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Comment by EternalFury | Hacker News Reader

My kids are phone drones. I failed to prevent it. I’ll never forgive myself.

That's heavy. If you're willing to share, I'm curious to hear more. Like when did you have kids, when did they get their hands on phones, how did it progress?

My own kids are still too young for this to be an issue, and I'm encouraged to see more and more collective action to delay or restrict smartphones and social media, so I feel like we have a chance. I've said before that people who had kids 5-10 years before me (say, 2005-2010) seem to have suffered the worst of it, totally caught off guard by the smartphone and social media boom.

Your estimate is dead on. My first was born in 2005 and my second in 2009. Social media and the early sexualization it brought were a problem for sure. But pretty much every interaction with these devices is messing with dopamine regulation.

Interesting. Thinking more now about why I picked 2005, I'm trying to decide if someone with a kid born in 2000 fared any better. I suppose that those kids were already teenagers when smartphones reached 50% market penetration, and giving smartphones to kids became normalized, and the "pivot to video" happened (really turning "social networks" into "social media" in my mind). I'm not sure if that was better or worse for them.

It's fixable, it's not a lost cause. Question is, are you and partner phone drones yourselves?

Not at all at first. More and more since the pandemic.

You have two options; a) pivot to a new product or b) just ditch them and start over fresh.

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