This should be law. Kids below 16 should only be allowed “dumb” phones. The internet has become the new tv and with ai becoming more prevalent it will be even worse.
I don't think denying children of phones is a good idea. First, we shield and deny them things enough as it is already (which only makes them less prepared for the real world later in life, a thing we can observe already). Secondly, I think that we should make policies that make (social) media on the internet less addictive, and implement stuff like good internet behavior into our parenting.
> Secondly, I think that we should make policies that make (social) media on the internet less addictive, and implement stuff like good internet behavior into our parenting.
I agree, and i think we should regulate fake news, manipulation, propaganda, etc. But it’s rather difficult as there is the risk of censorship and there is too much corruption allowing corporations to do as they please.
Therefore the only two options are either complete blackout - as we do with other sensitive topics - and good parenting. But how do you achieve good parenting since kids are raised by the state? Parents barely spend any time with their children, at least in most of the west, and there’s little control over what they do. In the uk massive numbers of kids are hooked onto people like andrew tate and other toxic popular figures. Those children will grow aggressive and sexist. Corruption allows tik tok to reign unhinged and teachers are helpless and in some cases clueless. Therefore the only option is to make it law that smart phones are banned for children. The risk is simply too high for individuals and the society at large.
I think word the "phone" is obstructing the problem a bit. It's a lot of things, but being a "smart" "phone" is usually not in the top 10 of uses.
You can somewhat make it what you want it to be by restricting apps, but you can't restrict the content of the apps to have safe or non addictive content (is there such a thing as dynamic non-addictive content at all?).
No thanks, nanny state. I’ll give my kids their first phone when I determine they are ready, and will manage it according to my own parenting principles.
Doesn’t the state already have enough power over us, and over our kids?
I agree in principle. But you lose some of the decision autonomy when every other person they interact with has one and those peoples communication is all digital.
Critical mass is the biggest issue/driver here, and you as an individual don't have the power to impact that.
Exactly. And I don't understand parents who give their kids unrestricted access to the internet (inc. on desktop machines) then expect the government to regulate what the kids see. Take some responsibility like these parents.
It's more about reducing the peer pressure that kids feel when their friends have phones.
While it's great for a child to have it in an emergency, these days phones are more likely to be used as a constant stream of TikTok, Reels, or YouTube shorts by children.
A cell phone is the best tracking device I've found for knowing where my kid is. They won't leave it behind and if it's outside of where I expect it to be, I get an alarm. I'd love a better option but I really haven't found something that's more reliably close to them at all times.
The better option is to not track them and to trust them and teach them about risks and autonomy and then allow them to make small mistakes now, so they won’t make big mistakes later when they don’t listen to you anymore.
You are legally responsible for your child until they are 18. There is a universe of difference between not trusting your children vs taking reasonable steps to ensure their safety by knowing their location when necessary.
How did "legally responsible for your child until they are 18" turn into "track them 24/7"? I would strongly argue permanent surveillance exceeds "reasonable steps", but I know I'm in the minority.
Non-parents seem to forget that children don’t have the same rights as adults. They don’t get all the same rights to privacy and freedom because they were birthed by their parents.
Parents have a legal right and obligation to know where their kids are. The technology used to achieve it is a mere implementation detail.
Also, technically, any adult who owns a smartphone has already consented to be permanently location tracked by their carrier and various entities that can buy location data from your carrier legally.
That's...not true? You don't have a legal obligation to know where your child is. Contextually, you might often want to know where they are, or who they're currently with in a broad sense. For older children, they can have autonomy for periods of time that can be pretty long.
Do you have kids? Kids don't make good decisions and trust takes time to build. Tracking kids is so the 'small mistakes' don't turn into something more serious.
>> Tracking kids is so the 'small mistakes' don't turn into something more serious.
The obvious question is "what did we do before?" I'm not sure how tracking stops serious mistakes; maybe it resolves them after the fact, suggesting that tracking their phone is not going to help parenting and you need another approach?
