281–290 of 351 posts
So far it works out.
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Or sugar. Or TV. Or video games. Modern technology may be more insidious but it's not the first threat of this type. Adults have been ranting and raving about kids relationships with media and technology and drugs and food and sex for a very, very long time.
It’s getting worse not better. We are creating an entire society that is wall to wall addiction that starts at birth. I think a big problem with it is that people don’t realize how addictive this stuff can be or how manipulative and insidious it is. They’re not prepared for it and they get blindsided when it takes over their lives or their kids lives. Infinite scroll alone is incredibly addictive. Add other tactics a…
We seem to romanticize the past as if before smartphones kids would spent their time reading Aristotle and doing calisthenics.
No one had a smartphone when I was a kid and instead I spent hours a day playing Nintendo or watching trash TV.
On the other hand, it wasn't that long ago that people could go to the grocery store and push a shopping cart without looking at their phone the whole time.
I think these are just the problems of a society of abundance.
Quite popular in my 9 year old's class, where the kids are generally "free range" (Scandinavia), and nobody wants to get them a phone.
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'm using the watch for older people. There is a sport watch, which I think has an esim. I have one of these but haven't been able to use it yet.
Feel free to ask me more over email if you want. It's on my profile page. I definitely went down the rabbit hole on finding this watch and it was a doozy.
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Your child is a special case. Speaking from experience, most kids get too sucked into the social aspect of phone use, to a detrimental degree. Group chats end up being the location of cyber bullying, for example.
There were no smartphones when I was young and I got bullied a lot. Kids bully wherever they interact. It's not the tech that's the problem.
For example, you can now bully people anonymously.
And you can bully people at any hour of the day or night - not just in public, in the brief periods between classes.
And with widespread camera phones you can not only make someone cry, you can video them crying, keep it forever, and send it to lots of people.
And don't forget that very fragile $300-1000 bit of electronics the kid is carrying, would be a real shame if something happened to it.
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…
Sigh. Sometimes you don’t need 10 peer reviewed articles to just know when something is bad. Were you the guy in the 60s saying smoking was totally fine because studies? Sometimes you just know inhaling smoke everyday is probably not good for you. Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.
We don't have that data for smartphones. It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms. As far as we can tell, the association between smartphone use and poor mental health is strongly concentrated in a minority of people with very high usage. There's a strong probability that the causality behind this association runs in the opposite direction - troubled people spend lots of time using digital devices, because they're escaping their troubled lives.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6883663/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01825-4
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Everyone has a different threshold for what they want from a dumb phone, some wants Google Maps, some think Youtube is ok, Google Chrome etc. which makes it hard to have a one true dumb phone. If you give access to the play store it's no longer a dumb phone The best way to have a dumb phone tailored to your needs is to take a cheap smartphone and make it dumb, either by using a different launcher, or a customized OS…
Isn't this what Family link [1] is for ? Or you can get an iPhone and use parental controls. My kids has a tablet and I get to decide what can be used and for how long, and nothing gets installed without my approval. [1] https://families.google/familylink/
After high school ended (2:30pm) most days I used to have some kind of club activity (2:30pm-3:30pm) and then hang out in the cafeteria or by the front of the school, waiting for a parent to pick me up on the way home from work (5pm). I had a dumb phone so I could stay in touch, and I could also walk home if I wanted (40min / no sidewalks / 35mph roads), but most of the time I just sat down and did homework and read…
So most kids seem to have a phone, be it smart, or dumb, from that kinda age. Certainly none of the kids wait for their parents to collect them that would be pretty inconvenient.
Parent here. This is a LOT easier today than it was 5-10 years ago. It feels like there's been a generation divide where younger kids are not as insistent on smartphones as the older kids were. Maybe it was covid. But also there's a lot of negative sentiment even amongst kids about smartphones - that they are addictive, encourage anti-social behaviors, and enable bullying. "Brain-rot". Our local school district banne…
I am 38 years old. I attend concerts very frequently, and - though it’s uncommon - some shows don’t allow photos or videos, at the artist’s request. And it’s enforced by venue staff. Even as someone who enjoys taking videos at concerts, I really like the vibe at shows that have a no-photo/no-video policy. It increases audience engagement, and it stops the phenomenon where everyone has their phone held high in the air…
It was really nice to not have phones being waved about everywhere.
I don't think many really watch those videos back anyway with the shaky video and tinny sound.
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This counterpoint feels like it needs just as much scrutiny as the position it’s refuting. Isn’t “but everyone else has one” the appeal kids make to their parents about most everything? (I know I was guilty of that as a kid myself) Why is this a new level of “denying them a social life”?
Because if you deny a kid a Nintendo, even though "everyone has one", it doesn't kill their social life, because they can still go over to a friend's house to play (arguably, this is better for their social life). If you don't give them a smartphone, and all their peers use their phones to communicate, as well as talk about TikTok videos, your kid will be excluded from all that. If that's where the majority of intera…
Many kids need access to group messaging to even be told that there's something going on at foo's house at 6.