> 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.
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.