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 banned phones during school hours just this last year and there has been an overwhelming positive sentiment from faculty and kids.
We don't otherwise do things like track screen time. Our kids have videogames and computers and tablets. But we're providing a dumbphone in late grade school and so far there are no protests to get anything else.
I'm 26, so now a decade removed from the relevant age bracket here, but was one of the first waves to hit high school with a majority of students having smartphones.
There's been a palpable shift in peers (and myself) post-pandemic with regards to phones and social media in particular. A lot more emphasis being placed on being present in person and a lot more skepticism across the board towards phones/social media. Peers are starting to have kids and almost none of them are posting pictures of their kids and when it's come up in conversation they're doing everything they can to delay ipads/smartphones.
I've had this same thought. I have younger kids, so we haven't yet reached the point of needing to contend with all this (e.g. "...but everyone else has an iPhone and Instagram and Tik-Tok account..."), and I've been encouraged by what seems like an increasingly popular movement to deal with it through collective action. It does seem like parents with kids 5-10 years older went through the worst of it; with society caught off-guard and any parent who fought the problem going hard against the grain.
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, blocking the view during popular songs.
I used to take video at concerts, a lot of it. And I rarely if ever went back and watched it in any meaningful capacity. It became dead space on my phone.
But at some point I started a ritual of recording of the performer coming out, picking up their instruments, and the first 20-30 seconds of the opening song. Then I put my phone away for the rest of the concert.
These videos are dear to me. They capture the feeling of the concert more than any longer random moment from before. I have a small library of them and I love to rewatch.
I wouldn't mind a concert enforcing those rules at all, though I appreciate that I've found a way to immortalize the moment in a way that coincidentally helps me feel comfortable putting away my phone for the rest of the night.
i think the overall quality of the experience using todays phones has tanked when compared to that of phones 15 years ago. when's the last time an app with angry birds' popularity was released? you cant even get the original angry birds game anymore; its rereleased with ads and microtransactions.
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 blue with animal icons, and would be revolting to my older kids. That would make it easy to wait until 9th grade for a more feature-rich phone, though maybe still not unfettered access.
Does anyone have a basic watch/dumbphone solution for older kids that they like?
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
I wish there was an easy to customize "dumb android os" that would let you pick initial applications you want to have, and then disable play store
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 thing got its hooks into her. I naively thought she might have been immune to it, given her habits and attitude. Boy was I wrong.
It's a real addiction, no matter how resistant you are.
I'm 44. I've never had social media accounts. When I was 18 or so, I had a Palm Pilot with a cellular modem cradle that let you actually go to (mostly text-based) websites. It was the first smart phone, really. Amazing for finding information, for someone who didn't even have dial-up internet until 5 years earlier. But eventually I put the Palm Pilot away. It wasn't really addicting (and it was insanely nerdy to walk around with a computer connected to the internet, in your pocket like that).
I militantly avoided owning anything beyond a flip phone again until I was 36 (2016), when I finally caved in and grudgingly bought a cheap Android phone to work on a mobile game. (For the first 6 months of development, I'd just written and tested it under emulation, but bug reports were getting too hard to reproduce). Six months after that, I found myself doom-scrolling on the damn thing every time I had a free moment.
What I noticed during my smartphone-free years of watching people play with theirs were a few things: They weren't considered nerdy. They weren't considered computers. The social awkwardness of looking at a device in public had changed into a shield for people against the social awkwardness of looking at their surroundings or acknowledging other people. People forgot how to interact and how to sit and wait without doing something with their phone. Doing something with the phone was more than passively sipping a drink or smoking a cigarette; it was a way to show other people that they didn't want to interact. Or a way to hide from interaction.
I think this has to do with the way apps are structured. The vast majority of people never needed a computer in their pocket. Computers were for information and for work. I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.
> I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.
I just wanted to highlight this section of your post for anyone skimming to have more of a chance of seeing it. Excellently put.
I would add - and think it's essential - that yes it took a great amount of marketing, but also a great amount of people who could have said or done something turning a blind eye and not sounding the alarm. I'm thinking mainly of developers who were happy bringing home a fat paycheck, and governments who were happy to have more information about their populations.
This is a great point. Kids can detect hypocrisy a mile away. Parents cannot, with a straight face, tell their kids to not be addicted to their smartphones when they themselves are addicted to their own smartphone.
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?
I started describing the situation and then realized doing so is a breach of her privacy, so deleted my comment. I did have parental controls on it in terms of the apps she has access to, but had not limited the time spent (my mistake). I wish there was also a way to limit the number of pickups.
yeah, I have an app blocker on my iphone to block news websites/apps called Freedom. Essential these days to staying productive - although, don't think this app would work for your child, because it is not very reliable and needs to be restarted every few days.
Either Android or iPhones can be customized. The parent has to take the time to sit down and set it up.
The iPhone has a lot of parental setting customization. You can disable certain built in apps, prevent installing anything from the App Store or just prevent making purchases, set screen time restrictions, and a whole bunch of other things [1].
Android has similar settings with Family Link [2].
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.
Apple is really dropping the ball here, there are serious issues with parental controls on iOS.
No way to revoke install permission. e.g. child got ahold of a parent's unlocked phone, turned off parent approval for their own phone, and then installed a social media app. We have uninstalled the app, but he can re-install without requesting permissions. We have resorted to a 1-minute (the minimum) screen time limit instead. (Only work around would be to create a whole new iCloud account for the child!)
You used to be able to delete the purchase from purchase history, but now you can only hide it, hiding it should just retrigger the approval process?
There are well known / well documented ways to circumvent screen time limits.
You can't add additional pass code / authentication for the settings app or the parental controls
No way to prevent deletion of messages and call logs (and 3rd party tools just do a remote sync on Wi-Fi, after the kids already likely deleted them)
Parental controls are often janky or laggy and sometimes just don't work at all. And often require multiple re-authentication (iOS 18 / Face ID does improve this to be fair)
Your comment reads a bit silly to me. It’s like your child has control over this situation instead of you, and you’re trying your hardest to negotiate a good position for yourself.
If your child doesn’t use the phone in the way you want them to, you could take the phone away.
Smart watches were banned in our kids primary school as some of them have cameras and were used to take inappropriate photos. We have finally decided for an analog watch and no tracking as we live in a safe neighborhood and they know most of the neighbors.
Did you ban pens and eye glasses too? Love places that make rules that prevent nothing from the offenders but make it worse for everyone else. If they had a hidden camera in a smartwatch they'll have a hidden camera in some other cheap gizmo.
Gabb seems to be the closest, but even that has a "virtual pet" type game built in that gamifies certain things.
I've also done an android phone with an MDM in kiosk mode. None of those let you limit who is contacted though, so it ends up being more like a classic dumb phone in that you can't browse the web, but can dial whomever you want. Just make sure that you disable the Google SMS app and use a stripped down one (I used simple-sms).
I think the problem is it's not a defensible business because there's little barrier to entry to create an Android watch with less features. Every carrier has their own dumb, minimal smart watches, but I'm sure most of them suck because the product management is probably outsourced.
Essential features and nonfunctional requirements:
- Calendar, time and date, alarms and reminders
- IP67
- Ruby or gorilla glass screen (scratches OK)
- Locked-down phone, texting, messaging, and location sharing
- Ability to call 911
- Minimal apps
- Minimal animation
- Band that's somewhat difficult to undo and hypoallergenic material... silicone seems pretty neutral
- Not disassemblable without tools because the kids I know would have them in pieces in minutes.
- Neither a fashion statement nor a kid group social faux pas
If any existing models fulfill these close enough, then great. If not, then it might be worth entertaining but would need a go-to-market strategy to compete with every other smartwatch mfgr on the market with unlimited funding.
lol, I know someone who got his kid a "dumb" flip phone figuring that would solve things. Pretty soon, his kid was showing me how it was android underneath and all the apps he had sideloaded.
Samsung has partnered with Safesurfer in NZ to create a "kid safe" social media free version of the Galaxy A15 and A25. Not a samsung / android fan tbh.
Our friends basically locked down an old phone to just the apps they approve of. Their 8-year-old is home alone for about an hour after school, and they don't have a landline.
We plugged in an old phone to a wall outlet, and just keep it locked with a pin. It allows for emergency calls. There is almost always someone home, so we don't feel the need to allow our kids to call us.
Another set of friends trusts their 11-year-old with full access.
I would submit map functionality to the list as well. I think it would be healthy for a kid old enough to tell time to experiment with navigating, maybe following along on their map on drives.
This problem was quite well solved by a kids learning their way around using their eyes and good paper map.
(I miss paper maps. They were actually designed to confer understanding — in particular, every street showed a name! Smartphone navigation apps and navigation websites often don’t show names any more.)
I agree that spending time with a really good map is like reading a book and confers more understanding than a map app. Map apps are pretty crumby, presumably because they're crammed into a screen. Paper maps are still a thing, I was at a book store the other day with a really big paper map section. In particular I enjoy geologic maps; they add depth and history to the landscape around you.
Map apps are much faster for navigation though. At least on the scale of walking a few blocks.
Yes. The Timex smart watch is perfect for this. You can find them on eBay for $20. You can get a SIM that works with T-Mobile usually. The only issue is that sometimes they are locked and getting them unlocked is some work. But I love these watches.
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.
My daughter has a normal android phone with Google Family Link and tons of builtin apps removed and websites blocked. The parental controls are pretty good.
Gotta agree here. The only apps that aren't blocked are the phone itself, messages, and a few games. Doesn't even have a browser on it much less social media. It's really been fantastic in letting her have a phone for communication, and technically she can text her friends if they want to, but no social media. It's pretty close to a dumb phone really. The location tracking alone is worth it, to me.
My only annoyance came when she turned 13, and Google decided to offer her complete freedom without parental consent. Left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about the project, which is a shame.
It was scummy, because naturally it will always cause tension. I feel the right way would have been to approach us. Instead they approach the child who will always click freedom. They also sent us parents an email letting us know she's free to do as she wishes and we're SOL.
We told her she could stay under Family Link, or else buy her own phone and service. That seems effective.
Sorry Google, I'll decide my childrens' internet access. Not your giant advertising machine.
I'm not a parent, but I see why someone might want to always know exactly where there child is and invest in anything which might improve their safety.
On the other hand, raising children without GPS surveillance seemed to work pretty well for many years. Is saying something like "Put on your timex and be back home by 6." no longer feasible? (Or if you want be even more old school "by sundown".)
You can get a basic flip phone from tracfone with a year of service (calls and text only, no mobile data) for $20-40. You can keep that plan but change to a regular smartphone and use google family app for parental controls.
I got my child an AppleWatch SE (a few years ago), which yeah, technically has a bunch of apps but they're not really useful or of interest to them, and if they don't have social media accounts (which mine don't), then it acts as a phone and locater without all the rest.
On the downside they kept begging for a phone so they could text their friends, which was reasonable, and texting on the Watch is a terrible experience. So we finally did give in to a phone but with locked down parental controls, so they can't install apps, etc. (though I'm finding those iOS parental controls don't work as well I had hoped; there's a huge issue with them being reset suddenly -- lots of forums of people complaining about this).
If it’s like an iPhone (or Mac!) you can disable all the apps you don’t want them to use.
Apple parental controls are great. Except on the AppleTV. I just want PIN unlock for any apps not on an allow-list. This does not seem like much to ask. But no.
We've used both gabb and an apple watch and they both work decently well. The apple watch has a few too many features by default but it's not as engrossing as a smartphone. The gabb watch was great overall. We switched from gabb -> apple at the end of 6th grade because we felt like our daughter had reached a point of being able to ignore the distractions of the watch in most settings and for the most part that's worked out well. We upgraded specifically to allow texting/IM'ing friends, which may or may not be within what some people want happening.
I will note that having her be able to call us is fantastic. There's a lot of end-of-school "hey you need to walk home today / walk over to my office / oh wait i'll pick you up" kind of coordination, which we could probably avoid with careful advance planning but it's really nice to be able to be flexible.
And also, youtube shorts / tiktok are the most addictive thing I've seen put in front of a child that age. She can browse YT shorts on her school computer at home (!!) and it's .. it's really stunning how absorbing it is for her. And not in a good way.
