Parents are teaming up to delay their children's first cell phone
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.