Why does everything have to always be so goddamn black and white always? "Smartphones bad, let's ban them for kids". Why not have smartphones with parental regulation?
Why not if you're a parent who thinks smartphones are bad, don't give one to your kid? No reason for a law here.
There’s an all or nothing problem here.
It’s actually a good way to ostracize your child by making them be the only one without a phone.
But that's also legislating how everyone should raise their kids based on how you want to raise yours.
I think the government should be going after service providers and advertiser's that knowing and deliberately target children with content that isn't curated by a suitable authority for the children's age group.
Previously we had librarians and TV channels to regulate children's media. Responsible people making reasonable judgements about the content a child should be targeted with.
That isn't the case anymore. Social media allows people and organisations direct access to children with no accountable authority in-between. Children are watching content that the child knows they shouldn't be watching. The producer and the service provider also knows this too. So children will place concert effort to avoid it being detected.
They all know that they are making content for children. Even when they're making content that the know isn't suitable for them. The people behind prime energy drink wanted to sell alcoholic drinks. They revealed in a podcast they didn't because they knew there was no market for it as their audience was far too young. Despite this they continue to make content that uses frequently sexual and violent humour. They also use and play with racism and sexism in their content.
Regulate the market and the problem will dwindle away. Their is entire businesses set up to pray on the attention of children.
Exactly. Some parts of my country are banning social media for kids without parental approval, which means they need to verify that I am an adult and my kid is not. That's a privacy violation imo, and I will use a VPN to get around it if needed.
I'm capable of monitoring what my kid has access to, and I'm capable of building trust with them so they don't feel the need to go behind my back. Laws like this don't allow for trust since the government is the one making the decisions, not the kids.
I'm not giving my kids a smartphone (except maybe a loaner phone here and there) until they prove to be they can be responsible, or they actually need one. I have a 10yo, and he's definitely not getting one yet.
These parents are lazy
Or bring back flip phones. Calling and texting but does basically nothing else.
They still exist! Most of them are designed to be extra durable too, perfect for kids.
I'm considering a Linux phone, like the Pinephone. I use Linux at home, so I'm comfortable locking it down to only have what I trust them to use. It looks like a regular smartphone, has terrible battery life (so limited late night time wasting), and most Android apps don't work anyway, but it makes calls and texts just fine. I may even just not get a data plan at all.
Hopefully they'll think it's cool since it'll be able to run a Minecraft server and whatnot.
Smartphones are great. Apps are user-hostile malware. Online spaces are, in the majority, traps. If every time you drove downtown you ended up in a corporate police state designed to play you and your friends off each other and make you all miserable so you look at more advertisements for shampoo, you would conclude that getting in the car is bad for you.
man? thats really well put. kudos.
would you mind if I screenshot'd your post to share with people or possibly post on bluesky
Sure
youre gonna be FUCKING famous dude
Trying to legislate this is...fucking stupid.
You don't want your kids to have a smartphone? Fine. Don't buy one. Kids dont need phones, bur if you're worried about them being able to contact you, just get a dumbphone on amazon.
Or a smart phone and just lock everything you don't want them to use out.
It’s not that simple. It just isn’t.
As a parent you’re in a constant balancing act between disconnecting from your teenager while also trying to provide guard rails to aid their maturity and growth. If you lose a battle in an area, their friends (and the wider world, because remember they have a phone) are more than happy to help raise them.
It’s always a compromise. You can stand your ground hard on area and that’s another shard of their life that you don’t have influence on and won’t hear about. Every channel between you and your kids have to be balanced between guidance and enforcement.
You dont need a law for this. If you dont want your kid to use or have a smartphone then dont buy them one.
If they don't create a new law then how will these parents impose their parenting on other families?
Honestly I would appreciate if they banned phone manufacturers from forcing Facebook, X, and other bullshit onto your phone. Making people go out and get it is one of the many intended barriers.
The question then would be if it might cause other problems. A lot of places are moving to e-learning, for example, and might expect the students to have internet access of some form or other.
Whether that be in the form of smartphone apps/websites, or through a laptop that the school provides, at which point, it's basically the same thing, especially if peer pressure puts them on social media or some such.
As I said in another comment if the parents are the ones to buy it then they can put heavy parental controls on the phones or tablets.
I use a work provided cellphone while I'm on my job site and they have that fucker so locked down I can't even change the auto lock timing so I know you can lock tons of things with passwords on phones and tablets.
Idk anything about school laptops because I'm apparently old as fuck now and that wasn't a thing when I was younger. But I would assume that they also use software to lock those down.
No, children deserve to be able to fact check their parent's biased narrative, too.
It's a conservative mindset to demand you get to monopolize the information your child receives until they're 18.
Many children are being radicalised by online content, like the criminal Andrew Tate becoming popular among teenagers.
Most people aren't fact checking anything online. They are far more likely to start believing conspiracy theories or outright false narratives.
There's no cure all solution. I consider homeschooled children taught to live their lives by regressive religious texts to be just as broken as the cult of Tate.
If any intervention will still yield roughly equivalent mixed results, I always err on the side of more access to information. A child can gravitate to Andrew Tate's toxicity, or they can look up facts about the confederacy their parents told them fought for "states rights and freedumb!"
In a perfect world, loving parents should be available to provide opinions and context, but I'd rather that child have the opportunity to seek out a rational, benevolent path if the parents attempt to indoctrinate them to their worldview with no other options.
The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that get mad at the schools for teaching children that genitals exist, the universe is billions of years old, and their country wasn't always perfect, stuff they need to know for life whether their parents like it or not.
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
i agree that parents should not have a monopoly over the information that their children get, but i think that well-educated school teachers are a better solution to this than the internet. (although this would require the US to put some kind of emphasis on improving its education system, so it’s probably unlikely)
There's some of that too.
