I’m inclined to agree. I was definitely an internet addict when I was a teenager, but now as a 40 year old, I’m persistently depressed by how many people my age simply cannot use more than the absolute basics of their phone and computer. Like sure, they can send a text and write in a Word document, but become completely paralysed by anything more complicated than that because they’re so terrified they’ll break something if they click on the wrong button. Those of us that are used to technology have no fear of pressing buttons to find out what they do.

I feel like there ought to be a sensible middle ground somewhere, where kids can be taught how to use the tools they’ll be relying on as adults, without exposing them to all the downsides of the internet and exploitative apps.

I’m a father of two young kids nowadays, and I also was a teenager in the 90s with internet access when my parents didn’t really know what it is.

I think her statement should read “no unrestricted/unlimited smartphone access for children”, but I think for a child time limited, guided smartphone access is important - just by letting her use my phone now and then I don’t think I’d be able to have her build up the media competency required for not wasting her pocket money on nonsensical predatory games when she’s a teenager.

She’s 7 now - she generally can chat with a limited amount of people (family members and some friends), make pictures, and request app installation. I’m approving pretty much every free app nowadays - at the beginning I was curating, but we went over game mechanics several times, so she’s now recognizing predatory or low effort games herself, and gets rid of them after trying them out. I have my doubts educating a teenager with significantly more technical skills, disagreeing with everything you say, and some ability to throw money at the problem will be as open as her to slowly learning those kind of pitfalls.

God I hate “screen time” discourse. Not all activity that happens on a screen is of equivalent value.

Dial-up and a CRT implies you had to learn a little bit about computers in order to use them for entertainment. A baby can use a modern smartphone. It’s not “preparing” them for anything beides being unable to self-pacify without consumption.

I generally agree. I think there are no great answers, but the expert they interviewed makes good points. The main point that resonates with me is the network effects: if everyone feels pressured to begin using tools because they feel like everyone else is on them, it’s very difficult for any parent to constrain their kid’s use.

Age prohibitions aren’t very restrictive because they’re difficult to enforce. They’re basically just advice and a legal tool to go after the very most flagrant business targeting minors.

As for the positive effects: that’s a great point. I want my kid to have access to explore cyberspace in the same way I want them to have access to explore our city and nearby wildlands. I want them to have as much freedom as possible while teaching them to recognize and avoid danger. I think in all these cases, exposure with supervision before gradually increasing unsupervised access to areas that have become familiar is the only strategy to achieve that that in aware of.

I will say one thing: my mother didn’t let us have a TV or by extension a nintendo back in the 80s.

Now, as a 41 year old man, I play video games almost every day.

I think it’s connected. If I don’t play video games, I feel like I’m not in control of my life. Having a video game system that I’m allowed to interact with is a part of my sense of accomplishment in the world.

I think they’re related. I don’t blame her at all (not because I don’t think there’s a causal link, but because I think blame is useless).

You make a very good point. It’s super important for kids to be on the same page as their peers.

Ideally no kids would have these things. Kids could bond with each other over the cruelty of the adults depriving them of tech, while growing up with healthy brains.

I think (as with everything) not doing any of the extremes is the way to go.

I’m a Wikipedia addict but I’m not complaining

Yeah and I remember playing Snake for half a day. And spending all the school breaks bragging with the phones. And once they had color displays, we shared funny 5 second video clips each day. And that was more than 20 years ago.

To be fair, I don’t think we were more addicted than you were ‘addicted’ to Pokemon cards. Extensively watching Peppa pig and Minecraft Lets-plays on daddy’s phone at the age of 3 is a new level, though.

Texting addiction was a thing.

It was? Honestly asking. Texting for me was cumbersone (T9) and .10c each (recieving too!) For my friends and I, texts were a means to an end (meeting up usually), not a place to have conversations.

You’re not wrong about ads though, the main difference today is that many apps are engineered to be addictive.

Twitter is a pub sub system. SMS is a messaging system.

Only the pub sun produces the possibility of endless content to just scroll through.

Agreed! That quote shifts the blame onto parents, and completely ignores a decade’s worth of evidence that today’s social media platforms were designed to be as addictive as possible. On purpose. For better “engagement metrics” so that they can get kids’ eyeballs on more ads.

I agree with you however I do think there’s something to be said about the actual actions behind it.

Addicted to texting was certainly a thing, I remember others certainly having it growing up and I myself remember the anticipation. But, it literally is just talking to your friends. At the very least the nature of conversation, to me personally, takes away some of the negative connotations. Being connected to a friend as a form of escapism of the real world, often with kinship as your friend felt very similar to how you did.

Compared to the usage today where it’s not conversational. The endless scrolling through posts, to the point where people like and I didn’t make enough content for the feed so other random content starts getting added. If the social media does have communication interactions, it’s likely not someone you know from real life and the depth of the interactions aren’t as deep. When texting all day you either run out of things to say and become complacent with the menial texting or you engage and delve deeper. Some early socials were able to mitigate this by still being able to have personality through it - obviously MySpace, but others like Gaia Online as well were apt for having an online presence. Now everyone and everything is so bland and exactly the same.

It was a tactical move by social media, widening the scope of meaningful interactions out into the friends list on the internet. Why stay talking to one to three people all day when you can be talking at 150+ people every day!

Anyway I hope this makes sense lol. I definitely agree that both were addicting but I do think texting at least is rooted in a social bonding and then reinforced with friendship at school, unlike the contemporary options where the friends likely aren’t even in the same state (which isn’t inherently bad by any means, but having that tactile friendship makes a huge difference)

Even before mobile phones, there where paid phone services, some about sex but some just to talk to people, that got people addicted.

I remember something called “the party line” where you would dial a paid number and you would be connected to sort of a group chat with some other people.

