mind there's a direct correlation between "screen time" and depression...
Meaning that kids that spend 5+ hours per day on their phones are depressed. Up to one hour had no noticeable effects. [0]
Now think about why a kid would self-isolate for 5 hours a day and it might give you a clue about why they are depressed in the first place (hint, it's not the magical screen!).
I would vote for this in the US in a heartbeat. Give them a flip phone. They can still call, text, even take very bad photos, without the targeted harm that is modern social media.
Some of them seem to be outcasts who don't care about them being socially isolated and would love them to stay at home and play Atari games.
Obviously stopping the kids from doom scrolling or watching netflix all day is crucial so they don't grown into morons is necessary but being weird and isolated is no fun either.
The problem is social life having been transplanted onto the back of social media. Kids are missing out on socialising. They shouldn't have to rely on social media for that, though.
The underlying issue is obviously that children have nothing better to do than to be on a smartphone and that school is an oppressive, boring, hostile, unnatural environment.
The answer isn't to take away their coping mechanism, it's to treat a human child like it should be treated. A young boy should be offered opportunities to partake in martial arts clubs, hunting clubs, robotics and programming competitions, fitness training, house building projects, general machinery and electronics projects and on and on the list goes. My honest opinion why society absolutely refuses to help children is because it is full of adults who envy and fear the children. They know that a 12 year old could do 80% of their job within a year if given the smallest amount of encouragement and instruction. Real life isn't allowed to compete with the virtual world, that's why the virtual world is winning in the child's life.
America use to have technical and vocational secondary schools, I went to one of the last ones in a top 3 major city, right before the last remnants of that legacy were phased out. In the 1960s, my high school had automobile shop, architectural drafting, wood shop that produced professional level artifacts at the senior level; in the 1940s, it had put together a plane. Today, it is yet another "college prep" competing for funds via standardized testing results, segregating students who are capable at purely academic demands and exercises from the vast majority of everyone else.
This shift was likely initiated both by the beginnings of austerity in the US and by a trends towards a cultural prejudice toward being able to work right out of high school (likely incubated that austerity), an outcome in no way exclusive to blue-collar work, but carried that connotation anyway and so became frowned upon (I distinctly remember this being a problem in the 90s, even though my grandfather worked his entire life at a General Electric factory, had bought a home for his family of 6, etc)
All the above sounds great but costs money. In the UK, the ruling class have consistently cut school budgets in real terms over decades. For example, music lessons are 30 to 1, sing or bring-your-own plastic recorder. For sports day, my child wasn't in the top few of the class that got to actually run on the last patch of grass that hasn't been sold off.
So… forgive me for jumping onto that, but I found the way you phrased it interesting - is it only boys allowed to do all that stuff? What are girls supposed to be doing, knitting and cooking?
i've been wanting to out-compete the current schooling paradigm by using kids as little innovators and having them graduate with the skills to set up or participate in a functional business, no college necessary.
Here in NSW Australia our new state government is implementing a no-mobile-phones-in-high-schools (11-18yo) policy, scheduled to come into effect the last term (quarter) of 2023.
This extends a similar existing policy in primary schools (5-11yo).
I think in general it's a well received policy, and pushes questions and decisions about ownership and usage outside of school back onto parents. It may shift some of the economics favourably for parents that want to hold off a little longer in providing their kids with a phone.
The problem - inasmuch as it's a problem - is evaluating the long-term success of such a policy in the absence of any kind of comparable control group.
https://www.waituntil8th.org : "The Wait Until 8th pledge empowers parents to rally together to delay giving children a smartphone until at least 8th grade. By banding together, this will decrease the pressure felt by kids and parents alike over the kids having a smartphone."
What about a smart phone as a safety device (parental leash) though? I have a 10 year old going into 6th grade next year, he has aged out of the after school program so I'm considering letting him walk home (about 1/2 -3/4 mile). There is no way in hell I would let him do that unless he has some way I can contact him and see where he is. He is at a charter school so there are far fewer neighborhood kids he could walk home with and no bus or anything like that. We're also not too concerned about screens since we let him use his iPad as much as he wants as long as he has nothing else he is supposed to do. Just curious if it seems reasonable as a safety (at least in my mind) device.
> I have a 10 year old going into 6th grade next year, he has aged out of the after school program so I'm considering letting him walk home (about 1/2 -3/4 mile).
At that age I was riding my bike the 3 or so miles to the nearest library to check out books.
In the far off long ago world of the 1990s, when crime was stupidly higher than it is now.