My policy is to always answer every question my kids have, ideally with some reputable online source. It's not "because I said so," but more "let's find out together."
But I'm also not going to be giving my kids a smartphone or allowing them to use social media until they prove to me that they're responsible. I want them to learn how to fact check misinformation, call out bullying, and demonstrate empathy over a text medium (so they don't become bullies). If they're mature enough to show that, I'll slowly introduce things to them.
That said, I'm convinced social media can have a huge negative impact on mental health. Lack of access has an impact too, so it's important to help them establish boundaries. I'm not going to be monitoring what they do (that's a privacy violation), but I will be slowly loosening what services I allow them to access on family devices.
My family doesn't get smartphones until age 12. That seems to work well
I'm probably going to make it a rule that my kids don't get them until 15. I'm 28 and have definitely been ruined by smartphones. My attention span is shit and motivation is hard to maintain when the internet is just right there.
I wish there was a device that only did the bare minimum of email, phone, texting, navigation, and music.
Minimalist productivity-first Android launchers might be what you're looking for.
I remember getting mine at like 15.
Dumbphones still exist. The only reason a child needs a phone is to place a call during an emergency, so as far as I'm concerned, they should get them whenever they can be trusted not to use them in class.
The post in February triggered a tidal wave of reaction from parents similarly gripped by anxiety about providing their children with a device they fear will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.
Can you imagine having to teach your kids about these risks, help them to deal with them and prepare them for adulthood?
That would be so much work.
To be fair, the smartphone market kinda sucks. There's not a great way to limit what the device can do without setting up privacy-violating controls.
So I'm looking into Linux phones like the Pinephone so I can completely remove access to certain features. I'll probably start with disabling WiFi and data (except access to the carrier for calls and texts), then slowly open things up from there. That way I don't need to monitor what they're doing, since I know the boundaries I've set, and I can loosen it up slowly as they earn my trust.
In the meantime, they can still access the Internet and whatnot on family owned devices, but only during times my wife and I set. That, too, will be loosened as they earn trust. I'm mostly concerned about time spent, not what they end up actually doing.
The school I work at is implementing this starting next week.
Except it's a music school so they can use metronome apps. Also, they can use it to send emails to the copy room to print music sheets. Or to use in class when it's required. Or for whatever exception they can think of. And they actually expect us to enforce it with all these exceptions.
Yeah, I'm sure it will work /s
[US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt] links the rise of the “phone-based childhood”, continual supervision by adults and the loss of “free play” to spikes in mental illness in young people.
So phones are one out of three of the cited problems, but the only one they're doing anything about. These poor kids are going to have to deal with helicopter parents and no free time with one less form of escape. Something tells me that'll make it worse.
This will definitely work.
Can you imagine caring about children's well development? Gross
iPad kids are gonna grow up to be unable to focus on anything or endure discomfort/boredom.
My childhood was before smartphones but when the Internet already existed.
In my preteen and teen years, the Internet was more or less my only escape from my horrible offline life. I envy today's kids that they can access it everywhere.
Everyone who wants to take that possibility away from any children, go have sexual intercourse with yourself.
Sounds like typical flag-shaggers, yearning for "the good old days" when there were four channels, you played in the road because the Tories took the playgrounds, etc - so they want to force it on their kids instead of accepting that the world has changed.
I’m a dad of four kids. I don’t yearn for the good old days, but I do wish social media companies were legally obliged to ensure kids are 16 before they let them into their platforms. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to conform and it affects girls in particular. Most 14 year olds aren’t in my opinion mature enough to put a phone down when it starts to become a negative influence on them.
May I ask you a direct question: Are you raising teens? If so, what are your impressions of how they use their phones (for good and bad)?
If you’ve not raised kids during this decade, is it possible you may not have seen first hand what happens?
The NHS is on fire and brits are wasting time on this shit?
Truly we are a divided and conquered species.
Almost all the solutions I read in this thread go from one extreme to the other. Here are my PERSONAL perceptions:
Taking away children's smartphones or limiting them is obviously not the solution, and if we did, in the process we would be violating multiple rights, to privacy, freedom, access to information, etc. There is no guarantee that they can be fulfilled in other ways.
But children are not responsible enough to use ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) without adult supervision!
That is simply false, the responsibility and use they make of ICT is not something that is born by magic, it depends completely on the education they receive, if you say that your children are not responsible enough to use a phone as their parent you are the main responsible. From that, start thinking about how to educate them to be more responsible, not all parents are as good as you at making sure you don't blind them.
Regarding privacy, there is a great discussion about parents and the privacy of children and adolescents, however, I will ask you some important questions.
Did you tell your parents everything? Didn't you divide school life, friends, and family? What would have happened if you had had ultra-religious or extremist parents in some way who limited your way of acting and your access to information that they did not consider part of their values? These three things have been happening for a long time.
I also read in a comment that people don't verify information. Many organizations, governmental, family, religious, etc. They don't want people to verify what they're told, but that doesn't mean we can't make our voice count to make it happen.
Another thing I read is a problem mainly in the United States (I'm not from there) and it's the iPhone, it's not worth wasting your time here, I mean bullying still strongly exists there. They need a big change in their education as the first important step in the discussion, I wish them luck.
Everything has to do with everything, and the general economic situation in the world keeps parents working instead of taking care of their children, but at the same time if we leave them the cell phone we will get worse. Taking measures on our side is not going to help, we have to generate consensus on the use of ICT.
Sorry for my English, I am learning the language and writing this text with the support of a translator, some things could not be expressed as I wanted.
EDIT: With translator, I mean google and LanguageTool.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
