That's a bit like saying addictive drugs themselves aren't a problem.
Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
My wife and I both work full-time and we still stick to my daughter's iPad restrictions: only an hour a day, no Instagram or TikTok or YouTube at all, and she only gets it after homework and chores and other things are done. We never take it anywhere. It's important that parents set AND KEEP boundaries.
My daughter now knows not to expect to be able to Snapchat her friends or anyone else because she's never been able to. When she mentions that her friends all have it, we remind her that our house is not their house and we have our rules in place for a reason, which we are always willing to explain.
While I agree that screens and TV ARE very addicting, that doesn't mean that parents are powerless or that the majority of the problems brought up in this article are not the fault of the parents.
Lack of ability to snapchat friends might not seem important... But communication is key to nearly everything in life, and not being part of those snapchat rumours, disputes and controversies now will probably mean your daughter doesn't get as good at the skills to interact with her peers in 20 years time.
She interacts with her peers at school and with her family... by that same token, ANYONE who grew up before Snapchat or the Internet had or has lacking social skills.
Also, she CAN FaceTime. I would not consider Snapchat or TikTok to be "socializing with friends" for an 8 year old.
> She interacts with her peers at school and with her family... by that same token, ANYONE who grew up before Snapchat or the Internet had or has lacking social skills.
You know how we don't really get this whole social media thing the kids are into these days? That's because we lack those social skills. Just like how your parents' generation struggles with E-mail despite it being so simple, because you grew up with that.
It might not bother you that you're bad at Telegram or whatever because none of your peers use it either. But her peers do.
You can communicate via a method your parents can't because you used it extensively in your prime while they didn't. Your grandparents probably had the same issue with fax machines and your grandchildren will probably have the same problem with neural-messaging. Every generation thinks "but this time it's different" and every generation is wrong.
I will still say that lacking the ability to communicate via a particular medium is not the same as lacking social skills. My inability to send messages via Morse code over telegraph lines doesn't mean that I lack social skills.
So if a skilled telegraph operator handed you a message including the word "naloopen" you would know what that means? There was not just one but several forms of telegraphese developed. A conversation held entirely in brief dots and dashes has a substantially different flow to it than say typing out a message on an internet forum, which in turn is nothing like how one would communicate with a 5 second fleeting video recording. A telegraph is a very simple machine to operate, I'm sure you could learn quickly, but you would certainly still lack the social skills necessary to keep up with a professional telegraph operator from a century ago.
Likewise, your parents certainly don't have any problem conceptually understanding keyboards, letters, or addresses - they were perfectly comfortable with typewriters, letterheads, and postal codes. Dealing with nigerian princes and chain mail might involve the use of technology, but these are very much social skills.
As someone who only uses social media platforms that are mildly reskinned versions of 80s/90s message forums, I don't really know what the "BCC vs CC" of tiktok is, nor do I care. I have an excellent understanding of how tiktok works technologically, but I lack the particular social skills tiktok requires. Since my peers do not get it either, this has never been a problem for me, but I'm sure in a few years when my kids expect me to just know how to snapple into the televoid with them that I'll look like an idiot as I search for a reply button somehwere.
Once again... not knowing how to communicate via a particular medium does not equate to a lack of social skills.
To your point, if a telegraph operator handed me a message I didn't understand, I could just say, "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" because that is social skills.
And if someone at the bar buys you a drink and you're not totally sure why, you can go over to them and say "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" You posses the social skill to ask for clarification, you lack the social skill of flirting.
That I can have someone translate to and from Urdu for me does not mean I have the social skill required to communicate via Urdu. Likewise, that your parents can ask you whether something is spam or not doesn't mean they have the social skill required to communicate via email.
Wikipedia defines social skills as:
"A social skill is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways."
If the ability to effectively communicate via a medium doesn't satisfy that definition, what does? You are welcome to use a different definition, but that's what I am referring to by social skills.
Flirting and speaking a foreign language are a false equivalence to not knowing how to e-mail or use social media.
Whether using your definition or another, my point still stands that social media does not lead to GREATER social skills than previous generations possessed.
Not being skilled in ALL aspects of socialization isn't the same thing as lacking social skills in general.
I really see no difference between trying to determine if someone is in to you based on how long they emphasize the y in hey versus trying to determine if someone is into you based on the number of times they repeat the letter y in heyyy.
I never claimed that social media leads to objectively greater social skills, there's no reason why being able to write a great email is inherently superior to being able to write a great telegraph message. However, one skill is undeniably more useful in this day and age. It does not matter if you call it a social skill or a technological skill, the fact remains that there are people who know how to communicate effectively via social media, and those who don't, and just because you are comfortable in the latter category does not mean your daughter will be too.
How many people sent a fax to a tow truck when they got in an accident? How many people met their future spouse faxing?
Conversely, how many people have been scammed out of their life savings by nigerian princes? How many people developed a poor work life balance as they could now do work from home any time?
I'm not going to argue that smart phones have no issues, but everything that came before had issues too, and all were abandoned when something better came along.
Yes. I don't know how old the GP's daughter is, but restricting communication apps—especially during a pandemic—seems counterproductive. TikTok, sure, whatever; it's a time suck and doesn't really help with social skills. But socializing online really matters now, especially for adolescents.
Edit: If she's eight years old, then this seems like a more reasonable restriction. Disregard what I said previously. Eleven or twelve might be a better time to get Snapchat, especially since that's about the time that most kids get their first smartphones today anyway.
Yes, she is 8. But even if she were 10 or 11, we'd probably keep similar restrictions. She does have access to FaceTime and our time restriction will probably grow as she ages.
A minor should not have access to Snapchat. It’s all fun and games until she sends a nude picture to a boy out of naïveté, falsely lured into a sense of security by Snapchat.
Oh, you read the article where a mother repeatedly says her 11 year old daughter is just like a crack addict because she prefers being on her phone to making her bed? The article where the mother admits to going into fits of rage and punishes the 11 year old child for doing nothing that isn't normally tolerated even in this already very strict household? The article where this mother of an 11 year old blames nothing but the phone for the fact that this girl entering into adolescence behaves differently than when she was a child?
No, this article was written by a narcissist who can't handle her little girl growing up and rather than dealing with it in a healthy way is instead raging against an inanimate object.
Having never been an 11 year old girl in a pandemic, I can't really speak to what "normal" is. Based on the the girl's behavior as described in the article, it certainly has had no noticeable negative effects.
I'm not a conservative and grew up listening to the music others where considering bad and were on the other side of the fence, they were an outdated generation in my eyes then.
Now as I got older I realize a lot of it was just crap stuffed into our faces keeping us from discovering the real good artists out there. Those folks did have a point here and there. A lot of that music was pumped by the music industry purely to make money and similarly this addictive software is doing the same thing with amplified effects and more shamelessness.
> That's a bit like saying addictive drugs themselves aren't a problem.
I mean... They're not. They're inanimate f----- objects. They've never maliciously set out to cause someone harm because they're inanimate f----- objects. They don't have an understanding of the concept of morals or ethics because they're inanimate f----- objects.
When I ingest them into my body -- that's when all hell breaks loose. They become a problem for me when I use them.
> Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
Who is this mythical "they"?
Technology is designed to do many jobs. Some of them include gamification to "maximise engagement" or some other cringeworthy buzzword. Some of them are literally as simple as "turn the lights off at 10pm" or "wake me up at 10am".
It's how we, as a collective species, implement and use technology that's usually the problem.
"technology" itself is, again, an inanimate f----- object.
> It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
I think this is called life? Yes, lots of things all happen at the same time and there's alway societal pressures one way or another.
But calling it warfare is pretty extreme and may be something useful to reflect on.
I see what you're getting, and I like the pothole analogy. I agree with the fact that it can be used like that in the English language, but I disagree with the idea behind it.
In the pothole analogy - it's like saying potholes are the reason for all these people's cars being damaged.
If no cars were driving over the pothole then the pothole wouldn't be a problem as no damage would ever be caused! It's an inanimate f----- object. It's just there.
It's the fact that people are driving cars on a road that has potholes that causes their cars to be damaged. It's some action that was taken that causes an effect to occur.
Then we get into the murky world of who is actually responsible and what is the solution. Which I don't have an answer for.
So, how about when your schoolwork requires you to 'ingest the drugs', you visit YouTube to watch the video your teacher picked out (they did a bad job IMO, but hey) ... then you're supposed to leave [cold turkey!] and get on with your work, except the website is highly animate and designed carefully to entice you to stay. All of a sudden you're spending the afternoon watching dross on YT because kids lack self-control and companies know how to exploit that.
Of course there's some blame goes to the teacher, but hey.
I think your response is disingenuous.
Aside, I don't know what tech you're using but mines all been blinken-lights and conditioned-response dings (by default) for years.
There is certainly a conflict, OP might have been slowly melodramatic in their choice of words but just as casinos foster their whales, so too tech companies use the psychology of addiction against consumers.
In your YouTube example there are are few people that have responsibilities:
- teacher
- video maker
- YouTube Devs
- companies
- "kids"
- individual
- school
- etc
YouTube (the drug) is just a series of instructions that make a slab of glass light up in a certain pattern and a speaker to oscillate in a particular fashion (depending on hardware).
It's an inanimate f----- object. It doesn't have "responsibilities".
That's the point I'm getting at. Why don't we, collectively, stop blaming the drugs/tech and start finding solutions to the actual problem?
It's easy to point the blame finger, it's harder to solve a problem.
A key difference is that YouTube/companies in part work to increase 'engagement' (which in turn encourages overuse, and encompasses the courting of addictive behaviors) even when it reduces utility.
Do you not think drug dealers aim to "maximise engagement" too? It's not the drug's fault for the dealers actions. So how about we stop blaming an inanimate f----- object and work to find a solution to the problem.
In your schoolwork example I can come up with four potential solutions off the top of my head:
- Speak to the teacher about concerns and ask about other ways of doing what is required
- Speak to parents and ask them to help with the homework
- Buddy up with a friend and watch the required video with a friend to avoid falling down a rabbit hole
- Use software like youtube-dl to download the video locally, to avoid temptation of watching another video
Then we come back full circle to the parent comment. It's not the drug's fault. It's not the phone's fault. It's not some software instruction's fault.
Blaming and ascribing fault is only helpful in identifying the problem. After that, the question becomes what can I do about it that will helpful for me today? What is my solution for how this affects me?
You know, technology doesn't just materialize spontaneously, it is made with a human purpose and that purpose (with all the subjectivity of everyone that participates in creating and fostering the technology) is imbued in those inanimate objects. When you use technology it guides you in its intended use according to its purpose, when you open a door by its handle, when you put your headphones on.
Phones and youtube specifically are made to make money by gaining and keeping one's attention. They achieve it with tactics that trigger addiction. Some people become addicts, some not so much, but if you have a human brain you will feel the pull to abuse them.