This is exactly what the Fitbit Ace LTE does. So far it's been great since my daughter has no desire to ask anything else on it besides increase physical activity to get prizes
But you don't need any of this? The parental lock out settings on Android and iOS are superb - you can buy any modern smartphone, and lock out everything you want so it acts like a dumbphone with a nice screen - i.e. disable the web browser, disable app installs etc.
I see this comment a lot and it seems to mostly highlight that people aren't investigating the very capable tools which already exist.
I didn't have a phone at all until I was in high school! Looking back on all the times that I was tragically killed or maimed as a result, it's a miracle I'm able to write this comment today!
I'm glad to see high schools pushing back on this. My college student had classes their first two years that required a smartphone in order to participate in class. Failure to procure an Android or Apple device that could run the app they used was an automatic 20% markdown on one's final grade for non-participation.
A friend shared a photo of a wall organizer that (middle school?) kids put their phones into during class. Even though I'm now long out of school, that they sort of have to adapt or else it will really affect the educational outcomes.
I don't think people failing out of college really has the same stigma for the institution. I wonder if in fact it would even help with the prestige somehow.
All of the studies (bonus points for linking to news articles instead of directly to the studies) have something to do with "time spent using screens/a phone/social media", but nothing to do with age of first use.
How can anyone trust this website has any basis in reality when they wrote a whole page explaining why and none of it was applicable?
Of course parents should regulate how much time their kids spend on electronics (similar to how parents of previous generations would prevent kids from watching TV 5 hours a day) - but this website presents no evidence that giving a kid a smartphone in 8th grade rather than 5th grade would make a meaningful difference.
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.
> Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.
The shape of the computer doesn't magically make it bad: It's what kids do that's the problem.
We took our kids tablets away because they weren't disengaging. But that's because they were into Youtube, which is highly addictive. If they were just using the tablets as e-readers, it would be a different story.
We had a mountain of data to show that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it. Same with asbestos and most of the other examples people point to.
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.
Yes, you do. I fundamentally disagree with you and don’t think you have reliable evidence to back up this claim. This reads like the pseudoscientists that are convinced aspartame causes cancer.
8th grade may be somewhat arbitrary, but as children grow older you trust them more with things that you didn't when they were younger, teaching them responsibility and independence over time.
I don't need a website to provide some type of evidence (not sure what kind of evidence you'd be referring to) to understand that. It's parenting 101. This is just applying it to social networks (that's the issue more than the phone itself) just it would apply to any other type of social interaction (going out with friends by themselves, TV, gaming, etc.)
The entire point of this website is to advocate for the arbitrary 8th grade cutoff. Additionally, an arbitrary hard cutoff is the opposite of gradually teaching kids responsibility and independence.
Either your child has a phone or they don’t have a phone. This is one of many binary actions along a progressive line during which you are teaching them responsibility and independence.
IMO it's not the phone itself that matters, it's what the kids do on it. Phone can be good to communicate with parents, bad for nearly anything else at a young age.
My daughter has autism, and struggles to connect with her classmates. She gets overwhelmed in groups, and is shy talking in person sometimes.
Now that her classmates started messaging each other, she is actually being included a lot more. She has started messaging and setting up online play dates with her classmates. I was so proud when I found her playing Minecraft with a class mate while FaceTiming. She was playing with a friend!
I don’t care what anyone says, that is good for my daughter.
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.
Right but the tech creates some new forms of bullying, and they're in addition to the traditional forms of bullying. All of which still presumably exist.
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.
The fact that you can never escape the bullying is a huge differentiator from the before times, where coming home after school was a sanctuary (assuming you didn't come from an abusive household).
These days kids are 24/7 connected to what is going on in social media and group chats, and it never goes away.
Sure, and I'm sorry for that, but in general technology introduces severe social and learning challenges. Extreme enough to induce a measurable increase in teen suicides since the introduction of social media and mobile phones.
As someone put it, that's from a time when the Internet was a place you went to (usually a corner) and, more important, a place that you could leave whenever you wanted. The dynamic is different.
As someone who didn't like school thwt much the thought of having to deal with some of those people 24/7 fills me with dread.
I haven't really read the research, but yeah, I don't think texting is bad and as you mentioned, it really is helpful to keep connected with friends. The one thing we found though is texting didn't last too long as they moved on to different apps (like Snapchat). I hope your daughter and friends can resist that change and just stick with simpler things like texting and FaceTime.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: that's the whole point of this program.
Parents are playing the prisoners' dilemma here. Many (most) feel like cell phones (social media in particular) are a net negative for younger kids. But they don't want their kids to be left out / socially isolated. So it's really easy to get into a situation where we all defect because "I don't really like this but everyone else is doing it". This "wait until 8th" thing provides a framework for parent to agree to cooperate on this issue.
TBD if it actually works. I certainly like the idea that we have some control over our culture/community and don't just need to passively accept a "tragedy of the commons" on an issue like this.
Assuming that's true*, it honestly isn't good reason to give your kids a smartphone. Your job description as a parent is pretty much to stop your kids from doing things they don't understand will hurt them. There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life. Like, if all the other kids were shooting up heroin it would be considered insane to say "you have to let them do it because all their friends are junkies", and I don't see it as being different for phones.
*It's also not clear that your premise is even true. Plenty of parents in the past have reported how their kids' friends adjusted just fine to not being able to use a smartphone to contact them, and that they still had healthy social lives.
> There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life.
From personal experience, being isolated as a kid can also be profoundly psychologically damaging and stunt development of normal life skills. Sure, see if the kid can get by without a smartphone for as long as possible, but if they do wind up completely excluded it's time to reevaluate the cost-benefit analysis and potential ways to mitigate smartphone overuse, not just think that the isolation is "okay" cause you're protecting them from phones.
There's a lot of people making claims based on paid research with agendas to sell fear. If you think you have some real empirical evidence that will standup to scrutiny, by all means share.
You may be confusing what happens with a phone with what is required.
Certainly kids can have a social life without a phone. It’s not required. I just had a kid who didn’t get instagram until 14. They claimed that their life was ruined, but they had a healthy social life without it (and without a phone).
I think people generalize what will happen without things they think are common incorrectly. Just because phones are used for many things, it doesn’t mean those things are impossible without phones.
I do think it works better if more parents did it and it was so nice to find other parents (super rare) who felt similarly.
The point of the pledge is that you take it and you encourage other parents in your school/neighbourhood to take it. So this helps solve the coordination problem:
"By signing the online pledge, you promise not to give your child a smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade as long as at least 10 families total from your child’s grade and school pledge. Once 10 families have pledged to delay the smartphone, you will be notified that the pledge is active! You will receive a list of families who are delaying from your child’s grade and emails for the parents."
I’d say cell phone penetration is sitting at about 25% with my 6th graders friend cohort and that seems to hold up when I talk to my friends with kids.
I don’t know if that will hold until 8th grade but for now my kids social life seems to revolve around the neighborhood, school and his activities.
I was under the impression phones/social networks were becoming unpopular. My kid certainly has a dim view of the latter.
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 interaction takes place, then yes, it does deny them a social life.
I grew up before smartphones and if somebody took away my very normal corded phone I would have definitely been had a much time communicating with my friends. I wouldn't have been happy about that at all. I did spend hours talking to friends perhaps even to the detriment of my studies.
What are we really trying to stop here? Are we really just trying to stop all the addicting apps? if so.. maybe we should be focusing on that at a higher level.
At least below age 12 or so, our kid's social life consists entirely of classmates that she sees 7 hours a day at school during weekdays, after school and in weekends playdates with classmates that she likes, sports, music and swimming lessons,and some time with parents in somewhere between. Where does the phone come on?
In our class we were the first to give our kid's a phone. She doesn't find it very interesting and barely spent any time on it, since she the only ones that she know with a phone number are her parents.
Pretty much secondary school in the UK (12+). I'm guessing middle schools / high schools in the US are the same? Yes, literally every kid in secondary school has a cell phone. Kids have whatsapp groups and communicate all the time with their friend circles.
According to an Ofcom survey in 2023, 9 in 10 kids aged 11 have a smartphone in the UK.
Presumably if time spent using these things is bad, then ensuring children spend no time on them till 8th grade will be an improvement. What am I missing?
The path they took to get to this pledge feels very similar to the path anti-vaccination advocates took (ie something intuitively "feels" bad -> look for evidence to support that). If a study came out that showed evidence that having a smartphone at an early age actually improved educational outcomes, do you think these people would reverse their position? I would guess not because above all else, this is a value judgement ("These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on YouTube.").
And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a value judgement. But trying to foist your values onto others is not something feel the need to support.
Primary 1 seems to be a pre-primary school type curriculum and you leave secondary school at the same exact age. So you reinforced the parents point, even your exception is pretty much the same except you call it P1 instead of nursery. From what I read, in most schools P1 activities are play based, many times there's no individual desks. It's basically kindergarten.
I think I’m missing your point- is your (overall) point that I should have known what age range 8th grade is in the US without looking it up? And that I should also know what activities happen in a US kindergarten?
I’ve had really strange replies to my original reply. I posted some information that I had to look up for the benefit of other people and now for some reason I need to say that school starts around age 6 in my country when my son started Primary 1 when he was closer to 4.5.
Others are trying to say that I should somehow automatically know that most of the world uses the similar(?) age ranges. I don’t even know what age school starts at in other parts of the UK despite sharing borders with them. Maybe I’m ignorant but it’s never been information that I needed to know or retain.
Was posting the age range of US grade 8 so controversial?
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 books. Spent a ton of time on the computer at home.
Got through "Brothers Karamazov" and "Anna Karenina" that way -- just 1.5hr a day of focused, uninterrupted time. I absolutely never would have read them and would have spent the whole time scrolling TikTok if I could have. Hrmm.
In Finland our kids pretty much go to school themselves from the age of six or so, and walk back when they're done for the day - and their afterschool activities are over.
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.
Sorry for being old but playing wow is different from scrolling tiktok. If These were drugs, wow would be a weed kind of thing and tiktok and the other cancers would be crack cocaine. In my honest humble opinion ofc
From a messaging point of view, “wait until 8th” and “until at least the end of 8th grade” may as well be a mile wide difference to kids at that age, and it’s unclear to parents who want to actually follow this guideline without reading all the particulars
This is a bandaid on a bullet hole. The root issue is that tech leaders (yes, these decision-makers are real, individual people, let's stop diluting accountability!) have forced themselves onto us and our kids with tracking, data mining, personalised advertising, distortion of facts, dark patterns, addiction-forming products, plausible but false AI content, brand-compliance, and all sorts of other user exploitation.
The social media/internet landscape as it exists today will probably be the smoking of this generation – everyone is doing it and many will die prematurely (due to stress, depression, lack of motivation and purpose, addiction), or waste so many years of their life consuming product that it will be a pretty good equivalent for dying early. And while banning the equivalent of cigarettes for kids a damn good idea, we definitely need to quit scrolling ourselves into a premature grave, too.
Why are we consuming it? Participating in the popular internet today shouldn't be "wait until 8th", but "wait a moment, you don't want this in your life, and the people around you don't want to deal with you involving them into it second-hand either".
i agree but they deserve credit for running a reasonable campaign. Look how you're ridiculing them, and now imagine how much ridicule they would receive if the campaign was total abstinence from smart phones?
Running a contrarian campaign is hard, especially given all of the status , social pressure and marketing surrounding smartphones.
What I said may have come off as ridicule. This campaign is an important effort. I argue that we should have more such efforts, bigger efforts, and even alternative efforts to prevent people’s addiction to social media.
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Apple Watches have been great for us. Both of my kids (ages 10 & 13) use a cellular Apple Watch which gives them a way to call/text with us and their friends but it doesn't give them access to social media. I know they'll want a phone soon (my youngest is already asking) but it's an easy "no" for us. I think waiting until around age 14 (or later) sounds about right. I'd like to delay even longer if possible. We'll see how hard they push.
