No, it is protecting them from 100's of PhDs spending their days optimizing their apps/websites for addiction[0].

This what I explain to our kids and they understand it very well.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39987490

IMO the problem with that argument is similar to the problem with arguing stopping the kids from touching a whirling sawblade is overprotective - you can let them learn that way, but there is a nontrivial chance they will suffer extreme lasting harm before learning their mistake, so the calculus becomes avoiding the cases where the probability of irrevocable harm is significant.

I'm all in favor of letting kids make mistakes rather than trying to stop them from doing everything, and that past a certain point, your attempts to filter what they consume are doomed in most environments.

But to the best of my ability to judge, not exposing children to unfiltered 0-friction instant gratification for some number of years is going to be somewhat practically necessary to allow them to develop enough experience with longer-term reward seeking to make such decisions based on actual information about the rewards versus just picking the easy button every time.

Otherwise, we've all seen the portrayals for many centuries before cell phones of what happens when you have people who have never had to do long-term planning for significant rewards, and are bored of the lack of texture in just taking the easy hit every time. Cell phones have just commoditized failing the marshmellow experiment.

Everyone’s definition of overprotective parenting is different. But we do know the harms of smartphones. Many of us have decided to curb it as much as we can, just as we want to mitigate pre-adult drinking and marijuana consumption (or at least demonstrate an environment that produces the least harms).

For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.

Where is the boundary between appropriately protective parenting and overprotective parenting?