In the case of phones and youtube the "mythical they" are the ones who profit from them and don't care about the effects of their tactics on the users. Maybe it is not warfare but it sure is asymmetric.
Parents are mortals, and modern apps are specifically designed to be addictive. It's the parent's fault, sure, but it is also the fault of the unethical practices of social media. Also, when you're talking about older children and teens, there's really a limit to how much you can actually control them.
What emotional chord was struck with you that drove you to use absolutes like "completely", "nothing to do with", and "100%" when the primary bad parenting the author acknowledges is buying the daughter an iPhone too early?
As the parent of a twelve year old, I can tell you that it's not so simple.
I gave my son an old computer a couple of years ago because he expressed a vague interest in learning to code like his daddy. That really didn't work out. But he discovered a great big world out there, and the computer was his window to it. And yes, the effects on his creativity were the same as for the child in the article.
So we tried, and partly succeeded, in limiting his time on it. But the truth is, there is a great deal for him to learn on YouTube, and we often do it together. His Minecraft creations are incredible. He maintains relationships with friends, including a distant cousin, through Discord and gaming. He sets up offline playdates the same way. These are not bad things.
Plus, with the pandemic, his schooling is all remote now. He has to log on in the morning and jump from Zoom class to class until early afternoon, and then all of his homework and reading is on Google Classroom. No, I can't limit access if we want him to attend school.
The problem here is not one of addiction and weak parenting. It's that screen time is genuinely valuable, and figuring out how to balance on-screen and off-screen activities isn't easy.
It was a trivial problem until remote education. Simply remove the network connection.
As a kid I had a computer and a few precious programming books. I could program, or... not much really. I guess I could have enjoyed WordPerfect.
As a parent now, I really need an answer for the remote education. I've tried keeping screens visible to parents. That really limits the parents, who have other things to deal with. Parental availability causes a massive reduction in time for online classes.
For reference in case somebody has ideas of a technical nature, mostly I'm dealing with Chromebooks going via DD-WRT, and I don't know much about either. There's also Android and Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Problems are web games, pointless videos, and reddit. Classes are at FLVS, EFSC, Khan Academy, and various textbook publishers like Pearson. Class video appears on all the popular video platforms, not counting the NSFW ones.
I think it's more of a caution/commiseration article, with a bit of sadness at kids inevitably growing up. I'm not going to sit and pretend that I have iron-clad rules on electronics and my kids never get more screen time than Bill Gates might recommend. We're all figuring out how to navigate it, and most of us are doing it imperfectly.
I think it's easy to say, but harder to apply when the said ten years old is reporting all their friends has a smartphone and as such they're missing on social events, private jokes or made fun of.
My niece went through that and my sister caved in. I get it. I'm with you in principle but the reality is harder than that in my opinion.
I think you're right. giving in to "keep the peace" is the road to hell. As a parent of a 4, 8, and 13 yo, boundaries are incredibly important. Draw the line. Grow a back bone, pay the short term price for the long term investment.
Parenting isn't easy. But most rewarding things aren't.
Or is it? Maybe it's actually good parenting and they only perceive the outcome to be bad because of misguided ideas of what "good children" should be. Case in point: if it wasn't for my addiction to video games growing up and constantly finding ways around my parent's restrictions, I would never have become a software developer. That much is certain. Not only that, but I would have a horrid disdain for my parents much like my step-sister (now in her 30s) does for her mother (whom was always praised for being a "good parent") that restricted everything when she was growing up; so much so that she moved more than 7,000 miles away when she finally reached college age.
Somehow everyone thinks they're an expert on parenting and that there's only one way to parent a child and it's a one-size-fits-all situation. Frankly that's asinine. People come in all flavors and sizes so to speak. What you consider to be "good parenting" might be viewed as bad parenting by another person. In that sense, there's a subjective component to parenting. I've seen a lot of parenting elitists here on HN and I doubt many of you even have children let alone understand the complexities that comes with parenting them at various stages.
There is a multi-billion dollar concerted effort by the largest companies in the world to get an iron grip on the attention of children at a level of granularity never before seen - don't pretend like that isn't a novel cultural force that should be reckoned with.
It’s not clear to me how they’ve decided their child is no longer “a creative genius”. It sounds like she’s just creating things via the phone now, and so the content isn’t literally sitting on the floor in the living room.
Whether it’s desirable for their child to be making digital content and publishing it is another question entirely, but the title premise never seems to be addressed directly. The article is a long-winded way to say ~“we keep making up arbitrary rules for the phone, and then we realize they’re arbitrary so we change them, but we never actually sit down and pick some sane and long-lived rules”.
Our precocious angels have been transforming into sullen monsters at the onset of adolescence since the beginning of time. Do we really think they would have stayed precocious angels forever, if only they had never discovered comic books or rock'n'roll or TV or video games or whatever the current teenage vice happens to be?
Sure, there is good evidence that smartphones are more addictive than a lot of other pastimes and devices, but the fact that your daughter turned into a teenager isn't that.
I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then.
She'd get a childhood without being a phone junkie. 9 hours a day is extremely worrying for an adult to spend on a phone but for a child it is way worse, they are in their formative years and that would turn into their baseline
> I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then.
I have 4 active mobile phones and I cannot understand the allure people who claim to be 'addicted' to phones have with them. I actually dread the time I spend on them, as the UX is so much worse when used to interface with Internet than a PC/Laptop in my opinion.
I also grew up at a time before smartphones but I grew up on the Internet using computers/laptops and admittedly spend a large time of my Life on both, for work and leisure, but I still cannot understand this seemingly prevalent disease that has afflicted so many. And I do have what some may deem an addictive personality, specifically to adrenaline and endorphins.
I think the common variable is the lack of time spent outside cities and their homes and have an almost pathological aversion to Nature. I can assure you that the latest Twitter beef seems incredibly insignificant after a 10 mile hike and watching the sunset in total silence, more should try it. Believe me I was there for its first incarnations and the forum 'flame wars,' of the 90s and early 2000s; they're only fun so many times until you grow out of them (ideally in your teens) and they all predictably start and end the same way. Its really not that interesting.
> Im not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14
As for this, I agree with OP; I went to private school most of my life with many helicopter parents who swore their children were supposed prodigies only to seem them 'throw it all away' after they left the 8th grade and got their first taste of freedom they discovered members of the opposite sex, cars, status, drugs and booze and many ended up in continuation schools as they did it all in excess.
I'm personally glad I went to one night school class (as I always skipped morning classes) my freshman year of HS just to see what happens to people like that, it was massive learning experience but also a deterrent to not fall into those traps.
It also got me interested in computer networking as I was in a class sponsored by Cisco and my fascination with tech went beyond just soldering/hacking Playstation and Dreamcast consoles and ripping games to sell at school.
I think the bias and their views tends to lean toward their disappointment, but some people are just too easily susceptible and are often coerced by their parents into a certain path, and once they have any semblance of freedom they just rebel against it all. And I can understand that as I have a few cousins that ended up that way and we could all see it coming from a very young age.
To be honest the people who I found to be most successful in Life, beyond just financial and material wealth, and over all well adjusted were people whose parents just let them become who they wanted after their toddler years and then nurtured and supported their skills and talents that way. They had very healthy relationships with their families, often after turbulent teenage years, and were very open and free thinking about problem solving and World views.
Everyone is prone to peer pressure, especially in your early teens when you have no idea who you are and often are so quick to give into group think to fit in (we're biologically hardwired that way for survival), so I can see why some parents may want to wait until 14 or older. But I finis it hard to accept the consequences these devices are supposedly creating. Social Media 'balling' and the supposed depression that follows for so many seem insignificant when you grew up seeing what job your friend finished for Arab Shieks in Saudi Arabia and Dubai to a bunch Zonda Rs and Helicopters for a lark on a Tuesday morning. It was just funny, and kind of sad to think anyone with much money was that crass and had su...
My kid's first "social" app is Roblox and part of my justification for is that it's easier to talk about some of the issues of social media while they are young and will listen to me.
We talk a lot about addiction and the tricks games play to make you want to come back every day. We talk a lot about safety and what predictors are looking for and what they say to try to sound like a friend. I hope these are good discussions and I hope they stay with my kids as they grow.
If I'd started at 14? They've already learned to tune me out by then.
It feels like a bit of both. The phone is probably a focal point for other issues. But, I don't think we should downplay the fact that the finely tuned, variable reward scheduled, Skinner boxs that are many modern apps are anywhere near comic books, rock'n'roll, or videogames of old. I'm pretty conscious of intrusive notifications and apps that aggressively vie for my attention. Even with those limits in place, I'm acutely aware of the effect of having reddit available from my pocket in < 2 seconds. Maybe I'm weak, but I feel that it affects most of us in a fundamental way to some degree.
I'm not saying that you said anything counter to this. I just think that apps which are hyper-tuned to captivate our every moment are a different beast.
I turned off all social media notifications on my devices so that I feel more like they're there to serve me rather than me a slave to it. Having it in my pocket is a lot less enticing when it's not constantly nagging me. I feel a lot more in control of it these days. I'm able to leave it on top of the microwave for hours at a time without feeling the anxiety of missing something.
I'm with you. The only audible notifications that I get are phone, text and a couple of other messaging apps that I barely use (I'm talking one message per month per app). I get visual notifications for my personal email. Contrary to many people apparently, I also view texting as an asynchronous activity; I don't fee any urge to view and reply instantly to texts.
I even turned off the visual notifications on my email, facebook, linkedin, everything else that would normally give people the impression that my device is there for their benefit and not mine. The only audible notifications I get are from my girlfriend on WhatsApp and phone calls... which reminds me, I've put my phone down somewhere and I should probably go find it... after my cup of tea.
If neural lace's primary use is going to be participation in the global network of advertisement-funded Skinner boxes, then honestly, I won't be getting one myself, despite how hyped I am about brain-computer interfaces in general.
This is how these things always go isn't it? We invent this incredible technology that augments what we do, what we can be, what we can learn, and what we can believe...
and then we turn it into an almost-exclusively advertising tool designed to convert a human being into a money making machine.
It's one of the reasons I'm not enthusiastic about technology anymore. I see what we do with it. Every. Single. Time.
I'll third this. I was so excited about the applications for speech/smart interfaces in the home a la Cherry 2000. But we got Alexa. A tool to buy stuff and spy. I won't denigrate the actual useful functions these devices have - I like to ask Alexa to tell me jokes when I'm at a friend's house that has one. However, it's all the things that come with it that turned me off.
I'm currently pursuing open-source tools to run home automation but it's slow-going. It's complex.
Little girls grow up into tweens obsessed with pop stars and friends and then into teens who rebel to find their own way. No amount of sheltering can stop it.
and the grownups who aren't their parents know this and are ready to make money on that with nothing but cost for the user/product. i don't think it's strange that parents don't want their children to be products.