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 afraid to even talk about it. This culture of forbidding inevitably leads to confused, repressed, misinformed kids and we've seen the backlash across multiple generations. We see an alternative, across those same many generations, working in other Western societies, yet we seem stubbornly incapable of learning any lessons from these extremely apt comparisons. We have the data, yet we keep treating kids like "others".
This is more like trying to keep cigarettes away from little kids. Phones are little pocket dopamine hit machines that feed short attention span slop.
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.
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 and our stupid ape dopamine system is no match.
It might get better once we culturally assimilate this knowledge and realize that this stuff is more psychologically manipulative than we think it ought to be. We need to look at apps that use addiction patterns the way we look at drugs.
We think: It’s just a screen! It’s not like opioids or meth or something. How can a screen take over someone’s life?
The average TikTok user spends three hours on the app per day. Average. That means half spend more. That’s insane. Not to single out TikTok. It’s just one example.
Every generation says it's getting worse. They might all be right. I'm certainly not denying a problem. I'm arguing that that solution, to keep trying to create a walled-off fantasy world for kids to keep them safe, has been proven worse than ineffective over a very long period of time.
Drugs are actually a great comparison. We keep pretending that we've "banned" drugs. Yet despite the endless fortunes spent, civil liberties curbed and countless lives ruined by incarceration, drugs remain universally available, increasingly potent and very, very cheap. At a certain point we have to accept that a failed approach has failed and dig deep for the courage to try something different.
It is hard to say. I use to be a pack a day smoker but I think I would even be shocked by the level of smoking if I was transported back to 1985 at this point.
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.
I have mixed feelings about this. Having unrestricted access to my devices at an early age is what made me have a career in software development later on. Having a computer, portable consoles, and then smartphones on was crucial - those were the devices I were playing with, and eventually tried developing for, or even just running homebrew programs.
Some of my lifelong friendships were made over the Internet, sometimes at a very young age (9~10yo), and we still talk to this day. I started posting on forums back when I was 7. Some of my friends got into their careers in similar ways - for example, by playing sysadmin when they were kids, then teenagers.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this. I think not allowing smartphones to be used in class is more reasonable.
Younger millennial chiming in: I'm pretty sure that 8th grade is exactly when I got my first smartphone, although social media had a fraction of the presence back then, so it's hard to draw a direct comparison to today. But I do feel like the timing worked out well enough: not having a smartphone until that point (since they didn't exist lol) turned me into a voracious reader, and the dumbphone I did have meant I was still able to text friends sporadically (T9 anyone?), but getting a smartphone was a good step towards the increased independence and social connectivity of high school. Also brought me into the world of ebook piracy to feed my reading habit, and the world of smartphone mods/jailbreaking to feed my geek streak.
This makes me think, as I've thought previously, that the generational labels seem too broad for the pace of change in information technology over the last 40 years. I read your comment as an older Millenial and thought "what?! a smartphone in 8th grade?!"
Despite being in the same "generation," someone born in the mid-80s came of age with radically different consumer technology compared to someone born just ten years later in the mid-90s. I have clear memories of trying to understand what the "Information Superhighway" was, and then getting dial-up Internet in our home for the first time. At the end of 8th grade, I convinced my dad to upgrade from 33 kbps dial-up to cable. As a sophomore in college, I remember thinking that some company would make a lot of money by putting Wi-Fi access points everywhere so we could have always-on Internet access with some sort of mobile device... Just a night-and-day difference from the experience of someone getting a smartphone in 8th grade.
Ha, maybe the labels were more useful when day-to-day technology wasn't progressing as quickly as it is now!
Your internet story is also funny to me because my dad worked at an ISP when I was a toddler. One of my earliest computer memories is when he taught me how to go into the Windows 98 graphics menu and toggle the color settings from 16-bit to 32-bit (or vice versa, can't remember now) before booting up a particular CD-ROM game, because otherwise the graphics would be put of whack. I must have been four or five.
I also remember asking why I couldn't play the games whose cool icons were always visible in the taskbar... turns out those "games" were Napster and IrfanView, lol.
Yeah, I think trying to make games work on Windows 3.1 to 9x was a very formative experience for just a narrow slice of Millenials. I've seen the definition of Millenials span all the way up to 2000 births, and I'm pretty sure the games "just worked" for a kid born in 2000.
To be fair, I've wondered if people in previous generations feel the same way. Like was the coming-of-age experience of an older Boomer, who was a teenager in 1960, much different from that of a teenager in 1980? I don't know.
My guess is the culture was a lot different between 1960 and 1980 (obviously, right) but the general workings of society weren't too far apart for the average person. You got in your car to go home and watch TV...
Also, I have a younger sibling born just after 2000 and games "just working" sounds about right. Not to mention that console gaming was really picking up around then.
> This makes me think, as I've thought previously, that the generational labels seem too broad for the pace of change in information technology over the last 40 years.
Yeah, no kidding. I'm an older millennial as well, and I didn't have a dumb phone until my senior year of college, let alone a smartphone.
My experience growing up was so much different from someone born just 10 years after me, even though we're technically in the same "generation".
Every year this post shows up. It’s based on flimsy evidence, and the pledge itself is nonsensical peer pressure. All children are different in how they interact socially. Some do better with a computer or phone as an intermediary. This has been true since the BBS scene in the 1980s through smartphones today. I have had two teens with very different relationships with their phones, one is a socialite, the other just uses it to read manga and text close friends. Both have used their phones since grade 6, and had access to phones and iPads and PCs since age 3. They’re comfortable with technology and understand the risks of talking to people online because that was my job as a parent: to teach them from a young age to see these devices as an extension of themselves, that they will eventually be the ones in charge of their privacy and how they wish to be treated.
Public policy is based on aggregate behavior patterns of the overall population. If every policy were to account for outliers like your teens, nothing would ever get done.
My teens aren’t outliers, and we’re not talking about public policy. We’re talking about an influence campaign that actually doesn’t have reliable evidence about aggregate behaviour patterns, it just has an agenda.
We have a house phone, which is normally in the unihertz "student mode" which prevents installing apps and only allowing use of some apps.
When our kids ask for their own phone, the answer is always an easy no. I have no problem with computers. But the internet is not your friend. Endless content is hard for me, a developed adult to resist at times.
If they want to stay up late, their forced to sneak a book into their bed.
No to both - but it’s important to teach kids self-moderating, both when it comes to food and to internet stuff. Withholding either is in my opinion solving it short-term while leaving kids unprepared for dealing with these things themselves.
As somebody who grew up right when the smartphone wave was starting, I feel extremely uneasy about ideas like this one.
I have had almost unrestricted access to a computer since the age of 9, and to a smartphone since the age of 12, and I can definitely say that I wouldn't be the person I am right now without that access.
It's sad to see people lament the demise of the "hacker spirit" on one hand, while denying their kids access to the devices necessary for that spirit to thrive on the other.
I've known several kids in my age group whose access to technology was severely restricted, and I strongly believe that all of them were significantly worse off and have had serious mental health consequences because of that. Not to mention that the restrictions didn't actually accomplish much in most cases, and, if anything, caused a form of Streisand effect when it came to e.g. explicit content or talking to (older) strangers online.
Unrestricted (and even more importantly, unmonitored) access to tech provides an "escape hatch" against abusive families. Yes, it may have somewhat of a bad effect on some kids, but for the kids that do need it, it's life changing to an extend that's hard to overstate.
English-speaking countries have always seemed more uptight about this though. I live in eastern EU, and we have never really done the whole "kids shouldn't have access to porn / swearing" thing much either, to the point of not having a word for "explicit" in my language, and using the word "censored" instead.
You had access to a computer for 3 entire years before you had access to a smartphone, that's what contributed to your growh. Had you had the phone forst, I doubt you would've attained the same growth.
Smartphones these days aren't tools that promote creativity and curiosity; they are passive consumption devices. They promote brain-rot and short attention spans, extremely hostile to curiosity and tinkering, promote walled-gardens and siloed ecosystems as they are designed to funnel you unto the specific add-ridden attention strip-mining facilities they call "Social Media" ala facebook, instagram, tiktok, and all that crap.
I would feel more at ease sendingy kids to a red light district.
You may have a case if there isn't access to any other tech. My five year old son and I use the PC and 3D print to make cool contraptions. We use a computer for Xlights to make light shows for the holidays. He isn't quite ready for online gaming but that could be an option in a few years. There he would, hopefully, be able to have communication with people around the world. This link references smart phones and the unfettering access kids have that rewires the brain due to the short quick dopamine hits of social media.
> Unrestricted (and even more importantly, unmonitored)
As someone who grew up during the beginnings of the web, and started playing with programming when I was about 7, I'd agree that access to technology is important. As a parent that has the responsibility of making sure my kids develop good habits and stay safe, I believe that access to the internet should be restricted and monitored.
> It's sad to see people lament the demise of the "hacker spirit" on one hand, while denying their kids access to the devices necessary for that spirit to thrive on the other.
When I was young devices weren't connected, so you could fiddle and not get yourself into too much trouble.
My concern isn't letting my kids loose on the computer, its letting them loose on the internet.
I would liken it to letting your kids go to a night club. theyre likely to be exposed to inappropriate content.
Ultimately these are tools, I wouldn't stop my young child using a knife, and in fact encourage them to learn how to use it safely, that doesn't mean Ill let my 5 year old keep a pen knife in their pocket.
My son is in high school. He has a smartphone. He doesn’t have social media accounts. I was just honest with him about how such companies make money, how they actively encourage addiction, etc. He chose, like me, to not have accounts with those companies. I am not sure why people believe that they cannot explain things to their children. My son was in middle school when we had this chat.
I congratulate you, for having a son, who is able to be so principled about things like that. It is great that you had this informing chat as a parent with your child, and that he was able to understand and draw his conclusions.
That said, I think for many kids that social pressure or network effect is quite a motivator to get social media accounts. Say all their friends have one and they have a group, where they usually organize. Or say they are interested in someone and wants their contact info, but they only give them their social media details. For many people traditional ways of communication are somehow not their way any longer. I am talking about e-mail, phone calls, SMS, letters, and whatever else.
It is a sad fact, that most people become supporters of the big tech data sharks, even if unknowingly, by creating peer pressure. I wish you and your son can both stay strong in your resolves and that your environment is not too excluding.
In my area it's becoming very popular for schools (middle and high) to restrict phones. They put them in the pouch things. I'm a bit surprised how much the parents support it. Talking to a local journalist he said he couldn't find parents with good arguments against it. One of them was "my son runs an online business and needs access to his phone for it".
I couldn't get a cell until I had a driver's license, which I think made sense at the time. Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone.
> Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone.
That's really the point of a program like this. A lot of parents think smartphones (mainly social media, really) are a net negative for their kids, but we have this tragedy of the commons situation where no one wants their kid to be left out / socially isolated. Having this "wait until 8th" thing is basically parents playing the prisoner's dilemma getting together and agreeing that it we'd be much happier if everyone cooperates rather than defect on this issue.
"Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone." Might ... but more likely not. I can't understand why this irrational fear of potential social problems if not tethered to a phone is outweighing the clear evidence of actual social problems when tethered to a phone has so much traction with adults.
Indirectly related to smartphone usage -
it’s incredibly hard for teenage kids to actually _find something to do_, at least here in Germany, where I live.
Going to watch a movie is very, very expensive - without snacks, you pay around 10 EUR, while the recommended amount of pocket money is around 30 EUR per month.
There are less and less public swimming pools, playgrounds usually don’t appeal to teens and are frequently neglected (on top of that, teens who meet at a playground are often chased away since they tend to leave litter behind, and the playgrounds are for younger kids).
The list goes on. In my opinion, we shouldn’t focus on taking smartphones away, thus limiting the options to do something even further, but instead focus on creating compelling, affordable alternatives, and teach kids to use their smartphones responsibly.
I applaud the initiative. I waited until the beginning of 7th and it was pretty hard, honestly. We don't give them free access to it, though (but ironically it's most valuable to ME for them to bring it to school).
Among my children, my oldest got an iphone for Christmas in 2007 when he was 17. The other four got them spread out over the following ten years but progressively younger in age. I cannot say that I see a big difference in their phone usage, grades, or social development. It seems to me that they all just got more attached to the phone the longer they had it. I am starting to see some push back from my 16-year-old after reading "Stolen Focus" a few months back and I hear that other kids her age are doing the same.