And yes, I do have kids of my own ranging from pre-phone to a brand new driver, so I get your motivation.
> Kids don't make good decisions and trust takes time to build.
Agreed, and it's our job as parents to sheppard them. Handing them a skinner box and plonking them into the world doesn't solve that problem. And tracking then 24/7 isn't likely to help. Kids have been finding ways to get around their parents knowing what they're doing throughout all of humanity, and smartphones won't (and haven't) changed that.
Yes, but only if its a smart phone. We started with cheap cell phones with gps but they'd leave them behind because they had no incentive to use them.
I really really wanted to delay them getting a smart phone as long as possible, but when all the other kids have one it's so fucking hard. We held up for a while but the tantrums and crying wore us down.
One of the joys of parenting is knowing what the right thing to do is and then failing to see it through.
We all have our failures. She was otherwise mature and a great kid. Literally every one of her friends had one and she was unable to participate with them in that way.
Yes, we caved but held out as long as we could. She's turned out to be an awesome young adult and seems to have come out of teen-land unscathed.
I apologise, I've reread my comment and realised it comes across as a direct criticism of you. It's not intended that way. Parenting is hard, and there's no way I'm judging your entire experience off a single comment.
My point was that broadly speaking, maturity should be a key factor in _anything_ for the individual child. Some kids can be trusted to ride a motorbike across a propertly at 9. Some shouldn't have a smartphone until 17. Some can fly across the country unaccompanied at 12.
Thank you, that means a lot to me -- such recognition and correction is in short supply in forums. She actually is quite mature for her age, but I think the pressure broke her.
I agree on the maturity factor, but society has gotten weird on allowing that to happen.
I love how every time a parent posts that they use a phone so they know where their kids are, it turns into the same argument about "surveillance." I have kids who are <10 years old, and a phone or watch that lets me know where they are makes me much more comfortable allowing them to roam our neighborhood. I can always get in touch with them and call them home from whoever's home they are playing in.
And then the argument becomes "when I was young, we didn't have phones, and we still found our way home." Which to me feels a bit like "I never wore a bike helmet, and I was fine." Not entirely the same argument, but along the same lines. Sometimes new technology helps us do things better than it was done in the past. Back in the day, we couldn't keep touch with our spouses throughout the day at work or especially while traveling. Now we can, and in my opinion, that's largely an improvement over what we had in the past.
Sure, some parents use it poorly to track and interrogate their kids about their location 24/7. But just because I track my kids does not mean I am spying on them or "getting them used to a surveillance state" like some arguments I have seen here.
I do get the pushback against the sentiment that some comments seem to have suggesting that the existence of smartphones creates some moral imperative to track kids under the age of 18 24/7 and make them always reachable. On the other hand, I pretty much agree with you. Just because some technology didn't exist when I was growing up doesn't mean I'm not being a little reckless if I leave my cell phone at home when I go off in the woods by myself.
As someone else wrote, a smartwatch may be a reasonable compromise.
Believe me I understand the anxiety around not knowing where your kid is, but consider that nobody knew where we were at that age. Think about the absolutely insane shit you got up to, that should have gotten you killed a thousand times over, and yet here you are.
Control will not keep them safe, and is in fact counter-productive. The more you control, the less responsibility and trust you give, the less of that, the more prone to catastrophic mistakes.
The idea that this is about "control" is incorrect. It's about safety. I want to know where my kid is, if I can't find them. I want to know they're at school and not the woods between school and home. I don't need to know what they're doing but I do want to know where they are, if they aren't where I expect them to be because I love them and don't want them to get hurt.
If kids were addicted to solving math problems and watching educational videos on their phone at age 12, would we still disapprove?
I think framing the problem as "smartphones are bad" isn't as easy or effective as "certain categories of apps are bad".
One practical way to implement / enforce something like this could be similar to the movie rating system in the US: G, PG, PG-13, R, etc. "R" rated movies ban kids < 6 completely, but allow kids 7 and older to see the movie if accompanied by an adult.