> I have a 10 year old... I'm considering letting him walk home (about 1/2 -3/4 mile)
That's about 0.8km ~ 1.2km. That's literally 10 minutes of walking, probably less as an energetic kid. What do you imagine will happen to your kid if they're left alone on a 10 minute walk?
It's about as cliched as it gets as a response, but at that age my friends and I were gone for hours on end much further than 1.2km from our homes with 0 devices of any kind, other than 1 or 2 kids that were lucky enough to have a Nokia.
> There is no way in hell I would let him do that unless he has some way I can contact him and see where he is.
I'm not saying you are wrong or right for wanting this, but it brings 2 thoughts to mind.
One is a reminder that our parents and beyond always joke about, back in the day throwing a few blankets in a car and driving 12 hours north for the weekend and having no way to contact anyone and "they were fine".
Second is this feeling of overlap between having a child grow up with a phone constantly on them, and our mental attachment to having them. Everyone is aware of this emptiness / stress that occurs with many people when you leave the house without your phone these days. You feel this strong mental attachment / reliance on this connection to the world. Now, are we forcing children to have that same mental reliance on these devices by starting them so young?
Again, not saying you are right/wrong to want it, just something that came to mind.
I was cycling (i.e. in the road) (sometimes walking, not in road) to and from school 2.0 miles away at that age. This was before/as phones were only just becoming interesting to that age group (getting MP3s and ringtones etc.), I think I didn't have one at first and then did, but I begged for it, it wasn't forces upon me as some sort of safety ('parental leash'?!) device.
What're you actually concerned about? Is that going to helped by your child having a phone themselves (vs some bystander)?
> There is no way in hell I would let him do that unless he has some way I can contact him and see where he is.
Then do what I did with my child as a half-way compromise: turn the phone off when at home, never let it into their bedroom, lock down the majority of functions (parental features) to the basics needed during the day and check usage.
There is no reason why parenting and ground rules can't come into play. It's not all-or-nothing.
Based on the comments here, most don't seem to understand that. Restricting access requires someone to actually parent and that seems to be too big of an ask for most of these folks. Instead a blanket ban is the only solution. And then it's only a solution if you can ban everyone else's kids from having phones as well so their precious little snowflake doesn't suffer from FOMO. There is a post on here about a dad whose relationships with his children were "ruined" by giving them smart phones. As if he has no agency outside of giving them the phones in the first place. It's ridiculous.
Funny enough, our daughters around that age walk about that distance to/from school regularly. We use a pair of walkie talkies [1] to comm, and they work shockingly well over that entire distance.
1: Pofung BF-T15. Two pack was $17 on Amazon at the time. Baofeng is an adjacent brand.
Up to you what you do with your kid, but I spent hours of unsupervised time outside at that age. The risk is very low, and a phone doesn’t really mitigate it much anyway. Do you really want to make him think that walking alone for half a mile is such a big deal?
> A study by the London School of Economics found pupils at phone-free schools performed better in GCSE exams, especially those in bottom 60% of KS2 tests
Lots of commenters here comparing smartphones and books... Hell, ever lost track of time reading because you were so deep in a book? There's no better feeling and doomscrolling is the exact opposite, it's a mindless activity.
Dupe of [0](original, 2 days ago, 10 points, 2 comments, low traction), [1] (1 day ago, 50 points, 5 comments). (HN guidelines: "Please submit the original source" which this submission credits/links to)
"As old as"? More like, "as young as". Most kids that age shouldn't even be using smartphones. Ask yourself: Why do they need it? Why do they need a computing device with nigh full access to the Internet 24/7? It's unhealthy, and for kids staying in touch with friends; kids need _plenty_ of break from their peers in order to grow and develop as an individual.
We've decided to wait till 10th grade to give our kid a smartphone. We might get a dumb phone sooner than that if they need to call us. It's easy to see kids getting addicted to any type of screen - TV, laptops, etc. Having a phone with them all the time seems like a terrible idea.
You could easily give them a basic iPhone with full lockdown on every app with just basic communication and internet browsing abilities.. why not that option?
iOS screen time/parental controls are a joke to bypass. To be clear I'm not aruging that parental controls are bad or not worth it--I'm arguing that Apple's built in mechanisms fail far too easily.
Why spend a few hundred dollars to turn an iPhone into a $50 phone? Feature phones give you communication and basic (if often painful) internet browsing abilities.
My friend said he relationship with his twos sons were irrevocably ruined by smartphones. Before, they would chat throughout all their car rides but as soon as he bought them smartphones, they stopped talking to him almost entirely and spent all their time on their phones.