Very interesting. Was wondering, are there any differences in how independent they are at the same age? Have read that there is a possibility that the smartphone may be contributing to the development of children to be delayed by a year or two. For instance, are your younger children less interested in driving at the same age and doing things on their own.
... although, even if this is true, this could just be that kids seem to be more attached to their parents then they used to be (have read this as well).
I really had to reflect a bit on this site, and show it to other friends with kids, to come to the conclusion.
This is helicopter parenting. Specifically, the way that the pledge requires that kids share all passwords and only install approved apps.
Kids need a degree of independence that they've lost in how structured modern day youth has become. An important part of growing up is being exposed to people who have different ideas and beliefs than parents and extended family, and making decisions and having real consequences.
I think it's more important to talk to children about what they encounter in their day-to-day lives, and find out about their struggles. It's important to remind children that they can turn off their smartphone, or delete an account on a social media site, if it doesn't bring them joy. As parents, it's our duty to tell children that they have the choice, but not make that choice for them.
As a father of a young child with diabetes, I have mixed feelings about this issue.
While I believe small children shouldn't carry smartphones, it's currently our only way to monitor their health when they're outside our immediate range, such as in daycare.
My child is quite small and not yet interested in the phone, but I expect that will change eventually. We've established ground rules: the phone can’t be used for watching videos or playing games and is intended solely as a medical device. However, maintaining that restriction may become challenging as she grows.
Yes, that's correct. It uploads data from the continuous glucose sensor to the medical device provider, allowing us parents to access that data on our smartphones. But it's not just about collecting statistics. For instance, delivering alerts to us, such as low glucose levels or pump malfunction, requires the phone to be present.
Additionally, it allows for remote monitoring of glucose levels. For example, during winter, when the child is bundled up in overalls, daycare staff can check the values without needing to undress her in freezing temperatures.
Recently, many insulin pumps, although not ours, have also evolved so that the algorithm controlling the pump operates via a smartphone. This means having the phone nearby is not just very useful; it's essential.
Our school says that every single time a kid gets a notification or call, everyone gets distracted, and that's why they are not allowing any one carry phone/smart watch.
It's weird to not give people access to the Network, which so far as I can tell is the core idea here.
It's extremely weird to assume that the specific age matters. This is always a bad idea and where it is necessary for practical reasons (e.g. licensing laws) that causes friction
I assumed this site was about waiting until they are eight and I thought huh, well, that's probably not a big problem for most kids and maybe if you don't think about it too hard that's an OK rule. But now I find it means high school age which is entirely crazy.
My wife and I adopted two severely abused and neglected children and held out until they were 14. But the thing that we quickly realized is that our children's online life was only as secure as their friends most permissive parent. It still boggles my mind how many elementary-aged children had unfettered access to the internet. I suspect a lot of them unwittingly traumatized themselves.
Fair point, but there are a couple of reasons why we would only apply this to kids. First, something can be harmful to children and not to adults. Second, even if smartphones are harmful to adults, for better or for worse we let adults ruin themselves. It's a necessary condition of freedom, that you have the ability to make bad choices as well as good.
Smartwatch without apps but with limited phone, texting, and location sharing to trusted contacts appears to be the way out offering most technical benefits without becoming a firehose of horribleness, addiction, and distraction.
Dumb / kosher phones seem like another idea but have the disadvantage of being another thing to loose and break rather than something that's strapped to them.
Another thing is to role-model and reinforce smartphone etiquette by not pulling them out to waste time when around other people.
I applaud keeping smartphone, social media, screen, and computer privileges minimum age as high and restricted as possible for as long as possible.
Idk, I bought my kid e-ink smartphone. Black and white screen. 10 fps if you don't mind ghosting. No play-store. She manages. If she wants to play games we have switch and pc and if she wants to watch whatever, we have google-tv stick.
Who will teach them how to (not) use them once they have one? I mean things like privacy, phishing, social media risks, addiction, subscription fees, etc.?
I think the possession of a device isn't the risk itself.
The parent has failed if the child can't teach themselves by that age. Besides, as you say, it's not so much the phone itself -- those risks can be learned or taught separately from the phone. (I didn't have my first phone until I was 23, but I'm not a tech-clueless zoomer and grew up with message boards.)
What an insulting and futile approach. You'd think a trained psychologist would know better than to think kids wouldn't a) find this laughable b) develop a severe and justified resentment and c) find a way around their comparatively less-tech-minded parents' arbitrary restrictions. I don't know his background, but it reeks of a person who "studies" kids instead of actually working with them.
It honestly looks more like a really, really bad photoshop cutout to me (weird but consistent edge, nose issue my be a blowout). AI generators I've used tend to get lighting more or less consistent but with edges that can waffle between blurry and sharp.
We waited until our kids were 14 to get their phones and they couldn't take them to their bed-room at night until their senior (last) year of high school. They are both in college now and it seemed to turn out OK so far.
> Initial results from a groundbreaking study by the National Institute of Health reveal that MRI's found significant differences in the brains of children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day.
Reminds me of "Every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying".
Jokes aside: "more than 7 hours a day" is a _quite little more_ than the 0 hours the site is asking for. Also I'd guess it might make a difference whether the kids are using a drawing app, tiktok, learning a foreign language, reading an eBook, playing a shooter, gambling, …
Grew up with a few guys who made pro teams and travel didnt help any of them or any of the other schlubs like me. Many of the best guys didnt even do travel for money or other reasons. We would have been better off playing at the park on the weekends.
I see the good intentions, but it's too idealistic. In many families both parents work and kids are expected to get home by themselves (such was the case for me from 3rd grade onwards). Smartphones are simply a necessity for communication and Google Maps. I can only ever see this working with upper middle class nuclear families with a stay at home parent.
Why would you need Google Maps to get home from school? I have an absolutely terrible sense of direction, but even I can memorize a single route after walking it a couple of times.
I walked the mile home from school from the age of five. Why would anyone need a map? And I spent all day outside away from home from the age of about eight in the summer with of course no phone of any kind and no maps even though I was tramping for miles through fields and streets. What has changed in the last sixty years that makes maps and communication a necessity?
Or ... we could continue doing what worked for all of us before being tethered to phones. Communicate beforehand / afterwards / using shared phones (which still exist) and learning to navigate the world using brains.
Almost all of that can be done offline. Pen and paper still exist. Example 1 is more difficult without a phone of your own, I was able to use a pay phone back in the day. Everything else you listed can be accomplished offline, on a computer, or by asking to use the school's phone for 1 minute. I mean, if the accident happened at school, the office may very well contact you themselves.
Yes, it can be more convenient but it absolutely isn't necessary.
The parent comment is almost an advertisement for waiting to give kids a smartphone until they're older. If one truly can't imagine doing any of these without post-2010 technology, then it would be good giving kids a little bit more time building their independence from both parents and smartphones.
Aspirational at best I'm afraid. What happens when the other partner/parent/family member isn't responsible, smashing your plans? Or if the event has a variable end time with no safe care or phone in between? How do you deal with emergencies like school closures that now require every child to line up to use available landlines (my personal favorite experience)?
Landlines are becoming scant in my particular part of my country, YMMV. I rarely even see them in my workplace anymore.
I remember recently reading about a town where all the parents in the entire town agreed not to give their kids smartphones, so then none felt they were missing out.
Exactly. It seems obvious to me that the vast majority of social media is junk and I'd prefer to keep my kids from getting drawn into it for as long as possible, and I think a ton of parents feel this way. The main counter-argument I hear is that "that's where socializing happens these days, and if you keep them away from it they'll just be left out / isolated from their peers".
An initiative like this acknowledges that we have some control over our culture. We don't just need to put up with a shitty status quo because "that's the way it is".
I grew up in a town where kids used yo-yos as economic status symbols and needed adult chaperones to resolve Pokemon card trading disputes that ended up in tears. In my sophomore English class I watched two kids fight after one accused the other of wearing a fake designer sweatshirt.
You can lead a horse away from water, but you can't stop it from getting thirsty. Reckoning with disparity is what helps kids grow up and shed the solipsism of childhood - take the smartphones away and you're leaving them even less equipped to deal with modern life. It's a catch-22, but I don't think banning everything digital is going to improve anyone's quality of life, kids or parents.
> take the smartphones away and you're leaving them even less equipped to deal with modern life.
I grew up without a smartphone and have done just fine as a software engineer. I don’t think access to a smartphone before age 15 would correlate to better life outcomes.
Why do you need to 'pledge' that. What BS. As a parent you can just decide to do so, no need to get anyone else involved.
Personally I'd make it dependent on the child's maturity. I was very mature at young age and my parents would let me travel on the train to other cities.
My goal is to see if I can get my kids all the way through highschool with just an Apple smart watch and an iPad for home and school stuff where it is required. It seems completely doable.
I'm 40, so got a phone at 17. I had rubbish internet in my teens, and anyway, didn't really 'discover' it. So I've never grew up in the connected world.
My eldest is now 7.
It seems to me secondary school is about the age for a mobile.
And at this point its basically supervised education
Good start ... but it should actually be "Wait until 18". I did this with my son and, now at 25, he has a much more normal perspective on connectivity and social media than most his age. There was ZERO downside (for all you worrisome types who think not having a phone is bad for some reason). Thinking kids "need phones!" for safety / socialization are making that shit up entirely.
Neither parent nor child has control over the device. That we let these valent swirling forces in someday is semi surprising.
I mostly wish there were empowered options parents & children could negotiate & navigate on their own. But all we get is cloudified software, that we don't have direct view of or insight to.
Every single popular / well-funded take on this topic seems to focus entirely on quantity, and not at all on quality.
There are many wonderful things for kids - even very young kids - to do on the internet, in collaboration / supervision / concert with a caring adult.
My now 9yo has been playing games like Monument Valley, Lost Sounds, Dragonbox, and the SNES randomizers since he was three (maybe two for some of them). And I have no doubt that these have been enormous boosts to his cognitive and behavioral development, and have given him (and so many kids his age) super powers compared to us.
It's one thing to ward off social media and FPSs; it's another entirely to suggest that refraining from use of a phone or computer is likely to lead to better outcomes.
Indeed, these debates always seem to lack any sort of nuance. Probably because it's about children, and it becomes really emotionally charged.
Teaching responsible use of technology is, in my opinion, one of my duties as a parent. That includes how to responsibly use a phone, ideally with the goal of improving my kids life.
I don't allow social media (which, I think is really the core of this issue), but I do allow other things like games (in moderation, with approval), communication (with approved contacts), as a dictionary and thesaurus, as an encyclopedia, etc.
I find it fascinating, that hacker news, the literal community for people tinkering with stuff seems to be full of people who want to gut their kids instead of teaching them how to use stuff responsibly.
Probably tons of people here know how to code since they've learned on their own.
Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone. Also kids have a lot of time that could be used to learn stuff. And even playing games is... not that bad.
But I guess kids should learn chinese or what is the current fad now or torment the kid with 50 extraculliculars.
> Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone
I grew up in the 90's and my parents were strict, particularly compared to a lot of my peers. Things like watching television was heavily restricted. I remember making similar arguments to my parent's deaf ears "I won't fit in, all the kids at school will be talking about what they watched on TV last night, I'll be a loser" etc.
My experience was that most of the kids didn't care that I couldn't understand their Simpson's references or whatever. If anything they were sympathetic, I would get a lot of "man your parents really suck" and then kids would shrug and move on.
I did resent my parents growing up. Looking back I think they were pretty clear examples of "tiger parent" stereotype. I felt immense pressure and stress to achieve good grades and it honestly felt like nothing I did was enough to make my parents happy. I get along with my parents now as an adult but as a teen my home life felt very unhappy at times. I can remember the relief I felt when I left home to live on my own.
So I think it is more likely your child will resent you, then them being ostracized by their peers.
> Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone.
That is supposition, not reality, and there are parents here who have shared their experience with kids having a healthy social life without a phone. More importantly, a very important role of parents is to make good decisions for their kids when the kids are still too immature to do that. "But all my friends are doing it" is literal child reasoning and should not be the only factor in parenting decisions.