Similarly, companies could sell versions of their smartphone that have parental controls enforced by default, with all app categories disabled by default, so that parents have to explicitly opt-in to the features and apps they allow kids to use.
How are parents supposed to exert control over their users when they can't control themselves?
I don't use social media (other than HN, if you will), but I have dozens of friends with kids that are unable to detach from their phones, even for a 60 minute dinner. Their kids are dozed on YouTube videos, not for the parents to have a break from work life, but instead so they themselves can doze on social media.
What a clown world. I don't have kinds, if I do have some in the future, they will not be allowed to be nowhere near a phone before they can put up an argument for it.
I've tried to stop a few times, but the withdrawals get so bad I end up in the hospital with doctors telling me I have to keep this addiction for the rest of my life because after using food for so long, the withdrawals would kill me at this point.
You joke, but food addiction is very real and, like the aforementioned addictions, is a challenging thing to come to terms with because it's something we all need to do in moderation.
Yeah and if my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
This is a real 'the medium is the message' situation here. What you're describing is possible but then the device stops being a smartphone as it is commonly understood and sold as.
A smartphone is a distraction device designed to keep you engaged as long as possible so that someone can make money by shoving ads in your face. That's what it's for. Everything else is secondary.
Maybe? Parental controls aren’t a panacea. We set them for my older kids during high school. The older two pooled their allowance for three months and then had a friend at school order them an unlocked phone that they left in a locker they shared. Life, uh, finds a way…
Most of the research I’ve seen suggests pretty clearly that it’s social media, and it affects girls more than boys. (And, yes, the effect appears to be causal—see [1] for a summary with citations.) The hard part is that the research also shows that the correct amount isn’t 0, it’s just that above a certain amount is really, really bad.
I agree. I wasn’t even mad, exactly; and I was impressed with the effort. It led to a conversation about _why_ they had the screen time limits in the first place, and how they should take responsibility for those decisions for themselves.
When I was in high school (1990s), my friend Mark removed the top sheet-metal ceiling from his locker and discovered a phone line going past. So he tapped into it and, to my knowledge, became the only kid in school with a phone in his locker. It was used for prank calls, of course.
Learning takes effort, you can't be addicted to that. What gets you addicted is fast gratification with little to no effort, and that's not really educational even if it pretends to be that.
It seems to me that the real culprit here is social media, not cell phones themselves. So why not focus on on-device restrictions instead? Is that not good enough?
The most frightening thing about these new consumption patterns is that you miss large but subtle aspects of life, the depth, magic and fantasy that bubbles up as weird emergence in the quiet moments before you sleep, when you wake up, exploring alone etc.
I'm hooked as an adult and can already see that i've become addicted to superficiality but the battle is getting increasingly harder as tech hooks deeper and deeper into our neurology.
There was a wave of books 10 years ago, "The end of absence" one them, exploring the themes of being the last generation to have experienced both before and the after 24/7 media consumption.
In one way it's echoing historical cycles like Thoreau talking about noisy trains in the distance distracting his poetry from his wood cabin in 1854 - but in other ways the distraction has become so exponential i seriously fear a generation will have problems with concentration, imagination or autonomy of thought.
Will they learn the beauty of solitude, that you often need some amount of boredom or tranquility for fantasy to arise, and that as in meditation the exploration of internal states can be key to a good and interesting life.
I'm reminded of a video game i once played about the native american ritual called Vision Quest where one isolates himself in a dark cabin - and as a lack of inputs creates vivid imagination like in a floatation tank - one finds his purpose eventually.
Not much different than religious sabbath or sitting meditation. To get something beautiful you have to remove noise.
Just turn it off. You will get a short period of withdrawal then you'll get the world as it is. I did, and while I miss some stuff, I'm better off. Don't blame "I'm hooked". It's down to you.
I've become better at it and is always reminded of the quiet summers when i was a child, the beautiful boredom and fantasy of "some part of my life that happened a long time ago", or running around without a cellphone, just being completely present and "away" from others in good and healthy sense like a rite de passage.
