Why does everything have to always be so goddamn black and white always? “Smartphones bad, let’s ban them for kids”. Why not have smartphones with parental regulation?
Why not if you’re a parent who thinks smartphones are bad, don’t give one to your kid? No reason for a law here.
What? You mean actually be a responsible parent?
Don’t be silly.
Seriously. Why even have a government unless they are telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, and parents what they can and cannot do, share with, or read to their children?
Parent here, raising kids without smartphones until they’re at least in high school.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
Older millennial here who didn’t get a (dumb) phone until high school, so I have no idea what the state is with kids and phones nowadays. Are they pressured by friends/school to have smart phones? How do you help them manage/cope?
My personal experience as a university student who had to use a flip phone for like a month while waiting for a replacement screen to arrive for the main phone, which is quite similar to what would have probably happened 10 years ago when I was still in school.
Everyone kinda expects you to just have one, for example, nobody uses the actual calling or SMS functions, they use chat apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, or discord. Most of the people that I talk to in the university, I wouldn’t even be able to contact without the apps, since I don’t actually know their phone numbers or e-mails
Thats one thing America has going for it. Texting is still a thing here
There are different challenges in early and late childhood. Things like peer pressure are a much bigger issue during late childhood.
In early childhood the kid wants the entertainment and it’s incumbent upon the parent to deny them that and provide more enriching activities that have fewer strings attached.
Yes. It’s how they communicate via social media and watch Tiktok. Also, the better the iphone you have, the cooler you are.
I’m amazed this is even controversial. My parents didn’t get me my first cellphone until I was in the 8th grade, and it was a flip phone. I didn’t get my first smartphone until the 10th grade, and it was a Blackberry. My first Android wasn’t until I was almost finished highschool. And I turned out just fine.
The only reason it’s controversial is because parents do not take responsibility for their children.
It seems like the big hangups are parents unwilling to face social backlash (“but all the other kids have phones”) and parents trying to justify their lack of effort with their kids (setting a device in front of the kid to shut them up). Ironically these two groups are willing to throw all the effort they don’t put into raising their children into defending their bad behavior.
There’s an all or nothing problem here.
It’s actually a good way to ostracize your child by making them be the only one without a phone.
But that’s also legislating how everyone should raise their kids based on how you want to raise yours.
Only if the law passes, which in theory means it has majority support. All laws legislate against the minority opinion.
True, but that all exists on a spectrum, and a law which prohibits all children from using a device because you don’t want your kid using that device and they’ll get bullied if they’re the only one, seems a little excessive. Might as well ban expensive sneakers or shiny pokemon cards too.
The root of the issue is parents controlling how much their child uses a device, and you just cannot legislate that away. Even if it was 100% illegal, you think parents wouldn’t let kids use the devices in their home if it made things easier? “Just ban it” never works, you need to incentivize alternate behavior.
Laws can allow exceptions and protect minorities. Laws are not always black and white, just like most of reality.
That wasn’t what I was saying
I think the government should be going after service providers and advertiser’s that knowing and deliberately target children with content that isn’t curated by a suitable authority for the children’s age group.
Previously we had librarians and TV channels to regulate children’s media. Responsible people making reasonable judgements about the content a child should be targeted with.
That isn’t the case anymore. Social media allows people and organisations direct access to children with no accountable authority in-between. Children are watching content that the child knows they shouldn’t be watching. The producer and the service provider also knows this too. So children will place concert effort to avoid it being detected.
They all know that they are making content for children. Even when they’re making content that the know isn’t suitable for them. The people behind prime energy drink wanted to sell alcoholic drinks. They revealed in a podcast they didn’t because they knew there was no market for it as their audience was far too young. Despite this they continue to make content that uses frequently sexual and violent humour. They also use and play with racism and sexism in their content.
Regulate the market and the problem will dwindle away. Their is entire businesses set up to pray on the attention of children.
Exactly. Some parts of my country are banning social media for kids without parental approval, which means they need to verify that I am an adult and my kid is not. That’s a privacy violation imo, and I will use a VPN to get around it if needed.