>and there are parents here who have shared their experience with kids having a healthy social life without a phone.
And there are others who have shared their experiences of responsibly teaching their kids how to coexist with technology. There's probably a lot more that aren't willing to say so, because they'll be roasted in the comments for being a "bad parent".
I don't let my kids have unfettered access to social media. But I let them have a smartphone. And I took the time initially, and continually, to have conversations about having a healthy relationship with technology.
Somehow this debate is always completely lacking in any sort of middle ground or nuance.
I think it's more important to talk about the services they use than what device they're on.
And most problematic services already have an age limit. It's the parents' damn job to make sure their kids are prepared for the usage of those services.
I'm more worried about the youtube-consumption on the PC than chatting with class-mates about school-related questions via smartphone.
meanwhile millenials had full reign over the internet as kids cause their boomer parents didnt know shit. back when everyone did the famous A/S/L questionare from randos online lol.
It's not just about internet access , it's about the medically recognized highly addictive and predatory nature of social media. It is designed with the same principles as slot machines, to draw you in and keep you engaged for as long as possible. The internet we grew up in was much less centralized and not yet optimized for this kind of manipulation.
I think you're right, plus there was a solid wall dividing online life from "IRL" back then. When I asked and answered "A/S/L" among randos, we were all anonymous. It was an escape from the social dynamics among my peers at school, sports, church, etc.
For a while, there was some consensus that anonymity and talking to strangers was the danger. So we got real name and photo policies, and the expectation that we'd have an online presence that was an extension of our real selves. Now that every kid's online persona is indivisible from their IRL identity, and their popularity can be measured with likes and followers and inclusion / exclusion from group chats, it just allows the social dynamics among their peers to play out 24/7 on steroids with no escape.
> 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 walkman, a calculator, a stopwatch and small handheld battery-driven games. Later a tamagotchi and whatever was trending. Also we were taught to use the phone-booth in case of an "emergency". While you do not have to agree that all of us needed all of this, nobody would've said to "wait until the age of 13" with all of this.
The phone I gave my kids were retired Android smartphones with Lineage OS installed. Almost all Google Apps removed or disarmed. I preinstalled Apps like: a calculator, camera, a secure messenger (Threema), clock, navigation (OSMAnd), a few educational games, a paint/drawing app, a calendar and added the most important contacts (Parents, siblings, grandparents) to the address book. We added more apps over time when we felt they might benefit from them.
We agreed upon usage duration and modalities. We mostly moved their TV-time towards their phones. We explained how to ask before taking a photo of a person.
What happened? My Kids started to get interested in how to read/write, used the navigation software during road-trips to find the next possible stop to have a break or try to find POIs along the road and wait them to pass by. They played with the calculator, started to learn English (non-native if that wasn't obvious, yet), started to "program" robots, send me "good nights" when I was late at work. Call me if they spontaneously decided to stay with a friend after school. Take photos during their holidays, listen to audiobooks during road-trips. Play with the torchlight in the tent.
The older one is now 12. She got access to our family calender and contact list, so she can plan her appointments with friends around ours, manage her ToDo-lists, make stop-motion videos, research all sorts of stuff on wikipedia, gain a very good understanding of how those devices work. Learn to take care of expensive gears and how it matters to have control over their own data and that backups are important. She learns how to manage her data plan by moving audiobooks for offline-usage. Also she helps her grandparents with all sorts of technical problems they have with their phones.
Yes, it's more work to teach a kid how to work with all this stuff than just throw an iPhone at them when they turn 13 and say "whoa, finally old enough to figure this all out." What could go wrong. Sorry, that I'm a bit salty on this topic (and I sometimes might not find the right words due to the language barrier), but just saying that a smartphone is bad because parents do not care for what their kids are doing with the device just feels plain wrong to me.
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.
LineageOS was just the easiest for me personally (was already installed anyway). But aren't there parental tools to lock down phones for non-tech people?
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.
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 approach. They should emphasize it being like an intro to high-school gift or something.
till I read it, i thought it meant the 8th of November,† and I was thinking "does this have something to do with the election?" I was a little afraid to click "take the pledge" for fear of what I might be supporting
† obscure trivial point of US law for fer'ners, US elections are held on "the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November" which puts them anywhere from Nov 2 to Nov 8, so that's why "wait till the 8th" is an election trigger. (I don't keep track of the date of the election this year, I just need to know it's going to be on Tuesday)
yes, or to put it another way, it's the first Tuesday of the month unless the first Tuesday is November 1st, then it's the second Tuesday, November 8th
pointing it out because it's always the first Tuesday unless that 1 out of 7 where you have to wait a week -1 for the first Monday.
I think the reasoning is something like "we need to have a full business day in November before we have an election, that will give us a chance to fix problems or something"... not sure if under the old county/shire system months made a difference or something.
Agreed 100%. Additional factors on top of all those is some countries start year 1 at age five, and others at age 6, and of course there's a variety of actual ages within a grade as well.
"Wait Until 9th" would have definitely helped a lot. "Wait until 14" might be even clearer. Or even "wait until high school".
I mean as a non American, I think this is one of the most American sites I've seen all week, and do not get the impression that they will particularly mind if it's ambiguous for other people in other countries
Clickbait is always to sell you something, this is the opposite. But I think the ambiguity helps, it’s not a specific cutoff date that is important but delaying the inevitable. Smartphone use at that age could bad, I’m thinking scammers paradise type of bad but with a different context. Middleschoolers aren’t scams targets but are perfect for being primed with nefarious things, think crypto and nfts, porn, gambling, addictive gaming and bad culture. I turned a blind eye on memes for a long time just because people do and like silly things but I’ve seen some disturbing memes out there. My kid is definitely not getting a smartphone till he understands some things.
People put something on the internet and they want attention and engagement. Then people use click bait to get people to look at something because they are curious or confused instead of knowing what it is from the title.
They sell you attention to something you didn’t expect. Click and bait says it all. In this case it’s something benefic, not selling you a device or service to help you in advertised ways. It’s just campaign to get kids away form smartphone and social media harm. I would not classify this as clickbait or self promotion. When you have kids you’ll think this more deeply and escape the knee jerk reaction that I don’t condemn at all. The web is mostly clickbait for self promotion.
not selling you a device or service to help you in advertised ways
Again, click bait means getting you to click on something in ways other than telling you what the article is about. Anything published on the internet wants readers. I don't know where you got the idea that 'clickbait' only applies to direct advertisements, but you should move past that.
If keeping kids away from harm doesn’t mean anything to you then I can’t help you. But you probably don’t have kids or know anyone with kids nor you care.
This thread was about the title being click bait because it's vague and confusing. You took a hard left into "you don't care about the kids" territory and it has absolute nothing to do with what is being talked about here.
This is not clickbait, it’s like a movement with a catchy name so it sticks. You seem to be stuck with clickbait but at the same time you don’t understand what clickbait is.
it’s like a movement with a catchy name so it sticks
No, it's a title with no information, because we're talking about the title.
You seem to be stuck with clickbait but at the same time you don’t understand what clickbait is.
No, you seem to not understand what clickbait is because you think it has to do with selling something directly, which is bizarre and not backed up by anything other than you claiming it.
An intentionally sensationalized, vague or misleading headline
Explain to me how "Wait Until 8th" isn't intentionally vague. If you knew nothing else, what would the title tell you? Nothing. That's vague. There could be more information in the title but there isn't. That's intentional.
IMHO, this feels like another wave of nannyism that follows after a new technology matures. Being a 90s kid, discovering porn, violence, warez were all normal part of growing up that I don't think has had any negative impact nor do the puritan panic about pornography.
Matter of fact the internet started speedrunning censorship and monopolization post 9/11 without much of a fight and I think this triggered the default in people to just shrug and seek other ways to access and share data.
It's as ridiculous as suggesting Bittorrent is harmful for kids because of its unrestricted limitless amount of data. What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
There's just so many things outside internet and smartphones that even adults struggle to balance, the last thing I think kids need are adults taking away that trial by fire and allowing themselves to develop their own sense of moderation.
The 2000s-2010s was incredibly rewarding for curious kids, not just because of what was out there, but because of the effort required to get such payoffs was high.
The reward of watching porn on the family computer was sneaking down the stairs at 3am, hoping no one heard the dialup tone, finding the right website, and waiting for the pixels to load.
Later, that moved into bedroom and with faster internet, and the result was slightly less pixelated boobs. And it was just out there, to be watched.
The internet today is not there to be observed. It's to be consumed, and then to stalk you even after you've left. It's not even at your fingertips anymore; it's in your bed, at full resolution, recommending you products that you actively ignore but passively absorb.
At that young impressionable age, the passive inputs are definitely the ones to monitor
You're interpreting this as nannyism with respect to the internet as a whole, while I think the pledge is really just about smartphones. If kids want to go and watch gore and porn on their laptops they should be free to do so.
The smartphone that is always on, always fighting for your attention, and always in your pocket has proven to be harmful to the development of most children.
> What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
I really wish kids would still learn self-balancing on their own. But the odds are stacked against them in the current age. TikTok and Instagram have gotten too good at this, backed by teams of scientists and ML models working with passion to fight their self-control.
I dunno. Growing up, both my parents and the society did moderate (i.e. censor) the content I had access to. As an adult, I'm definitely glad that this was kept away from me as a kid. I was a pretty reasonable kid, but I'm definitely not confident I would have handled it well.
That having access to (some) of those things was overall harmless doesn't seem to be a settled question.
With smartphones, the thing that stands out to me is a survey they did of parents. For those who gave their kids a smartphone before they turned 16, literally every parent regretted the decision (and some of them gave them the phone willingly).
Granted, N was probably not huge in that study, but it's a rare study that has no variance.
Some fears in this genre are well overblown, I agree. I also like the idea of kids learning for themselves, but it depends on whether they can learn before it becomes unmanageable. There is probably middle ground between no phone and phone here, and a less spoken about factor (IME) is that some kids and parents just have different dispositions and outcomes. Whether that is nature or nurture, it's hard to isolate or alter much right now. There is definitely nannyism following a new technology. I think it becomes gradually more true not because technology is inherently dangerous or something, but because we are producing technology that likely is more and more dangerous. Of course I don't consider social media addiction and Bittorrent on the same level.
>What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
Afaik theres pretty strong evidence of the negative effects of short form content on kids, and how addictive it is. We don't let kids eat as much candy as they want because we know they wont self regulate, I dont see how limiting online media consumption is any different.
Agreed its pure nannyism marketing and helicopter parents fueling such things.
Tubgirl, Goatse, LemonParty, Ebaumsworld, Rotten.com, LiveLeak had some of the most fucked up shit 90s teenage me could find and consume. Parental controls on electronics were an afterthought nor just didnt exist much then.
Its on parents to get involved if they want their kids to live in a safety bubble or like, you know, just have a conversation with them.
Honestly the 90s internet was peak internet imo, it was so pure and awesome. AOL, AIM, IRC, all the good times had. Captchas didnt even exist yet.
I see where your coming from (and I'm an indepedent since you mention Trump in your alias, so would like to open to both sides of an argument). But I kind of agree with keeping smartphones from kids. Yeah, like anything that is "really good" to an extreme degree, it's addictive.
And you do mention this that kids should learn to get a sense of moderation, but like other addictive things (hard drugs, alcohol and actually porn is supposed to be restricted), we keep them away from kids until they're at an age when they can handle it better.
also, I personally think spending an entire day watching tiktok is just so wasteful, feel like you've lost a 100k brain cells by the end of it, blah!
Tldr:Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food
Then block social media. Don't let the kids install apps, don't let them access the web, control who they can message. Why is the phone itself the problem?
Exactly. All of this screen time is bad for kids and the phone is the devil reincarnate is ludicrous. The type of content they are consuming is what parents should monitor. Allow kids to use the device appropriately. If they do something with the device that you deem as inappropriate, then talk to them and correct the behavior. It is through mistakes that kids (and adults) really learn. Sheltering and avoidance will do nothing to prepare them for the real world once they reach early adulthood.
