191–200 of 351 posts
> Students in eighth grade are usually 13–14 years old. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_grade In case anyone else outside the US couldn’t find the actual age when scanning the site.
Is this really that US specific? Ages 6-7 seems to be pretty common for first grade¹, which gives you 13-14 for eighth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_stage
Maybe off topic, but is that AI gen gore on the image of the small child looking down at his phone on the left?
> Let’s protect the elementary and middle school years from the distractions and the dangers of a smartphone. > … because of unrealistic social pressure and expectations to have one. Sorry, but I do not agree with the equivalence of a device and one of its possible usages. My kids got their first smartphone at the ages of 5-6. (dramatic pause) When I was younger me and my siblings got a camera, a Game Boy, a watch, a…
You should start a business selling those locked down phones to parents because 99% of them have never heard of Lineage OS. Half who have heard of it wouldn't know how to begin installing it and locking it down.
Another middle ground would be to insert no SIM card (my kids only had access via WiFi at first) or to disable mobile data.
Maybe my kids are special, but so far it was enough agree upon rules about what they are allowed to do. As soon as they break the rules they will loose some of their benefits. No rule works for everyone, but simple "no" to a technology that has so many upsides for our family life is also nothing for me.
Edit: also "selling a locked-down phone" is exactly NOT a solution. Parents will have to learn the up and downs of this technology and apply an individual solution to their situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s true. My daughter didn’t have a phone until 9th grade, which she just started. She had talked about getting a dumb phone because she wasn’t very into the smartphone thing, which I was supportive of. However she now takes public transit to high school, and really wanted the Transit app so she could easily navigate in the city. So, an iPhone is where we landed. And I have to say, it is astounding how quickly that…
Out of curiosity, what are her phone habits like? And, as others have mentioned, you can turn on parental controls to limit what apps she can have on it. Have you done this already?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s true. My daughter didn’t have a phone until 9th grade, which she just started. She had talked about getting a dumb phone because she wasn’t very into the smartphone thing, which I was supportive of. However she now takes public transit to high school, and really wanted the Transit app so she could easily navigate in the city. So, an iPhone is where we landed. And I have to say, it is astounding how quickly that…
I only have to look at my own phone habits to know that expecting any better from my children is probably unreasonable.
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…
The advantage of this is that it is as smart or dumb as I allow it to be.
Now that she is a little older (8th grade) I've slowly increased the allowed apps and screen time. She is able to do really useful things with it.
So in short: you can make a smart phone dumb, but you can't make a dumb phone smart.
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…
https://fortune.com/well/article/rules-for-curbing-kid-smart...
I don't think American society has been served well by our tradition of trying to confine children to a pretend kid's world and excluding them from the actual world their going to have to contend with. Our drinking culture is awful, our children are routinely barred from "adult" spaces which keeps them away from adult culture and socialization, we treat nudity and sex like some kind of crime to the point where we're…
They could be something else, but there is no business model that can compete with addiction.
I agree that kids need more real world experience. Mindlessly scrolling TikTok and playing repetitive games with compulsion loops designed by psychologists to maximize addiction isn’t real world experience.