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The Wait Until 8th pledge

waituntil8th.org

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Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#11

Post by wpietri »

voidhorse wrote: post #4

The fact that parents even consider giving kids phones before 8th grade is baffling to me. Growing up, I got a dumb cellphone around that age and it feels like an appropriate time. The internet is just too wild to let anyone younger than at least 13 go near it imo. What's especially unfortunate about it is that I get the sense most parents that hand out phones earlier could have just gotten their kid some handheld ga…

The problem parents often solve with a phone is not fun, but contact. When they are away from their kid, they want to know where the kid is, to be able to talk to them, and to have the kid able to call them. This is often especially important to divorced parents, who want to be able to contact the kid directly when at the other parent's house.

The problem a kid often solves with the phone is also not fun, but social connection to friends.

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#12

Post by bushwald »

parasubvert wrote: post #3

Yeah, how about no. Parent your kids to balance their screen time, and please keep them off social media as long as possible (or very supervised). But pledges like this are ridiculous, and remind me of how parents in the 80s thought the C64 or NES was going to rot kids brains, just like TV in the 70s.

There was an insurrection a couple of years ago because people raised on too much TV got riled up by the Internet on their phones. TV and phones are a destructive force (regardless of political affiliation).

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#13

Post by colecut »

voidhorse wrote: post #7
parasubvert wrote: post #3

Yeah, how about no. Parent your kids to balance their screen time, and please keep them off social media as long as possible (or very supervised). But pledges like this are ridiculous, and remind me of how parents in the 80s thought the C64 or NES was going to rot kids brains, just like TV in the 70s.

Balancing screen time seems doable and makes sense but the social media bit seems basically impossible. I have yet to encounter a kid with a smart phone that wasn't using it to view stuff on tiktok or youtube.

Yes there is some social activity on YouTube but I have trouble thinking of it as "social media" in the Facebook/Instagram sense..

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#15

Post by rcme »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #10

Bah, it's just a tool, and important one for safety and avoiding unnecessary distress. It's up to parents to take care of technological limits and discipline, but it's not not an all or nothing deal. Especially during pandemic, how else were kids supposed to have any connection to peers? And without pandemic, what's wrong with cousins playing Minecraft while many hundreds of miles away from each other.

This is the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#16

Post by voidhorse »

wpietri wrote: post #11
voidhorse wrote: post #4

The fact that parents even consider giving kids phones before 8th grade is baffling to me. Growing up, I got a dumb cellphone around that age and it feels like an appropriate time. The internet is just too wild to let anyone younger than at least 13 go near it imo. What's especially unfortunate about it is that I get the sense most parents that hand out phones earlier could have just gotten their kid some handheld ga…

The problem parents often solve with a phone is not fun, but contact. When they are away from their kid, they want to know where the kid is, to be able to talk to them, and to have the kid able to call them. This is often especially important to divorced parents, who want to be able to contact the kid directly when at the other parent's house. The problem a kid often solves with the phone is also not fun, but social…

That makes sense. In that case it seems like the best thing would be a dumb phone, not a smart phone. Or, if a smartphone, one that's pretty limited in range of functionality, at least.

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#17

Post by rottencupcakes »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #10

Bah, it's just a tool, and important one for safety and avoiding unnecessary distress. It's up to parents to take care of technological limits and discipline, but it's not not an all or nothing deal. Especially during pandemic, how else were kids supposed to have any connection to peers? And without pandemic, what's wrong with cousins playing Minecraft while many hundreds of miles away from each other.

This isn't about not giving them computers is it? This is about not giving them smart phones.

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#18

Post by wpietri »

parasubvert wrote: post #3

Yeah, how about no. Parent your kids to balance their screen time, and please keep them off social media as long as possible (or very supervised). But pledges like this are ridiculous, and remind me of how parents in the 80s thought the C64 or NES was going to rot kids brains, just like TV in the 70s.

Is this something you are currently doing? Or more a theory?

I know one parent, a software developer, whose kid goes to a school that strongly encouraged this and so they signed up for it. It seems to work fine for them. In contrast, I know other parents who have given their kids phones and it is quite hard to completely monitor their usage of it. Around the house, parents develop a background sense for where their kids are and what they're doing. If you hear a kid go into the kitchen, your ears perk up to make sure they're, say, getting cereal rather than playing with knives and fire. But a kid doing perfectly safe things on a phone looks about like a kid doing dangerous things on their phone. And a phone is portable enough that you can't really directly supervise them all the time.

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#19

Post by larusso »

The headline caught my eye because my birthday is on the 8th ;)

But to the topic. I have 3 kids and only my daughter (over ten) has a phone. We gave her an old iPhone and I disabled everything from internet to blocking foreign numbers. She has books and music access and can write to her friends. I‘m really against opening the internet at her age because I see one not the point why she would need it at that age and because we have some nice negative examples of „zombie“ kids walking around only having conversations in little chunks between smartphone breaks.

I grew up without a phone. And when I got my first phone (around 15) it was a dumb brick. To be fair it where the late 90th, early 2000 ;) Internet wasn‘t even big for me.

My other two kids don‘t have a phone. But also: I wouldn’t simply put an age to that decision. I mean either the person is right or not. I hear no complains from my kids and feel rarely the effects of social pressure. Also helps that my wife is resolute as a stone when it comes to that topic :)

Re: The Wait Until 8th pledge

#20

Post by voidhorse »

colecut wrote: post #13
voidhorse wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balancing screen time seems doable and makes sense but the social media bit seems basically impossible. I have yet to encounter a kid with a smart phone that wasn't using it to view stuff on tiktok or youtube.

Yes there is some social activity on YouTube but I have trouble thinking of it as "social media" in the Facebook/Instagram sense..

True, but I personally feel it's just as potentially damaging to the psyche, if not more so, in certain ways. Your kid starts watching minecraft let plays and next thing you know one of the lets players grifts for some neo-nazi or mysogynist and your kid has a bunch of bad ideas flowing into their head...
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