I’m capable of monitoring what my kid has access to, and I’m capable of building trust with them so they don’t feel the need to go behind my back. Laws like this don’t allow for trust since the government is the one making the decisions, not the kids.
I’m not giving my kids a smartphone (except maybe a loaner phone here and there) until they prove to be they can be responsible, or they actually need one. I have a 10yo, and he’s definitely not getting one yet.
The majority of people don’t understand the harms of social media even while living through them. That said social media is the majority of the problem, so just give us the ability to lock it down for our kids and that would work for me. Plenty of other good uses for smartphones.
You can already put parental restrictions on a smartphone
These parents are lazy
Or bring back flip phones. Calling and texting but does basically nothing else.
They still exist! Most of them are designed to be extra durable too, perfect for kids.
I’m considering a Linux phone, like the Pinephone. I use Linux at home, so I’m comfortable locking it down to only have what I trust them to use. It looks like a regular smartphone, has terrible battery life (so limited late night time wasting), and most Android apps don’t work anyway, but it makes calls and texts just fine. I may even just not get a data plan at all.
Hopefully they’ll think it’s cool since it’ll be able to run a Minecraft server and whatnot.
Pinephone owner here. The pinephone is not meant to be, not is it suitable for being, a phone you actually use. It’s a developer device.
As you say, the battery life is dreadful. If I actually do anything on it, it lasts maybe an hour and a half with the screen on, maybe up to six with it off.
It is slow. And I don’t mean omg it can’t multitask or play mobile games slow, I mean sometimes you type and it takes a while to appear on the screen slow.
Call quality is abysmal if you even manage to get calls to come through.
I love the pinephone as a project, and the software has improved a huge amount. But it’s not really suitable day to day.
Yeah, that’s why I’ve never pulled the trigger. I’m interested in the PPP, but reports say that battery life sucks and the camera doesn’t work. I’m honestly okay with the camera not working, but I need it to last most of the day.
I’m a developer, and I’d love to hack on it, but I need the phone to be usable as a daily driver first. For me that means: reliable MMS, good call quality, decent speakers, and all day battery life. I only need a couple Android apps, and even those may be negotiable (could carry a second phone to work if necessary). I can contribute to the rest of the nice to haves.
But the OG PP may be good enough for an emergency phone. Maybe. And it’s cheap enough to take a chance on it.
Laughs in Android flip phone
because parents are not regulating this. Its why we have minimum driving ages because parents cant just make their kid do the right thing.
Cars don’t have a feature called “parental control”. Smartphones do.
Smartphones are great. Apps are user-hostile malware. Online spaces are, in the majority, traps. If every time you drove downtown you ended up in a corporate police state designed to play you and your friends off each other and make you all miserable so you look at more advertisements for shampoo, you would conclude that getting in the car is bad for you.
man? thats really well put. kudos.
would you mind if I screenshot’d your post to share with people or possibly post on bluesky
Sure
youre gonna be FUCKING famous dude
Trying to legislate this is…fucking stupid.
You don’t want your kids to have a smartphone? Fine. Don’t buy one. Kids dont need phones, bur if you’re worried about them being able to contact you, just get a dumbphone on amazon.
Or a smart phone and just lock everything you don’t want them to use out.
I don’t think I like it, but there is an argument that kids without phones will be ostracized, or students will be expected to have access to phones in school, etc.
I know even in like 2012 or so some high school classes were expecting students to have phones for quick research and such. I wouldn’t be surprised if that type of thing was moving into lower grades
Parents are concerned that providing their children with a smartphone will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.
These same parents will also just shove a smartphone or a tablet in front of their kids faces to shut them up for a while.
Probably mostly not the same ones. Unless they just hate their children.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a device that blocked all social media, but was filled with educational, and age appropriate, apps for a child. I don’t think playing Math Blaster ruined my childhood. Super Mario Brothers didn’t give me any life skills, other than improving hand-eye coordination. Neither one ruined my life, though.
