The kids with phones are alright

If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.

For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.

There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)

Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.

An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.

It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.

The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.

If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.

If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.

Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.

It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.

The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.

I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.

A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.

Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.

Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.

Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.

For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.

I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.

Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.