A question I have that went unanswered is why the author would be hurt by being called a gamer.
When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
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Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
11 year olds can be brilliant, and tragically I suspect far more of them would if we didn't infantilize them.
Some level of infantilising is not necessarily a bad thing. I definitely was not equipped mentally to be able to overcome the things I am dealing with in my 20s. Was I any less smart when I was 11? Probably not; but now I have other skills and traits apart from intelligence. Work ethics, sense of responsibility, and empathy to name a few. Giving kids too much responsibility or credit does not help them further down t…
"Was I any less smart when I was 11? Probably not;"
For reasonable definitions of "less smart", yes, you were. There's a lot of work on child development, and it does not support the idea that an 11-year-old is as fully equipped as an adult. Piaget's child development stages is an accessible overview if you want a nice Googleable term. Modern academics would quibble with various aspects but from what I can see a lot of the general ideas one would get from a quick breeze-through are still a reasonable start.
I'm actually pretty close to first in line to say that we underestimate children... buuuut, at the same time, no, they are not just little adults that are getting suppressed by The Man or whatever. They really aren't anywhere near fully developed yet, and are as a population, generally incapable of many things no matter how hard you tried to push them. And even if you do find an individual 11-year-old that, say, is fine with calculus, in another 10 years they'll be even more developed.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#93This looks like a smart kid from the description given. It's possible that he spent a good time reading recent literature about the drawbacks and decided not to join the masses. Or he just thought twice before following everyone. Either way it's always refreshing to find very young people doing different stuff by themselves as it's specially tough not to follow the trends during that age. I also noticed that there's…
My 11-year old also never looks at her phone. We actually keep having to remind her to do so because we are texting her with reminders all the time. She seems to have almost zero interest in texting with her friends and will only occasionally play games or read books on the Kindle app. It's 100% just her personality though. Nothing that she learned to do. I also track her location with it and she likes us knowing where she is because she doesn't have a great sense of direction and is scared of getting lost.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one can really even define what a Millennial is, or who falls in to Generation Y/Z. Even "who is a Boomer?", and the tropes of what a Boomer is, fail when looking at my anecdotal data. Also often activist children are heavily influenced by their activist parents. Generational classification and "analysis" is almost as bad as stereotypes.
This comment is being down-voted, and I sort of understand why, as it comes off as overly abrasive. Obviously demographers use different years to define generations depending on the study. But I think the last part about stereotyping is worth discussion, even if the comment is overly abrasive. I was born in a year that traditionally was generally not considered "millennial" by demographers, but since it also did not…
Agree.
You sound like you were born in 1981 or 1982. I noticed this phenomenon as well, and it led me to conclude that "millennial" (and, to be fair, most other generational labels) really functions in common usage as an epithet, ie. anyone younger (or older) than me that I wish to denigrate by stereotyping them.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#95I read a report recently on predictions for Generation Alpha, i.e. the generation after Generation Z (in turn the generation after the Millennial Generation) very roughly born after 2010. One of the predictions was that they would be both "digital masters" but also "the new old fashioneds" that would be looking to break away from technology more, perhaps as a result of feeling neglected by parents constantly distract…
No one can really even define what a Millennial is, or who falls in to Generation Y/Z. Even "who is a Boomer?", and the tropes of what a Boomer is, fail when looking at my anecdotal data. Also often activist children are heavily influenced by their activist parents. Generational classification and "analysis" is almost as bad as stereotypes.
Unlike horoscopes, where a computer wouldn't be able to predict a person's "sign" from e.g. tweet data any more often than chance, generations really do work as a predictor for some behaviors (or vice-versa.)
Think of it this way: if 10% of every other generation does X, but 40% of a particular generation does X, then that generation really should be known for doing X, even though the majority of members of that generation don't do X! Don't let the easy availability of anecdotal counterexamples to a trend fool you; a trend in a population is a trend even if not literally everyone in that population is a part of it.
