Parents are concerned that providing their children with a smartphone will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.
These same parents will also just shove a smartphone or a tablet in front of their kids faces to shut them up for a while.
Probably mostly not the same ones. Unless they just hate their children.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a device that blocked all social media, but was filled with educational, and age appropriate, apps for a child. I don’t think playing Math Blaster ruined my childhood. Super Mario Brothers didn’t give me any life skills, other than improving hand-eye coordination. Neither one ruined my life, though.
I always would advocate for an act only when needed approach, blocking kids from accessing content their peers have access to can only result in them resenting you. And to what end, at some point they are going to get online they are going to start using social media they might as well be used to it.
You are much better off talking to your kids and having an open dialogue than you are trying to hide everything away from them, because that’s an impossible task.
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.
Almost all the solutions I read in this thread go from one extreme to the other. Here 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.
Credits to your “translator”
With translator, I mean some sentences were made with help of Google translator and language tool XD
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.
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.
What? You mean actually be a responsible parent?
Don’t be silly.
Seriously. Why even have a government unless they are telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, and parents what they can and cannot do, share with, or read to their children?
Parent here, raising kids without smartphones until they’re at least in high school.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
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There are different challenges in early and late childhood. Things like peer pressure are a much bigger issue during late childhood.
In early childhood the kid wants the entertainment and it’s incumbent upon the parent to deny them that and provide more enriching activities that have fewer strings attached.
My personal experience as a university student who had to use a flip phone for like a month while waiting for a replacement screen to arrive for the main phone, which is quite similar to what would have probably happened 10 years ago when I was still in school.
Everyone kinda expects you to just have one, for example, nobody uses the actual calling or SMS functions, they use chat apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, or discord. Most of the people that I talk to in the university, I wouldn’t even be able to contact without the apps, since I don’t actually know their phone numbers or e-mails
Thats one thing America has going for it. Texting is still a thing here
Yes. It’s how they communicate via social media and watch Tiktok. Also, the better the iphone you have, the cooler you are.
I’m amazed this is even controversial. My parents didn’t get me my first cellphone until I was in the 8th grade, and it was a flip phone. I didn’t get my first smartphone until the 10th grade, and it was a Blackberry. My first Android wasn’t until I was almost finished highschool. And I turned out just fine.
The only reason it’s controversial is because parents do not take responsibility for their children.
It seems like the big hangups are parents unwilling to face social backlash (“but all the other kids have phones”) and parents trying to justify their lack of effort with their kids (setting a device in front of the kid to shut them up). Ironically these two groups are willing to throw all the effort they don’t put into raising their children into defending their bad behavior.
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.
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.
Only if the law passes, which in theory means it has majority support. All laws legislate against the minority opinion.
Laws can allow exceptions and protect minorities. Laws are not always black and white, just like most of reality.
True, but that all exists on a spectrum, and a law which prohibits all children from using a device because you don’t want your kid using that device and they’ll get bullied if they’re the only one, seems a little excessive. Might as well ban expensive sneakers or shiny pokemon cards too.
The root of the issue is parents controlling how much their child uses a device, and you just cannot legislate that away. Even if it was 100% illegal, you think parents wouldn’t let kids use the devices in their home if it made things easier? “Just ban it” never works, you need to incentivize alternate behavior.
The majority of people don’t understand the harms of social media even while living through them. That said social media is the majority of the problem, so just give us the ability to lock it down for our kids and that would work for me. Plenty of other good uses for smartphones.
Or bring back flip phones. Calling and texting but does basically nothing else.
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.
Pinephone owner here. The pinephone is not meant to be, not is it suitable for being, a phone you actually use. It’s a developer device.
As you say, the battery life is dreadful. If I actually do anything on it, it lasts maybe an hour and a half with the screen on, maybe up to six with it off.
It is slow. And I don’t mean omg it can’t multitask or play mobile games slow, I mean sometimes you type and it takes a while to appear on the screen slow.
Call quality is abysmal if you even manage to get calls to come through.
I love the pinephone as a project, and the software has improved a huge amount. But it’s not really suitable day to day.
They still exist! Most of them are designed to be extra durable too, perfect for kids.
These parents are lazy
because parents are not regulating this. Its why we have minimum driving ages because parents cant just make their kid do the right thing.
When I was a kid I was always moving around, going place. Incredibly unsafe, but nobody in my neighborhood died young at least.
The point I want to make is that I have stronger bone density as a direct result of physical activity while young, and I worry about the younger generation now who won’t have that.
Yeah same, don’t forget about reflexes. If I accidentally fall, somehow my hands would always hit the ground first
A lor of people who grew up working the fields have now osteoporosis, so that’s not exactly true.
It’s still true regardless. Bone Density has a direct correlation with physical activity, especially for the young.
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.
I don’t think I like it, but there is an argument that kids without phones will be ostracized, or students will be expected to have access to phones in school, etc.
I know even in like 2012 or so some high school classes were expecting students to have phones for quick research and such. I wouldn’t be surprised if that type of thing was moving into lower grades
The NHS is on fire and brits are wasting time on this shit?
Truly we are a divided and conquered species.
See, you’re exactly who we’re worried about kids meeting.
iPad kids are gonna grow up to be unable to focus on anything or endure discomfort/boredom.
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.
I didn’t use mine in class because it wasn’t allowed and teachers would take it away if I did. Is that not a thing anymore? Or maybe just a german thing in the first place.
That being said, don’t need a smartphone to play games in class. I was a god at snake on my graphing calculator…
No, it isn’t universal. Teachers here quit trying basically as soon as smartphones became common.
For me it is equal parts paying attention in class, developing attention spans away from
video cracktiktok/shorts/whatever, and generally encouraging them to do other things.
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
I guess it would be too much to get a set of metronomes eh.
This will definitely work.
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.
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.
Thats how parenting works. Kids dont fact check, they dont know how to. Everyone has a biased narritive and will pass it off to their kids, thats not an issue.
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 alll 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 find a benevolent path. The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that ger mad at the schools for teaching children that their genitals exist and their country wasn’t always perfect.
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)
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
Critical thinking and reasoning must be taught, and in the US largely isn’t until the college level unfortunately. Many adults, many parents have no logical reasoning faculties and never will. Some are very proud of this, declaring the whims and opinions that pop into their heads “common sense.” I refer you to my fellow Americans who see salvation in a slumlord game show host nepo baby.
Again, some like myself may seek out such information if they are starved of it at home, if they have access. If anything, getting multiple conflicting opinions tends to make a new mind seek out ways to parse the true from the false, and that chance is better than no chance at all.
[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.
Who is ‘they’?
You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.
How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?
Dr. Thaddeus Q. They, clearly
Typical knife kill people - knife bad - ban knife nonsense
Truly some of the legislation of all time