When i see nieces in family everyone under the age of 20 is always inside of cyberspace, never present in the here and now, and while being hypersocial is normal for a teen, it's to an extreme degree for everyone including the smallest ones.
Trying to see the other side of it: The real world pretty much sucks, for adults and for children. Adults are living one missed paycheck away from insolvency. The rent is due in a week, and they're not sure they'll be able to pay it this month. Grocery bill is up over $200, and $5 doesn't even get the car home from the gas station. And Lumburgh is very likely to do another round of layoffs before Christmas. Aunt Sophie is addicted to meth and now uncle Leroy got himself arrested again, and their elderly mom won't stop calling to make the extended family figure out how to take care of Sophie's other kids. Their joints are in pain, but they can't afford to go to the doctor. They have 4 maxxed out credit cards and zero retirement savings.
The real world for kids is awful, too. They are constantly bored and there is no place to just go and play because the real world was not built for dreaming and play, but for commerce and every square inch of the planet needs to be either a parking lot or a business. And that's even if they could go places, but they can't because everything is a car ride away and they can't drive. They can't even get on a bicycle and go exploring because one of their miserable nosey neighbors will call the police or Child Protective Services if they see an unaccompanied kid roaming around. From the moment they enter school, they're told that the world is coming to an end due to climate change, and they're all gonna die.
And the world is awful for young adults/old teenagers. There are almost no jobs available that pay even close to what it would take to barely move out of their parents' basements. They know that they will never own a home, nor have any kind of financial security, and that the world is deliberately set up to allow a handful of people to sponge up everything, so why even bother? And if they do manage to get a job that lets them barely pay rent, they had to move to an unfamiliar, lonely city to take the job, leaving all their friends behind.
It's no wonder everyone is addicted to their phones and the fantasy worlds of games and social media. The real world is pretty awful for a lot of people.
> Aunt Sophie is addicted to meth and now uncle Leroy got himself arrested again
Does this reflect your actual life experiences or an invention? Because a lot of htis sounds like made-up whingeing.
> The real world for kids is awful, too. They are constantly bored and there is no place to just go and play ...
We can discuss the merits child boredom vs. child abuse if you wish because I can certainly do that. Your all-stations broadcast of failure and despair is boring. Stop it.
I’ve increasingly come to believe that sheltering young children from the harsh realities of the world and providing them a safe environment for their formative years is a necessity. They need to be allowed to grow into young people who are intellectually and emotionally prepared to deal with the all the chaos, fear, and violence of the world without being crippled from the start. Early childhood is so crucially important to positive outcomes later in life. They need to be lied to because the truth actively harms their development. The unfiltered deluge of information is toxic. Innocence isn’t just a nebulous concept, it is valuable to growth and increasingly vulnerable. I want every child to grow up with physical safety, financial stability, and a beautiful world. Then when they reach a suitable age they will be better equipped to handled reality without cracking under the immense pressure.
I hope I’m communicating this clearly, I’m not advocating for any political side, or “think of the children“ moralizing, nor do I have a practical plan to offer. I’m just depressed with how bad kids have it and how few adults really care.
I agree with some of the comments that it's not necessarily phones themselves, but I disagree that the culprit is simply social media. Any app on their phone is going to be geared towards keeping them locked into the experience, because that's how apps are built.
Full stop, I don't want anything manipulating my child's attention. Because as I'm getting older, I'm realizing that the most powerful tool you have as a human being is your ability to focus on a task and see it through to completion. Digital media of any kind has a perverse effect on that ability.
Parents of the 50's were too simplistic with their mistrust of televisions, but they had the right intuition. Digital screens are avatars for daydreams, and to dream too often is to drain your life of its most precious resource - time.
I don't agree with the notion that time spent dreaming is wasted. There is more to life than being productive and focused. There's no prize at the end of life.
There is a balance, of course. We can't just laze around all day for both psychological and survival reasons.
In the end, though, time spent enjoying yourself is rarely a waste.
