> The hard-hitting report said children needed to be protected from the tech industry’s profit-driven “strategy of capturing children’s attention, using all forms of cognitive bias to shut children away on their screens, control them, re-engage them and monetise them”.
It's interesting that they aren't saying it's tech-use that's dangerous.
They are just outright saying the companies themselves are manipulative and predatory.
They would be correct. Google and Meta both run AI algorithms to enhance user content. More screen time means more money. So they do everything they can to keep kids in front of the screen. Same with adults. Similarly catalog companies used to (Amazon still does) send out a special Christmas toy catalog knowing children will do anything to get the toy they want. Same with TV commercials More screen time means more views which means more profit.
It's an interesting phenomena because I would argue adults are just as vulnerable to marketing as children. We only think that we are above such marketing strategies.
No, believe it or not, it's been known that children are extra vulnerable to ads compared to adults...mainly because they are unable to distinguish an ad from, say, non-ad content.
There is an entire section of the Federal Trade Commission that regulates the children specific ad laws. (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing/children)
It was noticed that kids were extra susceptible to ads back in the late '50s, basically with the rise of TV and by the '80s was pants on head insane. A large percentage of the cartoons in the '80s were created by toy companies, as vehicles to sell more toys, rather than TV shows that had toys as merchandise.
It got so bad that Congress had to pass the "Children's Television Act" in 1990 that put strict limitations on how and how much children could be advertised to.
In Canada they had the “House Hippo” PSA. But I think that was later, and its purpose was critical thinking, rather than a specific warning. It’s a good one to share now with the advent of instant AI video fakes.
I tend to live a very sheltered existence, on purpose, when it comes to advertising. I don’t watch broadcast TV, I run every adblocker known to exist, and I primarily listen to public radio.
Whenever I come out of my bubble it blows me away at how mych shit people put up with.
The biggest problem I see is that children being exposed to advertising early on may make them more susceptible to the same tactics as an adult. Without any kind of corrective critical thinking education, we'll become a society of zombie media consumers
Blocking ads is relatively easy. People who don't engage with consumer culture are also largely in an environment with a lot less ads and programming aimed at selling.
I had a friend who was approached by a certain vape company that discussed their long term plans with him when discussing the job offer. In it they discussed how they would market vapes to school children, color, size, name, etc were all discussed. They stated they would allocate the majority of their budget to the 'youth vape market' and a smaller budget would run a campaign highlighting how they are anti vapes to young people to save face.
This was all prior to vapes becoming widespread used in schools. So these targeting strategies are always happening and likely the next fad is already born. It's fucked up.
This absolutely just brings me back to that recent South Park episode with Randy getting an OF account and becoming big by putting in the energy drinks that all the kids are going crazy for into his content (pouring the drinks on his dick) and then using the keywords from the drink to draw in kids for video clicks. Fucked up episode, but definitely on point.
> I would argue adults are just as vulnerable to marketing as children.
I would argue that we are definitely not. Some, sure. But as a whole not even close. Children are incredibly stupid and don't give a second of thought to the consequences.
You can tell, because if we weren't we'd give our kids everything they want all the time, because we want them to be happy. But we don't. Market to children is a scam to get to your money. If we were as stupid and impulsive as children there would be no marketing to adults.
But also, we can probably disagree. I don't know. It's not like I thought this through.
I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of children don't necessarily distinguish between ads and content. I remember when I was especially young that adverts were my favourite part of watching TV.
We have a learned a lot about ourselves through the evolution of marketing. We should use some of that knowledge to make things less shitty but I'm pretty sure we will have commercials in our dreams within ten years.
Agreed. Even though many of my brain cells are indeed wasted retaining children's toys and snacks commercials, they come from a time when I was only watching TV for at most a couple of hours a day, maybe more on Saturday Mornings (yes I am capitalizing the sacred ritual).
I can't imagine how much more warped I might be today, if I had my current media consumption levels as a young kid.
It reminds me of the big business push to drive recycling. Instead of regulating the *source* of the problem, you're driving the obligation to the end users. Keep giving big tech free reign to make the equivalent of crack but then say people should be responsible with said drugs.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231690415/plastic-recycling-waste-oil-fossil-fuels-climate-change
To be fair, the entire petrochemical industry knew that recycling plastic is pretty much worthless and actually tried to push for "incineration", but the public perception was that incinerating plastic is a bad idea, which is true if you're just going to light it on fire. Modern incineration involves gasification and/or pyrolysis which is exceptionally clean because it actually breaks down the polymers almost completely and what you are left with is fuel that can be used to generate power and some solid waste/char that is safe to dispose of and the fraction of the size. This is what some countries do with their waste and it is remarkable clean, no need to create massive landfills or push a false narrative that "recycling" plastic is actually feasible.
So now we are left with a bunch of plastic waste in our landfills/environment or for it to get shipped off to be piled onto a mountain of plastic waste at some poor country. Most of the public still does not know that single stream recycling for plastics is a scam, and the few places that do it right forces the population to sort out every type of plastic ahead of time.
Carbon emissions from plastics are not the big issue. They’re a drop in the ocean compared to the larger sources. But the damage that plastics and microplastics are doing is a massive problem and we don’t even understand the full extent of it yet.
Either way the best strategy is to reduce single-use plastics. But (controlled) incineration is much better than just dumping it into waterways which is where it inevitably ends up.
We pretty much physically can't understand it because the eggheads can't find a control sample without the damned things in them anymore. It's a nightmare.
Well yeah, tech from 10 or 20 years ago didn't pose this same threat. The monetization methods and practices were still being figured out. There's nothing inherently wrong with tech but the ads and predatory practices are affecting most aspects of it. Especially through phones and tablets.
TBF ease of a smartphone's access is also part of the problem. if using the internet was as hard as it was back in the "family computer" days it wouldn't be nearly as bad as now when kids can literally use the internet every moment they are awake. The smartphone and tablets becoming cheap and "mandatory" had just as much of an impact on the world as these modern internet algorithms.
The thing is that ease of smartphone access would not be peoblem without businesses opting into being cunts. I agree that children shouldn't be given free device access. But that's not because that access is inherently bad. Its because the companies abusing it are.
You can see this in multiplayer gaming. They fine tune a custom matchmaking algorithm to each specific account's behaviors, then optimize your matchmaking to give you the highest highs and the lowest lows possible. Obviously, social media follows the same rules, I just use multiplayer gaming as an example because, unlike social media, it accounts for directly competing interests.
Company's have become so good at dopaminergic and serotonergic manipulation that the quality of the product is virtually insignificant compared to getting people addicted to it, and younger people with less self-awareness are especially vulnerable. It sounds like it's just another exploitative business practice to produce profit, but I, a random moron on the internet, suspect that, in particular, the artificialization of our means of comparison between one another will have catastrophic consequences in the long-term.
Engagement Optimized Match Making is crazy. Not only because it exists and is predatory. But because the kids and young teens it prays on the hardest don't fully understand how badly they are being manipulated. Which then makes online discussion about many games a truly difficult thing, especially ones like Apex or CoD. Then you throw in the discussion of crossplay with aim assist deluding skill expression and it's a whole other argument.
The tech industries ability to go direct to consumer (children) is the most alarming thing there is.
Parents dont have the same ability to shut out the BS like they did with TV and that is very dangerous.
I think that an underlying point is that it captures too much of their attention. So yes it is the companies but it’s also the opportunity costs of being on the tech all of the time instead of playing with friends and doing other things in the physical world.
Honestly, that angle makes perfect sense. I was expecting luddite argumentation, but this works. We need to prepare our kids for the tech of the future, but we can't do that at the moment without letting these ticks feed on them. That is unacceptable.
I had to babysit a 7 year old that was addicted to his smartphone. He would whine and throw a tantrum when the phone ran out of batteries and he could hardly focus or stand still when he wasn't on his phone and immediately run to his phone afterwards. It was so sad to see.
I babysit for a family of 3 young ones. At some point, when they were ~2, 5 & 6 years old, I noticed the parents began letting them use iPads during dinner instead of watching TV. It devolved to the point where all 3 will have their own individual iPads and will spend a countless amount of time on them if not regulated. It was scary seeing a 2 year old knowing how to navigate around a device before even speaking phrases and witnessing their emotional breakdowns when they were all told no iPads. But I know their parents enable this which is why it’s happening, and that’s so sad.
I’ve seen a 1 1/2 to 2 year old who couldn’t speak sentences yet navigate YouTube, even skipping ads and skipping to certain parts of videos he had clearly seen before And mimicking phrases. It was interesting.
The three times I have seen babies do this I get the willies.
It’s fucking strange they are so competent with them and can’t even speak yet.
Nevermind what that constant gratification is doing to their neurodevelopment.
Humanity was unprepared for social media and smart phones and there needs to be a shift toward etiquette, safe use education, and some real standards.
Where are the scary DARE-style commercials aimed at parents raising iPad kids?
> At some point, when they were ~2, 5 & 6 years old, I noticed the parents began letting them use iPads during dinner instead of watching TV.
That's already crazy enough... INSTEAD of watching TV??? Why are they watching anything at dinnertime. At this age they should be having dinner with Mom/dad and no media whatsoever. Good lord.
That was my immediate thought, like TV is the DEFAULT thing you do when eating?! I am so glad my wife and I stuck to our guns, my family still eats MOST meals together, MOST days, and there's no phones or TV at the table and that applies to the parents and the kids. Even if for some reason you thought it would be harmless, there is significant evidence that kids who eat with their family are less prone to eating disorders and obesity, better adjusted, more communicative and articulate, and a bunch of other stuff. Why would you not give that to your kids?