With kids getting to that age, I’m holding off as much as possible, and I’m indoctrinating them to the sociopathy of social media, where the Algorithms don’t give a shit about you, they will do whatever it takes to maximize your engagement on their platform.
I know as a non-parent I should be the last person being frustrated with others' parenting choices, but it seems weird that your friend just "let" smartphones ruin his relationship with his kids, rather than imposing and enforcing limits on their use. Maybe the smartphones go into the glove box when riding in the car. Or in general, maybe the smartphones aren't always physically accessible to the kids, and are only given to them when they have a need for them, or when it's "playtime".
When I was a kid, my parents didn't allow to sit and play Nintendo all day, as much as I wanted to sometimes. The idea that getting a smartphone for a kid inevitably means that they're going to have it on their person and be glued to it 24/7 is just bonkers.
The problem is that screens are just scarily addicting for kids. They have limited, supervised screen time to less than half an hour a day for the youngest (5) and around an hour a day for the eldest (8), yet despite that it's practically all they care about. The only thing they seem to think about is getting back mum's phone so that they can watch youtube or whatever it is they do, despite it being such a short part of their otherwise eventful days.
Hell, I've got a Steam Deck that I bring with me whenever I come around to visit, yet they don't care about it at all despite my steam library having around 900 games, they'd rather use my phone!
Really it should be on a case by case basis. At 11 or 12, maybe even 10, I would have been pretty interested in trying different roms for phones and stuff like that.
In that sense they would be denying a kid an opportunity to self-learn, which I don't agree with.
No, that would take time and effort and money and self discipline and speaking to their kids. This is a free (actually cheaper than free), quick thing they can boast about doing at dinner parties.
I bet right now some teenager in Ireland is surely stocking up on low cost tablets to sell to those kids at a markup. Anybody who thinks those kids won't just hide their contraband devices from their parents and teachers is a fool who doesn't remember being a kid.
Jesus. Learn how to use the parental features and turn off access to mindless apps. Not letting your child take photos, look up info, share their location or a million other uses for a mobile phone besides TikTok is just short sighted.
That would put extra effort on the parenting side. Yuck. That's not why people get kids! Parenting ... It's easier to just ban it and not think about such things. And those kids won't be able to do this on their kids because the lack of contact points in their childhood, too. So yeah, just ban it. Problem solved for generations! /s
Parental features fail far too often. As someone deeply knowledgable about the space, it makes complete sense why some parents opt for a dumb phone or no phone and its not due to the parent being lazy.
Is there something inherent about how parental controls have to function that means that they can't be made reliable enough, or is it that Apple and Google have dropped the ball and could do better?
Parental controls/monitoring are an acceptable invasion of privacy. There's been a big push by these companies to at least appear to care about privacy, which results in parental control apps being limited in what they can do. A few companies that really care have innovated to try and help, but its still a challenge and often forces a bad UX on the child and parent.
Offering parental controls built into the platform appears to always be an after thought by these big companies. They'll release a non-innovative copycat solution as lip service eventually so they can claim they care. Beyond that, based on how poor their solutions are and how difficult to setup/maintain/use, seems like they don't actually care.
The "dangers" on smartphones are not limited to just a few apps. Dangerous content is found everywhere. Social media, texting, chatting, web browsing, video games, etc. Dangers include accessing "bad" content, but also simply accessing good content too much. "Bad" content is found everywhere, including "acceptable" sites/apps. So whatever the solution is it needs to work on every app. For example, loads of apps use a Webview (built in web browser in the app). A child could use an "approved" app by mom n dad to then access the web to view whatever content they wanted using the webview.
Its actually a very difficult problem to solve. Think of the headache tech has moderating content... now you have to moderate with very limited knowledge about whats actually being done on the device (each platform has different limitations). And to make it worse each parent and child has a different set of rules for what is okay vs not okay for that child based on their beliefs, age, culture, etc (basically a custom set of moderation rules).
How do you build a solution thats easy for parents to use but actually works? Its difficult. A dumb phone or no phone is often a wise choice, especially when the child is young. Eventually parents need to realize its their job to prepare their child for adulthood, so that means giving them unfettered access to a smartphone (ideally with some parental monitoring) so they can coach them to use it responsibly.
I wonder for how many of them it'll be a case of "one rule for you, another rule for our child because they're not like the rest of the riff-raff"? A lot of this will be lip-service, that much I am sure of.