Time spent enjoying yourself is frequently a waste — not because enjoyment is bad or immoral, but because there are so many easily attainable and shallow pleasures available today. Many of the richest pleasures in life sit on the other side of intense bouts of boredom or tedium or even pain.
Is time spent recovered from a torn ACL a waste? No, we do not tell athletes to play with injuries without rehab. What do you think relaxation is for the mind? I hope you're not a parent
For sure, totally agree. And I think "downtime" or "boredom" is an important part of life that shouldn't always be avoided (another reason I dislike phones). My wording was too subtle - the "too often" was meant to be significant, as daydreaming is also an important part of your life. Much of my productive work is actually a result of that daydream mode, though it's more active daydreaming, rather than what happens when I'm on my phone, where my brain is primarily in a passive state.
I'm 40 and have three kids including teenagers. I grew up on the unrestricted internet before cell phones.
I've lost all hope here for one reason:
Your kids friends parents don't care because they are all addicted to their phones and ignoring their kids
It's not even like "choose better friends." Unless your kids are literally in friend groups where all of the parents choose to restrict phones and change their entire lifestyle compared to their peers you're in a losing battle with the broader culture.
The only thing I feel I can do is create such a trusting relationship with my kids that they will come to me with anything that we have discussed is problematic. So far so good and we've been able to catch things that would have been a bigger deal without such a trusting relationship
Parents will always lose this type of battle because devices like tablets, phones, and TVs give parents a legitimate break.
For every parent who is going “no screens until age XYZ” there’s ten others who just need to get something done around the house and have their children leave them alone or stop breaking shit for 10 minutes.
Your strategy is the right one. The parent should be the trusted confidante.
I'd quibble with whether the break is "legitimate" but I wholeheartedly agree here
It is unconscionable the pervasiveness to which parents literally stick a device in front of their kids for their own benefit. I get it, life is hard and kids are a lot of work.
Your work or friends or instagram or whatever, is infinitely less important than building a healthy engaged relationship with your children. You're harming them and they are losing out on the vanishingly small amount of time you have to give them the focus, attention and attachment that is REQUIRED to create a healthy person and these are things only a parent (or adoptive parent) can give.
It's just like anything else you need to teach moderation.
My daughter gets to choose what she does on her tablet, and it has educational games.
She gets to choose when she watches.
I decide how much total screen time, < 1hr per day total, and 50% of the time she will choose to watch something with me after dinner on the big TV rather than use it during snack time.
I understand where you're coming from, but don't lose hope. The power of "sure, everyone else has one, but we're not everyone else" is strong. There's a big difference between caving in following along, and accepting that outside the house is (mostly) also outside your control.
We have a trusting relationship with our kid too, and accept that he's going to do many things we disallow in our household, outside the house. It's working out pretty well, I think.
There was a similar unquestioned presumption at his school that he would have a phone by now. I asked reasonable questions, and that presumption is no longer present.
Poor kids of these helicopter parents will be crippled in life when they don't have basic skills like operating a keypad to text or using a phone to check assigbments, getting into the habit of healthy use, instead they will be struggling compared to their peers who grew up with the technology. If you hate cell phones, you are probably better served being amish
UX design is so good today that literal 3 year olds pick up basic usage in like hours.
Will they develop the skills to really master complex technologies for big fancy jobs? No, but then neither is the kid playing Candy Crush for 8 hours a day.
What on Earth are you talking about? These things didn't exist when I was a kid, but me and others from my generation helped _build_ the damn system as I grew up!
Yeah, no. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can learn to use a smartphone in less than a day, and the ins and outs in a week. The kids I teach programming to who grew up with smartphones are hilariously technologically inept, not even knowing what files and folders are in the median case. The main thing the phone teaches is to mindlessly swipe or to stand there watching a video.
I’ve been leading the charge with peer parents that the new starter phone is a cell enabled smart watch rather than a smart phone. They can text; they can call; they can share location. Best of all: no social media.
My youngest kid had classmates with phones in second grade… ugh.