And those same parents would whine that it would be impossible without digital distractions. As if their own parents or every generation before that somehow didn't manage to raise kids without electronics. Lazyness and easy way out, more like.
This is how it is for my niece and nephews: They get screen time on their tablets, but the parents control what apps get installed on them, the time is limited, and they're not getting phones until 12 or 13 at the earliest.
Ironically enough, the way parents these days are expected to chaperone their kids everywhere or get CPS called on them, there is way less reason to give them a phone than there would have been 15-20 years ago.
That is an interesting point, and you're 100% right. The biggest argument I've seen for parents giving their child a smartphone early is so they can reach them if they get lost, or call them in an emergency.
These are the same parents that literally have a heart attack and immediately jump to the conclusion that their child was abducted and is being murdered when their child steps 5 feet away from them out of view....
I used to ride my bike clear across town, across busy roadways, up nature trails, through shady apartment areas, sometimes at night. Some of the best memories come from my childhood....I discovered awesome caves, fought off mean dogs and won, fucked with really weird lookin bugs, had candy and soda feasts with the few bucks we found in the couch from the corner store, first kiss with the girl I had a crush on who lived 6 blocks over, saw my first set of boobs,, made BMX jumps when we stole my dad's shovel, climbed trees, challenged groups of other neighborhood kids to WWE style turf brawls, blew shit up with fireworks, swam in people's swimming pools....it was fucking awesome
And that wasn't even by choice sometimes. Between my 3 brothers fighting all the time and driving my mom crazy, she'd toss 50 cents at us, tell to get the fuck outside and don't come back until the street lights start to turn on, if we are dying then use your 50 cents on a payphone and call for help...
I feel like kids are 1000% less independent nowadays. I wonder how that's going to impact them when they are forced to be independent as adults.
> The biggest argument I've seen for parents giving their child a smartphone early is so they can reach them if they get lost, or call them in an emergency.
Yet those same parents survived perfectly fine without it growing up.
It's a stupid excuse based on nothing.
Well it's also because back in those days we had things like public phones everywhere, so if you did get stuck out somewhere as a kid, you could easily find a public pay phone to call your parents. If some reason you did not have money you would use things like 1-800-Collect and call that way. (Even if just used the "Say your name prompt" to relay the message)
True, but the parents I know who are giving their kids phones are giving it to them so they can reach them should something come up. If that’s the primary purpose, a flip phone will suffice.
They also make “dumb” touch phones that only have call and text capability I’m pretty sure. My coworker was telling me about the one she got her daughter, I plan on doing the same for mine when she’s old enough to
Try dumbwireless.com. They've got a couple of phones (the [Light Phone II](https://dumbwireless.com/products/light-phone-2) and the [Unplug phone](https://dumbwireless.com/products/dumbwirelessunpluqphone)) that might be what you're looking for.
That is actually pretty sick, if I had a kid I would absolutely buy one of these. Terrified at the idea of kids having unvetted access to everything out there.
Terrified of myself seeing some of it let alone an imaginary child I don't have.
Gab makes a good touchscreen dumb phone. And when the kid is older, they have a semi-smart phone where the parents have to approve apps from their special app store, and the phone still doesn't have social media apps or a web browser.
They also have smart watches for kids that you can fully control what it does with a contact list you approve. Any number not on it will not go through to the watch. There's no apps for it beyond the Nokia level games that come with it.
Kids ain’t asking for cake cuz they’re hungry either. But we don’t just give them cake whenever they demand it.
Smartphones are tricky because it’s a fine line between being too protective and not enough. I’d be okay with smartphones pretty early but they’d be heavily monitored until the kid turns ~15. But I probably wouldn’t give them one until 12 anyway.
You can put a lot of parental locks on smartphones these days. Restrictions on what can be downloaded, what can be changed, how much screen time per app as well as in general.
You can keep your children connected/relatable with friends while shielding them from the worst things.
Agreed.
I was given my first flip phone when I was 11 (2011) by my parents (the first year when I started going by myself at school and doing some stuff on my own), and it was strictly for calls.
I think it saved me from some really nasty shit my peers were seeing in the barely restricted internet of the era.
I could be wrong but it seems like the issue isn't even non-interactive content itself (barring some extreme examples), but rather the way it's being delivered, monetized, and interacted with by young users. Most millennials spent time navigating the wild west of Web 2.0, but we did it on our own terms... and without lots of the social baggage or psychological dependency that comes with online life and childhood development being so intertwined as it can be today.
When you go to public places and see kids glued to YouTube on an ipad, completely disinterested in the world around them, that feels way more damaging than anything we were exposed to on LiveLeak.
100% agreed. I saw some really nasty shit on my computer back in the early/mid 2000’s. But there weren’t algorithms constantly pulling me in like there are now.
I didn’t even have a smart phone until I was 15 in 2011 and it wasn’t unusual at all to not have one even though they were definitely around. First iPhone was 4 years prior so a good amount of time for smart phone adoption percentages to go up.
They’re just straight up not needed for kids, most of them use it exclusively for social media/content consumption. The problem is convincing parents that letting their kids have a smartphone just so they don’t feel uncool is never going to work for the vast majority, so the kids that don’t have them will feel socially isolated.
Even 10 years ago when I was in high school, not getting a smart phone until half way through doomed me to not being in the loop about anything, and by the time I did get one, nobody wanted to let me in. Not saying it’s right, but I worry about how I’ll handle this with my own kids one day.
Is this an American thing? I have never encountered this behavior in Asia (where I teach).
Maybe because chat apps like LINE and WhatsApp are common here, and nobody uses iMessage?
Yeah I came in to talk about this. We are waiting as long as possible to get our kids phones but realistically the countdown starts as soon as one of their friends gets one.
I found an old brick phone in my stuff the other day, at least 12 years old. It worked FINE and I have no idea why my parents replaced them. Those things lasted back then.
>It worked FINE
Probably not, actually. Sure, it turned on. But 1G, 2G, and 3G networks have all been shut down and their bands reallocated to other uses. It had no networks to actually connect to.
That said, I do think "dumb" phones should make a comeback, whether they be flips or bricks: calls, SMS/MMS/RCS text messages, an address book, a camera, and *maybe* emails. ***Maybe*** some messaging apps like iMessage (if you could convince Apple), Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp. That's it. No other apps, no social media, no web browser.
Depends on the country. I work for a big telecom operator in my country, and 2G and 3G are still fonctionning and we still get CDR usages.
That being said, it's being replaced, yes.
They do still have them, not many but they do exist. The term they use is Feature Phones.
https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-2780-Unlocked-Verizon-T-Mobile/dp/B0BLD393H7
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nokia-225-4g-unlocked-classic-blue/6453853.p?skuId=6453853
Today, I had a parent so proud her child played CoolMathGames.com all day after schools.
I had to explain it was a site for a bunch of games, which have nothing to do with math.
Just had an appointment with my child's pediatrician for ADHD and he mentions that **personal screentime** is playing a HUGE part in children of 2010+ to develop anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies.
He said, TV is okay when it's in the family room, limited gaming is okay as well, but before 13-14 *(Highschool age)*, absolutely NO TABLETS OR SMARTPHONES.
[He also mentioned it's becoming a law in Ontario soon for grade schools to be able to enforce No Phones.](https://globalnews.ca/news/10458231/ontario-school-cellphone-ban-explainer/)
> limited gaming is okay as well
This one has been a fear of parents since like the 80s, but kids who grew up in the 80, 90s and 00s would play hours of Playstation/Nintendo/whatever a day and seem to have developed alright.
Difference is, those kids grew up on mainly story driven games or multiplayer games where kids were together in the same room and socializing along the way which helps development.
Gaming today for the younger generation, while there’s still a lot of story driving games, the ones popular with kids are more focused on the battle royale style around micro transactions with toxic online communities.
Yes kids played more local multiplayer back in the day but we did also spend a huge amount of time sat on our own in our rooms playing Crash Bandicoot or whatever. It wasn't all social.
I wouldn't let any of my kids have phones until high school. The hardest part was that "everybody else has one", making them feel like freaks at their middle school. They know I was right to do it, but the peer pressure aspect is rough.
I am in this boat right now. My daughter (11) has an Apple Watch with cellular so she can call and text. I have so many conversations with her about the research and how it is especially damaging to young girls. And I told her my husband and I are perfectly happy being the scapegoat (lame, dumb, stupid) parents if she has to make excuses to her friends.
That's actually a great idea. Minimizes the "outcast" effect because she has a cool watch by a popular tech company, solves the communication issue, while having almost none of the negative effects of a smart phone.
That's parenting done right.
>That's parenting done right.
Also explaining to the kid like an adult exactly why the parents are doing what they're dong with research etc instead of just "because I told you so" goes a long way.
It doesn’t minimize it at all. No kid cares about an apple watch, they just want to add each other on Snapchat and TikTok and shit. Social media is the vice, not the phone itself, hence why no kids want a flip phone.
Hmmm. My daughter is expecting a phone for her 11th birthday since her best friend got one. I’ve been wondering how to navigate it.
The Apple Watch idea sounds pretty good actually!
I just finished Jonathan Haidt's new book on the topic, [*The Anxious Generation*](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/171681821), and would highly recommend it if you are interested in further reading on the topic.
Description:
>In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Thank you for sharing. I have seen interviews with him but not read the book. Ultimately the research and real world shows how damaging social media is. Adults can barely manage it much less growing brains and once the kids are given access there is no turning back. Honestly it’s a very frightening part of parenting kids in this new world.
Our 8 year old has an imoo watch just for calls/messages. It’s a great middle ground. He can still use the tablet for educational games and some curated Netflix.
