151–160 of 351 posts
I know the site clarifies it, but the headline messaging on this is meaninglessly confusing. "Wait until 8th!" "Oh, you mean their 8th birthday?" "No, 8th grade!" "Oh, so wait until they're in 8th grade, got it!" "No no, until the end of the 8th grade, when they graduate middle school!" "Oh, so it's really wait until 9th" Just seems like this would be the beginning of every conversation and lead to a non-unified appr…
I know the site clarifies it, but the headline messaging on this is meaninglessly confusing. "Wait until 8th!" "Oh, you mean their 8th birthday?" "No, 8th grade!" "Oh, so wait until they're in 8th grade, got it!" "No no, until the end of the 8th grade, when they graduate middle school!" "Oh, so it's really wait until 9th" Just seems like this would be the beginning of every conversation and lead to a non-unified appr…
I'm in the UK and have no idea what age 8th grade even is.
meanwhile millenials had full reign over the internet as kids cause their boomer parents didnt know shit. back when everyone did the famous A/S/L questionare from randos online lol.
It's not just about internet access , it's about the medically recognized highly addictive and predatory nature of social media. It is designed with the same principles as slot machines, to draw you in and keep you engaged for as long as possible. The internet we grew up in was much less centralized and not yet optimized for this kind of manipulation.
For a while, there was some consensus that anonymity and talking to strangers was the danger. So we got real name and photo policies, and the expectation that we'd have an online presence that was an extension of our real selves. Now that every kid's online persona is indivisible from their IRL identity, and their popularity can be measured with likes and followers and inclusion / exclusion from group chats, it just allows the social dynamics among their peers to play out 24/7 on steroids with no escape.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this post from another thread is a good answer to this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41930275#41931671 Tldr:Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food
Then block social media. Don't let the kids install apps, don't let them access the web, control who they can message. Why is the phone itself the problem?
There are many wonderful things for kids - even very young kids - to do on the internet, in collaboration / supervision / concert with a caring adult.
My now 9yo has been playing games like Monument Valley, Lost Sounds, Dragonbox, and the SNES randomizers since he was three (maybe two for some of them). And I have no doubt that these have been enormous boosts to his cognitive and behavioral development, and have given him (and so many kids his age) super powers compared to us.
It's one thing to ward off social media and FPSs; it's another entirely to suggest that refraining from use of a phone or computer is likely to lead to better outcomes.
I know the site clarifies it, but the headline messaging on this is meaninglessly confusing. "Wait until 8th!" "Oh, you mean their 8th birthday?" "No, 8th grade!" "Oh, so wait until they're in 8th grade, got it!" "No no, until the end of the 8th grade, when they graduate middle school!" "Oh, so it's really wait until 9th" Just seems like this would be the beginning of every conversation and lead to a non-unified appr…
Agreed 100%. Additional factors on top of all those is some countries start year 1 at age five, and others at age 6, and of course there's a variety of actual ages within a grade as well. "Wait Until 9th" would have definitely helped a lot. "Wait until 14" might be even clearer. Or even "wait until high school".
Younger millennial chiming in: I'm pretty sure that 8th grade is exactly when I got my first smartphone, although social media had a fraction of the presence back then, so it's hard to draw a direct comparison to today. But I do feel like the timing worked out well enough: not having a smartphone until that point (since they didn't exist lol) turned me into a voracious reader, and the dumbphone I did have meant I was…
This makes me think, as I've thought previously, that the generational labels seem too broad for the pace of change in information technology over the last 40 years. I read your comment as an older Millenial and thought "what?! a smartphone in 8th grade?!" Despite being in the same "generation," someone born in the mid-80s came of age with radically different consumer technology compared to someone born just ten year…
Your internet story is also funny to me because my dad worked at an ISP when I was a toddler. One of my earliest computer memories is when he taught me how to go into the Windows 98 graphics menu and toggle the color settings from 16-bit to 32-bit (or vice versa, can't remember now) before booting up a particular CD-ROM game, because otherwise the graphics would be put of whack. I must have been four or five.
I also remember asking why I couldn't play the games whose cool icons were always visible in the taskbar... turns out those "games" were Napster and IrfanView, lol.
We don’t wait. We tell the kids they can have once when they can buy it themselves. In our experience that usually happens when they are about 17.
I think the possession of a device isn't the risk itself.
I'm still surprised the "dumb phone for kids" and "dumb watch with basic comms" markets are so underdeveloped (from my perspective). I would love my kids to have (a) gps tracking, (b) ability to send texts/calls to like 5 predefined numbers, (c) tell the time, and nothing else. But watches all seem to have games or weird gamified fitness trackers (Google's new fitbit for kids). Or they are super kid-ish, like bright…
I didn't have a phone at all until I was in high school! Looking back on all the times that I was tragically killed or maimed as a result, it's a miracle I'm able to write this comment today!
I'm going to post the same comment I did last year when this showed up on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207142 ), as checking the website it still seems to be true: Literally none of the evidence on the website's own "Why" page supports their suggestion: https://www.waituntil8th.org/why-wait All of the studies (bonus points for linking to news articles instead of directly to the studies) have something…
IMO it's not the phone itself that matters, it's what the kids do on it. Phone can be good to communicate with parents, bad for nearly anything else at a young age.
My daughter has autism, and struggles to connect with her classmates. She gets overwhelmed in groups, and is shy talking in person sometimes.
Now that her classmates started messaging each other, she is actually being included a lot more. She has started messaging and setting up online play dates with her classmates. I was so proud when I found her playing Minecraft with a class mate while FaceTiming. She was playing with a friend!
I don’t care what anyone says, that is good for my daughter.