Legos? Their innate limitation as simple bricks that can be shaped into many things is what makes them creative in my opinion. Though I suspect what you may be hinting at. If kids have no toys they'd use their imagination more or make their own toys.
Legos constrain creativity to simple objects that get stuck together. The creativity is not applicable in the real world and hurts imagination of the world that exists. Yes, what you said.
And now after saying all that I realize when comparisons are made of US to developing countries the same harbingers to creativity and innovation appear where if a situation in America can be resolved through a particular means, the lack of such means become an obstacle to the similar rise of developing countries.
I would love it if you clarifies your point or found a name for the economic theorist.
I will admit that a lego kit with instructions is very different to a collection of lego parts and I would encourage every parent to buy buckets of assorted bits rather than kits that might end up staying on a shelf once assembled
The share of iPhone for today's teenagers is much higher than the regular population. Much of it from the natural progression from old iPod Touches, where they built their accounts, apps etc.
It’s not about smartphones, same thing was years ago with “I bought my child a PC, and now he’s stop doing anything...”. It’s bad parenting, addictive social media’s or games that’s responsible for that, not device itself.
I don't think it's about IPhone or smartphones per see but the technology/software running on them which turns them into skinner boxes and which are not even constrained to certain physicals spaces as they are being carried and used everywhere. And the 9 hours on the phone is an absolutely worrying thing.
It could be a deciding factor - modern smartphones and tablets are already very skewed to content consumption rather than content creation, and iOS devices even more so with their walled garden & app censorship approach.
While its preatty simple to start coding on a Windoss/Linux PC, Android and iOS devices are not self hosting, you need to download an SDK, set device into developer mode, etc. - a barrier in itself. On iOS it's even more complicated if you wanted to write an app for your iPhone and share it with friends - expensive developer subscription & draconian app review!
So my worry is we will loose a generation of developers who would otherwise get to coding and sharing of their creation on PCs if their first and only device is a locked down cosume-only device like an iPhone.
Familiar teacher told me not to give any phone or tablet for school aged kids. I wanted to buy iPad for my son and then buy LEGO EV3. LEGO apparently does not like windows. But I’ll listen to the advice. She is in normal school in normal district, but there are enough cases of smartphone addiction. Kids are getting aggressive and need psychiatrist when the phone is being taken away. And these cases occur more and more often. So as a father I don’t want to open this can of works as long as I can. Schools should bad phones in the first place.
Meanwhile, she self-admittedly said she broke all her rules regarding the phone. Also her child grew up into a teenager. Kids don’t stay the same forever.
This lady needs to set rules for use, and then be firm with them. If you don't want your child to use a device for more than an hour a day, don't let them use it for nine.
All this child is doing is learning that their parent is a push over. You gotta be firm and push back.
The article doesn't focus on what's going on outside of the phone. 14 is a pivotal age, because it's about that time that high school starts. A lot of what the author describes sounds like a girl beginning the process of detaching herself from her parents. But there could be other factors at work.
This is incredibly dramatic. Buy her some drawing and art apps. Lean into the TikTok thing and find her a local dance or drama troupe. This is what we did with my younger sister, who is the same age. Instead of painting on a canvas, she paints digitally. Instead of bemoaning her TikToks, we've taken her to singing and dancing competitions, which she's won.
Or, perhaps, accept that during a pandemic, when your child's entire social sphere has collapsed, the internet, Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok, et. al. are the closest they can get to interacting with and making friends.
>When friends visit, she occasionally asks them to watch her latest TikTok videos. Some are even funny and creative. Or so I tell myself. It helps with the guilt.
I can't be the only person who finds this comment to be really sad.
This isn't the iPhone's fault. This is someone failing to support their child's hobbies because they're not the perfect idyllic vision they had. End of story.
It's bigger than supporting her hobby. She's addicted to the phone, it's very clear, it drives her every action during the day. If her addiction was painting, and she had meltdowns from not finding her brush, or fighting with mom because she can't stay up late, her mom might have the same reaction.
The author obviously wanted to allow for a balance but it quickly grew out of control to the point where the only thing that mattered was her phone. That's not healthy, and that's not failing to support her hobby.
I don't really like the article, but to me there is a problem and it isn't just teenagers but adults as well, everywhere you go people are just mindlessly phone out and scrolling. Games are sucking a bunch of time as well. Quarantining has made it worse.
You'd hope people were more educated or exposed to cool ideas but given the debate on the election and the most popular videos on youtube it doesn't seem to be that way.
Maybe its just a new normal and I'm old. I feel lucky the internet didn't exist when I was young.
My dad smashed my computer around the laundry (where the computer lived) with my cricket bat because I was "playing games" instead of studying.
"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation.
But just like my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots, who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society.
It's worth learning anyway, even just to help one's family videos not be so damned boring and amateurish.
Not everything has to be directly related to employment. It's nice to know how to cook a meal, even if you have absolutely no ambition to work in a restaurant.
> my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots
Why are you so convinced this sentence isn't going to describe you in 20 years?
The head of technical support at the company for which I work recently quit her job to support her husband's streaming career. He makes in three months more than I do in a year.
This idea that things like iPhones, or video games, or any other piece of technology cannot possibly be productive or profitable in the future, it's got to die.
When I was young, my passion for computers meant I wouldn't become the lawyer people suggested I should be, but now I make more than most of my lawyer friends. Things change, and "using an iPhone" may end up being the key to future happiness, career opportunities, or who knows what?
> The head of technical support at the company for which I work recently quit her job to support her husband's streaming career. He makes in three months more than I do in a year.
For every one of those, there are hundreds of streamers who quit their jobs to focus on streaming but ended up broke, and thousands of streamers who spend every free moment outside of their day job trying to build a following but never get there.
The old dream of rock stardom, well, you get a guitar and figure out that it's actually hard and maybe you shelve that. Streaming... anybody can play Minecraft, so you can keep the dream alive a lot longer.
Sure, but I'm not saying "everybody should try streaming for a living." I'm saying it's not true that kids using iPhones is always a dead-end timesuck.
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I'm sorry, I fail to see how providing a counter-example to someone pooh-poohing phone use by children is now analogous to advocating for productive cocaine use.
It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.
I explicitly added the disclaimer to preempt your attempt to ignore my question, which you did anyway. Fantastic.
You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.
Okay, I'll try this one last time. Please try to read the whole comment, rather than getting hung up on one element of it. You know, like you incorrectly suggest I did.
This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.
This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.
That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!
Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."
That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.
So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."
Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.
It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.
So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.
Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!
Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.
TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.
Don’t most streamers use complex setups involving professional-grade AV equipment, custom-built gaming computers, and complicated software like OBS to glue it all together? I don’t think you can learn how to do all that stuff by spending lots of time on your iPhone as a teenager.
Turning that into a career seems like a moonshot, making it comparable to other "achieve celebrity" plans young adults may have (become a movie star, become a famous youtuber, become a famous rockstar, etc)
I think in general these aspirations shouldn't be shat on, but young adults with these aspirations should probably be gently guided in more realistic directions.
You dont have too, the time investment is minimal,many girls were already taking erotic pics anyway. If you are attractive you can ride that wave for several years and keep living your life normally.
I've noticed that many of these girls are college students and the money from their admirers is useful to buy clothes, gadgets and to take their boyfriends to fancy vacations.
So as long as you are aware this is a bubble you will be doing fine.
I don't know what you mean by 'you don't have to.' The claim above is that there is a difference between learning how to program and having an onlyfans account. Your response was to say the difference is that the latter makes money. My response to that is the former is more likely to turn it into a career. I don't see where compulsions come into it.
You dont need to invest time in onlyfans. It's free money basically. For all the other 'careers' , Youtubers, modelling, acting, singing, there is a huge opportunity cost because you have to invest a lot of time just to have a slim chance. If you are 20 yo attractive girl, you take some pics every other day, the less clothes the better and you may be raking money in the thousands by month. It's your choice what to do with the rest of your time.
Turning it into a career is difficult, not because it's hard to get into. Rather it's hard to stay there because your attractiveness is a finite resource that is running out eventually.
That could only do so because someone learned how to program in assembly even if not being payed for it.
A good example of how making money not always equate to making value.
There would be no Mark Zuckerberg without Rasmus Lerdorf. And if both were in the same room with me, it would be with Rasmus that i would like to talk to, because it doesnt matter that his net worth is peanuts compared to Zuckerberg, because from my perspective at least he created more value to society doing harder things than Zuckerberg.
With Tiktok, Youtube and the like, the comparison gets even worse when you compare the abyss of money making vs. value produced..
I'd argue that "doing tiktok" is not creating but consuming an app. Similar as writing a reply in a chat app is not "creating literature" (generally) but merely consuming the features of that app.
Writing replies in a chat app is learning to type. Typing is a job skill, people used to pay for typing classes.
If, in the chat app, you create literature, you're creating literature. Some people are, most people aren't. If, on tiktok, you create interesting short films, you're creating interesting short films. Some people are, most people aren't.
To sum up, I agree with you that "doing tiktok" is like using a chat app, and agree with you that it's not necessarily educational. I disagree that it's necessarily not educational.
I missed so many experiences sitting in front of the computer all day, it didn’t really get me any further than if I had taken a more modest interest.
YouTube and Minecraft and these digital realities are fake realities. Whatever happiness they provide is temporary and short lived. It took me until my 30s to realize this and now I’m starting all over again.
Digital stuff is fine in moderation, but I will not let my children build a life around it like my parents allowed me to.
I have an almost 17 year old who doesn't want a smartphone.
He plays Minecraft/KSP about 90 minutes each night.
But he'd always, always accept an offer to do something else with me or someone else in the family.
So I make sure, as his father, to make that offer sometimes. And I also feel fine if I'm feeling like a book or a movie or something else.
Not all kids become [insert teenager cliches] upon the onset of teenage-dom, for all the different reasons this can be true... but when I was his age, I definitely defaulted to getting on the computer instead of doing other things.
I do think it's interesting how little discussion there is in culling digital behaviors moreso during pandemic times. I personally don't have a lot of interest in any of the new iPhones because my iPhone mostly lives on my desk at home. It hardly ever gets out.
Why do you think he somehow "managed" this? How your children act and what they want to do is, in many ways, beyond your control. Do you think of yourself like that? Like "I acted like X because my parents raised me like Y?"
I spent a year of my starting teenage years tinkering with my android phone. Custom ROM and stuff.
Then I got a better PC and spent time trying to make website to earn money because everyone was doing it.
I failed. AdSense didn't pay me anything. I realized it was more profitable to make a blog on how to make money online than go try if yourself.
I built my first gaming rig. Played few games and got bored after a few months.
I ended up watching death note on YouTube through recommendations.
Finished 500+ anime within a year. It was the best past time after school.
Got bored of that. This time, I though of making money using software. Worked with WordPress, earned some cash fixing people's site and optimizing them by removing useless plugins, adding yoast SEO, improving cache and moving people from shared hosting on GoDaddy.