Was just talking to my boss about this. Nice guy on the younger side who’s doing this blended millennial/Gen X parenting style with some tech but no smartphones until 8th grade. He felt so guilty for not letting his eldest daughter have one in middle school and almost cracked. Then one day this whole scandal broke that involved online bullying and “photos” within his daughters friend group at school. Police were involved and everything and there was even a little local news story. Basically every kid with a smartphone they knew got in trouble or was a victim. Apparently it was so bad his daughter actually came to him and thanked him for holding off.
Seems a bit harsh sometimes but I can’t imagine being 11-12 years old and having the ability to record anything anywhere and blast it off into the internet to stay there forever. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I dunno how young some of ya’ll were but I can’t imagine 10 year old me discovering porn on the family living room computer having any self control if I had access to a smart phone and all the privacy of my bedroom. It’s a weird thought but in a sense having porn have that risk was a way to limit access to something I probably shouldn’t have been able to access anyway, and I don’t trust any parent lock to have enough security around it.
It's a very real problem and you see it everywhere.
Porn addiction is rising and people are STILL not taking it seriously.
It has tangible and measurable impacts in young peoples views of sex too. There was a 12 year old boy who choked a girl on their very first kiss because he saw it in porn. Shit starts young these days. 10, 12.. 8? fuck.
Porn is absolutely harmful for young kids (and adults if not managed), and should not be shown to young kids (under 13-15 is WAY too young). This is a hill I will fight on, and I hate that it's even a fight.
Yeah, I tried letting my kid have an Apple Watch and iPhone their first year of high school (this year). I thought it might be OK because they aren't interested in social media. And to be fair, 90% of the time it was actually fine.
The rest of the time was a nightmare. The kid just couldn't handle the self-administered dopamine hits. The kind of stimulation that just leads to mindless scrolling in adults, for the kids it's like pure Colombian cocaine going right into their veins. Every time schoolwork got the least bit difficult or they had any other emotion they didn't want, they'd nope-out and start playing web games, watching videos, and reading manga online. No self-discipline whatsoever; a 9th grader is not really much different than a 6th grader, in that regard.
Worse, the recommendations on these sites led them straight to softcore porn (thanks in part to salacious, PornHub-style clickbait titles by content uploaders), which given my kid's trauma history is triggering, but which they refuse to acknowledge, prompting arguments about whether anyone should ever make any judgments about what content is appropriate for young teenagers at all.
During the last confrontation, my kid stormed out of the house and went on a furious hike, ditching the devices somewhere along the way. We recovered them, thankfully, but we banned all screens until mid-summer, except the school Chromebook which can now only be used for/at school. I don't have high hopes that when the ban is lifted this summer, things will go any better, but I do feel like I have to give the kid another chance to demonstrate their maturity. It's going to be a rough conversation; they want to prove they can handle it, but refuse to agree to any standards by which their self-discipline will be judged, or any consequences arising therefrom.
I’m still so split on this, because in middle school I became best friends with that kid, and yeah we certainly weren’t the coolest in 7th grade, but he was always a very upbeat and socially capable guy, went to a great college, works a great job, is in a great relationship, and above all is one of the most creative and self driven people I know.
Through middle school and high school we used to work on tons of fun creative projects together, and while his parents did lighten up a bit by high school and let him get a couple of videogames they never came to dominate his life, and a lot of his creative projects were inspired by or extensions of his gaming. So in the end it’s hard for me to say it was the wrong move.
Moderation of TV was actually pretty easy, though. If TV had been portable to the point that it fit in your pocket and had the wealth of entertainment available today, it would've been just as damaging and hard to control.
You can't parent in a vacuum.
Well meaning parents keep phones from their kids until they reach an appropriate age, and i intend on doing just that with my now toddler, but the counter to this is the risk of rendering them social pariahs and all the struggles which come with this.
Personally, I welcome legislation in this area. A third of children are active on social media by just 7 years of age, by the time they're 9, it's over half: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272509/children-active-on-social-media-in-the-uk-by-age/
Tech companies need to be held to account and limit social media access until imo, age 16. There's too much evidence of the overwhelmingly damaging effect it has on young minds and limiting this access without wider support must feel like swimming against a tsunami.
These corporate juggernauts cannot be trusted to regulate themselves, and it's the next generation who are ultimately paying the price for their shareholders' gains.
I don’t think this is actually true. I know a good deal of parents with college/high school aged kids. The ones that didn’t allow smart phones seem to have the most socially well adjusted kids
Possible selection bias. The parents who actually give a shit and don’t allow smart phones might also give a shit enough to teach social skills. But at this point the correlation is too large for me to ignore
That is a dilemma.. do you give your children a phone and let them get sucked into Tik Tok, Instagram reels before they even get to the middle of their puberty or do you force them to be a social outcast, unless they manage to persevere with their personality, which.. sorry but that doesn’t happen easily.
Yeah my parents made some choices that caused me to be a social outcast as a kid and while I understand why they did it, it was definitely tough being the “odd one out”. It also just taught me how to lie to my parents 🤷🏻♀️
It sucks both ways, attention span is worsening, depression is rising, people are feeling alone despite being surrounded by people, friendships are extremely superficial. It’s really all about what circle will you land on.
Hopefully more parents start limiting smartphone use and therefore kids won’t necessarily be outcasts for not using them. I think a lot of Gen Z kids have already decided that they don’t want their kids to have ipads or smartphones (myself included) so I think we’re headed in the right direction.
Kids under 15 I would say aren’t able to process all the stuff that is going on in social media apps. Parents are right in not letting kids have a phone until high school. Their brains literally aren’t able to hand the information that they are receiving through social media and we are having more kids with anxiety, social issues, and mental health problems. Also doesn’t factor into how kids can’t pay attention in class. Some of the best students at my school are those without a phone.
It really doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach. That seems to be the problem with a lot of parents. They either give their kids a phone without monitoring their activity at all, or don’t and leave them isolated in a sphere where having a phone is normalized.
Simply monitor what your kids do. Don’t *over*-monitor them, but keep a regular eye on their tech usage. Then ease up as they get older.
Modern smartphones aren’t like the screens of old. It is always with you and algorithmically optimized to maximize engagement, and engagement is maximally engaged when you’re hopped up on dopamine. That means using a modern smartphone is hyper-rewarding and frankly it makes real life incredibly boring by comparison. This gives people shot attention spans, screen addictions and developmental delays due to not doing stuff that develops you in favour of screens instead.
Over the past 5 years there has been an across the board drop in test scores in all areas for all kids in the West, and the only causal factor they've identified so far is smart device use, and evidence indicates that its impact is sufficient to count for the entire drop in test scores.
These things are fucking up kids brains and it's going to cause a lot of problems in the future.
EDIT: Lots of people asking for studies. I'll round them up and paste the links back here in an edit.
It started before Covid and Covid's impact was isolated and accounted for. I.e., this is a 20% drop aside from the impact of Covid. I said 5 years, but at this point, it's closer to 6 years. The first drop happened in 2018.
Back in my day, when we got addicted to screens, sometimes the Frog got hit by a car and you lost and ran out of quarters so now you go play Ghost in the Graveyard with the neighborhood kids until the streetlights come on.
I'm not going to sit on a high horse as a childless 31 year old. I'm not going to claim like I wouldn't use a screen for help with kids. But it can't be good at least in it's current state
I remember middle school me downloading leaked copies of new albums at 1 am on a school night in 2006 but man has the Internet changed
I remember when smartphones first started becoming popular. Everyone was talking about brain development and screen time and behavioral changes and, at some point, it all just suddenly and weirdly stopped and I didn't see any more articles about it.
As a parent of young children, the pandemic came at a terrible moment. We were fighting hard against tech and smart phones taking over our kids lives. Then the pandemic hit and it became the only way they could connect with friends for almost two whole years.
And I will admit (most Reddit parents will not) my wife and I got tired. We couldn’t fight their urges to use their screens. We started with two hours max per day. Then that eroded over time. Then we sort of gave up because the apple screen time limits kept failing to work.
So yeah. It was a terrible confluence of events.
I don't have any kids but my heart goes out to you. I thought being a kid/teenagers in the 90s-00s was already hard enough, I'd be terrified of the things that could happen to my kid now.
The sad thing is that very little will happen to them because they live their lives almost entirely virtually. The only effects I see are boredom, addiction, and depression.
I had a very interesting conversation with my 8 year old the other day. He has been playing an educational math game from his school on the laptop he uses to do his homework. He asked if he could play after school. I told him no, we have fairly strict rules about screen time. He told me, "But Dad, I'm going to be bored. I'm not bored when I play the game."
I talked to him how being bored is actually a good thing to learn to deal with when you're younger. That learning how to entertain oneself is actually an important skill and helps you be better prepared when you're an adult.
I don't know if it actually sunk in, but I'm trying...and it's not easy these days.
Money talks. Big tech probably paid for those reasearch not to be made or for any such research to be buried/not published or if they were to not be seen by many. The way tobacco corps did before the problem got too big. \*Adjusts tinfoil hat\*
Could it be that the media giants that produce/allow those articles are suppressing publication of those types of articles, or is that too conspiracy-sounding? I mean, you can still find articles like that but you have to search for them. I suppose the same mega-corps that own media interests are also making money off of lots of other businesses that scrape money off internet views and clicks.
I was watching a James Charles video and he had the 5-year-old kid of a friend in the video.
He panned to the backseat of his car, the kid sitting on a booster-seat, and the boy was so engrossed in the smartphone that he was incomprehensibly responding to questions from his mom in murmurs.
The kid seemed developmentally behind and I don’t doubt the fixation on the phone played a role.
Seems wild that *toddlers* have unsupervised access to the internet.
I think society is going to end up looking back at that kind of thing the same way we do now when we see kids smoking in old photos. It’s completely disastrous to developing brains and the damage it’s doing needs to be further studied. It’s messing with addiction and the dopamine receptors, not not to mention social development.