Just fyi Greystones is a super exclusive wealthy area with insane property prices. probably every structure there would sell for at least 1 million euro.
It's a satellite town of Dublin with a big motorway going by it that people commute to Dublin city centre on. Also on the coast with nice beaches and multiple golf courses for the rich assholes.
I was interested in article but once I saw Greystones, I just thought, gross. Of course the wealthy elites can afford (in terms of time, money, education, opportunity cost etc.) to take steps to be more healthy.
The irony is that adults in Ireland like everywhere else spend hours online or watching tv. Everybody could have time to offer a healthy environment. As a community, what do you need more than a room for a library and a field to run and play soccer? Polo, golf and sailing are not the only sports that build character.
The requirement is not wealth but being committed. That's even more difficult but easily ignored when lack of wealth seems to be the obstacle.
What's your point? That mental health initiatives are only worth discussing if they originate in working class communities?
Also, I grew up in the vicinity of Greystones and painting it as a kind of Irish Beverly Hills is daft. Everyone I knew from the town was regular middle class.
It's the rubbish parents who cannot build a relationship with their children without dictating what other parents are allowed to do. If you cannot be a responsible parent because of what other parents are doing, you're the lousy parent.
Great. "Let's make our children much less tech-savvy in this world where importance of tech skills is skyrocketing, just because we can't be bothered to parent them well so they turn to tablets and phones for entertainment."
Absolutely terrible move. Good that it's voluntary.
Maybe you missed all the previous articles on HN about how the latest generations are less technically literate, unable to navigate file systems, unable to use regular PC applications (only knowing smartphone versions), and generally only knowing how to stay within the locked down walls of modern smartphone ecosystems.
In 5 years I'd assume that skill will be completely obsolete for "normal" people.
Heck even as a programmer I loathe navigating files and am searching everything as much as I can. Sure some kids will need to learn about file systems as they grow up, just as some of us learned how boot loaders work or how CPU are architected. But I wouldn't put that as mandatory literacy even today.
> regular PC applications
Looking at the latest developments from Apple and Microsoft, I don't see "regular" PC applications staying much different from phone/tablets one for much longer either.
My mother, in the mid 90s, could just barely use a computer to type something up in Word and print it out. She was just sorta starting to grasp email by 2000. Even some kids I knew in middle and high school had trouble with the basics of navigating around a Mac and using a web browser. Go back to the late 80s when my dad brought home the first computer I got to use, and most of my schoolmates had never even seen one, let alone knew how to use one.
I absolutely agree that the locked down environments we have today are awful and counter-productive. But my nephew could scroll through YouTube Kids on a tablet when he was three years old and start the videos he wanted to watch, and go back to find something else when he was tired of it. Three years old! Now, at seven, even though he can't always read everything, he can operate fairly complex apps.
I guess it depends on how you define "technical literacy". I look at it more as "being able to successfully navigate the technology of the time", not so much "be a hacker", which seems to be what some people try to push it to be.
I think ui is like a language that you need to read to be able to navigate software. My experience is that many older people learn to use software by rote and can't read the UI well. Even quite technically skilled people. But my niece could read a UI from a young age and is more able to figure stuff out. And young people are more willing to use the UI hints that older people avoid (like a ribbon on word).
I don’t see file systems remaining for anyone outside techies within 5 years. Even now, unless the system wants a file in a particular place, I just save it wherever and conduct a search.
Even as a dev, I can’t say I really know how to use the file system on Mac as I have only owned Mac computers since search became zippy and all development work happens inside an IDE.
Kids don’t know how to use a file system as the speed of search has rendered day to day use of the file system mostly irrelevant.
PC applications are also increasingly disappearing. Things are done on the web (even many “desktop” apps are just the site in an Electron instance) or on the phone.
Ridiculous strawman argument, smartphones —are not— synonymous with all technology. You can educate children in different types of technology and yet also not give them unfettered access to smartphones.
Ridiculous strawman argument, smartphones are the easiest and most convenient way of accessing information. A ban on them is a big block on informational freedom.
Couldn’t agree more. The older generation didn’t go to school in a world with Google, and they dont’t understand what technology prohibition does to kids. I’ve gone to school with people who weren’t allowed access to technology. Saying it puts them at a disadvantage is an understatement.
Technical literacy needs to be cultivated. We should be teaching kids to use technology productively, not banning it.
The decision to ban smartphones generally comes from a weighing of the benefit of the information they provide access to versus the damage phone usage causes to childrens’ psyche.
This principle and the adults advocating for this should be looked into. The “for the children” crowd is invariably the ones harming the most children.