I started to tinker with PHP code and themes like Divi, adata. Then I wanted to build a CMS. Looked up stuff and it felt complicated so after trying for a few weeks, dropped the idea.
Now I got into novels and manga because I was running out of anime. Probably 700+ or so titles. Enjoyed that for a bit. Finished Chinese, russian, Japanese, etc light novels using Google translate. It was fun. I was addicted.
Now something clicked again and I purchased courses on udemy for 90% discount (yeah it is always discounted). Finally, I knew enough programming after few weeks to create a CMS. I did that but it turned pretty poor compared to WordPress.
Joined an online non-profit therapy group. Listened to people and gave advice...in retrospect, k shouldn't have done that.
Joined discord, spent time there and well learnt more about weird internet cultures and spheres.
Started to get worried about future. Spent time researching health insurance, FIRE, investment and saving strategies. Opened broker account on few online sites using my dad's identity. Landed on r/wsb. Spent few weeks researching and stalking people there. Concluded it was nothing more than gambling. I started buying equity. Built a decent portfolio. Then diversified with Forex and SIP index fund.
Roughly more or less how I spent my teenage years. There are lot of other small and things I did but will be too personal.
All happiness is temporary and short lived. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I believe that any action that gave us truly permanent happiness would turn us into lotus eaters...
>"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with. Even if they did escape the attention algorithm long enough to get bored and explore there is nothing to discover it's a locked black box.
Blanket statements are easy but reality is much more complex.
iSH, code learning apps, Codecademy via the iPad browser, iBooks, Library Genesis for getting any book in existence for free, Duolingo, cloud coding. I could go on...
There's many, many ways of learning through these devices.
Is anything you listed even remotely on the same level as "assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game", what does Duolingo have to do with being able to understand and prod the workings of the machine in your hand.
Still a locked down black box designed around attention algorithms and I'm getting tired of pretending it's not.
Many HN readers earn a living from programming skills they developed by exploring computers aimlessly as kids in the 1990s and 2000s. I’m a Duolingo addict who has used the app daily for more than three years, so I do think it’s a fun way to build basic language skills. But no matter how much time I spend in the app, I won’t learn how it works or get the ability to change, modify or develop it. The learning experience is stage-managed by a company and funded by ads displayed between the lessons. It is very different to my experience of learning to write HTML and PHP when I was in high school.
> But no matter how much time I spend in the app, I won’t learn how it works or get the ability to change, modify or develop it.
Who cares? Just because you and many others on HN learned some stuff from fiddling with some computers doesn't mean that learning a language is lesser.
"Ah, you aren't doing things that I did as a kid that lead to my high income! You're trash, kid! Git gud!"
My point isn’t about coding versus learning languages, it’s about open-ended creative activities versus ad-sponsored iOS games. Don’t get me wrong, I like playing the games too!
Has anyone ever learned those languages on an iPad though? Even if you know a few languages already, learning a new one by writing software on a device with a small screen, no keyboard, no filesystem, no native app IDE, no browser debugger, and severely limited multitasking, seems almost impossible to me. If I had an iPad rather than a computer running Windows 95 when I was growing up, I don’t think I’d know how to code today.
I agree, unless you're typing raw hex codes into the instruction pipeline, you're not really programming. And truthfully, I'd prefer manipulating gates by hand. Otherwise, how do you know you're really talking to the machine.
I hate high-level amateurs like you, diluting this serious and noble craft with your hex codes. If you're not etching the silicon yourself, it's ephemeral fluff. Get serious.
as someone who finds the kind of programming possible on iOS extremely primitive, I still find your comment disingenuous. Kids even creating and uploading tiktoks, or messing around with their friends creations in roblox or even trying Swift Playgrounds is miles more useful than... learning pascal and assembly to make the most boring game ever.
kids have access to magic these days, while algorithmic abuse is rampant, thats not an iPad's core proposition.
> None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with.
It has a generally standards-compliant browser, so while you may not be able to use assembly language and pascal, you can probably connect to something that lets you write and run programs through the browser (whether they actually run in the browser or remotely).
The UI isn't ideal for it, but neither was the membrane keyboard on my Timex/Sinclair 1000.
I think there's a big gulf between Minecraft, Roblox, Facetime and even Youtube when compared to TikTok/Snapchat/Facebook.
Not all screen time is created equal, and there are any number of ways for a child to be creative and learn and socialise in the digital world as suppose to the physical one.
The social networks are a bit different. What value is a child getting from them that they wouldn't get from a WhatsApp group? As other commenters have pointed out, these big platforms are engineered to the last detail to 'increase engagement'. To put it another way - they are purposefully addictive and I don't see the value that might make that worthwhile.
I started my kids on an app called Simply Piano, and am trying it out myself. I loved music my whole life but never wanted to take piano lessons; now I do, so I'm trying it out.
Have you read the book "Running on Empty" by Jonice Webb? It describes a pattern she identifies as "childhood emotional neglect" (a possibly misleading label). The pattern she describes usually includes a combination of lack of attention, lack of an emotional connection between parent and child, and lack of appropriate responses to problems the child faces.
Your comment made me think of that book, and I certainly found it very useful in overcoming some of the lingering consequences of my odd upbringing. My mother was not abusive, but was alternately neglectful and controlling, and I only recently found out that she was continuing patterns from her own childhood. I highly recommend the book if your situation is at all similar.
1) They are bad parents
2) They are good parents
3) Smartphones are a qualitatively different addiction problem than TV, comic books, or other demonized technology of yore
4) It is correlation not causation
5) Her problems were partly caused by the iPhone
It seems more like he set boundaries, then let his daughter run past them. Setting boundaries is hard, it takes strength, but you can't sacrifice boundaries to "keep the peace". Short team peace is long term hell.
They are bad parents for not sticking to boundaries on occasions. They are good parents for caring enough to try to have boundaries,, thinking about the positive and negative impact the phone and apps may have on her. Sure, nothing can be true and false _in the same respect and same time_ (Law of Non-Contradiction), but I routinely feel I'm both a good and bad parent.
The problem isn’t the phone, is that she’s being socialized into adulthood by a bad influence: the crowd. Not just her friends at school, but the national and global crowd she can access through the phone.
You can stop it, but you won’t. The messages we give to girls now are awful. They are taught by the crowd to freely wield their sexual and social power instead of being taught to use it thoughtfully. This power is intoxicating and can only be tamed by strong values. They will be indoctrinated against your “outdated” parental authority. Their “heroes” will be criminals and bad women like Cardi B. If you really want to stop that, pull her out of the school she’s going to, find a ‘conservative’ school to send her to, and spend time teaching your values at home. You probably won’t do any of this. It’s not the phone, it’s the values and who is teaching them. And right now, that’s not you.
> Somewhere along the way, I realize that apps like TikTok and Instagram are impervious to Apple’s Screen Time limit. They work even when the rest of her phone shuts down. To keep the peace, I let it slide.
The author is completely wrong about this, so I can only assume that their kid is indeed being creative and has manipulated them into believing it.
Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends.
> Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends
This time it is so different. On the landline with friends you could talk but not be manipulated by external actors. Landlines are not exactly skinner boxes and also they cannot be thrown into one's pocket and be with them virtually everywhere. This time it is different.
I actually noticed this the other day. I set a 10 minute time limit on Instagram, and while I'll get the "5 minutes left" reminder, it won't kick me out of the app the way it does for other apps. Running iOS 14.2.
Can anyone from Apple or an iOS dev chime in? What is the screen time limit supposed to do? Are apps required to abide by it, and these ones are circumventing that somehow, or is it optional for the app to shut down?
This seems fixable, either on the dev side or with better communication about how the feature actually works. There's no reason to dupe people.
Also 14.2, I went and checked this on my own phone. It both gave me the 5 minute warning, and then locked the app when the limit expired.
Could be a bug somewhere that I'm not being hit by, of course.
Also, could be the article writer using parent-controlled screen time limits and having accidentally(?) unchecked the "block at limit" option in the rule, which would let the phone-user hit the "ignore limit" button for it.
"A real public health issue is widespread apathy, likely as a byproduct of enough easy to access content to basically numb you in a cloud of short-term dopamine hits in exchange for long-term lack of fulfillment and motivation." - @nikillinit
I think a lot of people are missing the point. That could be attributed to the poor title, though.
The way I see it, pre-phone their daughter was probably much more engaged with her parents and was doing more manual creative stuff. After the phone appeared, she distanced herself and got absorbed by it.
I don't get why so many people here are trying to defend smartphones/social media?
Isn't it pretty obvious they are addictive? And to a young kid, that doesn't know any better, it can get really bad.
Agreed that these can be bad (my kids have some socials but I keep an eye on them and have lots of talks about pitfalls to avoid), but for the sake of argument I can't help pointing out that what you're describing is a normal process of individuation that teens all go through.
Social attention focused inward toward family --> Social attention turning outward towards others + establishing an identity apart from that of the family. This is totally normal.
Is being addicted to creating tiktkok/instagram content to get likes such a bad thing?
The fight to stand out on those social networks forces you to be creative.
Some apps are addictive, not all of them. The biggest problem IMO is that "no phone" isn't an option. Kids need a phone to participate in society. That's just the way it is. The problem I see is that phones have super addictive apps like TikTok that target young kids, so giving them the "good half" of a phone means you also end up giving them the "bad half" and kids aren't good at understanding why the bad half is bad for them.
It's like serving a kid a plate of food with vegetables and meth side-by-side and the meth dealer is making every effort they can to push the meth into the vegetables.
> A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.
I don't think it's the phone itself that was the problem here, I think its allowing your teenager unfettered access to social media. TikTok, Facebook, IG, are not particularly healthy IMO. There is something to look at here with the loss of interest in reading and being creative. iPhones are in fact very good outlets for creativity, its just that children need limits within them just like anything else.
Parents should be engaged with what kids are actually doing on their devices and be able to set boundaries for their digital lives. I'm all for being creative, and I think digital tools can be a real boon to it. Making games, videos, digital art, programming etc. are all awesome, character building experiences. Scrolling through feeds for 9 hours a day watching celebrities do hand-jives and gossip, not as much..
> A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.
SCHOOL! SCHOOL! A thousand times: school!
Of course a child who likes reading for leisure is going to do it less readily when they are told what books to read and forced to read them on someone else's schedule and analyze rather than enjoy them. I have no idea why people are blaming the phone and not school here.
A lot of the comments here seem to be saying that (1) kids getting addicted to phones is no different than getting addicted to TV, books, etc, and that this is just the latest iteration of a complaint parents have had for generations and (2) this person is a bad parent.
I used to agree with (1), but lately I'm inclined to think that this time, it really is different. Very different. And the primary reason is that unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more, on a scale we've never seen before. Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. TV isn't a bi-directional communication platform that has thrown teenagers into an arena where they're communicating with thousands of people at a time when they're still figuring out how to communicate in small groups.