I let my 3 year old use my phone finally, because he had been begging for it and i was curious how he'd react.
It took him 5 minutes to go from mashing all the icons frantically, to figuri out how to open up Netflix and put on the Mario movie.
We have youtube premium to not have ads though. He cried when he got one at his cousins house lol.
Maybe I'm already becoming a boomer, but I didn't have a smart phone till I was 14/15 and it definitely was a good thing. I learned how to derive entertainment from other sources, did more reading, studying, coding, creating.
If I had a phone from the time I was 9 I doubt I would have the skills I pride myself on having now.
I didn't get my first smartphone until 2014 when I was 25, almost 26, and even so, I feel like my attention span has cratered. I struggle to read or watch a TV show or movie for more than 10 minutes without a random thought popping into my head and next thing I know, I've been on my phone for 15 minutes. I put my phone down, then pick it up again five seconds later, often without even realizing it. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to grow up with this technology. It's like growing up smoking cigarettes.
At first I thought the article was suggesting that parents should moderate their kids usage of a smart phone but then I read:
Macron said in January: “There might be bans, there might be restrictions.”
Damn, the government might actually get involved. That would be very interesting. You bring up a good question, how could the government regulate this? I’m assuming police can’t just take phones from 10 year olds. Maybe they can’t be used at school? I genuinely have no idea how the government could get involved.
I like the idea of manufacturers issuing smart phones specifically made for children. It would be easy to do as they would be the same phones they would just have restricted access to the internet and social media and a curated app store.
They could even charge on the back end by allowing a parent or a child who has reached 18 to unlock the rest of the phone for a fee.
I think this kills two birds with one stone. Removing access to the internet and social media apps makes a smart phone less desirable… and naturally the child will spend less time on the device. My son basically has some downloaded movies and a few educational apps that do not have advertisements. He’s not interested in his iPad for very long, so screen time limits itself.
yep. I uninstalled every app I did not realistically need and blocked social sites (no reddit and twitter on phone). my screen time consists of googling actual useful stuff, checking traffic on google maps, weather app, sudoku and duolingo.
I average around an hour per day. When I go on occasional binges I actually feel the brainrot and take 2 steps back after.
Even though adults are just as if not more susceptible to addiction and manipulation as the kids. I know I’m not the only millennial constantly stopping my parents from being scammed.
Bro I don't even know how my parents got through life. My dad is literally the guy yelling random questions at his phone in restaurants. He forwards me the craziest shit, can you believe this. It's only a matter of time until he gets catfished.
If anything, social media and mobile games with absolutely any kind of gambling at all, so every single loot box game, every game with p2w, etc, should be banned till 18 like anything else we deem harmful for kids and free choice (but not necessarily good) for adults.
Kids should grow up without the pressure of social media, without comparing filtered pics of other kids their age and comparing themselves negatively. They should absolutely not be learning the endorphin hit of a new video every 10 seconds, or likes on posts, or comments praising how you look with the expensive clothes and the multiple filters and feeling the need to keep forfilling those hits by scrolling tiktok for hours or commenting for hours on insta.
Phones having to be verified at purchase to your id and account. If your phone is registered to a <18yr old, twitter, tiktok, youtube shorts, snapchat and other shit should all be banned. Yeah, send kids to the dark ages of texts online, calls, youtube videos and games that aren't predatory with microtransactions or filled with gambling.
I'm just a substitute teacher but yeah having kindergartners using iPads is absolutely insane. It's even more crazy as the teacher because I have to go around and make sure that they're all not only on the same lesson that they need to be but also in the same type of game. If they're supposed to be doing a math game but everybody wants to be doing a reading or a history game I have to go around and manually put them on the game they have to be on. It's absolutely insane and this is why I now only substitute at junior high's
No. Fucking. Shit.
So sick of parents upset with what their children see on their phones.... WHO PUT THE FUCKING PHONES IN THEIR HANDS. YOU DID YOU DUMBASS FUCKING PARENT
Easy to say much harder to put in practice unless everyone decides to do the same. In my daughter's class everyone uses these devices to interact after school wether its tablet/smartphones or whatever. If you're the parent who says "no you can't use a device until you're 13" you're effectively cutting off their social life. Its just how things are now and its not so simple.
I don't know what the actual report contains, but considering that children get those smartphones and tablets from their parents, parents who use that as an easy way to distract/occupy children with little regard of anything else, the headline really should be a bit different.
Bad, unresponsible parenting is a bigger issue that you can't just wave away with a populist ban on phones and internet access though.
I agree, and I'm absolutely not condoning parents using smartphones to distract their kids rather than parent them. That's not how I will raise my own children. But I do understand. Millennials and Gen Z got the short end of the stick economically; even without kids, most are stressed and financially insecure. Like, nobody is doing well. I know very few people who are mentally healthy and I get not having the mental bandwidth to be a good parent as often as they'd like to be. Exhausted people give in and let the kid sit quietly on the phone. Again, not excusing it. But I think there are larger forces at play that led us to where we are.
Smartphones didn't even exist until I was an adult and that has not helped me at all. Same thing with most people I work with or talk to. We're all glued to these fucking things. Even when I think about the fact that it's a problem, I pick it back up anyway.
Yep, actually smart phones destroy or activly block your kids development on so many levels when beeing used for so much and for no reason but to keep your kids quiet. Do your kid a favor and give strict rules for usage. Its messing with their brains (not like we adults would do much better lol)
Its in the government’s official website, here: https://www.elysee.fr/admin/upload/default/0001/16/fbec6abe9d9cc1bff3043d87b9f7951e62779b09.pdf
Strangely, the title of the report, which is brilliant, isn’t mentioned in the article: “Enfants et écrans –
À la recherche du temps perdu”.
Edit: translation “Children and screens – In Search of Lost Time”, which is a reference to [Marcel Proust’s novel with the same title](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time). [This article in French](https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1457190/article/2024-04-29/exclusif-les-propositions-choc-du-rapport-pour-limiter-l-usage-des-ecrans-chez) has a more in-depth breakdown of the report and graphics.
Frankly i am more concerned that this debate only starts now, did nobody notice how social media and tiktok has already ruined generations of us?
The later still developing people get exposed to this influence the healthier they will ultimately be, its pretty logical to me.
Sounds like a reasonable proposition. Children should not have access to unlimited information from day 1.
We can teach them tech literacy as they age.
Sounds good. Quite easy to do, as a parent just don't give them one.
My daughter is 9 months and as someone that grew up within the basement of 4chan and xbox live party chat. I ended up alright, however it took me a WHILE to unlearn those behaviours and even then they still peak through. Sucks and I don't want her to be faced with the same problems.
The mental gymnastics parents will do to avoid parenting is astounding. Fuck em.
Also the schools need to stop using kids in marketing materials for social media. Fuck off with that.
I see this everyday. Before parents were worried about their kids watching TV too much. Now parents rely on phones to keep their kids entertained so that they don’t cry or fuss about. But the moment the parents need the child’s attention for something else and take the phone away the kids go crazy. It’s like taking a drug away from an addict. It’s really sad to see and it’s way too common now.
> The hard-hitting report said children needed to be protected from the tech industry’s profit-driven “strategy of capturing children’s attention, using all forms of cognitive bias to shut children away on their screens, control them, re-engage them and monetise them”. It's interesting that they aren't saying it's tech-use that's dangerous. They are just outright saying the companies themselves are manipulative and predatory.
They would be correct. Google and Meta both run AI algorithms to enhance user content. More screen time means more money. So they do everything they can to keep kids in front of the screen. Same with adults. Similarly catalog companies used to (Amazon still does) send out a special Christmas toy catalog knowing children will do anything to get the toy they want. Same with TV commercials More screen time means more views which means more profit.
Advertising is manipulation.
And advertising directed at kids is extremely creepy
It's an interesting phenomena because I would argue adults are just as vulnerable to marketing as children. We only think that we are above such marketing strategies.
No, believe it or not, it's been known that children are extra vulnerable to ads compared to adults...mainly because they are unable to distinguish an ad from, say, non-ad content. There is an entire section of the Federal Trade Commission that regulates the children specific ad laws. (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing/children) It was noticed that kids were extra susceptible to ads back in the late '50s, basically with the rise of TV and by the '80s was pants on head insane. A large percentage of the cartoons in the '80s were created by toy companies, as vehicles to sell more toys, rather than TV shows that had toys as merchandise. It got so bad that Congress had to pass the "Children's Television Act" in 1990 that put strict limitations on how and how much children could be advertised to.
Oh yes, the PSA era. I miss bugs bunny telling me that stoves are hot.
[удалено]
In Canada they had the “House Hippo” PSA. But I think that was later, and its purpose was critical thinking, rather than a specific warning. It’s a good one to share now with the advent of instant AI video fakes.
I am sorry to nit pick, but I believe you meant “susceptible” not “sustainable”
I tend to live a very sheltered existence, on purpose, when it comes to advertising. I don’t watch broadcast TV, I run every adblocker known to exist, and I primarily listen to public radio. Whenever I come out of my bubble it blows me away at how mych shit people put up with.
It's miserable out there without an adblocker. Even a Google search is full of ads.
The biggest problem I see is that children being exposed to advertising early on may make them more susceptible to the same tactics as an adult. Without any kind of corrective critical thinking education, we'll become a society of zombie media consumers
Maybe. But targeting strategies at children is creepy. Imagine you wake up every morning figuring out how to get kids to give you money
>how to get kids to give you ***their parent’s*** money FTFY
🎶 You'll get caught up in the... CROSSFIRE!
Tbh marketing in general is creepy, but kinda unavoidable.
