The Wait Until 8th pledge

In Denmark we are on the brink of banning smartphones in schools. Not because we want to but because all the science point toward them being dangerous. I’m personally not on the hardliner side, but I’ve yet to see a single argument as to why children need to have access to a smartphone during class except for cases of accessibility. All of the pro phones in school voices in the debate here are from the tech industry or are media science professors who haven’t done any research on the health impacts.

I think it’s wild to find HN debating whether this is similar to banning books, or how the smartphone is just the comic or the video. Especially because I assume that you weren’t allowed to read comic books during class.

I don’t think you should keep access to the devices from your children, but do they need to own their own internet connected smartphones that they can use without supervision? I don’t personally think so. This is anecdotal, but I’m in my early forties so I grew up with the internet being supervised until I had enough money to buy a PC of my own which coincidentally was around the time I was in the 8th or 9th (not sure if the age ranges are the same across US and DK grades, but I was 14ish) grade. Before that I had a Commodore 64 in my room, and I had a game boy, but if I wanted to use the internet I had to do it on the family PC. I don’t think this was intentional by my parents, I think it was because a PC was just really expensive in the early 90ies. But it worked out well. Sure my friends and I spent time at the local library, downloading images of Pamala Anderson in a swimsuit, scared the librarian would get there before it had completed loading. (If you’re young, you won’t know this fear, but images would load line by line and a big swimsuit image would take several minutes to load, often failing in the process.)

I plan on doing something similar with my children, and I really hope our legislators will help out by banning smartphones in schools. My children had access to supervised usage from 3-4ish, but we’re a bit picky about what they get to use. This is because playing things like digital puzzles don’t give children the same development as actually touchy the pieces, and because we both have an healthy hate for mindless F2P games. Not because they are inherently evil (they probably are) but because we want to play games with our children when they get older, and if they are too indoctrinated then all they’ll want to play is stuff we won’t. Which will likely happen anyway, but hey.

Ah, sure, and teachers will accept this and happily go back to the "stoneage" just because some parents-sekt has decided no smart phones anymore?

You can not outlaw technology on a social level. Many control freaks would love to, but that doesnt change reality at slightest.

Aren't you a bit of an outlier though?

"This time is different"

I do think modern apps, adtech, and addiction engineering are devastatingly effective and different from predecessors. We need to treat these with specific care. Similar to nukes vs. conventional bombs. Adtech and recommendation algos are the WMD of the marketing world.

I was recently interviewed for a job by a guy doing infra at an adtech company. He had a PhD in physics from UCLA. These are the big guns your 7 year old is up against. TV and video games did not have this intellectual firepower behind them. May the odds be in your child's favor.

> So far he hasn't turned into a domestic terrorist, and neither is he selling heroin for crypto on the dark web. Also, he has specific times when he can use his devices аnd limits on how much time.

I think this sort of hyperbole is unhelpful. What people are worried about is more mundane: whether the hyperconnectedness will make their kids less happy in the short or long run. There is some evidence that the age of first smartphone negatively correlates with these outcomes. [1] For my daughters, I worry about social media use, body image issues, and the like.

> Just delaying their first contact to the age of 13/14 won't magically guarantee they will be able to navigate it responsibly. This is just magical thinking born out of laziness.

I don't think most parents think this would be a magic bullet. They just think that it is one (important) tool in the toolkit. We understand that parents (noun) are supposed to parent (verb). It's not lazy to say that we think our children would be better served if their brains were a bit more developed before they are confronted with the world of addictive apps and always-on social media.

I'm glad to hear that things have worked out well for your kid. There are of course a variety of outcomes for different kinds of kids. No one knows whether their kid would have been happier (or would have grown into a happier adult) had they done something differently. We are all just trying to figure out how to do our best, and for some people that means slowing down the rate of change from one generation to the next.

1: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...