This solves the problem of kids being ostracized because their parents limited their screen time or didn't buy them a phone until they were too old.
As I read it it's not about transforming kids into luddite. I don't see where it's explained that, say, a 10 years old cannot play Fortnite at home or that a 8 y/o cannot play Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch.
It's specifically about preventing kids from wasting their lives on that inferior piece of mediocre turd that a smartphone is.
They can technically install another app and add random people as contacts, but it would be very hard to do that without our knowledge.
TBH this tackles some of the worst attention traps for kids, but I consider screen time in general for kids as huge waste of time and their life, it doesn't matter how big screen is. Of course there is educational purpose, but it may not be easy keeping the device purely to that.
Life is about completely different things, if kids won't learn that early, they will face many struggles later. They can waste their life in front of their screens once they reach adulthood as much as they like, lets not mess them up even beforehand.
We don't build computers to be used socially. I've seen... demos? Someone makes a table with touch input recognizing the entire space and installs an app that encourages collaborative investigation. This is a far cry from an app. If I were to go through a list of all tech developments in the last 10 years, I can't imagine more than 2 or 3 that did something to improve IO-level collaboration. We have LOTS of collaboration software, but none of it is on the human-interface level. You start with everyone having their own device.
Big screens are good IMO. The bigger the better, take the entire wall. One room should have 1 screen. It should be so big and unignorable that people stop taking the personal screen they carry in their pocket.
I know all the shows that my other family members watch. I don't love 'em, but I can have a conversation about a character (and we do!). On the other hand, I have no accurate sense what TikToks they watch. Yet, those TikTocks have been dramatically more impactful of people's views on various subjects from politics, to cleaning, to finance, to mental health. But there's no opportunity to say "hey, that's false".
I would however encourage laptops and desktops which require them to be offline periodically when they venture into the real world.
Citizens looked around and saw a vacuum of righteous leadership on this issue. Notice that it always takes a leader (the principal in this case) and then people who actively and vocally follow (the health minister) to allow the social space for Laura Bourne to feel like they aren’t alone in doing the right thing.
This process is exactly what we need to be doing for all things. Everyone needs to be involved and yes it takes time and effort.
> Stanford Medicine researchers did not find a connection between the age children acquired their first cell phone and their sleep patterns, depression symptoms or grades.
Once a child of that age has a smartphone, they pretty much have _unfettered_ access to everything the internet has, or they will quickly find a way to. It only takes one peer (e.g. with older brothers) to turn the whole barrel rotten.
As a parent already coming under pressure with an 11 year old, I'm not going to just blindly trust that one Stanford study, and instead listen to fellow parents, their experience and ideas, and above all wait for as long as possible before bowing to the inevitable.
https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/youth-mental-h...
Or having digital drugs is the future now and healthy is the thing of the past?
I’d argue that the analogy to drugs here is really an analogy to addiction, and there’s no magic involved in addiction: just exploitation of reward pathways leading to maladaptive behaviors.
And we don’t see an increasing percentage of people walking across busy and dangerous intersections, driving on highways at high speed, walking through dangerous neighborhoods, etc. while looking down at a deck of cards, oblivious to the world around them.