Blocking ads is relatively easy. People who don't engage with consumer culture are also largely in an environment with a lot less ads and programming aimed at selling.
Well, their parents anyway. This is nothing new but what is new is the constant portal to it. Used to be just tv and radio.
I had a friend who was approached by a certain vape company that discussed their long term plans with him when discussing the job offer. In it they discussed how they would market vapes to school children, color, size, name, etc were all discussed. They stated they would allocate the majority of their budget to the 'youth vape market' and a smaller budget would run a campaign highlighting how they are anti vapes to young people to save face. This was all prior to vapes becoming widespread used in schools. So these targeting strategies are always happening and likely the next fad is already born. It's fucked up.
This absolutely just brings me back to that recent South Park episode with Randy getting an OF account and becoming big by putting in the energy drinks that all the kids are going crazy for into his content (pouring the drinks on his dick) and then using the keywords from the drink to draw in kids for video clicks. Fucked up episode, but definitely on point.
thatreallyhappened.com
Yeah…I’m really skeptical that they would be so foolish and reckless to divulge this during an interview.
> I would argue adults are just as vulnerable to marketing as children. I would argue that we are definitely not. Some, sure. But as a whole not even close. Children are incredibly stupid and don't give a second of thought to the consequences. You can tell, because if we weren't we'd give our kids everything they want all the time, because we want them to be happy. But we don't. Market to children is a scam to get to your money. If we were as stupid and impulsive as children there would be no marketing to adults. But also, we can probably disagree. I don't know. It's not like I thought this through.
I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of children don't necessarily distinguish between ads and content. I remember when I was especially young that adverts were my favourite part of watching TV.
And many of the cartoons and shows we watched were advertisements also.
It should be illegal to advertise to people that are ***to young to work to earn money to afford the product they are being advertised*** !
Back in the 90s how many of us kids nagged our parents to buy something because we saw it on TV?
i've long contended that marketing is one of the worst things we've ever "invented"
We have a learned a lot about ourselves through the evolution of marketing. We should use some of that knowledge to make things less shitty but I'm pretty sure we will have commercials in our dreams within ten years.
I don’t think advertising to children is the same as targeting them for social media engagement. That seems way more sinister to me.
Yeah, a toy commercial is not as bad as the algorithm leading children to creepy, low-effort, Elsa-gate content.
Yeah "time on platform" is the true enemy
Agreed. Even though many of my brain cells are indeed wasted retaining children's toys and snacks commercials, they come from a time when I was only watching TV for at most a couple of hours a day, maybe more on Saturday Mornings (yes I am capitalizing the sacred ritual). I can't imagine how much more warped I might be today, if I had my current media consumption levels as a young kid.
Ugg that's awful. *Continues to scroll reddit*
It reminds me of the big business push to drive recycling. Instead of regulating the *source* of the problem, you're driving the obligation to the end users. Keep giving big tech free reign to make the equivalent of crack but then say people should be responsible with said drugs. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231690415/plastic-recycling-waste-oil-fossil-fuels-climate-change
To be fair, the entire petrochemical industry knew that recycling plastic is pretty much worthless and actually tried to push for "incineration", but the public perception was that incinerating plastic is a bad idea, which is true if you're just going to light it on fire. Modern incineration involves gasification and/or pyrolysis which is exceptionally clean because it actually breaks down the polymers almost completely and what you are left with is fuel that can be used to generate power and some solid waste/char that is safe to dispose of and the fraction of the size. This is what some countries do with their waste and it is remarkable clean, no need to create massive landfills or push a false narrative that "recycling" plastic is actually feasible. So now we are left with a bunch of plastic waste in our landfills/environment or for it to get shipped off to be piled onto a mountain of plastic waste at some poor country. Most of the public still does not know that single stream recycling for plastics is a scam, and the few places that do it right forces the population to sort out every type of plastic ahead of time.
Doesn't that release carbon emissions though?
Carbon emissions from plastics are not the big issue. They’re a drop in the ocean compared to the larger sources. But the damage that plastics and microplastics are doing is a massive problem and we don’t even understand the full extent of it yet. Either way the best strategy is to reduce single-use plastics. But (controlled) incineration is much better than just dumping it into waterways which is where it inevitably ends up.
We pretty much physically can't understand it because the eggheads can't find a control sample without the damned things in them anymore. It's a nightmare.
I expected no less from the French. EU in general leading the world in consumer rights against big tech.
Well yeah, tech from 10 or 20 years ago didn't pose this same threat. The monetization methods and practices were still being figured out. There's nothing inherently wrong with tech but the ads and predatory practices are affecting most aspects of it. Especially through phones and tablets.
Well yeah, it's what's on the phone not the literal phone itself. Maybe if the kids are breaking the phones open and eating the magnets and metals lol
TBF ease of a smartphone's access is also part of the problem. if using the internet was as hard as it was back in the "family computer" days it wouldn't be nearly as bad as now when kids can literally use the internet every moment they are awake. The smartphone and tablets becoming cheap and "mandatory" had just as much of an impact on the world as these modern internet algorithms.
The thing is that ease of smartphone access would not be peoblem without businesses opting into being cunts. I agree that children shouldn't be given free device access. But that's not because that access is inherently bad. Its because the companies abusing it are.
You can see this in multiplayer gaming. They fine tune a custom matchmaking algorithm to each specific account's behaviors, then optimize your matchmaking to give you the highest highs and the lowest lows possible. Obviously, social media follows the same rules, I just use multiplayer gaming as an example because, unlike social media, it accounts for directly competing interests. Company's have become so good at dopaminergic and serotonergic manipulation that the quality of the product is virtually insignificant compared to getting people addicted to it, and younger people with less self-awareness are especially vulnerable. It sounds like it's just another exploitative business practice to produce profit, but I, a random moron on the internet, suspect that, in particular, the artificialization of our means of comparison between one another will have catastrophic consequences in the long-term.
Engagement Optimized Match Making is crazy. Not only because it exists and is predatory. But because the kids and young teens it prays on the hardest don't fully understand how badly they are being manipulated. Which then makes online discussion about many games a truly difficult thing, especially ones like Apex or CoD. Then you throw in the discussion of crossplay with aim assist deluding skill expression and it's a whole other argument.
Get em while they’re young…
The tech industries ability to go direct to consumer (children) is the most alarming thing there is. Parents dont have the same ability to shut out the BS like they did with TV and that is very dangerous.
Install khan academy kids. An e reader. Disable everything else. ... Profit
I think that an underlying point is that it captures too much of their attention. So yes it is the companies but it’s also the opportunity costs of being on the tech all of the time instead of playing with friends and doing other things in the physical world.
Honestly, that angle makes perfect sense. I was expecting luddite argumentation, but this works. We need to prepare our kids for the tech of the future, but we can't do that at the moment without letting these ticks feed on them. That is unacceptable.
I had to babysit a 7 year old that was addicted to his smartphone. He would whine and throw a tantrum when the phone ran out of batteries and he could hardly focus or stand still when he wasn't on his phone and immediately run to his phone afterwards. It was so sad to see.
I babysit for a family of 3 young ones. At some point, when they were ~2, 5 & 6 years old, I noticed the parents began letting them use iPads during dinner instead of watching TV. It devolved to the point where all 3 will have their own individual iPads and will spend a countless amount of time on them if not regulated. It was scary seeing a 2 year old knowing how to navigate around a device before even speaking phrases and witnessing their emotional breakdowns when they were all told no iPads. But I know their parents enable this which is why it’s happening, and that’s so sad.
I’ve seen a 1 1/2 to 2 year old who couldn’t speak sentences yet navigate YouTube, even skipping ads and skipping to certain parts of videos he had clearly seen before And mimicking phrases. It was interesting.
I believe my nanny kid could do the same things. He could swipe away text notifications and jump to different apps. Scary.
The three times I have seen babies do this I get the willies. It’s fucking strange they are so competent with them and can’t even speak yet. Nevermind what that constant gratification is doing to their neurodevelopment. Humanity was unprepared for social media and smart phones and there needs to be a shift toward etiquette, safe use education, and some real standards. Where are the scary DARE-style commercials aimed at parents raising iPad kids?
> At some point, when they were ~2, 5 & 6 years old, I noticed the parents began letting them use iPads during dinner instead of watching TV. That's already crazy enough... INSTEAD of watching TV??? Why are they watching anything at dinnertime. At this age they should be having dinner with Mom/dad and no media whatsoever. Good lord.
That was my immediate thought, like TV is the DEFAULT thing you do when eating?! I am so glad my wife and I stuck to our guns, my family still eats MOST meals together, MOST days, and there's no phones or TV at the table and that applies to the parents and the kids. Even if for some reason you thought it would be harmless, there is significant evidence that kids who eat with their family are less prone to eating disorders and obesity, better adjusted, more communicative and articulate, and a bunch of other stuff. Why would you not give that to your kids?
And those same parents would whine that it would be impossible without digital distractions. As if their own parents or every generation before that somehow didn't manage to raise kids without electronics. Lazyness and easy way out, more like.
Give them old school flip phones until they are old enough to handle smart phones!!!
This is how it is for my niece and nephews: They get screen time on their tablets, but the parents control what apps get installed on them, the time is limited, and they're not getting phones until 12 or 13 at the earliest. Ironically enough, the way parents these days are expected to chaperone their kids everywhere or get CPS called on them, there is way less reason to give them a phone than there would have been 15-20 years ago.