Regarding (2), I think people are being far too critical. The author acknowledges many of their own missteps, and they're also going through a time where, iPhone or not, their daughter is growing apart from them, and I imagine that's very difficult emotionally. I also feel like they really humanized how budging a little bit on rules here and there can spiral out of control, and how that feels. I really appreciated that perspective.
"Bad parent" can be applied to anything that goes wrong, and is an empty assertion. And it seems to be asymmetrically applied to mothers, not fathers.
Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat."
This bias in the literature makes it look like there are some brilliant parents out there, who have found the secret for success that the rest of us can "just" follow. There are of course parallels in the business literature.
The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents.
I overheard a discussion between two friends about the effects of TV on behavior. One friend's argument: "Of course commercial TV affects behavior. That's its purpose." This stuff is designed to manipulate us. Maybe that's possible with books too, but books have just not risen to that level of sophistication.
It's kind of comforting that the ad industry has thrown billions of dollars into trying to mind-control people, and conversion rates are still super low. Maybe we got lucky; maybe on another planet somewhere, intelligent life is 1000x more susceptible to ads.
> Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat."
I agree with everything you say except for this. We have friends (2 kids now) where mom is like that. On first glance all is perfect, she is perfect mom that manages to do so many things, all is great etc. Apart from actual reality once you know them better and you know where to look. At the end they are no better than rest of us, in some aspects far from it (this kind of behavior stems from some deeper issue(s), which tend to manifest in various ways). And all this charade starts to look pathetic pretty quickly.
Be honest, open, laugh at your fails, we all went through it, its normal. It will get you further with almost everybody including yourself. Definitely with me.
/ If I misunderstood what you meant then sorry for the preaching.
Ah, but do you have kids? Because whooboy, lemme tell ya... Speaking as a parent, I can honestly say there is nobody more judgemental than other parents. I can't tell you how many times I've heard parents criticize other people's parenting.
Parenting is a thankless job is fraught with insecurity and doubt, and every parent thinks they are not doing good enough, and constantly comparing themselves to other parents. Seeing a parent who shows weakness, who is not doing a good job, is a vindication for parents. "Hey, look, I'm not as bad as HIM/HER". You don't want other parents to think that about you, so you make sure you never EVER allow parents to see you make a mistake because you know the first thing that will happen is they will go home and talk about it with their parent/parent/friend/whoever.
Parenting is just like any other job. You can be an employee, but if people think you're a screw up don't expect to be invited to any social functions. Except in this case it's not just you who is getting excluded... It's your child and the rest of your family.
> The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents.
I agree and hope people don't take this in a defeatist way. I've found that the biggest impact you can have on anyone's behavior (adult or child) is to set the example. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away, and besides, they only know how to act the way the see. Work on yourself, and your kids will follow.
> I've found that the biggest impact you can have on anyone's behavior (adult or child) is to set the example.
I agree in principle, but I find that that doesn't map very well to the digital world.
This past Saturday, I spent about six hours staring at a screen. My kids did too. I was making music, an act I find creative, meaningful, and intellectually stimulating. They were mostly watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.
At the primitive monkey brain level where "setting an example" kicks in, all my kids saw was that I was staring at a screen so they did too.
Learning to play Minecraft seems like a meaningful activity. It's essentially digital Legos, not to different perhaps from the way you compose music on your digital canvas.
Is there something else you would rather your kids be doing?
Go outside. Explore the neighborhood. Ride your bike. Read a book. Practice your cello. Tinker in the basement.
I may be old fashioned, but Minecraft strikes me as faux-creative. It's not something you get "better" at. That's just my reaction, having watched it done. It puts you in a state of flow without actually flowing anywhere.
My question was intended as a direct question to parent poster. If that's what you want your kids to be doing, then that's what you should be doing. Your kid wants to be just like you. They watch everything you do, and they will find their own way to do what they think you are doing.
So, want your kids to go outside? Go outside. Want them to read? Read. Want them to practice cello? Practice cello.
Want them to learn how to build digital creative? Let them see you building your own digital creations.
From my experience and observation of other parents and kids, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they want to be like you, sometimes the opposite.
There's certainly many factors involved (age is a huge one), and it's important to remember that you cannot control or change other people. You can only influence them to change. I believe that is just as true of children as any other human.
By doing the activity yourself, you expose the child to it, and they may decide to take part. Over time, they will almost certainly take interest. That doesn't mean you read a book one day and get frustrated because they are playing video games. You read a book every weekend because you want to, and over time, it influences how your child perceives best use of free time, demonstrates discipline, and showcases a non video game activity.
Ok, so why did you not make music together with your children if you don't want them to watch Minecraft videos? It feels like you wasted an opportunity there. Blaming your kids for not knowing how to make music is pretty weird.
Yeah. Every time I hear someone blamed for bad parenting, I think about how Abraham Lincoln's father used to beat him for reading. Let's all try to raise little Lincolns, then?
I was 100% convinced my kids won't get these devices until their very late teens, when I saw how my less than 1 year old reacted to the phones my wife and I use. Because his reaction is pure instinct, the dopamine response just to the colors and brightness was shocking.
We now have to work HARD to keep these devices away from him. Part of it, of course, is he observes how much attention we pay them but his eyes definitely light up differently when they are turned on. And that's without the manipulative, 1000-engineers-optimizing-for-your-addiction software built into them.
I honestly find it harder and harder to believe these things do anything positive for us. I 100% believe they can I just think we've turned them into something ugly, right now.
I've babysat for friends with a 3 and 5 yr old, and it is phenomenal how you could grab their attention (and distract from any ailment they had a second earlier) by showing them youtube videos of fire engines with sirens.
>unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more
I think the TV, film, and print media attempted to do the same, they were/are just much less effective at it. For example, watch a "slow burn" movie like Alien. Most modern movies, by comparison, seem to be edited to keep our short attention span tuned in. Same with the old adage "sex sells"...we've always been trying to hijack human attention we're just so good about it now it's essentially been weaponized.
I agree with you - when a book is down, a TV is off or a console is off, it doesn't ping you and light up to gain your attention. Sure, as kids we watched a lot of TV, but when it was time to turn it off we didn't get a sound to tell us someone "Liked" your photo. As you said, these aren't bi-directional.
I think the hardest thing for this parent was balancing what was right for their child (and they seemed to be confident in their opinion) and what would hold them back socially at school. It's hard to say no to a child that says "Everyone else has an iPhone" because we all remember being that kid left out from something when we were young.
IDK. I mean you're right, of course, but I remember getting engrossed in books to the point where I lost sleep, or delayed doing other important things because I either could not put it down or I was drawn back to it. This happened as a teen and as a young adult, not so much lately but I really don't read books nearly as much as I used to.
I was also an avid reader growing up and spent many nights under the covers with a flashlight.
I think the big difference is the adaptivity of the phone. Books don't figure out what personally engrosses you and tweak the rest of the book so you can't put it down. That feels too powerful IMO.
Also, at some point you finish the story. There's a natural stopping point and conclusion that makes it easier to out the book down and spend time doing something else before picking up the next one.
Contrast that with so many apps whose main feed uses some sort of infinite scroll.
> thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer.
As one of the thousands of engineers dedicated to making you use your consumer electronics a little bit more: it's really easy to defeat my work. You make a conscious decision not to use the product, you catch yourself using it, you stop. Do it for about a month and you've broken the habit. That's why we look at metrics like MAUs and L28s. There is basically nothing I can do about a user who actively doesn't want to use the product; we basically throw up our hands and say "Not our target market."
The reason my job exists is because hundreds of millions of people don't think like that, and don't have any conscious opinion one way or another about my product. It's those users we're trying to influence, the ones who are basically ambivalent, allocate their time based on emotion, and don't have any strong beliefs one way or another about what they should be spending their time on or how they want their life to look. There are enough of them that this market is worth billions, but everything I do - all the engagement work and instant gratification and positioning subtle hints in the UI - is about influencing the people who don't care one way or another. If that is not you - if you have actively made a conscious choice what you want to spend your time on, and it's not watching TV more - you won't even see my product. (It was actually pretty awkward when I took my job, because I work on TVs but watch basically none and didn't even own a TV beforehand.)
Here is a little exercise: imagine yourself being a drug dealer, and read your own comment out loud. It rings perfectly, and it is no coincidence, proportions aside.
You cannot absolve yourself from responsibility just because your target audience 'had a choice'.
FWIW I think drugs should be legal too (though I won't go near them myself), and the rest of the country is gradually coming around to that realization.
> You make a conscious decision not to use the product
I feel like I've heard this before, re: alcoholism, obesity, etc... It's true that if you just decide to stop the behavior you don't like, you're cured. But it is so far from easy that it's a lifelong journey for many people.
Your job is not just to compete for a limited number of zombies, but to keep as many people that actually do care from climbing out of the hole. People are not binary between zombie/not zombie, they're on a spectrum, and I think it's naive to think that anyone with the slightest desire to not use your product can just close it & quit.
> Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer
Books and other forms of media have been optimised to be addictive to read/watch for decades. It might not happen at the same scale, but the increase in scale also means that the mediums get less personal. I think that balances things out in some ways.
The problem is not the technology, the problem is as she mentions in passing bad parenting. If it wasn't an iPhone it would be "talking through the landline" (remember ALF's starting scene? it was an issue for us kids in the 80s/90s) Cable TV, or marijuana or any other addictive passtime.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadThe problem has nothing to do with an iPhone. It has 100% to do with bad parenting.
The author even acknowledges this, but I guess blaming the iPhone gets more clicks than "Poor parenting harms child".
Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
My daughter now knows not to expect to be able to Snapchat her friends or anyone else because she's never been able to. When she mentions that her friends all have it, we remind her that our house is not their house and we have our rules in place for a reason, which we are always willing to explain.
While I agree that screens and TV ARE very addicting, that doesn't mean that parents are powerless or that the majority of the problems brought up in this article are not the fault of the parents.
But anyway, he is right. For most parents is an uphill battle against tech and social media they're bound to lose due to mostly exhaustion.
Also, she CAN FaceTime. I would not consider Snapchat or TikTok to be "socializing with friends" for an 8 year old.
You know how we don't really get this whole social media thing the kids are into these days? That's because we lack those social skills. Just like how your parents' generation struggles with E-mail despite it being so simple, because you grew up with that.
It might not bother you that you're bad at Telegram or whatever because none of your peers use it either. But her peers do.
My point was that saying Snapchat or social media leads to greater social skills than what previous generations had is very hard for me to believe.
You can communicate via a method your parents can't because you used it extensively in your prime while they didn't. Your grandparents probably had the same issue with fax machines and your grandchildren will probably have the same problem with neural-messaging. Every generation thinks "but this time it's different" and every generation is wrong.
