Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
That's still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
He may not have been bullied, but he may have missed out on bonding and closeness that his peers enjoyed. There was a study that showed life is way better for kids if they don't have a phone, but only if their peers also don't have phones
This fact alone makes me conflicted about this. I don't want my kids to walk around having phones from an early age, but I know first hand that being excluded as a kid is not a enjoyable experience. And kids are vicious creatures to each other too.
Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can't imagine how it's like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent's garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today's youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can't imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there's literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can't do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to "vandalism" i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn't given us any money since 2014.
My neighborhood has the same problem. There's absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They're on the playground, they're biking on the sidewalks, they're playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they're f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I'd said, he'll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There's no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven't got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It's one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don't have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children's technology access, but I fear such groups' 'useful idiot' value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we fought valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it's a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be "cool" online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
Lol, I would've been bullied in school if I didn't have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
This, tbh. You don't get bullied for something, you get bullied because bullies want to bully.
Uncool boomers be like: "It's the damn phones", when they've created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They've created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, "It's dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I'm talking to you?"
It seriously is part 'those damn phones'.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
I'm disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires."
—Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void" and "to not feel left out" is the correct solution at least for me.
After the SORA AI reveal today I'm starting to see that luddites have a point. I don't think we'll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I've seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I've seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don't even know how to use a phone. I don't see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn't teach you what a file system even is.
The goal is to change the norm, Fernyhough said, so that when children come to the end of primary school, the class “bands together and says, ‘Let’s all delay until at least 14.’
Yeah right that's going to happen: p
They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them
Older people forget that the norm of childhood has changed. And assume that children should do the same things they did instead of learning how to moderate what they do
"Why don't kids play outside nowadays" Look out the window. What outside? How do they play there? They could go to a park, but how do they get there? They could play in the city, but would that be safe? They could go bush, but how? They could play around the neighbourhood, and then what, make a tiny bike ramp by digging and gathering a bit of dirt from a drain and then get reported and then have the council send letters to everyone living in the area to ask if they'd seen the kids and if so please say who they are and then put up signs saying that the area (ie the big drain they got the dirt from and the bit about it) may be under surveillance despite there not really being anywhere to put cameras? (that last one is a true story from where I live btw)
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don't want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren't is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
Humanity never changes, adults still think we know better what's good for young people than they themselves do. When I was a child and teenager, I hoped that this attitude would die out over the generations, seems that that isn't happening.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