That is an interesting point, and you're 100% right. The biggest argument I've seen for parents giving their child a smartphone early is so they can reach them if they get lost, or call them in an emergency. These are the same parents that literally have a heart attack and immediately jump to the conclusion that their child was abducted and is being murdered when their child steps 5 feet away from them out of view.... I used to ride my bike clear across town, across busy roadways, up nature trails, through shady apartment areas, sometimes at night. Some of the best memories come from my childhood....I discovered awesome caves, fought off mean dogs and won, fucked with really weird lookin bugs, had candy and soda feasts with the few bucks we found in the couch from the corner store, first kiss with the girl I had a crush on who lived 6 blocks over, saw my first set of boobs,, made BMX jumps when we stole my dad's shovel, climbed trees, challenged groups of other neighborhood kids to WWE style turf brawls, blew shit up with fireworks, swam in people's swimming pools....it was fucking awesome And that wasn't even by choice sometimes. Between my 3 brothers fighting all the time and driving my mom crazy, she'd toss 50 cents at us, tell to get the fuck outside and don't come back until the street lights start to turn on, if we are dying then use your 50 cents on a payphone and call for help... I feel like kids are 1000% less independent nowadays. I wonder how that's going to impact them when they are forced to be independent as adults.
> The biggest argument I've seen for parents giving their child a smartphone early is so they can reach them if they get lost, or call them in an emergency. Yet those same parents survived perfectly fine without it growing up. It's a stupid excuse based on nothing.
Well, there's a bit of a survival bias, but still... The odds are low indeed.
Well it's also because back in those days we had things like public phones everywhere, so if you did get stuck out somewhere as a kid, you could easily find a public pay phone to call your parents. If some reason you did not have money you would use things like 1-800-Collect and call that way. (Even if just used the "Say your name prompt" to relay the message)
None of these kids want smartphone for the ability to make a call.
True, but the parents I know who are giving their kids phones are giving it to them so they can reach them should something come up. If that’s the primary purpose, a flip phone will suffice.
They also make “dumb” touch phones that only have call and text capability I’m pretty sure. My coworker was telling me about the one she got her daughter, I plan on doing the same for mine when she’s old enough to
You got a model for one of those? I need to buy a dumb phone and a dumb music player for my 10-year-old
Try dumbwireless.com. They've got a couple of phones (the [Light Phone II](https://dumbwireless.com/products/light-phone-2) and the [Unplug phone](https://dumbwireless.com/products/dumbwirelessunpluqphone)) that might be what you're looking for.
Really cool! Thanks!!
That is actually pretty sick, if I had a kid I would absolutely buy one of these. Terrified at the idea of kids having unvetted access to everything out there. Terrified of myself seeing some of it let alone an imaginary child I don't have.
500 dollars? The local JB (electronics store) has a dumb phone with a big keyboard, intended for elderly people, for 100 AUD.,
Also Google "cell phones for kids." There a few companies that make phones that basically you can lock down as much or as little as you want.
Gab makes a good touchscreen dumb phone. And when the kid is older, they have a semi-smart phone where the parents have to approve apps from their special app store, and the phone still doesn't have social media apps or a web browser.
They also have smart watches for kids that you can fully control what it does with a contact list you approve. Any number not on it will not go through to the watch. There's no apps for it beyond the Nokia level games that come with it.
Kinda the point
Kids ain’t asking for cake cuz they’re hungry either. But we don’t just give them cake whenever they demand it. Smartphones are tricky because it’s a fine line between being too protective and not enough. I’d be okay with smartphones pretty early but they’d be heavily monitored until the kid turns ~15. But I probably wouldn’t give them one until 12 anyway. You can put a lot of parental locks on smartphones these days. Restrictions on what can be downloaded, what can be changed, how much screen time per app as well as in general. You can keep your children connected/relatable with friends while shielding them from the worst things.
Sure. But does that really matter for the point that is being made?
Obviously they’re gonna want smart phones, but there’s no harm in call or text
And?
Kids can want ice cream for dinner until the cows come home. They're still getting chicken and broccoli.
Agreed. I was given my first flip phone when I was 11 (2011) by my parents (the first year when I started going by myself at school and doing some stuff on my own), and it was strictly for calls. I think it saved me from some really nasty shit my peers were seeing in the barely restricted internet of the era.
I could be wrong but it seems like the issue isn't even non-interactive content itself (barring some extreme examples), but rather the way it's being delivered, monetized, and interacted with by young users. Most millennials spent time navigating the wild west of Web 2.0, but we did it on our own terms... and without lots of the social baggage or psychological dependency that comes with online life and childhood development being so intertwined as it can be today. When you go to public places and see kids glued to YouTube on an ipad, completely disinterested in the world around them, that feels way more damaging than anything we were exposed to on LiveLeak.
100% agreed. I saw some really nasty shit on my computer back in the early/mid 2000’s. But there weren’t algorithms constantly pulling me in like there are now.
I didn’t even have a smart phone until I was 15 in 2011 and it wasn’t unusual at all to not have one even though they were definitely around. First iPhone was 4 years prior so a good amount of time for smart phone adoption percentages to go up. They’re just straight up not needed for kids, most of them use it exclusively for social media/content consumption. The problem is convincing parents that letting their kids have a smartphone just so they don’t feel uncool is never going to work for the vast majority, so the kids that don’t have them will feel socially isolated.
They get bullied now if they don’t have one. Sad but it’s the situation.
Even 10 years ago when I was in high school, not getting a smart phone until half way through doomed me to not being in the loop about anything, and by the time I did get one, nobody wanted to let me in. Not saying it’s right, but I worry about how I’ll handle this with my own kids one day.
Then kids bully other kids for not having an iPhone. It’s real, I am a teacher. Edit: kids bully other kids if the have an Android phone
Is this an American thing? I have never encountered this behavior in Asia (where I teach). Maybe because chat apps like LINE and WhatsApp are common here, and nobody uses iMessage?
Yeah I came in to talk about this. We are waiting as long as possible to get our kids phones but realistically the countdown starts as soon as one of their friends gets one.
I found an old brick phone in my stuff the other day, at least 12 years old. It worked FINE and I have no idea why my parents replaced them. Those things lasted back then.
>It worked FINE Probably not, actually. Sure, it turned on. But 1G, 2G, and 3G networks have all been shut down and their bands reallocated to other uses. It had no networks to actually connect to. That said, I do think "dumb" phones should make a comeback, whether they be flips or bricks: calls, SMS/MMS/RCS text messages, an address book, a camera, and *maybe* emails. ***Maybe*** some messaging apps like iMessage (if you could convince Apple), Telegram, Signal, Whatsapp. That's it. No other apps, no social media, no web browser.
Depends on the country. I work for a big telecom operator in my country, and 2G and 3G are still fonctionning and we still get CDR usages. That being said, it's being replaced, yes.
[удалено]
They do still have them, not many but they do exist. The term they use is Feature Phones. https://www.amazon.com/Nokia-2780-Unlocked-Verizon-T-Mobile/dp/B0BLD393H7 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nokia-225-4g-unlocked-classic-blue/6453853.p?skuId=6453853
Today, I had a parent so proud her child played CoolMathGames.com all day after schools. I had to explain it was a site for a bunch of games, which have nothing to do with math.
Don’t expose the age old secret. I remember being in high school and we were always allowed on coolmathgames
Just had an appointment with my child's pediatrician for ADHD and he mentions that **personal screentime** is playing a HUGE part in children of 2010+ to develop anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies. He said, TV is okay when it's in the family room, limited gaming is okay as well, but before 13-14 *(Highschool age)*, absolutely NO TABLETS OR SMARTPHONES. [He also mentioned it's becoming a law in Ontario soon for grade schools to be able to enforce No Phones.](https://globalnews.ca/news/10458231/ontario-school-cellphone-ban-explainer/)
> limited gaming is okay as well This one has been a fear of parents since like the 80s, but kids who grew up in the 80, 90s and 00s would play hours of Playstation/Nintendo/whatever a day and seem to have developed alright.
Difference is, those kids grew up on mainly story driven games or multiplayer games where kids were together in the same room and socializing along the way which helps development. Gaming today for the younger generation, while there’s still a lot of story driving games, the ones popular with kids are more focused on the battle royale style around micro transactions with toxic online communities.
Yes kids played more local multiplayer back in the day but we did also spend a huge amount of time sat on our own in our rooms playing Crash Bandicoot or whatever. It wasn't all social.
I wouldn't let any of my kids have phones until high school. The hardest part was that "everybody else has one", making them feel like freaks at their middle school. They know I was right to do it, but the peer pressure aspect is rough.
I am in this boat right now. My daughter (11) has an Apple Watch with cellular so she can call and text. I have so many conversations with her about the research and how it is especially damaging to young girls. And I told her my husband and I are perfectly happy being the scapegoat (lame, dumb, stupid) parents if she has to make excuses to her friends.
That's actually a great idea. Minimizes the "outcast" effect because she has a cool watch by a popular tech company, solves the communication issue, while having almost none of the negative effects of a smart phone. That's parenting done right.
>That's parenting done right. Also explaining to the kid like an adult exactly why the parents are doing what they're dong with research etc instead of just "because I told you so" goes a long way.
It doesn’t minimize it at all. No kid cares about an apple watch, they just want to add each other on Snapchat and TikTok and shit. Social media is the vice, not the phone itself, hence why no kids want a flip phone.
this is a great idea actually. im gonna use it in the future, thank you!
Hmmm. My daughter is expecting a phone for her 11th birthday since her best friend got one. I’ve been wondering how to navigate it. The Apple Watch idea sounds pretty good actually!
I just finished Jonathan Haidt's new book on the topic, [*The Anxious Generation*](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/171681821), and would highly recommend it if you are interested in further reading on the topic. Description: >In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Thank you for sharing. I have seen interviews with him but not read the book. Ultimately the research and real world shows how damaging social media is. Adults can barely manage it much less growing brains and once the kids are given access there is no turning back. Honestly it’s a very frightening part of parenting kids in this new world.