Which in America is the year that it becomes legal to use social media, if anyone’s wondering (not like it’s specifically illegal under, but collecting data from users under this age isn’t allowed so the networks don’t allow it)
Two years after the begininng of secondary school; in general lower-secondary starts around age 11, and in the US it usually begins with Junior High which is often, but not always, 7th grade,
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 banned phones during school hours just this last year and there has been an overwhelming positive sentiment from faculty and kids.
We don't otherwise do things like track screen time. Our kids have videogames and computers and tablets. But we're providing a dumbphone in late grade school and so far there are no protests to get anything else.
I'm 26, so now a decade removed from the relevant age bracket here, but was one of the first waves to hit high school with a majority of students having smartphones.
There's been a palpable shift in peers (and myself) post-pandemic with regards to phones and social media in particular. A lot more emphasis being placed on being present in person and a lot more skepticism across the board towards phones/social media. Peers are starting to have kids and almost none of them are posting pictures of their kids and when it's come up in conversation they're doing everything they can to delay ipads/smartphones.
This is wonderful to hear.
I've had this same thought. I have younger kids, so we haven't yet reached the point of needing to contend with all this (e.g. "...but everyone else has an iPhone and Instagram and Tik-Tok account..."), and I've been encouraged by what seems like an increasingly popular movement to deal with it through collective action. It does seem like parents with kids 5-10 years older went through the worst of it; with society caught off-guard and any parent who fought the problem going hard against the grain.
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, blocking the view during popular songs.
I used to take video at concerts, a lot of it. And I rarely if ever went back and watched it in any meaningful capacity. It became dead space on my phone.
But at some point I started a ritual of recording of the performer coming out, picking up their instruments, and the first 20-30 seconds of the opening song. Then I put my phone away for the rest of the concert.
These videos are dear to me. They capture the feeling of the concert more than any longer random moment from before. I have a small library of them and I love to rewatch.
I wouldn't mind a concert enforcing those rules at all, though I appreciate that I've found a way to immortalize the moment in a way that coincidentally helps me feel comfortable putting away my phone for the rest of the night.
I was at a DJ shadow concert recently and he had a notice at the start about not using phones and letting others enjoy the show without devices.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=olJNpcikaeo
How is it that we are just now making phones in the classroom? I would have assumed this was the case since smart phones came out
i think the overall quality of the experience using todays phones has tanked when compared to that of phones 15 years ago. when's the last time an app with angry birds' popularity was released? you cant even get the original angry birds game anymore; its rereleased with ads and microtransactions.
My kid is cool wearing a cellular smart watch. He’s not allowed to wear it during school, but can keep it in his backpack.
In the UK:
https://smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/
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 blue with animal icons, and would be revolting to my older kids. That would make it easy to wait until 9th grade for a more feature-rich phone, though maybe still not unfettered access.
Does anyone have a basic watch/dumbphone solution for older kids that they like?
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
I wish there was an easy to customize "dumb android os" that would let you pick initial applications you want to have, and then disable play store
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 thing got its hooks into her. I naively thought she might have been immune to it, given her habits and attitude. Boy was I wrong.
It's a real addiction, no matter how resistant you are.
I'm 44. I've never had social media accounts. When I was 18 or so, I had a Palm Pilot with a cellular modem cradle that let you actually go to (mostly text-based) websites. It was the first smart phone, really. Amazing for finding information, for someone who didn't even have dial-up internet until 5 years earlier. But eventually I put the Palm Pilot away. It wasn't really addicting (and it was insanely nerdy to walk around with a computer connected to the internet, in your pocket like that).
I militantly avoided owning anything beyond a flip phone again until I was 36 (2016), when I finally caved in and grudgingly bought a cheap Android phone to work on a mobile game. (For the first 6 months of development, I'd just written and tested it under emulation, but bug reports were getting too hard to reproduce). Six months after that, I found myself doom-scrolling on the damn thing every time I had a free moment.
What I noticed during my smartphone-free years of watching people play with theirs were a few things: They weren't considered nerdy. They weren't considered computers. The social awkwardness of looking at a device in public had changed into a shield for people against the social awkwardness of looking at their surroundings or acknowledging other people. People forgot how to interact and how to sit and wait without doing something with their phone. Doing something with the phone was more than passively sipping a drink or smoking a cigarette; it was a way to show other people that they didn't want to interact. Or a way to hide from interaction.
I think this has to do with the way apps are structured. The vast majority of people never needed a computer in their pocket. Computers were for information and for work. I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.
> I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.
I just wanted to highlight this section of your post for anyone skimming to have more of a chance of seeing it. Excellently put.
I would add - and think it's essential - that yes it took a great amount of marketing, but also a great amount of people who could have said or done something turning a blind eye and not sounding the alarm. I'm thinking mainly of developers who were happy bringing home a fat paycheck, and governments who were happy to have more information about their populations.
I only have to look at my own phone habits to know that expecting any better from my children is probably unreasonable.
This is a great point. Kids can detect hypocrisy a mile away. Parents cannot, with a straight face, tell their kids to not be addicted to their smartphones when they themselves are addicted to their own smartphone.
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?
I started describing the situation and then realized doing so is a breach of her privacy, so deleted my comment. I did have parental controls on it in terms of the apps she has access to, but had not limited the time spent (my mistake). I wish there was also a way to limit the number of pickups.
No worries that you deleted it, can understand that you want to be cautious with your child:)
Btw, I actually don't have a child so haven't used parental controls, but just found out that they do have an app time-limit setting: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/set-up-screen-time-ip....
yeah, I have an app blocker on my iphone to block news websites/apps called Freedom. Essential these days to staying productive - although, don't think this app would work for your child, because it is not very reliable and needs to be restarted every few days.
I use the built in iOS controls for my kids and they are generally sufficient
Just took a look at the app limit features in parental controls, seems really useful:)
That’s sad but probably inevitable. Is there room for something like a personal Garmin navigation device? Does that already exist?
Either Android or iPhones can be customized. The parent has to take the time to sit down and set it up.
The iPhone has a lot of parental setting customization. You can disable certain built in apps, prevent installing anything from the App Store or just prevent making purchases, set screen time restrictions, and a whole bunch of other things [1].
Android has similar settings with Family Link [2].
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121
[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/android-parental-controls-e...
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/
Apple is really dropping the ball here, there are serious issues with parental controls on iOS.
No way to revoke install permission. e.g. child got ahold of a parent's unlocked phone, turned off parent approval for their own phone, and then installed a social media app. We have uninstalled the app, but he can re-install without requesting permissions. We have resorted to a 1-minute (the minimum) screen time limit instead. (Only work around would be to create a whole new iCloud account for the child!)
You used to be able to delete the purchase from purchase history, but now you can only hide it, hiding it should just retrigger the approval process?
There are well known / well documented ways to circumvent screen time limits.
You can't add additional pass code / authentication for the settings app or the parental controls
No way to prevent deletion of messages and call logs (and 3rd party tools just do a remote sync on Wi-Fi, after the kids already likely deleted them)
Parental controls are often janky or laggy and sometimes just don't work at all. And often require multiple re-authentication (iOS 18 / Face ID does improve this to be fair)
Your comment reads a bit silly to me. It’s like your child has control over this situation instead of you, and you’re trying your hardest to negotiate a good position for yourself.
If your child doesn’t use the phone in the way you want them to, you could take the phone away.
Had the exact same reaction, this seems like an IT administrator parenting through IT controls at work.
Do you have children yourself?
That is the worst thing to do as it means at least one parent and as many kids need to have google accounts.
Nothing gets installed without 2 approvals, and 3 confirmations with your passcode. I really wish they’d fix all that duplication.
> some wants Google Maps
There was a Java ME version of Google Maps. I had it on my flip-phone in 2006/2007.
I doubt it still exists, though.
Smart watches were banned in our kids primary school as some of them have cameras and were used to take inappropriate photos. We have finally decided for an analog watch and no tracking as we live in a safe neighborhood and they know most of the neighbors.
Did you ban pens and eye glasses too? Love places that make rules that prevent nothing from the offenders but make it worse for everyone else. If they had a hidden camera in a smartwatch they'll have a hidden camera in some other cheap gizmo.
Gabb seems to be the closest, but even that has a "virtual pet" type game built in that gamifies certain things.
I've also done an android phone with an MDM in kiosk mode. None of those let you limit who is contacted though, so it ends up being more like a classic dumb phone in that you can't browse the web, but can dial whomever you want. Just make sure that you disable the Google SMS app and use a stripped down one (I used simple-sms).
I can buy my kid a very cheap android phone and lock it down to only run a couple of select apps.
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 think the problem is it's not a defensible business because there's little barrier to entry to create an Android watch with less features. Every carrier has their own dumb, minimal smart watches, but I'm sure most of them suck because the product management is probably outsourced.
Essential features and nonfunctional requirements:
- Calendar, time and date, alarms and reminders
- IP67
- Ruby or gorilla glass screen (scratches OK)
- Locked-down phone, texting, messaging, and location sharing
- Ability to call 911
- Minimal apps
- Minimal animation
- Band that's somewhat difficult to undo and hypoallergenic material... silicone seems pretty neutral
- Not disassemblable without tools because the kids I know would have them in pieces in minutes.
- Neither a fashion statement nor a kid group social faux pas
If any existing models fulfill these close enough, then great. If not, then it might be worth entertaining but would need a go-to-market strategy to compete with every other smartwatch mfgr on the market with unlimited funding.
lol, I know someone who got his kid a "dumb" flip phone figuring that would solve things. Pretty soon, his kid was showing me how it was android underneath and all the apps he had sideloaded.
Samsung has partnered with Safesurfer in NZ to create a "kid safe" social media free version of the Galaxy A15 and A25. Not a samsung / android fan tbh.
Our friends basically locked down an old phone to just the apps they approve of. Their 8-year-old is home alone for about an hour after school, and they don't have a landline.
We plugged in an old phone to a wall outlet, and just keep it locked with a pin. It allows for emergency calls. There is almost always someone home, so we don't feel the need to allow our kids to call us.
Another set of friends trusts their 11-year-old with full access.
I would submit map functionality to the list as well. I think it would be healthy for a kid old enough to tell time to experiment with navigating, maybe following along on their map on drives.
This problem was quite well solved by a kids learning their way around using their eyes and good paper map.
(I miss paper maps. They were actually designed to confer understanding — in particular, every street showed a name! Smartphone navigation apps and navigation websites often don’t show names any more.)
I agree that spending time with a really good map is like reading a book and confers more understanding than a map app. Map apps are pretty crumby, presumably because they're crammed into a screen. Paper maps are still a thing, I was at a book store the other day with a really big paper map section. In particular I enjoy geologic maps; they add depth and history to the landscape around you.
Map apps are much faster for navigation though. At least on the scale of walking a few blocks.
Yes. The Timex smart watch is perfect for this. You can find them on eBay for $20. You can get a SIM that works with T-Mobile usually. The only issue is that sometimes they are locked and getting them unlocked is some work. But I love these watches.
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.
My daughter has a normal android phone with Google Family Link and tons of builtin apps removed and websites blocked. The parental controls are pretty good.
Gotta agree here. The only apps that aren't blocked are the phone itself, messages, and a few games. Doesn't even have a browser on it much less social media. It's really been fantastic in letting her have a phone for communication, and technically she can text her friends if they want to, but no social media. It's pretty close to a dumb phone really. The location tracking alone is worth it, to me.
My only annoyance came when she turned 13, and Google decided to offer her complete freedom without parental consent. Left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about the project, which is a shame.
Thanks for the warning, I guess I'll need to watch out for that in a few years.
It was scummy, because naturally it will always cause tension. I feel the right way would have been to approach us. Instead they approach the child who will always click freedom. They also sent us parents an email letting us know she's free to do as she wishes and we're SOL.
We told her she could stay under Family Link, or else buy her own phone and service. That seems effective.
Sorry Google, I'll decide my childrens' internet access. Not your giant advertising machine.
The iPhone has restricted access mode, to limit access to bad stuff, typically used for child gateways.