Unrelated story time: at my daughter’s 9th birthday party, one of her friends at the party literally tugged my shirt sleeve and asked if I could find her another activity to do because the party was boring. I explained that this was the activity for now and we’d be changing soon. Apparently this child has never been told no in their life because they whipped out a cell phone and called their mom, said the party was boring, and asked to be picked up. Their mom came and they left. I was pretty shocked.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 93.5 ms ] threadI agree, and i think we should regulate fake news, manipulation, propaganda, etc. But it’s rather difficult as there is the risk of censorship and there is too much corruption allowing corporations to do as they please.
Therefore the only two options are either complete blackout - as we do with other sensitive topics - and good parenting. But how do you achieve good parenting since kids are raised by the state? Parents barely spend any time with their children, at least in most of the west, and there’s little control over what they do. In the uk massive numbers of kids are hooked onto people like andrew tate and other toxic popular figures. Those children will grow aggressive and sexist. Corruption allows tik tok to reign unhinged and teachers are helpless and in some cases clueless. Therefore the only option is to make it law that smart phones are banned for children. The risk is simply too high for individuals and the society at large.
You can somewhat make it what you want it to be by restricting apps, but you can't restrict the content of the apps to have safe or non addictive content (is there such a thing as dynamic non-addictive content at all?).
Doesn’t the state already have enough power over us, and over our kids?
Critical mass is the biggest issue/driver here, and you as an individual don't have the power to impact that.
While it's great for a child to have it in an emergency, these days phones are more likely to be used as a constant stream of TikTok, Reels, or YouTube shorts by children.
You are legally responsible for your child until they are 18. There is a universe of difference between not trusting your children vs taking reasonable steps to ensure their safety by knowing their location when necessary.
Parents have a legal right and obligation to know where their kids are. The technology used to achieve it is a mere implementation detail.
Also, technically, any adult who owns a smartphone has already consented to be permanently location tracked by their carrier and various entities that can buy location data from your carrier legally.
/s
The obvious question is "what did we do before?" I'm not sure how tracking stops serious mistakes; maybe it resolves them after the fact, suggesting that tracking their phone is not going to help parenting and you need another approach?
And yes, I do have kids of my own ranging from pre-phone to a brand new driver, so I get your motivation.
Agreed, and it's our job as parents to sheppard them. Handing them a skinner box and plonking them into the world doesn't solve that problem. And tracking then 24/7 isn't likely to help. Kids have been finding ways to get around their parents knowing what they're doing throughout all of humanity, and smartphones won't (and haven't) changed that.
I really really wanted to delay them getting a smart phone as long as possible, but when all the other kids have one it's so fucking hard. We held up for a while but the tantrums and crying wore us down.
One of the joys of parenting is knowing what the right thing to do is and then failing to see it through.
Yes, we caved but held out as long as we could. She's turned out to be an awesome young adult and seems to have come out of teen-land unscathed.
My point was that broadly speaking, maturity should be a key factor in _anything_ for the individual child. Some kids can be trusted to ride a motorbike across a propertly at 9. Some shouldn't have a smartphone until 17. Some can fly across the country unaccompanied at 12.
I agree on the maturity factor, but society has gotten weird on allowing that to happen.
And then the argument becomes "when I was young, we didn't have phones, and we still found our way home." Which to me feels a bit like "I never wore a bike helmet, and I was fine." Not entirely the same argument, but along the same lines. Sometimes new technology helps us do things better than it was done in the past. Back in the day, we couldn't keep touch with our spouses throughout the day at work or especially while traveling. Now we can, and in my opinion, that's largely an improvement over what we had in the past.
Sure, some parents use it poorly to track and interrogate their kids about their location 24/7. But just because I track my kids does not mean I am spying on them or "getting them used to a surveillance state" like some arguments I have seen here.
As someone else wrote, a smartwatch may be a reasonable compromise.
Control will not keep them safe, and is in fact counter-productive. The more you control, the less responsibility and trust you give, the less of that, the more prone to catastrophic mistakes.
I think framing the problem as "smartphones are bad" isn't as easy or effective as "certain categories of apps are bad".