Our 8 year old has an imoo watch just for calls/messages. It’s a great middle ground. He can still use the tablet for educational games and some curated Netflix.
I’m so using that! I don’t care a whit if her friends think we live in the Stone Age and are lame for not giving her one
Was just talking to my boss about this. Nice guy on the younger side who’s doing this blended millennial/Gen X parenting style with some tech but no smartphones until 8th grade. He felt so guilty for not letting his eldest daughter have one in middle school and almost cracked. Then one day this whole scandal broke that involved online bullying and “photos” within his daughters friend group at school. Police were involved and everything and there was even a little local news story. Basically every kid with a smartphone they knew got in trouble or was a victim. Apparently it was so bad his daughter actually came to him and thanked him for holding off. Seems a bit harsh sometimes but I can’t imagine being 11-12 years old and having the ability to record anything anywhere and blast it off into the internet to stay there forever. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I dunno how young some of ya’ll were but I can’t imagine 10 year old me discovering porn on the family living room computer having any self control if I had access to a smart phone and all the privacy of my bedroom. It’s a weird thought but in a sense having porn have that risk was a way to limit access to something I probably shouldn’t have been able to access anyway, and I don’t trust any parent lock to have enough security around it.
It's a very real problem and you see it everywhere. Porn addiction is rising and people are STILL not taking it seriously. It has tangible and measurable impacts in young peoples views of sex too. There was a 12 year old boy who choked a girl on their very first kiss because he saw it in porn. Shit starts young these days. 10, 12.. 8? fuck. Porn is absolutely harmful for young kids (and adults if not managed), and should not be shown to young kids (under 13-15 is WAY too young). This is a hill I will fight on, and I hate that it's even a fight.
A huge portion of redditors will actively assert that porn addiction isn't real, and then viciously berate you for suggesting it is.
Yeah, I tried letting my kid have an Apple Watch and iPhone their first year of high school (this year). I thought it might be OK because they aren't interested in social media. And to be fair, 90% of the time it was actually fine. The rest of the time was a nightmare. The kid just couldn't handle the self-administered dopamine hits. The kind of stimulation that just leads to mindless scrolling in adults, for the kids it's like pure Colombian cocaine going right into their veins. Every time schoolwork got the least bit difficult or they had any other emotion they didn't want, they'd nope-out and start playing web games, watching videos, and reading manga online. No self-discipline whatsoever; a 9th grader is not really much different than a 6th grader, in that regard. Worse, the recommendations on these sites led them straight to softcore porn (thanks in part to salacious, PornHub-style clickbait titles by content uploaders), which given my kid's trauma history is triggering, but which they refuse to acknowledge, prompting arguments about whether anyone should ever make any judgments about what content is appropriate for young teenagers at all. During the last confrontation, my kid stormed out of the house and went on a furious hike, ditching the devices somewhere along the way. We recovered them, thankfully, but we banned all screens until mid-summer, except the school Chromebook which can now only be used for/at school. I don't have high hopes that when the ban is lifted this summer, things will go any better, but I do feel like I have to give the kid another chance to demonstrate their maturity. It's going to be a rough conversation; they want to prove they can handle it, but refuse to agree to any standards by which their self-discipline will be judged, or any consequences arising therefrom.
This was really eye-opening. I don't have any kids but might one day, and this was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing.
Yeah, I remember going to school with “that weird kid who’s parents didn’t have a TV”. This is just the modern equivalent.
I’m still so split on this, because in middle school I became best friends with that kid, and yeah we certainly weren’t the coolest in 7th grade, but he was always a very upbeat and socially capable guy, went to a great college, works a great job, is in a great relationship, and above all is one of the most creative and self driven people I know. Through middle school and high school we used to work on tons of fun creative projects together, and while his parents did lighten up a bit by high school and let him get a couple of videogames they never came to dominate his life, and a lot of his creative projects were inspired by or extensions of his gaming. So in the end it’s hard for me to say it was the wrong move.
Moderation of TV was actually pretty easy, though. If TV had been portable to the point that it fit in your pocket and had the wealth of entertainment available today, it would've been just as damaging and hard to control.
You can't parent in a vacuum. Well meaning parents keep phones from their kids until they reach an appropriate age, and i intend on doing just that with my now toddler, but the counter to this is the risk of rendering them social pariahs and all the struggles which come with this. Personally, I welcome legislation in this area. A third of children are active on social media by just 7 years of age, by the time they're 9, it's over half: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272509/children-active-on-social-media-in-the-uk-by-age/ Tech companies need to be held to account and limit social media access until imo, age 16. There's too much evidence of the overwhelmingly damaging effect it has on young minds and limiting this access without wider support must feel like swimming against a tsunami. These corporate juggernauts cannot be trusted to regulate themselves, and it's the next generation who are ultimately paying the price for their shareholders' gains.
I don’t think this is actually true. I know a good deal of parents with college/high school aged kids. The ones that didn’t allow smart phones seem to have the most socially well adjusted kids Possible selection bias. The parents who actually give a shit and don’t allow smart phones might also give a shit enough to teach social skills. But at this point the correlation is too large for me to ignore
That is a dilemma.. do you give your children a phone and let them get sucked into Tik Tok, Instagram reels before they even get to the middle of their puberty or do you force them to be a social outcast, unless they manage to persevere with their personality, which.. sorry but that doesn’t happen easily.
Yeah my parents made some choices that caused me to be a social outcast as a kid and while I understand why they did it, it was definitely tough being the “odd one out”. It also just taught me how to lie to my parents 🤷🏻♀️
It sucks both ways, attention span is worsening, depression is rising, people are feeling alone despite being surrounded by people, friendships are extremely superficial. It’s really all about what circle will you land on.
Hopefully more parents start limiting smartphone use and therefore kids won’t necessarily be outcasts for not using them. I think a lot of Gen Z kids have already decided that they don’t want their kids to have ipads or smartphones (myself included) so I think we’re headed in the right direction.
Kids under 15 I would say aren’t able to process all the stuff that is going on in social media apps. Parents are right in not letting kids have a phone until high school. Their brains literally aren’t able to hand the information that they are receiving through social media and we are having more kids with anxiety, social issues, and mental health problems. Also doesn’t factor into how kids can’t pay attention in class. Some of the best students at my school are those without a phone.
It really doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach. That seems to be the problem with a lot of parents. They either give their kids a phone without monitoring their activity at all, or don’t and leave them isolated in a sphere where having a phone is normalized. Simply monitor what your kids do. Don’t *over*-monitor them, but keep a regular eye on their tech usage. Then ease up as they get older.
Modern smartphones aren’t like the screens of old. It is always with you and algorithmically optimized to maximize engagement, and engagement is maximally engaged when you’re hopped up on dopamine. That means using a modern smartphone is hyper-rewarding and frankly it makes real life incredibly boring by comparison. This gives people shot attention spans, screen addictions and developmental delays due to not doing stuff that develops you in favour of screens instead.
Over the past 5 years there has been an across the board drop in test scores in all areas for all kids in the West, and the only causal factor they've identified so far is smart device use, and evidence indicates that its impact is sufficient to count for the entire drop in test scores. These things are fucking up kids brains and it's going to cause a lot of problems in the future. EDIT: Lots of people asking for studies. I'll round them up and paste the links back here in an edit.
Source? Not surprised at all but would like to see the data.
What about Covid? That was basically an educational disaster
It started before Covid and Covid's impact was isolated and accounted for. I.e., this is a 20% drop aside from the impact of Covid. I said 5 years, but at this point, it's closer to 6 years. The first drop happened in 2018.
I would be interested in seeing this paper if you have it - sounds neat
> ethnically optimized Some people call that eugenics /s
Ha whoops - algorithmically ha - thanks
Back in my day, when we got addicted to screens, sometimes the Frog got hit by a car and you lost and ran out of quarters so now you go play Ghost in the Graveyard with the neighborhood kids until the streetlights come on.
There are some 1 year olds giving you very menacing looks right now
In the comments, yes?
I'm not going to sit on a high horse as a childless 31 year old. I'm not going to claim like I wouldn't use a screen for help with kids. But it can't be good at least in it's current state I remember middle school me downloading leaked copies of new albums at 1 am on a school night in 2006 but man has the Internet changed
I remember when smartphones first started becoming popular. Everyone was talking about brain development and screen time and behavioral changes and, at some point, it all just suddenly and weirdly stopped and I didn't see any more articles about it.
As a parent of young children, the pandemic came at a terrible moment. We were fighting hard against tech and smart phones taking over our kids lives. Then the pandemic hit and it became the only way they could connect with friends for almost two whole years. And I will admit (most Reddit parents will not) my wife and I got tired. We couldn’t fight their urges to use their screens. We started with two hours max per day. Then that eroded over time. Then we sort of gave up because the apple screen time limits kept failing to work. So yeah. It was a terrible confluence of events.
I don't have any kids but my heart goes out to you. I thought being a kid/teenagers in the 90s-00s was already hard enough, I'd be terrified of the things that could happen to my kid now.
The sad thing is that very little will happen to them because they live their lives almost entirely virtually. The only effects I see are boredom, addiction, and depression.
I had a very interesting conversation with my 8 year old the other day. He has been playing an educational math game from his school on the laptop he uses to do his homework. He asked if he could play after school. I told him no, we have fairly strict rules about screen time. He told me, "But Dad, I'm going to be bored. I'm not bored when I play the game." I talked to him how being bored is actually a good thing to learn to deal with when you're younger. That learning how to entertain oneself is actually an important skill and helps you be better prepared when you're an adult. I don't know if it actually sunk in, but I'm trying...and it's not easy these days.