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You shouldn’t need a law, but the reality is that you simply can not control it. Your kid will interact with other kids and most will have access to a smart phone.
There absolutely needs to be a law of some kind
How about we create some data and privacy laws that benefit everyone and this will benefit now and for their whole life.
Yeah, that would be nice too, but do you honestly see that happening either? I don’t. And for that Matter: there are more problems with children having unlimited access to media through irresponsible parents than just data and privacy not being respected.
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Should we remove gambling and drug access restrictions for youths? After all, parents can just parent around it.
Like all things, there’s moderation to consider. It’s fine to debate if this is too far, but to simple blame parents for being lazy or unwilling to parent is short sided.
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Why are you all so fucking aggressive? How fuck it’s annoying me to the point to not even wanting to participate at all. How about some civility? Can you imagine how a nice discussion there could be? Ffs
I know I can limit what my child might see on their phone, but there are other children and other phones and you just can’t regulate like you want to.
Internet safety would be one concern but not all. It’s not that simple like you make it out to be.
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Yeah, well, sorry. I was annoyed by people being unreasonable and either jumping to conclusions or not really interested in a constructive discussion. What’s the point in trying to have a discussion if there is nobody really trying?
I’ll just leave it at that.
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If they don’t create a new law then how will these parents impose their parenting on other families?
The question then would be if it might cause other problems. A lot of places are moving to e-learning, for example, and might expect the students to have internet access of some form or other.
Whether that be in the form of smartphone apps/websites, or through a laptop that the school provides, at which point, it’s basically the same thing, especially if peer pressure puts them on social media or some such.
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Honestly I would appreciate if they banned phone manufacturers from forcing Facebook, X, and other bullshit onto your phone. Making people go out and get it is one of the many intended barriers.
Also OEMs should not be succumbed by Google. Punkt has already introduced MC02 with option to install Google services.
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No, children deserve to be able to fact check their parent’s biased narrative, too.
It’s a conservative mindset to demand you get to monopolize the information your child receives until they’re 18.
Many children are being radicalised by online content, like the criminal Andrew Tate becoming popular among teenagers.
Most people aren’t fact checking anything online. They are far more likely to start believing conspiracy theories or outright false narratives.
There’s no cure all solution. I consider homeschooled children taught to live their lives by regressive religious texts to be just as broken as the cult of Tate.
If any intervention will still yield roughly equivalent mixed results, I always err on the side of more access to information. A child can gravitate to Andrew Tate’s toxicity, or they can look up facts about the confederacy their parents told them fought for “states rights and freedumb!”
In a perfect world, loving parents should be available to provide opinions and context, but I’d rather that child have the opportunity to seek out a rational, benevolent path if the parents attempt to indoctrinate them to their worldview with no other options.
The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that get mad at the schools for teaching children that genitals exist, the universe is billions of years old, and their country wasn’t always perfect, stuff they need to know for life whether their parents like it or not.
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
i agree that parents should not have a monopoly over the information that their children get, but i think that well-educated school teachers are a better solution to this than the internet. (although this would require the US to put some kind of emphasis on improving its education system, so it’s probably unlikely)
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
Critical thinking and reasoning must be taught, and in the US largely doesn’t until the college level unfortunately. Many adults, many parents have no logical reasoning faculties and never will. Some are very proud of this, declaring the whims and opinions that pop into their heads “common sense.” I refer you to my fellow Americans who see salvation in a slumlord game show host nepo baby. There’s a reason humanity spent 180+ thousand years wandering in the dirt before stumbling upon a less brutal way to live 10-20 thousand years ago.
Again, some like myself may seek out such information if they are starved of it at home, if they have access. If anything, getting multiple conflicting opinions tends to make a new mind seek out ways to parse the true from the false, and that chance is better than no chance at all.
There’s some of that too.
My policy is to always answer every question my kids have, ideally with some reputable online source. It’s not “because I said so,” but more “let’s find out together.”