One practical way to implement / enforce something like this could be similar to the movie rating system in the US: G, PG, PG-13, R, etc. "R" rated movies ban kids < 6 completely, but allow kids 7 and older to see the movie if accompanied by an adult.
Similarly, companies could sell versions of their smartphone that have parental controls enforced by default, with all app categories disabled by default, so that parents have to explicitly opt-in to the features and apps they allow kids to use.
I don't use social media (other than HN, if you will), but I have dozens of friends with kids that are unable to detach from their phones, even for a 60 minute dinner. Their kids are dozed on YouTube videos, not for the parents to have a break from work life, but instead so they themselves can doze on social media.
What a clown world. I don't have kinds, if I do have some in the future, they will not be allowed to be nowhere near a phone before they can put up an argument for it.
We should disapprove. Saying an addiction is fine because it's educational is like saying being addicted to working out is okay.
I've tried to stop a few times, but the withdrawals get so bad I end up in the hospital with doctors telling me I have to keep this addiction for the rest of my life because after using food for so long, the withdrawals would kill me at this point.
This is a real 'the medium is the message' situation here. What you're describing is possible but then the device stops being a smartphone as it is commonly understood and sold as.
A smartphone is a distraction device designed to keep you engaged as long as possible so that someone can make money by shoving ads in your face. That's what it's for. Everything else is secondary.
If you changed that it wouldn't be a smartphone.
Most of the research I’ve seen suggests pretty clearly that it’s social media, and it affects girls more than boys. (And, yes, the effect appears to be causal—see [1] for a summary with citations.) The hard part is that the research also shows that the correct amount isn’t 0, it’s just that above a certain amount is really, really bad.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
I'm hooked as an adult and can already see that i've become addicted to superficiality but the battle is getting increasingly harder as tech hooks deeper and deeper into our neurology.
There was a wave of books 10 years ago, "The end of absence" one them, exploring the themes of being the last generation to have experienced both before and the after 24/7 media consumption.
In one way it's echoing historical cycles like Thoreau talking about noisy trains in the distance distracting his poetry from his wood cabin in 1854 - but in other ways the distraction has become so exponential i seriously fear a generation will have problems with concentration, imagination or autonomy of thought.
Will they learn the beauty of solitude, that you often need some amount of boredom or tranquility for fantasy to arise, and that as in meditation the exploration of internal states can be key to a good and interesting life.
I'm reminded of a video game i once played about the native american ritual called Vision Quest where one isolates himself in a dark cabin - and as a lack of inputs creates vivid imagination like in a floatation tank - one finds his purpose eventually.
Not much different than religious sabbath or sitting meditation. To get something beautiful you have to remove noise.
I've become better at it and is always reminded of the quiet summers when i was a child, the beautiful boredom and fantasy of "some part of my life that happened a long time ago", or running around without a cellphone, just being completely present and "away" from others in good and healthy sense like a rite de passage.
When i see nieces in family everyone under the age of 20 is always inside of cyberspace, never present in the here and now, and while being hypersocial is normal for a teen, it's to an extreme degree for everyone including the smallest ones.
The real world for kids is awful, too. They are constantly bored and there is no place to just go and play because the real world was not built for dreaming and play, but for commerce and every square inch of the planet needs to be either a parking lot or a business. And that's even if they could go places, but they can't because everything is a car ride away and they can't drive. They can't even get on a bicycle and go exploring because one of their miserable nosey neighbors will call the police or Child Protective Services if they see an unaccompanied kid roaming around. From the moment they enter school, they're told that the world is coming to an end due to climate change, and they're all gonna die.
And the world is awful for young adults/old teenagers. There are almost no jobs available that pay even close to what it would take to barely move out of their parents' basements. They know that they will never own a home, nor have any kind of financial security, and that the world is deliberately set up to allow a handful of people to sponge up everything, so why even bother? And if they do manage to get a job that lets them barely pay rent, they had to move to an unfamiliar, lonely city to take the job, leaving all their friends behind.