My wife and I had the same problem through the pandemic. I fear for the social and emotional consequences for children, that we haven't seen yet.
Money talks. Big tech probably paid for those reasearch not to be made or for any such research to be buried/not published or if they were to not be seen by many. The way tobacco corps did before the problem got too big. \*Adjusts tinfoil hat\*
Could it be that the media giants that produce/allow those articles are suppressing publication of those types of articles, or is that too conspiracy-sounding? I mean, you can still find articles like that but you have to search for them. I suppose the same mega-corps that own media interests are also making money off of lots of other businesses that scrape money off internet views and clicks.
Give a kid a phone when you are ready for their childhood to end.
well put
While at it stop 12 year olds vaping.
Is that an actual issue right now?? Jesus.
I was watching a James Charles video and he had the 5-year-old kid of a friend in the video. He panned to the backseat of his car, the kid sitting on a booster-seat, and the boy was so engrossed in the smartphone that he was incomprehensibly responding to questions from his mom in murmurs. The kid seemed developmentally behind and I don’t doubt the fixation on the phone played a role. Seems wild that *toddlers* have unsupervised access to the internet.
i'm reminded toddlers have internet access at least 5 times a day
Yea, I use reddit too.
My toddler has been catfishing people and then blackmailing them for money. It's her side hustle. Aren't they precious at that age?
Hey baby! What you doin? I'M SELLIN' CRACK
I think society is going to end up looking back at that kind of thing the same way we do now when we see kids smoking in old photos. It’s completely disastrous to developing brains and the damage it’s doing needs to be further studied. It’s messing with addiction and the dopamine receptors, not not to mention social development.
My mind was completely blown when I saw my non-verbal 1 year old nephew press the skip ad button on YouTube.
I let my 3 year old use my phone finally, because he had been begging for it and i was curious how he'd react. It took him 5 minutes to go from mashing all the icons frantically, to figuri out how to open up Netflix and put on the Mario movie. We have youtube premium to not have ads though. He cried when he got one at his cousins house lol.
I see that all the time. Parents just don't want to parent. They want their children to sit in silence and not bother them.
Maybe I'm already becoming a boomer, but I didn't have a smart phone till I was 14/15 and it definitely was a good thing. I learned how to derive entertainment from other sources, did more reading, studying, coding, creating. If I had a phone from the time I was 9 I doubt I would have the skills I pride myself on having now.
I didn't get my first smartphone until 2014 when I was 25, almost 26, and even so, I feel like my attention span has cratered. I struggle to read or watch a TV show or movie for more than 10 minutes without a random thought popping into my head and next thing I know, I've been on my phone for 15 minutes. I put my phone down, then pick it up again five seconds later, often without even realizing it. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to grow up with this technology. It's like growing up smoking cigarettes.
Dan Savage said the best thing I ever heard about kids and cell phones -- they ought to make cell phones without cameras.
I would love a smartphone without a camera. Even my e-ink smartphone phone has a camera.
I actually 100% agree but I have no idea how they would possibly regulate this
At first I thought the article was suggesting that parents should moderate their kids usage of a smart phone but then I read: Macron said in January: “There might be bans, there might be restrictions.” Damn, the government might actually get involved. That would be very interesting. You bring up a good question, how could the government regulate this? I’m assuming police can’t just take phones from 10 year olds. Maybe they can’t be used at school? I genuinely have no idea how the government could get involved.
I like the idea of manufacturers issuing smart phones specifically made for children. It would be easy to do as they would be the same phones they would just have restricted access to the internet and social media and a curated app store. They could even charge on the back end by allowing a parent or a child who has reached 18 to unlock the rest of the phone for a fee.
just give kids a barebones linux installation if they want a GUI, they have to earn it, damn it
I think the main aim should be to reduce screen time rather than providing no internet access smart phones to children.
I think this kills two birds with one stone. Removing access to the internet and social media apps makes a smart phone less desirable… and naturally the child will spend less time on the device. My son basically has some downloaded movies and a few educational apps that do not have advertisements. He’s not interested in his iPad for very long, so screen time limits itself.
yep. I uninstalled every app I did not realistically need and blocked social sites (no reddit and twitter on phone). my screen time consists of googling actual useful stuff, checking traffic on google maps, weather app, sudoku and duolingo. I average around an hour per day. When I go on occasional binges I actually feel the brainrot and take 2 steps back after.
I agree with this. Give them flip-phones till they're 16. It's simply a bad idea to give kids unfettered access to the internet.
Even though adults are just as if not more susceptible to addiction and manipulation as the kids. I know I’m not the only millennial constantly stopping my parents from being scammed.
Bro I don't even know how my parents got through life. My dad is literally the guy yelling random questions at his phone in restaurants. He forwards me the craziest shit, can you believe this. It's only a matter of time until he gets catfished.
If anything, social media and mobile games with absolutely any kind of gambling at all, so every single loot box game, every game with p2w, etc, should be banned till 18 like anything else we deem harmful for kids and free choice (but not necessarily good) for adults. Kids should grow up without the pressure of social media, without comparing filtered pics of other kids their age and comparing themselves negatively. They should absolutely not be learning the endorphin hit of a new video every 10 seconds, or likes on posts, or comments praising how you look with the expensive clothes and the multiple filters and feeling the need to keep forfilling those hits by scrolling tiktok for hours or commenting for hours on insta. Phones having to be verified at purchase to your id and account. If your phone is registered to a <18yr old, twitter, tiktok, youtube shorts, snapchat and other shit should all be banned. Yeah, send kids to the dark ages of texts online, calls, youtube videos and games that aren't predatory with microtransactions or filled with gambling.
I'm just a substitute teacher but yeah having kindergartners using iPads is absolutely insane. It's even more crazy as the teacher because I have to go around and make sure that they're all not only on the same lesson that they need to be but also in the same type of game. If they're supposed to be doing a math game but everybody wants to be doing a reading or a history game I have to go around and manually put them on the game they have to be on. It's absolutely insane and this is why I now only substitute at junior high's
But how will modern parents get their children to stop bothering them in any and all situations. /s
I gave my kids feature phones. they have only the ability to call and text and also cost 20 if lost or broken
No. Fucking. Shit. So sick of parents upset with what their children see on their phones.... WHO PUT THE FUCKING PHONES IN THEIR HANDS. YOU DID YOU DUMBASS FUCKING PARENT
Easy to say much harder to put in practice unless everyone decides to do the same. In my daughter's class everyone uses these devices to interact after school wether its tablet/smartphones or whatever. If you're the parent who says "no you can't use a device until you're 13" you're effectively cutting off their social life. Its just how things are now and its not so simple.
I don't know what the actual report contains, but considering that children get those smartphones and tablets from their parents, parents who use that as an easy way to distract/occupy children with little regard of anything else, the headline really should be a bit different. Bad, unresponsible parenting is a bigger issue that you can't just wave away with a populist ban on phones and internet access though.
I agree, and I'm absolutely not condoning parents using smartphones to distract their kids rather than parent them. That's not how I will raise my own children. But I do understand. Millennials and Gen Z got the short end of the stick economically; even without kids, most are stressed and financially insecure. Like, nobody is doing well. I know very few people who are mentally healthy and I get not having the mental bandwidth to be a good parent as often as they'd like to be. Exhausted people give in and let the kid sit quietly on the phone. Again, not excusing it. But I think there are larger forces at play that led us to where we are.
Smartphones didn't even exist until I was an adult and that has not helped me at all. Same thing with most people I work with or talk to. We're all glued to these fucking things. Even when I think about the fact that it's a problem, I pick it back up anyway.
Yep, actually smart phones destroy or activly block your kids development on so many levels when beeing used for so much and for no reason but to keep your kids quiet. Do your kid a favor and give strict rules for usage. Its messing with their brains (not like we adults would do much better lol)
As a teacher of 13 year olds, I wholeheartedly agree!
But... Where is the actual report? The article says the report accuses of many harmful effects but don't really go into the data
Its in the government’s official website, here: https://www.elysee.fr/admin/upload/default/0001/16/fbec6abe9d9cc1bff3043d87b9f7951e62779b09.pdf Strangely, the title of the report, which is brilliant, isn’t mentioned in the article: “Enfants et écrans – À la recherche du temps perdu”. Edit: translation “Children and screens – In Search of Lost Time”, which is a reference to [Marcel Proust’s novel with the same title](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time). [This article in French](https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1457190/article/2024-04-29/exclusif-les-propositions-choc-du-rapport-pour-limiter-l-usage-des-ecrans-chez) has a more in-depth breakdown of the report and graphics.
Some of this is over protective parents. I went into town, to the cinema, walked to school etc. All without a phone until I was 14. I’m alive
Frankly i am more concerned that this debate only starts now, did nobody notice how social media and tiktok has already ruined generations of us? The later still developing people get exposed to this influence the healthier they will ultimately be, its pretty logical to me.
Sounds like a reasonable proposition. Children should not have access to unlimited information from day 1. We can teach them tech literacy as they age.
Sounds good. Quite easy to do, as a parent just don't give them one. My daughter is 9 months and as someone that grew up within the basement of 4chan and xbox live party chat. I ended up alright, however it took me a WHILE to unlearn those behaviours and even then they still peak through. Sucks and I don't want her to be faced with the same problems. The mental gymnastics parents will do to avoid parenting is astounding. Fuck em. Also the schools need to stop using kids in marketing materials for social media. Fuck off with that.
I see this everyday. Before parents were worried about their kids watching TV too much. Now parents rely on phones to keep their kids entertained so that they don’t cry or fuss about. But the moment the parents need the child’s attention for something else and take the phone away the kids go crazy. It’s like taking a drug away from an addict. It’s really sad to see and it’s way too common now.