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Comment by Refusing23 | Hacker News Reader

my kid has a phone that is so boring to use (only snake, texting and calling) that he has it in the bottom of his backpack and only takes it out when he needs to call me

its truly amazing and i hope to keep it this way forever. meanwhile the rest of his class mates have smartphones and stare at it from the moment they leave their home ... and i assume till it runs out of battery. they dont even watch where they're going.

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I dread the day when my daughter (who is now 3) tells me that she is a laughing stock and pariah because she misses out on every event that happens at school because she doesn’t have a smart phone/no social media. The only way to correctly do this is to outright ban kids from having smart phones and accessing social media nationwide. Being the handful that selectively buck the system is a hard road.

You’re absolutely right (I suspect some have read this as 3 year olds need phones).

But aren’t kids already banned from many places they congregate. WhatsApp, Fortnite, etc.

A ban only works if

1) significant numbers support it

2) the ban is enforced

And neither of those are likely outside of school, and in my experience are unlikely in school.

Oh yeah, to clarify, I mean when she like 10.

I believe banning kids from using smart phones is much more enforceable than individual bans on particular sites

I had a gameboy with a special cartridge loaded with roms I ordered from a strange European import site that took 3 months to arrive, and this was 2002! I played video games in every class. I was a bad student. I set a bad example.

Yet learning how to load roms on it, the firmware, the command line. My poor mother didn't know what to do with me - I was constantly late, skipping school, in detention, hanging out with burn outs. My siblings didn't do that stuff until college.

And now I'm wealthy and the most successful graduate of a 700 person class! Food for thought for the parents of "burn out" tech addicted youths...

And yet for every one "you", there are thousands of "them" who simply type out a few commands, load the firmware once, and then just play the games.

Maybe two decades ago, there was an article going around about a person who became a commercial pilot thanks to World of Warcraft (WoW improved his English through raids). That doesn't really mean that playing WoW is a good way to become a pilot though.

I suspect that in your case, even without the Gameboy, you'd end up where you are now.

I don’t know. I was always anti-authority and hated rules. I just did what I wanted. My point is there is hope for the rule breakers, and technology obsession combined with a poor school record doesn’t instantly mean someone should be written off

Sure you made it but that’s probably not the norm. Also, there are plenty of people that do a three month boot camp course late in life and end up doing well in software and tech careers. You don’t really have to be loading roms when you’re seven years old for it to work out.

I think we got very lucky that "computer know-how" happened to translate into well-above-gainful employment over the past 40 years. When my dad bought me a Commodore 64 at 11 years old, he surely didn't do it thinking that my obsession with learning about computers would carry my entire adult career into retirement. He just thought he was getting me a video game machine and it would have nothing to do with whatever I ended up doing for the rest of my life.

In a parallel universe, where computers didn't take off and become important, we'd have run-of-the-mill jobs today, and our fascination with firmware and the command line would be mere nostalgic childhood memories.

If you can, buy them a camera so they can still take snaps of their moments. Used Sony NEX-5 with a kit pancake lens will do and is very small.

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