Likewise, your parents certainly don't have any problem conceptually understanding keyboards, letters, or addresses - they were perfectly comfortable with typewriters, letterheads, and postal codes. Dealing with nigerian princes and chain mail might involve the use of technology, but these are very much social skills.
As someone who only uses social media platforms that are mildly reskinned versions of 80s/90s message forums, I don't really know what the "BCC vs CC" of tiktok is, nor do I care. I have an excellent understanding of how tiktok works technologically, but I lack the particular social skills tiktok requires. Since my peers do not get it either, this has never been a problem for me, but I'm sure in a few years when my kids expect me to just know how to snapple into the televoid with them that I'll look like an idiot as I search for a reply button somehwere.
To your point, if a telegraph operator handed me a message I didn't understand, I could just say, "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" because that is social skills.
That I can have someone translate to and from Urdu for me does not mean I have the social skill required to communicate via Urdu. Likewise, that your parents can ask you whether something is spam or not doesn't mean they have the social skill required to communicate via email.
Wikipedia defines social skills as:
"A social skill is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways."
If the ability to effectively communicate via a medium doesn't satisfy that definition, what does? You are welcome to use a different definition, but that's what I am referring to by social skills.
Whether using your definition or another, my point still stands that social media does not lead to GREATER social skills than previous generations possessed.
Not being skilled in ALL aspects of socialization isn't the same thing as lacking social skills in general.
I never claimed that social media leads to objectively greater social skills, there's no reason why being able to write a great email is inherently superior to being able to write a great telegraph message. However, one skill is undeniably more useful in this day and age. It does not matter if you call it a social skill or a technological skill, the fact remains that there are people who know how to communicate effectively via social media, and those who don't, and just because you are comfortable in the latter category does not mean your daughter will be too.
Conversely, how many people have been scammed out of their life savings by nigerian princes? How many people developed a poor work life balance as they could now do work from home any time?
I'm not going to argue that smart phones have no issues, but everything that came before had issues too, and all were abandoned when something better came along.
Edit: If she's eight years old, then this seems like a more reasonable restriction. Disregard what I said previously. Eleven or twelve might be a better time to get Snapchat, especially since that's about the time that most kids get their first smartphones today anyway.
Phones certainly can be a problem, but the problem here has nothing to do with the phone.
It's not all their fault. They're fighting an asymmetric war. Millions of parents are.
No, this article was written by a narcissist who can't handle her little girl growing up and rather than dealing with it in a healthy way is instead raging against an inanimate object.
If covid happened in 1990, we'd all be on our land lines for 9 hours a day, and there would be nothing wrong with that either.
Now as I got older I realize a lot of it was just crap stuffed into our faces keeping us from discovering the real good artists out there. Those folks did have a point here and there. A lot of that music was pumped by the music industry purely to make money and similarly this addictive software is doing the same thing with amplified effects and more shamelessness.
You clearly feel that statement is false but don't provide any support for your strange point of view.
I mean... They're not. They're inanimate f----- objects. They've never maliciously set out to cause someone harm because they're inanimate f----- objects. They don't have an understanding of the concept of morals or ethics because they're inanimate f----- objects.
When I ingest them into my body -- that's when all hell breaks loose. They become a problem for me when I use them.
> Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit.
Who is this mythical "they"?
Technology is designed to do many jobs. Some of them include gamification to "maximise engagement" or some other cringeworthy buzzword. Some of them are literally as simple as "turn the lights off at 10pm" or "wake me up at 10am".
It's how we, as a collective species, implement and use technology that's usually the problem.
"technology" itself is, again, an inanimate f----- object.
> It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
I think this is called life? Yes, lots of things all happen at the same time and there's alway societal pressures one way or another.
But calling it warfare is pretty extreme and may be something useful to reflect on.
In common usage of the english language, a thing can be a 'problem' without being sentient or unavoidable.
A pothole in the highway can be a problem if it's damaging people's cars - even if they could avoid it by driving more cautiously.
In the pothole analogy - it's like saying potholes are the reason for all these people's cars being damaged.
If no cars were driving over the pothole then the pothole wouldn't be a problem as no damage would ever be caused! It's an inanimate f----- object. It's just there.
It's the fact that people are driving cars on a road that has potholes that causes their cars to be damaged. It's some action that was taken that causes an effect to occur.
Then we get into the murky world of who is actually responsible and what is the solution. Which I don't have an answer for.
Of course there's some blame goes to the teacher, but hey.
I think your response is disingenuous.
Aside, I don't know what tech you're using but mines all been blinken-lights and conditioned-response dings (by default) for years.
There is certainly a conflict, OP might have been slowly melodramatic in their choice of words but just as casinos foster their whales, so too tech companies use the psychology of addiction against consumers.
- teacher
- video maker
- YouTube Devs
- companies
- "kids"
- individual
- school
- etc
YouTube (the drug) is just a series of instructions that make a slab of glass light up in a certain pattern and a speaker to oscillate in a particular fashion (depending on hardware).
It's an inanimate f----- object. It doesn't have "responsibilities".
That's the point I'm getting at. Why don't we, collectively, stop blaming the drugs/tech and start finding solutions to the actual problem?
It's easy to point the blame finger, it's harder to solve a problem.
The other parties want to maximise utility.
In your schoolwork example I can come up with four potential solutions off the top of my head:
- Speak to the teacher about concerns and ask about other ways of doing what is required
- Speak to parents and ask them to help with the homework
- Buddy up with a friend and watch the required video with a friend to avoid falling down a rabbit hole
- Use software like youtube-dl to download the video locally, to avoid temptation of watching another video
Then we come back full circle to the parent comment. It's not the drug's fault. It's not the phone's fault. It's not some software instruction's fault.
Blaming and ascribing fault is only helpful in identifying the problem. After that, the question becomes what can I do about it that will helpful for me today? What is my solution for how this affects me?
i.e. learning to develop personal responsibility.
Phones and youtube specifically are made to make money by gaining and keeping one's attention. They achieve it with tactics that trigger addiction. Some people become addicts, some not so much, but if you have a human brain you will feel the pull to abuse them.
In the case of phones and youtube the "mythical they" are the ones who profit from them and don't care about the effects of their tactics on the users. Maybe it is not warfare but it sure is asymmetric.
I'm saying that it's not the software's fault. In the immortal words of Philip K Dick: "dont blame the drug dude".
Blaming some faceless, mythical "they" gets everyone exactly nowhere. It doesn't solve anything.
There's a bigger question that everyone could be asking...
I gave my son an old computer a couple of years ago because he expressed a vague interest in learning to code like his daddy. That really didn't work out. But he discovered a great big world out there, and the computer was his window to it. And yes, the effects on his creativity were the same as for the child in the article.
So we tried, and partly succeeded, in limiting his time on it. But the truth is, there is a great deal for him to learn on YouTube, and we often do it together. His Minecraft creations are incredible. He maintains relationships with friends, including a distant cousin, through Discord and gaming. He sets up offline playdates the same way. These are not bad things.
Plus, with the pandemic, his schooling is all remote now. He has to log on in the morning and jump from Zoom class to class until early afternoon, and then all of his homework and reading is on Google Classroom. No, I can't limit access if we want him to attend school.
The problem here is not one of addiction and weak parenting. It's that screen time is genuinely valuable, and figuring out how to balance on-screen and off-screen activities isn't easy.
As a kid I had a computer and a few precious programming books. I could program, or... not much really. I guess I could have enjoyed WordPerfect.
As a parent now, I really need an answer for the remote education. I've tried keeping screens visible to parents. That really limits the parents, who have other things to deal with. Parental availability causes a massive reduction in time for online classes.
For reference in case somebody has ideas of a technical nature, mostly I'm dealing with Chromebooks going via DD-WRT, and I don't know much about either. There's also Android and Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Problems are web games, pointless videos, and reddit. Classes are at FLVS, EFSC, Khan Academy, and various textbook publishers like Pearson. Class video appears on all the popular video platforms, not counting the NSFW ones.
But with everything we know now, there’s no excuse. Parents are being irresponsible letting their child have a smart device.
A ten year old? Forget it.
My niece went through that and my sister caved in. I get it. I'm with you in principle but the reality is harder than that in my opinion.
Parenting isn't easy. But most rewarding things aren't.
Or is it? Maybe it's actually good parenting and they only perceive the outcome to be bad because of misguided ideas of what "good children" should be. Case in point: if it wasn't for my addiction to video games growing up and constantly finding ways around my parent's restrictions, I would never have become a software developer. That much is certain. Not only that, but I would have a horrid disdain for my parents much like my step-sister (now in her 30s) does for her mother (whom was always praised for being a "good parent") that restricted everything when she was growing up; so much so that she moved more than 7,000 miles away when she finally reached college age.
Somehow everyone thinks they're an expert on parenting and that there's only one way to parent a child and it's a one-size-fits-all situation. Frankly that's asinine. People come in all flavors and sizes so to speak. What you consider to be "good parenting" might be viewed as bad parenting by another person. In that sense, there's a subjective component to parenting. I've seen a lot of parenting elitists here on HN and I doubt many of you even have children let alone understand the complexities that comes with parenting them at various stages.
There is a multi-billion dollar concerted effort by the largest companies in the world to get an iron grip on the attention of children at a level of granularity never before seen - don't pretend like that isn't a novel cultural force that should be reckoned with.
Whether it’s desirable for their child to be making digital content and publishing it is another question entirely, but the title premise never seems to be addressed directly. The article is a long-winded way to say ~“we keep making up arbitrary rules for the phone, and then we realize they’re arbitrary so we change them, but we never actually sit down and pick some sane and long-lived rules”.
We can actually take technology and make it something worthwhile and enriching. It doesn't have to be this way.
When TV came out there was actually a lot of hope that it could be used to educate people for example.
Our precocious angels have been transforming into sullen monsters at the onset of adolescence since the beginning of time. Do we really think they would have stayed precocious angels forever, if only they had never discovered comic books or rock'n'roll or TV or video games or whatever the current teenage vice happens to be?
Sure, there is good evidence that smartphones are more addictive than a lot of other pastimes and devices, but the fact that your daughter turned into a teenager isn't that.
I have 4 active mobile phones and I cannot understand the allure people who claim to be 'addicted' to phones have with them. I actually dread the time I spend on them, as the UX is so much worse when used to interface with Internet than a PC/Laptop in my opinion.
I also grew up at a time before smartphones but I grew up on the Internet using computers/laptops and admittedly spend a large time of my Life on both, for work and leisure, but I still cannot understand this seemingly prevalent disease that has afflicted so many. And I do have what some may deem an addictive personality, specifically to adrenaline and endorphins.
I think the common variable is the lack of time spent outside cities and their homes and have an almost pathological aversion to Nature. I can assure you that the latest Twitter beef seems incredibly insignificant after a 10 mile hike and watching the sunset in total silence, more should try it. Believe me I was there for its first incarnations and the forum 'flame wars,' of the 90s and early 2000s; they're only fun so many times until you grow out of them (ideally in your teens) and they all predictably start and end the same way. Its really not that interesting.