It also has assistive access mode, which only permits access to good stuff, mostly to simplify UI's for the elderly, et al.
Both put the burden of integration on the configuring user, who basically becomes the system UI designer with a limited and awkward palette.
A nice feature in either case would be a way to edit, package and share or sell such configurations.
Indeed, I could see Apple building out this capability as a product line architecture supporting enterprise, health, and childhood/education.
I'm not a parent, but I see why someone might want to always know exactly where there child is and invest in anything which might improve their safety.
On the other hand, raising children without GPS surveillance seemed to work pretty well for many years. Is saying something like "Put on your timex and be back home by 6." no longer feasible? (Or if you want be even more old school "by sundown".)
You can get a basic flip phone from tracfone with a year of service (calls and text only, no mobile data) for $20-40. You can keep that plan but change to a regular smartphone and use google family app for parental controls.
Sounds like Xplora [1] to me. I assume they have an English-language site but failed to find it and it's late, sorry.
[1]: https://xplora.se/
US: https://shop.myxplora.com/ UK: https://xplora.co.uk/
I got my child an AppleWatch SE (a few years ago), which yeah, technically has a bunch of apps but they're not really useful or of interest to them, and if they don't have social media accounts (which mine don't), then it acts as a phone and locater without all the rest.
On the downside they kept begging for a phone so they could text their friends, which was reasonable, and texting on the Watch is a terrible experience. So we finally did give in to a phone but with locked down parental controls, so they can't install apps, etc. (though I'm finding those iOS parental controls don't work as well I had hoped; there's a huge issue with them being reset suddenly -- lots of forums of people complaining about this).
If it’s like an iPhone (or Mac!) you can disable all the apps you don’t want them to use.
Apple parental controls are great. Except on the AppleTV. I just want PIN unlock for any apps not on an allow-list. This does not seem like much to ask. But no.
We've used both gabb and an apple watch and they both work decently well. The apple watch has a few too many features by default but it's not as engrossing as a smartphone. The gabb watch was great overall. We switched from gabb -> apple at the end of 6th grade because we felt like our daughter had reached a point of being able to ignore the distractions of the watch in most settings and for the most part that's worked out well. We upgraded specifically to allow texting/IM'ing friends, which may or may not be within what some people want happening.
I will note that having her be able to call us is fantastic. There's a lot of end-of-school "hey you need to walk home today / walk over to my office / oh wait i'll pick you up" kind of coordination, which we could probably avoid with careful advance planning but it's really nice to be able to be flexible.
And also, youtube shorts / tiktok are the most addictive thing I've seen put in front of a child that age. She can browse YT shorts on her school computer at home (!!) and it's .. it's really stunning how absorbing it is for her. And not in a good way.
https://www.thelightphone.com/
This is exactly what the Fitbit Ace LTE does. So far it's been great since my daughter has no desire to ask anything else on it besides increase physical activity to get prizes
Also interested in this - the Apple Watch for Kids setup seems a possibility, but it's only available in certain countries
But you don't need any of this? The parental lock out settings on Android and iOS are superb - you can buy any modern smartphone, and lock out everything you want so it acts like a dumbphone with a nice screen - i.e. disable the web browser, disable app installs etc.
I see this comment a lot and it seems to mostly highlight that people aren't investigating the very capable tools which already exist.
They already make this. Gizmo on Verizon. SyncUp on T-Mobile. Garmin bounce if you’re ok with them only being able to send voice memos and not call.
I didn't have a phone at all until I was in high school! Looking back on all the times that I was tragically killed or maimed as a result, it's a miracle I'm able to write this comment today!
I'm glad to see high schools pushing back on this. My college student had classes their first two years that required a smartphone in order to participate in class. Failure to procure an Android or Apple device that could run the app they used was an automatic 20% markdown on one's final grade for non-participation.
A friend shared a photo of a wall organizer that (middle school?) kids put their phones into during class. Even though I'm now long out of school, that they sort of have to adapt or else it will really affect the educational outcomes.
I don't think people failing out of college really has the same stigma for the institution. I wonder if in fact it would even help with the prestige somehow.
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 to do with "time spent using screens/a phone/social media", but nothing to do with age of first use.
How can anyone trust this website has any basis in reality when they wrote a whole page explaining why and none of it was applicable?
Of course parents should regulate how much time their kids spend on electronics (similar to how parents of previous generations would prevent kids from watching TV 5 hours a day) - but this website presents no evidence that giving a kid a smartphone in 8th grade rather than 5th grade would make a meaningful difference.
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.
> Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.
The shape of the computer doesn't magically make it bad: It's what kids do that's the problem.
We took our kids tablets away because they weren't disengaging. But that's because they were into Youtube, which is highly addictive. If they were just using the tablets as e-readers, it would be a different story.
But they weren’t using them as e-readers. Why would they, kids books with beautiful illustrations are 1000x better.
We had a mountain of data to show that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it. Same with asbestos and most of the other examples people point to.
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
Yes, you do. I fundamentally disagree with you and don’t think you have reliable evidence to back up this claim. This reads like the pseudoscientists that are convinced aspartame causes cancer.
Sounds like contrarian nerdism to me.
8th grade may be somewhat arbitrary, but as children grow older you trust them more with things that you didn't when they were younger, teaching them responsibility and independence over time.
I don't need a website to provide some type of evidence (not sure what kind of evidence you'd be referring to) to understand that. It's parenting 101. This is just applying it to social networks (that's the issue more than the phone itself) just it would apply to any other type of social interaction (going out with friends by themselves, TV, gaming, etc.)
The entire point of this website is to advocate for the arbitrary 8th grade cutoff. Additionally, an arbitrary hard cutoff is the opposite of gradually teaching kids responsibility and independence.
Either your child has a phone or they don’t have a phone. This is one of many binary actions along a progressive line during which you are teaching them responsibility and independence.
IMO it's not the phone itself that matters, it's what the kids do on it. Phone can be good to communicate with parents, bad for nearly anything else at a young age.
Why is texting friends bad?
My daughter has autism, and struggles to connect with her classmates. She gets overwhelmed in groups, and is shy talking in person sometimes.
Now that her classmates started messaging each other, she is actually being included a lot more. She has started messaging and setting up online play dates with her classmates. I was so proud when I found her playing Minecraft with a class mate while FaceTiming. She was playing with a friend!
I don’t care what anyone says, that is good for my daughter.
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.
Right but the tech creates some new forms of bullying, and they're in addition to the traditional forms of bullying. All of which still presumably exist.
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.
The fact that you can never escape the bullying is a huge differentiator from the before times, where coming home after school was a sanctuary (assuming you didn't come from an abusive household).
These days kids are 24/7 connected to what is going on in social media and group chats, and it never goes away.
If the “non-special cases” had parents that didn’t allow them to have iMessage, my daughter wouldn’t have anyone to FaceTime with.
Sure, and I'm sorry for that, but in general technology introduces severe social and learning challenges. Extreme enough to induce a measurable increase in teen suicides since the introduction of social media and mobile phones.
Yeah for me too. When I was young I was very active in chatboxes on local BBSes. There was no internet yet for normal people.
It would have been terrible if my parents would have banned that. But they were very progressive luckily.
As someone put it, that's from a time when the Internet was a place you went to (usually a corner) and, more important, a place that you could leave whenever you wanted. The dynamic is different.
As someone who didn't like school thwt much the thought of having to deal with some of those people 24/7 fills me with dread.
I haven't really read the research, but yeah, I don't think texting is bad and as you mentioned, it really is helpful to keep connected with friends. The one thing we found though is texting didn't last too long as they moved on to different apps (like Snapchat). I hope your daughter and friends can resist that change and just stick with simpler things like texting and FaceTime.
I don't know why, but your message moved me. Thanks for sharing! I'm happy for your daughter and wish her many friends, as many as she wants.
Kids entire social lives run on their phones. Covid accelerated this and pushed down the age for where this was true.
Denying your kid a smart phone is basically denying them a social life nowadays. It simply doesn't work unless everyone does it.
> It simply doesn't work unless everyone does it.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: that's the whole point of this program.
Parents are playing the prisoners' dilemma here. Many (most) feel like cell phones (social media in particular) are a net negative for younger kids. But they don't want their kids to be left out / socially isolated. So it's really easy to get into a situation where we all defect because "I don't really like this but everyone else is doing it". This "wait until 8th" thing provides a framework for parent to agree to cooperate on this issue.
TBD if it actually works. I certainly like the idea that we have some control over our culture/community and don't just need to passively accept a "tragedy of the commons" on an issue like this.
Assuming that's true*, it honestly isn't good reason to give your kids a smartphone. Your job description as a parent is pretty much to stop your kids from doing things they don't understand will hurt them. There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life. Like, if all the other kids were shooting up heroin it would be considered insane to say "you have to let them do it because all their friends are junkies", and I don't see it as being different for phones.
*It's also not clear that your premise is even true. Plenty of parents in the past have reported how their kids' friends adjusted just fine to not being able to use a smartphone to contact them, and that they still had healthy social lives.
> There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life.
From personal experience, being isolated as a kid can also be profoundly psychologically damaging and stunt development of normal life skills. Sure, see if the kid can get by without a smartphone for as long as possible, but if they do wind up completely excluded it's time to reevaluate the cost-benefit analysis and potential ways to mitigate smartphone overuse, not just think that the isolation is "okay" cause you're protecting them from phones.
Please provide links to the "plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids".
Google exists
There's a lot of people making claims based on paid research with agendas to sell fear. If you think you have some real empirical evidence that will standup to scrutiny, by all means share.
You may be confusing what happens with a phone with what is required.
Certainly kids can have a social life without a phone. It’s not required. I just had a kid who didn’t get instagram until 14. They claimed that their life was ruined, but they had a healthy social life without it (and without a phone).
I think people generalize what will happen without things they think are common incorrectly. Just because phones are used for many things, it doesn’t mean those things are impossible without phones.
I do think it works better if more parents did it and it was so nice to find other parents (super rare) who felt similarly.
The point of the pledge is that you take it and you encourage other parents in your school/neighbourhood to take it. So this helps solve the coordination problem:
"By signing the online pledge, you promise not to give your child a smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade as long as at least 10 families total from your child’s grade and school pledge. Once 10 families have pledged to delay the smartphone, you will be notified that the pledge is active! You will receive a list of families who are delaying from your child’s grade and emails for the parents."
I’d say cell phone penetration is sitting at about 25% with my 6th graders friend cohort and that seems to hold up when I talk to my friends with kids.
I don’t know if that will hold until 8th grade but for now my kids social life seems to revolve around the neighborhood, school and his activities.
I was under the impression phones/social networks were becoming unpopular. My kid certainly has a dim view of the latter.
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 interaction takes place, then yes, it does deny them a social life.
And even if most of the social life doesn't happen on phones, appointments and figuring out when/where to meet absolutely does.
Many kids need access to group messaging to even be told that there's something going on at foo's house at 6.
I grew up before smartphones and if somebody took away my very normal corded phone I would have definitely been had a much time communicating with my friends. I wouldn't have been happy about that at all. I did spend hours talking to friends perhaps even to the detriment of my studies.
What are we really trying to stop here? Are we really just trying to stop all the addicting apps? if so.. maybe we should be focusing on that at a higher level.
At least below age 12 or so, our kid's social life consists entirely of classmates that she sees 7 hours a day at school during weekdays, after school and in weekends playdates with classmates that she likes, sports, music and swimming lessons,and some time with parents in somewhere between. Where does the phone come on?
In our class we were the first to give our kid's a phone. She doesn't find it very interesting and barely spent any time on it, since she the only ones that she know with a phone number are her parents.
> Kids entire social lives run on their phones.
> Denying your kid a smart phone is basically denying them a social life nowadays.
Wow, what country is that true? Thankfully, not in the country I reside. None of the children I know have social lives that revolve around the phone.
Wherever you live, if the phone is already the central aspect of a child's social life, that is a great tragedy.
Pretty much secondary school in the UK (12+). I'm guessing middle schools / high schools in the US are the same? Yes, literally every kid in secondary school has a cell phone. Kids have whatsapp groups and communicate all the time with their friend circles.