Of course, there might well be a better way to divide up the population that serves as a better predictor for the trend, and so "explains away" the generational effect. E.g. changes in racial composition (and so culture) due to immigration over the years; or growth of subcultures as self-reinforcing memetic entities, apart from any generational proclivity toward them; or economic effects pushing people to have different emotional needs (e.g. a change in gender-balance of the workforce will see different types of businesses created to offer self-care to tired workers.)
But, by another lens, all these other effects are "part of" the generational effect; they're the composition of the narrative the generation will tell about itself, and so be remembered for.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#96Kid says this about phones: 1. They’re infantilizing, a set of digital apron strings meant to attach you to your mother. (He was onto something there.) 2. They compromise a boy’s resourcefulness because kids come to rely on the GPS instead of learning Scout skills. 3. They make people trivial. That's one smart kid.
The boy didn't say any of these things. The author interpreted them from their son's actions, like using printed maps to get around, and verbally mocking the author with shouts of "texty! emoji!" when he sees her using her phone.
I fail to understand why this is relevant. I quoted the text because I agree.
I don't think that the kid is a super genius or that the article is 100% verbatim or even 100% real (there are no articles like that anymore).
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#97This looks like a smart kid from the description given. It's possible that he spent a good time reading recent literature about the drawbacks and decided not to join the masses. Or he just thought twice before following everyone. Either way it's always refreshing to find very young people doing different stuff by themselves as it's specially tough not to follow the trends during that age. I also noticed that there's…
> This looks like a smart kid from the description given. It's possible that he spent a good time reading recent literature about the drawbacks and decided not to join the masses. Or he just thought twice before following everyone. Or it is a reaction to a parent obsession. I can imagine how a kid hates screens because parent spend more time with them then with the kid.
I.e. the same reason for the creation of the "straightedge" subculture in the 90s: they had developed a revulsion to the mistakes they grew up around.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#98One take that I have heard repeatedly lately is that while our current "old generation" may be seen as the digital immigrants that are never quite embedded due to not growing up with the technology around them, and the somewhat younger but now adult generation may be seen as the digital natives that did, the next generation may very well be the one that looks back at the digital natives and (probably correctly) states that they were naive in their assessment of technological threat, the rise of "big data" and whatever other privacy concerns may arise from the way we treat, or rather don't care about, our personal data today.
Without question most people today (myself included) upload their private photos and videos to "free" cloud services without a second thought of what these may be used for. Technologies like facial recognition, deep fakes etc. are only in their infancy, but it doesn't take much imagination to see the next generation launching a counter culture, partly because that's just what young people do, to later look back at the "digital natives" with the smug realization that they never saw any of it coming despite the signs being obvious.
Parents today love to concern themselves with "screen time" and other pointless measurements of how "genuine" (read: how similar to their own) the childhood of their own kids is, but they couldn't care less about how their own bank accounts, personal photos and phone calls slowly are slipping into the semi-public domain.
Maybe it's just my own penchant for cyberpunk talking, but I have a hard time seeing how the subcultures of the future won't turn against these "convenient" sacrifices that regular people make on a daily basis, using their own privacy as currency. Just ask any young person what they think about Facebook and you'll get the idea -- it's for old people.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#99A question I have that went unanswered is why the author would be hurt by being called a gamer.
Getting called anything feels mean when a 14 year chants it at you.
Re: When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone
#100There is a whole subreddit dedicated to probably made up behaviour of children like that. https://www.reddit.com/r/wokekids/top/?t=all
There’s another (/r/nothingeverhappens) dedicated to the pattern of people failing to realize just how big the world is and how often the internet allows us to see extremely uncommon events.
We are currently racking up about 245 years of collective human experience every second, and most of it is available to be reported to the internet. And most of it is from cultures and life-experiences different from yours, no matter who you are.
Human intuition about what is “plausible” for other humans to have experienced is frequently wrong.