> Im not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14
As for this, I agree with OP; I went to private school most of my life with many helicopter parents who swore their children were supposed prodigies only to seem them 'throw it all away' after they left the 8th grade and got their first taste of freedom they discovered members of the opposite sex, cars, status, drugs and booze and many ended up in continuation schools as they did it all in excess.
I'm personally glad I went to one night school class (as I always skipped morning classes) my freshman year of HS just to see what happens to people like that, it was massive learning experience but also a deterrent to not fall into those traps.
It also got me interested in computer networking as I was in a class sponsored by Cisco and my fascination with tech went beyond just soldering/hacking Playstation and Dreamcast consoles and ripping games to sell at school.
I think the bias and their views tends to lean toward their disappointment, but some people are just too easily susceptible and are often coerced by their parents into a certain path, and once they have any semblance of freedom they just rebel against it all. And I can understand that as I have a few cousins that ended up that way and we could all see it coming from a very young age.
To be honest the people who I found to be most successful in Life, beyond just financial and material wealth, and over all well adjusted were people whose parents just let them become who they wanted after their toddler years and then nurtured and supported their skills and talents that way. They had very healthy relationships with their families, often after turbulent teenage years, and were very open and free thinking about problem solving and World views.
Everyone is prone to peer pressure, especially in your early teens when you have no idea who you are and often are so quick to give into group think to fit in (we're biologically hardwired that way for survival), so I can see why some parents may want to wait until 14 or older. But I finis it hard to accept the consequences these devices are supposedly creating. Social Media 'balling' and the supposed depression that follows for so many seem insignificant when you grew up seeing what job your friend finished for Arab Shieks in Saudi Arabia and Dubai to a bunch Zonda Rs and Helicopters for a lark on a Tuesday morning. It was just funny, and kind of sad to think anyone with much money was that crass and had su...
We talk a lot about addiction and the tricks games play to make you want to come back every day. We talk a lot about safety and what predictors are looking for and what they say to try to sound like a friend. I hope these are good discussions and I hope they stay with my kids as they grow.
If I'd started at 14? They've already learned to tune me out by then.
I'm not saying that you said anything counter to this. I just think that apps which are hyper-tuned to captivate our every moment are a different beast.
"My daughter was a creative genius, then we bought her first neural lace."
and then we turn it into an almost-exclusively advertising tool designed to convert a human being into a money making machine.
It's one of the reasons I'm not enthusiastic about technology anymore. I see what we do with it. Every. Single. Time.
It makes me sad. All the lost potential.
Advertising in particular is a cancer that, over time, consumes every single communications medium.
I'm currently pursuing open-source tools to run home automation but it's slow-going. It's complex.
Feels like that's most parents these days. At least - feels like it is within the bay area.
Perfection also harms creativity.
In fact there was a economic theorist who claimed that by introducing limitations in a system you also introduce entrepreneurship and innovation.
And now after saying all that I realize when comparisons are made of US to developing countries the same harbingers to creativity and innovation appear where if a situation in America can be resolved through a particular means, the lack of such means become an obstacle to the similar rise of developing countries.
I will admit that a lego kit with instructions is very different to a collection of lego parts and I would encourage every parent to buy buckets of assorted bits rather than kits that might end up staying on a shelf once assembled
Albert O. Hirschman
Looks like 85% share in the US: http://www.pipersandler.com/2col.aspx?id=287&releaseid=18206
While its preatty simple to start coding on a Windoss/Linux PC, Android and iOS devices are not self hosting, you need to download an SDK, set device into developer mode, etc. - a barrier in itself. On iOS it's even more complicated if you wanted to write an app for your iPhone and share it with friends - expensive developer subscription & draconian app review!
So my worry is we will loose a generation of developers who would otherwise get to coding and sharing of their creation on PCs if their first and only device is a locked down cosume-only device like an iPhone.
Meanwhile, she self-admittedly said she broke all her rules regarding the phone. Also her child grew up into a teenager. Kids don’t stay the same forever.
1. A child that is growing up.
2. A parent that gives in too much.
This lady needs to set rules for use, and then be firm with them. If you don't want your child to use a device for more than an hour a day, don't let them use it for nine.
All this child is doing is learning that their parent is a push over. You gotta be firm and push back.
Or, perhaps, accept that during a pandemic, when your child's entire social sphere has collapsed, the internet, Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok, et. al. are the closest they can get to interacting with and making friends.
>When friends visit, she occasionally asks them to watch her latest TikTok videos. Some are even funny and creative. Or so I tell myself. It helps with the guilt.
I can't be the only person who finds this comment to be really sad.
This isn't the iPhone's fault. This is someone failing to support their child's hobbies because they're not the perfect idyllic vision they had. End of story.
The author obviously wanted to allow for a balance but it quickly grew out of control to the point where the only thing that mattered was her phone. That's not healthy, and that's not failing to support her hobby.
You'd hope people were more educated or exposed to cool ideas but given the debate on the election and the most popular videos on youtube it doesn't seem to be that way.
Maybe its just a new normal and I'm old. I feel lucky the internet didn't exist when I was young.
"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation.
But just like my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots, who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society.
I’m afraid it is not so with an iPhone. Our phones take without giving. Now excuse me I should probably log off and do something useful.
...this month, maybe this year, until the next fad hits the 'net and all those influency types need to adapt or exit.
Not everything has to be directly related to employment. It's nice to know how to cook a meal, even if you have absolutely no ambition to work in a restaurant.
Why are you so convinced this sentence isn't going to describe you in 20 years?
This idea that things like iPhones, or video games, or any other piece of technology cannot possibly be productive or profitable in the future, it's got to die.
When I was young, my passion for computers meant I wouldn't become the lawyer people suggested I should be, but now I make more than most of my lawyer friends. Things change, and "using an iPhone" may end up being the key to future happiness, career opportunities, or who knows what?
For every one of those, there are hundreds of streamers who quit their jobs to focus on streaming but ended up broke, and thousands of streamers who spend every free moment outside of their day job trying to build a following but never get there.
The old dream of rock stardom, well, you get a guitar and figure out that it's actually hard and maybe you shelve that. Streaming... anybody can play Minecraft, so you can keep the dream alive a lot longer.
It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.
You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.
This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.
This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.
That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!
Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."
That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.
So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."
Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.
It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.
So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.
Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!
Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.
TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.
That's all. Don't be...
I think in general these aspirations shouldn't be shat on, but young adults with these aspirations should probably be gently guided in more realistic directions.
I've noticed that many of these girls are college students and the money from their admirers is useful to buy clothes, gadgets and to take their boyfriends to fancy vacations.
So as long as you are aware this is a bubble you will be doing fine.
With Tiktok, Youtube and the like, the comparison gets even worse when you compare the abyss of money making vs. value produced..
If, in the chat app, you create literature, you're creating literature. Some people are, most people aren't. If, on tiktok, you create interesting short films, you're creating interesting short films. Some people are, most people aren't.
To sum up, I agree with you that "doing tiktok" is like using a chat app, and agree with you that it's not necessarily educational. I disagree that it's necessarily not educational.
Definitely wouldn't let my kids anywhere near it.
I missed so many experiences sitting in front of the computer all day, it didn’t really get me any further than if I had taken a more modest interest.
YouTube and Minecraft and these digital realities are fake realities. Whatever happiness they provide is temporary and short lived. It took me until my 30s to realize this and now I’m starting all over again.
Digital stuff is fine in moderation, but I will not let my children build a life around it like my parents allowed me to.
He plays Minecraft/KSP about 90 minutes each night.
But he'd always, always accept an offer to do something else with me or someone else in the family.
So I make sure, as his father, to make that offer sometimes. And I also feel fine if I'm feeling like a book or a movie or something else.
Not all kids become [insert teenager cliches] upon the onset of teenage-dom, for all the different reasons this can be true... but when I was his age, I definitely defaulted to getting on the computer instead of doing other things.
I do think it's interesting how little discussion there is in culling digital behaviors moreso during pandemic times. I personally don't have a lot of interest in any of the new iPhones because my iPhone mostly lives on my desk at home. It hardly ever gets out.
I want tech to augment their lives, not replace them (or destroy them).
I certainly don't.
Then I got a better PC and spent time trying to make website to earn money because everyone was doing it.
I failed. AdSense didn't pay me anything. I realized it was more profitable to make a blog on how to make money online than go try if yourself.
I built my first gaming rig. Played few games and got bored after a few months.
I ended up watching death note on YouTube through recommendations.
Finished 500+ anime within a year. It was the best past time after school.
Got bored of that. This time, I though of making money using software. Worked with WordPress, earned some cash fixing people's site and optimizing them by removing useless plugins, adding yoast SEO, improving cache and moving people from shared hosting on GoDaddy.
I started to tinker with PHP code and themes like Divi, adata. Then I wanted to build a CMS. Looked up stuff and it felt complicated so after trying for a few weeks, dropped the idea.
Now I got into novels and manga because I was running out of anime. Probably 700+ or so titles. Enjoyed that for a bit. Finished Chinese, russian, Japanese, etc light novels using Google translate. It was fun. I was addicted.
Now something clicked again and I purchased courses on udemy for 90% discount (yeah it is always discounted). Finally, I knew enough programming after few weeks to create a CMS. I did that but it turned pretty poor compared to WordPress.
Joined an online non-profit therapy group. Listened to people and gave advice...in retrospect, k shouldn't have done that.
Joined discord, spent time there and well learnt more about weird internet cultures and spheres.
Started to get worried about future. Spent time researching health insurance, FIRE, investment and saving strategies. Opened broker account on few online sites using my dad's identity. Landed on r/wsb. Spent few weeks researching and stalking people there. Concluded it was nothing more than gambling. I started buying equity. Built a decent portfolio. Then diversified with Forex and SIP index fund.
Roughly more or less how I spent my teenage years. There are lot of other small and things I did but will be too personal.
Moderation has always been necessary.
None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with. Even if they did escape the attention algorithm long enough to get bored and explore there is nothing to discover it's a locked black box.
iSH, code learning apps, Codecademy via the iPad browser, iBooks, Library Genesis for getting any book in existence for free, Duolingo, cloud coding. I could go on...
There's many, many ways of learning through these devices.
Still a locked down black box designed around attention algorithms and I'm getting tired of pretending it's not.
Who cares? Just because you and many others on HN learned some stuff from fiddling with some computers doesn't mean that learning a language is lesser.
"Ah, you aren't doing things that I did as a kid that lead to my high income! You're trash, kid! Git gud!"
Wasm and WebGL certainly are.
[0] https://xkcd.com/378/
kids have access to magic these days, while algorithmic abuse is rampant, thats not an iPad's core proposition.
You can artificially lock down the device and expose only such things, but default mode is YouTube and Roblox type stuff.
Not sure what your point is here.
Err.... Wasm? WebGL?