Some people even got in debt because of massive phone bills.

I don’t really have a formed opinion on this subject. (Though I have some experience with certain things where holding back in childhood has lead to potentially much bigger addictions)

But I can tell you that my uncle bought smartwatches to his children. The watches are only allowed to call family members & have GPS tracking on them, have no games, no Youtube no distractions. They are exactly what you are describing, a safety feature. (though the kids regularly dualwear them to cover for each other, so … :D )

Unfortunately, it’s not like that. The current state of internet services and social media is inherently addictive and problematic, and that’s especially true in formative years.

While education is extremely important, it won’t be enough.

The first step in dealing with addiction is understanding it and identifying it. The problem is that parents often don’t speak to their children about the dangers, and what it could mean, with concrete examples.

The issue of addiction to technology is deeply rooted in the way our brains are structured. This is particularly concerning for children and teenagers, as their brains are not fully developed until around the age of 21. Simply having conversations about the dangers of addiction is not a sufficient solution, especially considering that many adults are also addicted to technology. After all, here we are, possibly spending time online arguing with strangers instead of engaging in more productive activities.

To address this issue, it’s crucial to move away from a black-and-white mindset. Extremes are rarely beneficial. It may be necessary for children to have smartphones for safety and communication purposes, but these devices should come with certain restrictions. For instance, limiting the ability of children to install any app they want or restricting excessive screen time could be effective measures. By implementing these controlled measures, we can provide the necessary safety net while also safeguarding the mental and emotional well-being of younger users.

However, real-world actions should be informed by scientific evidence. Any approach we adopt needs to be backed by data (and not opinions) proving its effectiveness in achieving the desired outcomes.

Agreed. We bought my son a phone when he was traveling between states and flying as an unaccompanied minor a bunch because of split parenting. He was about nine. We had strict rules about when he was allowed to use it and when he ABSOLUTELY was not allowed to NOT have it. We also didn’t turn on the data (and made him use Wifi) until he was 12.

We absolutely NEEDED him to have it, given those conditions.

The modern internet is weird. It’s a space where you can link up a Skinner machine feeding you pure hate and vitriol directly to your brain, but it’s also a space where you can teach yourself literally anything.

I feel like the trick is using it more for the latter and less for the former. Even using Beehaw too much, it quickly becomes obvious that I need to shift my focus. Endless streams of news and opinion aren’t, like, great.

I think there are ways to impose child safety locks, as it were, on a phone’s access to the internet? Like a curfew or “max hours in a day” limit. I feel like that would make more sense than not giving a kid a phone.

And there are also tricks one can apply to circunvent some of that attention-grabby design, like putting the phone in grayscale mode.

Also, unlike cigarettes, smartphones serve many purposes, and 99.999% of people (in countries where they are ubiquitous) will need to own one at some point. I think it may be better to actively teach a child how to handle the information-overload, attention grabbing tricks, misinformation, and so on of the internet, rather than leaving them to just figure it out for themselves later on.

My concerns with denying children a smartphone altogether include:

• Phones are an essential safety device, and smartphones are better at this than dumb phones because of things like GPS and maps navigation (especially for kids who get lost easily), clear emergency alerts (e.g. “expect a tsubami in 3 minutes”, or “there is an active shooter currently around the grocery store at x and y street”), the ability to store easily accessible information for first responders in the phone (which can sometimes also be auto-shared when you make a 911 call), and the ability to easily and silently text 911 if they find themselves in a situation where calling is dangerous.

• Phones and social media are now an integral part of most kids’ social lives. If a kid doesn’t have a smartphone and can’t join in on real time group chats, with the ability to see the things their peers share in that chat, or if they don’t have video chat access, they’ll be cut off from a lot of other kids and their social life will suffer for it.

And access to social media is especially important for kids who need to find support they can’t find easily irl, like for queer or neurodivergent kids who benefit from talking to others like them on the internet - even if they’re lucky and their parents are supportive, it’s not the same as finding a peer support group. For similar reasons, access to digital library collections can be a big deal. Granted, some of this would be covered if they have access to the internet on a laptop or desktop, but at that point they’d have internet access anyway so they might as well have the phone too.

• Phones are more and more often required for basic utilitarian access, too. Sometimes taking the city bus requires a phone because you can’t pay cash anymore. Sometimes the laundry machine doesn’t take coins, only app or internet payment. Sometimes the menu at a restaurant is just a QR code that tells you to look at their website. It sucks but it’s only getting more this way.

I’m not advocating for giving smartphones to literal toddlers, but beyond a certain (fairly low) age I think at this point the risks of giving a kid a smartphone are outweighed by the risks of them not having one.

What’s a bad idea?

Letting children borrow their parents’ phone?

Relatively new parent here. I regret to inform you that your hypothesis is incorrect, at least for my kid. He’s still an infant, though and I don’t know if you include kids under 1 in “small children”.

My wife and I only use our phones to track his nap times, take a picture of him occasionally (once a week or so), and make phone calls. He is still magnetically attracted to them. If you leave one sitting on a surface he can reach he will go for it and start trying to get it to light up on the lock screen. This is especially frustrating for my wife and I as we intend to restrict screen time as much as possible through early childhood.

Even removing social pressures and constructs around phones they are little boxes with moving lights on one side that respond to your touch. That’s inherently interesting to children even before they can meaningfully interpret writing or abstract images.

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Do me a favor and explain how that would work, assuming 24 hours in a day.

How many parents do you imagine are going to actually do this? Free time is a resource most parents rarely have. It’s the reason a smartphone ends up in a child’s hands: to keep them occupied.

Doesn’t seem like it would solve the core problem of internet scrolling being bad for the brain.