My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

I don't think it's the phone itself that was the problem here, I think its allowing your teenager unfettered access to social media. TikTok, Facebook, IG, are not particularly healthy IMO. There is something to look at here with the loss of interest in reading and being creative. iPhones are in fact very good outlets for creativity, its just that children need limits within them just like anything else.

Parents should be engaged with what kids are actually doing on their devices and be able to set boundaries for their digital lives. I'm all for being creative, and I think digital tools can be a real boon to it. Making games, videos, digital art, programming etc. are all awesome, character building experiences. Scrolling through feeds for 9 hours a day watching celebrities do hand-jives and gossip, not as much..

I used to agree with (1), but lately I'm inclined to think that this time, it really is different. Very different. And the primary reason is that unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more, on a scale we've never seen before. Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. TV isn't a bi-directional communication platform that has thrown teenagers into an arena where they're communicating with thousands of people at a time when they're still figuring out how to communicate in small groups.

Regarding (2), I think people are being far too critical. The author acknowledges many of their own missteps, and they're also going through a time where, iPhone or not, their daughter is growing apart from them, and I imagine that's very difficult emotionally. I also feel like they really humanized how budging a little bit on rules here and there can spiral out of control, and how that feels. I really appreciated that perspective.

There are a few aspects which are worrying:

- Social pressure to be connected constantly increases for children below 14 years.

- Sites like TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, etc. are designed to be addictive. Children at such a young age do not have the same level of self control like you.

- The longer kids spend time on these platforms, the smaller their bubble gets where they live in.

I understand that as a good parent you can try to explain such things and guide them. But many won't.

Recently I was invited to a school meeting about screen time. I was shocked at some recommendations, for example, age = hours of screen time per week. Also many parents trust tablets and phones way more than desktops. This also worries me, because arguably there are more ways to be creative on desktops.

I also spent endless hours playing video games when I was young and chatting about them on forums and irc. But social media is on a whole other level and I think most people do not even realize it.