But I’m also not going to be giving my kids a smartphone or allowing them to use social media until they prove to me that they’re responsible. I want them to learn how to fact check misinformation, call out bullying, and demonstrate empathy over a text medium (so they don’t become bullies). If they’re mature enough to show that, I’ll slowly introduce things to them.
That said, I’m convinced social media can have a huge negative impact on mental health. Lack of access has an impact too, so it’s important to help them establish boundaries. I’m not going to be monitoring what they do (that’s a privacy violation), but I will be slowly loosening what services I allow them to access on family devices.
Thats how parenting works. Kids dont fact check, they dont know how to. Everyone has a biased narritive and will pass it off to their kids, thats not an issue.
My family doesn’t get smartphones until age 12. That seems to work well
I’m probably going to make it a rule that my kids don’t get them until 15. I’m 28 and have definitely been ruined by smartphones. My attention span is shit and motivation is hard to maintain when the internet is just right there.
I wish there was a device that only did the bare minimum of email, phone, texting, navigation, and music.
Minimalist productivity-first Android launchers might be what you’re looking for.
Those exist, there are a few products intended to provide that minimalist experience.
I remember getting mine at like 15.
Dumbphones still exist. The only reason a child needs a phone is to place a call during an emergency, so as far as I’m concerned, they should get them whenever they can be trusted not to use them in class.
I didn’t use mine in class because it wasn’t allowed and teachers would take it away if I did. Is that not a thing anymore? Or maybe just a german thing in the first place.
That being said, don’t need a smartphone to play games in class. I was a god at snake on my graphing calculator…
No, it isn’t universal. Teachers here quit trying basically as soon as smartphones became common.
For me it is equal parts paying attention in class, developing attention spans away from
video cracktiktok/shorts/whatever, and generally encouraging them to do other things.
The post in February triggered a tidal wave of reaction from parents similarly gripped by anxiety about providing their children with a device they fear will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.
Can you imagine having to teach your kids about these risks, help them to deal with them and prepare them for adulthood?
That would be so much work.
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To be fair, the smartphone market kinda sucks. There’s not a great way to limit what the device can do without setting up privacy-violating controls.
So I’m looking into Linux phones like the Pinephone so I can completely remove access to certain features. I’ll probably start with disabling WiFi and data (except access to the carrier for calls and texts), then slowly open things up from there. That way I don’t need to monitor what they’re doing, since I know the boundaries I’ve set, and I can loosen it up slowly as they earn my trust.
In the meantime, they can still access the Internet and whatnot on family owned devices, but only during times my wife and I set. That, too, will be loosened as they earn trust. I’m mostly concerned about time spent, not what they end up actually doing.
no matter what you tell your kid, if left unrestricted they will end up on some bad places. Its just a fact
The school I work at is implementing this starting next week.
Except it’s a music school so they can use metronome apps. Also, they can use it to send emails to the copy room to print music sheets. Or to use in class when it’s required. Or for whatever exception they can think of. And they actually expect us to enforce it with all these exceptions.
Yeah, I’m sure it will work /s
I guess it would be too much to get a set of metronomes eh.
No, it’s “better” to source materials for education from the students themselves. In the US, good luck learning if you don’t have the mandated school supplies. I’m sure if we didn’t need the state-sponsored daycare so adults can work, the administration would rather have all students be virtual.
[US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt] links the rise of the “phone-based childhood”, continual supervision by adults and the loss of “free play” to spikes in mental illness in young people.
So phones are one out of three of the cited problems, but the only one they’re doing anything about. These poor kids are going to have to deal with helicopter parents and no free time with one less form of escape. Something tells me that’ll make it worse.
Who is ‘they’?
You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.
How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?
Dr. Thaddeus Q. They, clearly
This will definitely work.
Can you imagine caring about children’s well development? Gross
Typical knife kill people - knife bad - ban knife nonsense
Truly some of the legislation of all time
My childhood was before smartphones but when the Internet already existed.
In my preteen and teen years, the Internet was more or less my only escape from my horrible offline life. I envy today’s kids that they can access it everywhere.
Everyone who wants to take that possibility away from any children, go have sexual intercourse with yourself.