While I'm looking forward to this experiment, it feels so much like all what adults (many of them) are forbidding to children, thinking it will be better off preserving their innocence, until they turn 18. They've suddenly access to cars, alcohol, sex and more, and when mixed together, especially the alcohol part, after 18 years of obedience, this sometimes doesn't end up very well. On another hand, some parents educate their children drinking small amount of wine and/or beer - is that worse?
What’s funny is, it used to be a social norm here (in Ireland) for you to not be allowed get a phone until you were 13 or so (usually: just before you went to secondary school).
Of course, people from fucking Greystones would make out that this is a revolutionary new concept. I can’t see it lasting, they will be back to letting the iPad raise their kids within the year.
I strongly believe kids shouldn't have access to smartphones until they turn 18. Ideally this would be a legal mandate, which would help to reduce peer pressure. ("Everyone else at school has a smartphone!")
18? That's ridiculous. I'd understand 14, but at 18 it's not too rare to live alone and have a full time job. And even before, access to maps or Wikipedia is generally quite useful. It's the social media that's the main issue, and not the other features.
Practically, 11+ year olds are capable of getting their hands on anything they want if they have the money and inclination for it. And they certainly have the inclination to get a smartphone.
So the only way to achieve your vision would be to ban giving money to anybody under the age of 18.
You can get a smartphone that has all the major functionality for much less than a thousand bucks. Much less than a hundred bucks even. $30 will get you something that a kid will be content with: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Straight-Talk-TCL-30-Z-32GB-Black...
Ban all phones for kids? That's a terrible idea, what if they are in a ditch with a broken leg after falling off a bike? Only smartphones? Perhaps, but a dumbphone is just a smartphone with restricted set of apps. It seems better to restrict apps based on appropriate age and individual needs than have a hard to tweak limit. For example, Maps is pretty useful when lost and Zoom is helpful with school events while away from home.
Oh, please, get off your high horse. It's not about casually joking about child death; it's about assessing risks and making rational decisions. Kids survived for centuries without mobile phones - hell, humans survived for millennia without mobile phones.
Are there risks? Sure. But there are risks in everything. And, by the way, that phone can distract your kid while crossing the road, ending up in a much more likely dangerous situation.
Plus, the idea is not about banning phones altogether but rather regulating them, using them wisely. You know, like how we should use literally any tool ever invented? Having an appropriate usage based on age and situation is called responsible parenting, not Orwellian control.
We can either raise a generation of mindless zombies glued to screens, or we can try and foster responsible and thoughtful use of technology. I know which one I'd prefer.
I don't know if you have ever visited Alaska, but I watched a homeowner trying to take out a bag of garbage and a bear with cabs coming to try and snatch it. Personally, I would want whoever in the family is doing that to have some kind of a failsafe if a wildlife interaction goes wrong. If not a gun, then high end bear spray that would still be dangerous to a human if misused. Do you really think that even teenagers should never take out garbage in Alaska? There are also places where a cellphone is the right risk/benefit balance.
So because we had it worse when we were kids, we should make sure kids today don't get to take advantage of anything modern?
When I was a kid, I got to play with the cast-off computers my dad would bring home from work. If he had your attitude, he would have thought, "oh, we didn't have computers when I was a kid, so certainly there's no value in my son having one".
That’s hyperbole. The computers you were lucky to grow up with weren’t entry points to multi billion dollar industries with the sole intent of pinning a child to a screen and sell them stuff. Smartphones introduce children to addictive behaviour way too early in their life, and that’s a completely different situation than tinker devices of yore.
not sure how old you are, but the consoles of the early 90s were very addictive, Sega, Nintendo had really great games, much more than what I can find nowadays on Facebook or Tiktok which bores me after a few minutes of scrolling.
The difference? Well, the key was that I had just some time slots I was authorized to play in a week and I suppose responsible parents now do the same with their kids smartphones.
The difference between then and now is that on smartphones all the interesting things are inseparably intertwined with the actively dangerous things. A Nintendo console would allow you to play, but if a parent set a time limit and took away the console after that, the only effect would be your inability to continue playing. By taking away a smartphone, you’re stripping children of their primary access to their community. People seem to have forgotten what it’s like if you’re the outcast child who doesn’t get what it’s all about. Self worth, status, formation of taste and creativity, social contacts, and interaction, are all happening on social media now, whether we like it or not.
This solves the problem of kids being ostracized because their parents limited their screen time or didn't buy them a phone until they were too old.