It has a generally standards-compliant browser, so while you may not be able to use assembly language and pascal, you can probably connect to something that lets you write and run programs through the browser (whether they actually run in the browser or remotely).
The UI isn't ideal for it, but neither was the membrane keyboard on my Timex/Sinclair 1000.
Not all screen time is created equal, and there are any number of ways for a child to be creative and learn and socialise in the digital world as suppose to the physical one.
The social networks are a bit different. What value is a child getting from them that they wouldn't get from a WhatsApp group? As other commenters have pointed out, these big platforms are engineered to the last detail to 'increase engagement'. To put it another way - they are purposefully addictive and I don't see the value that might make that worthwhile.
My stepfather refused to let me take piano lessons, because those would turn you into a "sissy" (e.g., Liberace).
Yeah, I'm still angry about it.
Give it a shot!
Your comment made me think of that book, and I certainly found it very useful in overcoming some of the lingering consequences of my odd upbringing. My mother was not abusive, but was alternately neglectful and controlling, and I only recently found out that she was continuing patterns from her own childhood. I highly recommend the book if your situation is at all similar.
1) They are bad parents 2) They are good parents 3) Smartphones are a qualitatively different addiction problem than TV, comic books, or other demonized technology of yore 4) It is correlation not causation 5) Her problems were partly caused by the iPhone
It seems more like he set boundaries, then let his daughter run past them. Setting boundaries is hard, it takes strength, but you can't sacrifice boundaries to "keep the peace". Short team peace is long term hell.
You can stop it, but you won’t. The messages we give to girls now are awful. They are taught by the crowd to freely wield their sexual and social power instead of being taught to use it thoughtfully. This power is intoxicating and can only be tamed by strong values. They will be indoctrinated against your “outdated” parental authority. Their “heroes” will be criminals and bad women like Cardi B. If you really want to stop that, pull her out of the school she’s going to, find a ‘conservative’ school to send her to, and spend time teaching your values at home. You probably won’t do any of this. It’s not the phone, it’s the values and who is teaching them. And right now, that’s not you.
The author is completely wrong about this, so I can only assume that their kid is indeed being creative and has manipulated them into believing it.
Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends.
This time it is so different. On the landline with friends you could talk but not be manipulated by external actors. Landlines are not exactly skinner boxes and also they cannot be thrown into one's pocket and be with them virtually everywhere. This time it is different.
This seems fixable, either on the dev side or with better communication about how the feature actually works. There's no reason to dupe people.
Could be a bug somewhere that I'm not being hit by, of course.
Also, could be the article writer using parent-controlled screen time limits and having accidentally(?) unchecked the "block at limit" option in the rule, which would let the phone-user hit the "ignore limit" button for it.
"The modern devil is cheap dopamine." - @naval
The way I see it, pre-phone their daughter was probably much more engaged with her parents and was doing more manual creative stuff. After the phone appeared, she distanced herself and got absorbed by it.
I don't get why so many people here are trying to defend smartphones/social media?
Isn't it pretty obvious they are addictive? And to a young kid, that doesn't know any better, it can get really bad.
Social attention focused inward toward family --> Social attention turning outward towards others + establishing an identity apart from that of the family. This is totally normal.
It's like serving a kid a plate of food with vegetables and meth side-by-side and the meth dealer is making every effort they can to push the meth into the vegetables.
I don't think it's the phone itself that was the problem here, I think its allowing your teenager unfettered access to social media. TikTok, Facebook, IG, are not particularly healthy IMO. There is something to look at here with the loss of interest in reading and being creative. iPhones are in fact very good outlets for creativity, its just that children need limits within them just like anything else.
Parents should be engaged with what kids are actually doing on their devices and be able to set boundaries for their digital lives. I'm all for being creative, and I think digital tools can be a real boon to it. Making games, videos, digital art, programming etc. are all awesome, character building experiences. Scrolling through feeds for 9 hours a day watching celebrities do hand-jives and gossip, not as much..
SCHOOL! SCHOOL! A thousand times: school!
Of course a child who likes reading for leisure is going to do it less readily when they are told what books to read and forced to read them on someone else's schedule and analyze rather than enjoy them. I have no idea why people are blaming the phone and not school here.
I used to agree with (1), but lately I'm inclined to think that this time, it really is different. Very different. And the primary reason is that unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more, on a scale we've never seen before. Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. TV isn't a bi-directional communication platform that has thrown teenagers into an arena where they're communicating with thousands of people at a time when they're still figuring out how to communicate in small groups.
Regarding (2), I think people are being far too critical. The author acknowledges many of their own missteps, and they're also going through a time where, iPhone or not, their daughter is growing apart from them, and I imagine that's very difficult emotionally. I also feel like they really humanized how budging a little bit on rules here and there can spiral out of control, and how that feels. I really appreciated that perspective.
Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat."
This bias in the literature makes it look like there are some brilliant parents out there, who have found the secret for success that the rest of us can "just" follow. There are of course parallels in the business literature.
The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents.
I overheard a discussion between two friends about the effects of TV on behavior. One friend's argument: "Of course commercial TV affects behavior. That's its purpose." This stuff is designed to manipulate us. Maybe that's possible with books too, but books have just not risen to that level of sophistication.
I agree with everything you say except for this. We have friends (2 kids now) where mom is like that. On first glance all is perfect, she is perfect mom that manages to do so many things, all is great etc. Apart from actual reality once you know them better and you know where to look. At the end they are no better than rest of us, in some aspects far from it (this kind of behavior stems from some deeper issue(s), which tend to manifest in various ways). And all this charade starts to look pathetic pretty quickly.
Be honest, open, laugh at your fails, we all went through it, its normal. It will get you further with almost everybody including yourself. Definitely with me.
/ If I misunderstood what you meant then sorry for the preaching.
Parenting is a thankless job is fraught with insecurity and doubt, and every parent thinks they are not doing good enough, and constantly comparing themselves to other parents. Seeing a parent who shows weakness, who is not doing a good job, is a vindication for parents. "Hey, look, I'm not as bad as HIM/HER". You don't want other parents to think that about you, so you make sure you never EVER allow parents to see you make a mistake because you know the first thing that will happen is they will go home and talk about it with their parent/parent/friend/whoever.
Parenting is just like any other job. You can be an employee, but if people think you're a screw up don't expect to be invited to any social functions. Except in this case it's not just you who is getting excluded... It's your child and the rest of your family.
I agree and hope people don't take this in a defeatist way. I've found that the biggest impact you can have on anyone's behavior (adult or child) is to set the example. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away, and besides, they only know how to act the way the see. Work on yourself, and your kids will follow.
I agree in principle, but I find that that doesn't map very well to the digital world.
This past Saturday, I spent about six hours staring at a screen. My kids did too. I was making music, an act I find creative, meaningful, and intellectually stimulating. They were mostly watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.
At the primitive monkey brain level where "setting an example" kicks in, all my kids saw was that I was staring at a screen so they did too.
Is there something else you would rather your kids be doing?
I may be old fashioned, but Minecraft strikes me as faux-creative. It's not something you get "better" at. That's just my reaction, having watched it done. It puts you in a state of flow without actually flowing anywhere.
So, want your kids to go outside? Go outside. Want them to read? Read. Want them to practice cello? Practice cello.
Want them to learn how to build digital creative? Let them see you building your own digital creations.
From my experience and observation of other parents and kids, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they want to be like you, sometimes the opposite.
By doing the activity yourself, you expose the child to it, and they may decide to take part. Over time, they will almost certainly take interest. That doesn't mean you read a book one day and get frustrated because they are playing video games. You read a book every weekend because you want to, and over time, it influences how your child perceives best use of free time, demonstrates discipline, and showcases a non video game activity.
We now have to work HARD to keep these devices away from him. Part of it, of course, is he observes how much attention we pay them but his eyes definitely light up differently when they are turned on. And that's without the manipulative, 1000-engineers-optimizing-for-your-addiction software built into them.
I honestly find it harder and harder to believe these things do anything positive for us. I 100% believe they can I just think we've turned them into something ugly, right now.
I think the TV, film, and print media attempted to do the same, they were/are just much less effective at it. For example, watch a "slow burn" movie like Alien. Most modern movies, by comparison, seem to be edited to keep our short attention span tuned in. Same with the old adage "sex sells"...we've always been trying to hijack human attention we're just so good about it now it's essentially been weaponized.
I think the hardest thing for this parent was balancing what was right for their child (and they seemed to be confident in their opinion) and what would hold them back socially at school. It's hard to say no to a child that says "Everyone else has an iPhone" because we all remember being that kid left out from something when we were young.
I think the big difference is the adaptivity of the phone. Books don't figure out what personally engrosses you and tweak the rest of the book so you can't put it down. That feels too powerful IMO.
Contrast that with so many apps whose main feed uses some sort of infinite scroll.
There's DND (Do Not Disturb) mode for this. It's just a button click away on all phones.
As one of the thousands of engineers dedicated to making you use your consumer electronics a little bit more: it's really easy to defeat my work. You make a conscious decision not to use the product, you catch yourself using it, you stop. Do it for about a month and you've broken the habit. That's why we look at metrics like MAUs and L28s. There is basically nothing I can do about a user who actively doesn't want to use the product; we basically throw up our hands and say "Not our target market."
The reason my job exists is because hundreds of millions of people don't think like that, and don't have any conscious opinion one way or another about my product. It's those users we're trying to influence, the ones who are basically ambivalent, allocate their time based on emotion, and don't have any strong beliefs one way or another about what they should be spending their time on or how they want their life to look. There are enough of them that this market is worth billions, but everything I do - all the engagement work and instant gratification and positioning subtle hints in the UI - is about influencing the people who don't care one way or another. If that is not you - if you have actively made a conscious choice what you want to spend your time on, and it's not watching TV more - you won't even see my product. (It was actually pretty awkward when I took my job, because I work on TVs but watch basically none and didn't even own a TV beforehand.)
You cannot absolve yourself from responsibility just because your target audience 'had a choice'.
I feel like I've heard this before, re: alcoholism, obesity, etc... It's true that if you just decide to stop the behavior you don't like, you're cured. But it is so far from easy that it's a lifelong journey for many people.
Your job is not just to compete for a limited number of zombies, but to keep as many people that actually do care from climbing out of the hole. People are not binary between zombie/not zombie, they're on a spectrum, and I think it's naive to think that anyone with the slightest desire to not use your product can just close it & quit.
Books and other forms of media have been optimised to be addictive to read/watch for decades. It might not happen at the same scale, but the increase in scale also means that the mediums get less personal. I think that balances things out in some ways.
It really does not seem different to me.
The problem is not the technology, the problem is as she mentions in passing bad parenting. If it wasn't an iPhone it would be "talking through the landline" (remember ALF's starting scene? it was an issue for us kids in the 80s/90s) Cable TV, or marijuana or any other addictive passtime.