It's no wonder everyone is addicted to their phones and the fantasy worlds of games and social media. The real world is pretty awful for a lot of people.
Does this reflect your actual life experiences or an invention? Because a lot of htis sounds like made-up whingeing.
> The real world for kids is awful, too. They are constantly bored and there is no place to just go and play ...
We can discuss the merits child boredom vs. child abuse if you wish because I can certainly do that. Your all-stations broadcast of failure and despair is boring. Stop it.
I hope I’m communicating this clearly, I’m not advocating for any political side, or “think of the children“ moralizing, nor do I have a practical plan to offer. I’m just depressed with how bad kids have it and how few adults really care.
Full stop, I don't want anything manipulating my child's attention. Because as I'm getting older, I'm realizing that the most powerful tool you have as a human being is your ability to focus on a task and see it through to completion. Digital media of any kind has a perverse effect on that ability.
Parents of the 50's were too simplistic with their mistrust of televisions, but they had the right intuition. Digital screens are avatars for daydreams, and to dream too often is to drain your life of its most precious resource - time.
“To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
Our devices are a 24/7 anti-unborable medication. They’re other things too, which is what makes them especially challenging to get rid of.
There is a balance, of course. We can't just laze around all day for both psychological and survival reasons.
In the end, though, time spent enjoying yourself is rarely a waste.
Time spent enjoying yourself is frequently a waste — not because enjoyment is bad or immoral, but because there are so many easily attainable and shallow pleasures available today. Many of the richest pleasures in life sit on the other side of intense bouts of boredom or tedium or even pain.
I've lost all hope here for one reason:
Your kids friends parents don't care because they are all addicted to their phones and ignoring their kids
It's not even like "choose better friends." Unless your kids are literally in friend groups where all of the parents choose to restrict phones and change their entire lifestyle compared to their peers you're in a losing battle with the broader culture.
The only thing I feel I can do is create such a trusting relationship with my kids that they will come to me with anything that we have discussed is problematic. So far so good and we've been able to catch things that would have been a bigger deal without such a trusting relationship
It's always been hard to be a good parent.
For every parent who is going “no screens until age XYZ” there’s ten others who just need to get something done around the house and have their children leave them alone or stop breaking shit for 10 minutes.
Your strategy is the right one. The parent should be the trusted confidante.
It is unconscionable the pervasiveness to which parents literally stick a device in front of their kids for their own benefit. I get it, life is hard and kids are a lot of work.
Your work or friends or instagram or whatever, is infinitely less important than building a healthy engaged relationship with your children. You're harming them and they are losing out on the vanishingly small amount of time you have to give them the focus, attention and attachment that is REQUIRED to create a healthy person and these are things only a parent (or adoptive parent) can give.
My daughter gets to choose what she does on her tablet, and it has educational games.
She gets to choose when she watches.
I decide how much total screen time, < 1hr per day total, and 50% of the time she will choose to watch something with me after dinner on the big TV rather than use it during snack time.
We have a trusting relationship with our kid too, and accept that he's going to do many things we disallow in our household, outside the house. It's working out pretty well, I think.
There was a similar unquestioned presumption at his school that he would have a phone by now. I asked reasonable questions, and that presumption is no longer present.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobi...
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Are mobile phone ownership and age of acquisition associated with child adjustment? A 5-year prospective study among low-income Latinx children
“Findings suggest an absence of meaningful links from mobile phone ownership and acquisition age to child adjustment.”
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13851
Will they develop the skills to really master complex technologies for big fancy jobs? No, but then neither is the kid playing Candy Crush for 8 hours a day.
My youngest kid had classmates with phones in second grade… ugh.
Unrelated story time: at my daughter’s 9th birthday party, one of her friends at the party literally tugged my shirt sleeve and asked if I could find her another activity to do because the party was boring. I explained that this was the activity for now and we’d be changing soon. Apparently this child has never been told no in their life because they whipped out a cell phone and called their mom, said the party was boring, and asked to be picked up. Their mom came and they left. I was pretty shocked.