According to an Ofcom survey in 2023, 9 in 10 kids aged 11 have a smartphone in the UK.
1: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...
I think most social activities can be done on computers, no? Using Google Voice / VoIP service of your choice and whatnot
The only exception to this I see is WhatsApp (which I’ve always hated for expecting all users to have a phone and try to avoid for that reason)
https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/
> Kids entire social lives run on their phones.
So on the matter of re-opening schools, there was no need for it that was related to their social well-being?
Presumably if time spent using these things is bad, then ensuring children spend no time on them till 8th grade will be an improvement. What am I missing?
I regularly see gangs of e-bike groms with cellphones terrorizing my town.
I'm not sure having a smartphone has at all impacted their outside time.
What age did you allow your kids to have a smartphone if you don’t mind me asking?
The path they took to get to this pledge feels very similar to the path anti-vaccination advocates took (ie something intuitively "feels" bad -> look for evidence to support that). If a study came out that showed evidence that having a smartphone at an early age actually improved educational outcomes, do you think these people would reverse their position? I would guess not because above all else, this is a value judgement ("These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on YouTube.").
And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a value judgement. But trying to foist your values onto others is not something feel the need to support.
> 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
In Scotland, the first year of school is Primary 1
We have P1-P7, then secondary S1 - S4, with S5 and S6 optional.
> Children start primary school aged between 4½ and 5½ depending on when the child's birthday falls.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Scotland
Primary 1 seems to be a pre-primary school type curriculum and you leave secondary school at the same exact age. So you reinforced the parents point, even your exception is pretty much the same except you call it P1 instead of nursery. From what I read, in most schools P1 activities are play based, many times there's no individual desks. It's basically kindergarten.
I think I’m missing your point- is your (overall) point that I should have known what age range 8th grade is in the US without looking it up? And that I should also know what activities happen in a US kindergarten?
My point is 6 years old is a good heuristic to use for "start school" age and even scotland is similar
I’ve had really strange replies to my original reply. I posted some information that I had to look up for the benefit of other people and now for some reason I need to say that school starts around age 6 in my country when my son started Primary 1 when he was closer to 4.5.
Others are trying to say that I should somehow automatically know that most of the world uses the similar(?) age ranges. I don’t even know what age school starts at in other parts of the UK despite sharing borders with them. Maybe I’m ignorant but it’s never been information that I needed to know or retain.
Was posting the age range of US grade 8 so controversial?
Agreed. Australian school years are January-December but you're still 13 or 14 in Year 8.
Weirdly the site actually clarifies that they mean end of 8th grade at the earliest, so more like 14-15 I think.
Yeah I thought 8 years old was kinda surprisingly young to "wait" for!
This is clearly aimed at Americans only.
Well, "Wait for 8th or whatever the similarly-aged grade level is in your area" doesn't sound quite as punchy.
This is applicable to anyone, anywhere, though sure, it's targeted at a US audience.
The point is that this website is not applicable to anyone, anywhere, since the core message is strictly US-only.
If the authors were aware of this, they may have focused their message on, eg the children's age, which should be more universal.
"Wait until 13" is not much worse than "wait until 8th".
I think I’m missing your point. Would you rather I had not posted the age for people outside the US?
No, I'm saying the website is aimed squarely at those in the U.S.
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 books. Spent a ton of time on the computer at home.
Got through "Brothers Karamazov" and "Anna Karenina" that way -- just 1.5hr a day of focused, uninterrupted time. I absolutely never would have read them and would have spent the whole time scrolling TikTok if I could have. Hrmm.
In Finland our kids pretty much go to school themselves from the age of six or so, and walk back when they're done for the day - and their afterschool activities are over.
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.
I would've gone home, every day. And then I would've read, after I played hours of World of Warcraft ;-)
Oh wait, that's what actually happened!
But I agree and I don't want to bd young these days anymore.
Sorry for being old but playing wow is different from scrolling tiktok. If These were drugs, wow would be a weed kind of thing and tiktok and the other cancers would be crack cocaine. In my honest humble opinion ofc
> The Wait Until 8th pledge empowers parents to rally together to delay giving children a smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade.
For context, students in eighth grade (US) are usually 13–14 years old.
From a messaging point of view, “wait until 8th” and “until at least the end of 8th grade” may as well be a mile wide difference to kids at that age, and it’s unclear to parents who want to actually follow this guideline without reading all the particulars
This is a bandaid on a bullet hole. The root issue is that tech leaders (yes, these decision-makers are real, individual people, let's stop diluting accountability!) have forced themselves onto us and our kids with tracking, data mining, personalised advertising, distortion of facts, dark patterns, addiction-forming products, plausible but false AI content, brand-compliance, and all sorts of other user exploitation.
The social media/internet landscape as it exists today will probably be the smoking of this generation – everyone is doing it and many will die prematurely (due to stress, depression, lack of motivation and purpose, addiction), or waste so many years of their life consuming product that it will be a pretty good equivalent for dying early. And while banning the equivalent of cigarettes for kids a damn good idea, we definitely need to quit scrolling ourselves into a premature grave, too.
Why are we consuming it? Participating in the popular internet today shouldn't be "wait until 8th", but "wait a moment, you don't want this in your life, and the people around you don't want to deal with you involving them into it second-hand either".
i agree but they deserve credit for running a reasonable campaign. Look how you're ridiculing them, and now imagine how much ridicule they would receive if the campaign was total abstinence from smart phones?
Running a contrarian campaign is hard, especially given all of the status , social pressure and marketing surrounding smartphones.
I agree.
What I said may have come off as ridicule. This campaign is an important effort. I argue that we should have more such efforts, bigger efforts, and even alternative efforts to prevent people’s addiction to social media.
thanks for saying that
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Apple Watches have been great for us. Both of my kids (ages 10 & 13) use a cellular Apple Watch which gives them a way to call/text with us and their friends but it doesn't give them access to social media. I know they'll want a phone soon (my youngest is already asking) but it's an easy "no" for us. I think waiting until around age 14 (or later) sounds about right. I'd like to delay even longer if possible. We'll see how hard they push.
Not a kid anymore but I bought one for myself to reduce my own cell phone usage.
It's amazing.
I can pay for stuff, I can make calls, I can use maps, I can hear music, store my subway card QR-code.
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 afraid to even talk about it. This culture of forbidding inevitably leads to confused, repressed, misinformed kids and we've seen the backlash across multiple generations. We see an alternative, across those same many generations, working in other Western societies, yet we seem stubbornly incapable of learning any lessons from these extremely apt comparisons. We have the data, yet we keep treating kids like "others".
This is more like trying to keep cigarettes away from little kids. Phones are little pocket dopamine hit machines that feed short attention span slop.
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.
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 and our stupid ape dopamine system is no match.
It might get better once we culturally assimilate this knowledge and realize that this stuff is more psychologically manipulative than we think it ought to be. We need to look at apps that use addiction patterns the way we look at drugs.
We think: It’s just a screen! It’s not like opioids or meth or something. How can a screen take over someone’s life?
The average TikTok user spends three hours on the app per day. Average. That means half spend more. That’s insane. Not to single out TikTok. It’s just one example.
Every generation says it's getting worse. They might all be right. I'm certainly not denying a problem. I'm arguing that that solution, to keep trying to create a walled-off fantasy world for kids to keep them safe, has been proven worse than ineffective over a very long period of time.
Drugs are actually a great comparison. We keep pretending that we've "banned" drugs. Yet despite the endless fortunes spent, civil liberties curbed and countless lives ruined by incarceration, drugs remain universally available, increasingly potent and very, very cheap. At a certain point we have to accept that a failed approach has failed and dig deep for the courage to try something different.
It is hard to say. I use to be a pack a day smoker but I think I would even be shocked by the level of smoking if I was transported back to 1985 at this point.
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.
My dad routinely spends way more than three hours per day watching television.
I have mixed feelings about this. Having unrestricted access to my devices at an early age is what made me have a career in software development later on. Having a computer, portable consoles, and then smartphones on was crucial - those were the devices I were playing with, and eventually tried developing for, or even just running homebrew programs.
Some of my lifelong friendships were made over the Internet, sometimes at a very young age (9~10yo), and we still talk to this day. I started posting on forums back when I was 7. Some of my friends got into their careers in similar ways - for example, by playing sysadmin when they were kids, then teenagers.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this. I think not allowing smartphones to be used in class is more reasonable.
Younger millennial chiming in: I'm pretty sure that 8th grade is exactly when I got my first smartphone, although social media had a fraction of the presence back then, so it's hard to draw a direct comparison to today. But I do feel like the timing worked out well enough: not having a smartphone until that point (since they didn't exist lol) turned me into a voracious reader, and the dumbphone I did have meant I was still able to text friends sporadically (T9 anyone?), but getting a smartphone was a good step towards the increased independence and social connectivity of high school. Also brought me into the world of ebook piracy to feed my reading habit, and the world of smartphone mods/jailbreaking to feed my geek streak.
This makes me think, as I've thought previously, that the generational labels seem too broad for the pace of change in information technology over the last 40 years. I read your comment as an older Millenial and thought "what?! a smartphone in 8th grade?!"
Despite being in the same "generation," someone born in the mid-80s came of age with radically different consumer technology compared to someone born just ten years later in the mid-90s. I have clear memories of trying to understand what the "Information Superhighway" was, and then getting dial-up Internet in our home for the first time. At the end of 8th grade, I convinced my dad to upgrade from 33 kbps dial-up to cable. As a sophomore in college, I remember thinking that some company would make a lot of money by putting Wi-Fi access points everywhere so we could have always-on Internet access with some sort of mobile device... Just a night-and-day difference from the experience of someone getting a smartphone in 8th grade.
Ha, maybe the labels were more useful when day-to-day technology wasn't progressing as quickly as it is now!
Your internet story is also funny to me because my dad worked at an ISP when I was a toddler. One of my earliest computer memories is when he taught me how to go into the Windows 98 graphics menu and toggle the color settings from 16-bit to 32-bit (or vice versa, can't remember now) before booting up a particular CD-ROM game, because otherwise the graphics would be put of whack. I must have been four or five.
I also remember asking why I couldn't play the games whose cool icons were always visible in the taskbar... turns out those "games" were Napster and IrfanView, lol.
Yeah, I think trying to make games work on Windows 3.1 to 9x was a very formative experience for just a narrow slice of Millenials. I've seen the definition of Millenials span all the way up to 2000 births, and I'm pretty sure the games "just worked" for a kid born in 2000.
To be fair, I've wondered if people in previous generations feel the same way. Like was the coming-of-age experience of an older Boomer, who was a teenager in 1960, much different from that of a teenager in 1980? I don't know.
My guess is the culture was a lot different between 1960 and 1980 (obviously, right) but the general workings of society weren't too far apart for the average person. You got in your car to go home and watch TV...
Also, I have a younger sibling born just after 2000 and games "just working" sounds about right. Not to mention that console gaming was really picking up around then.
> This makes me think, as I've thought previously, that the generational labels seem too broad for the pace of change in information technology over the last 40 years.
Yeah, no kidding. I'm an older millennial as well, and I didn't have a dumb phone until my senior year of college, let alone a smartphone.
My experience growing up was so much different from someone born just 10 years after me, even though we're technically in the same "generation".
I'm Mid-GenX. I didn't have a cordless landline phone until after college. I got my first dumb phone when I was 25 or 26.
Now get off my lawn. :)
Hm, I think we got our first cordless when I was in 4th or 5th grade. First phone I remember was rotary, pulse-dial.
Every year this post shows up. It’s based on flimsy evidence, and the pledge itself is nonsensical peer pressure. All children are different in how they interact socially. Some do better with a computer or phone as an intermediary. This has been true since the BBS scene in the 1980s through smartphones today. I have had two teens with very different relationships with their phones, one is a socialite, the other just uses it to read manga and text close friends. Both have used their phones since grade 6, and had access to phones and iPads and PCs since age 3. They’re comfortable with technology and understand the risks of talking to people online because that was my job as a parent: to teach them from a young age to see these devices as an extension of themselves, that they will eventually be the ones in charge of their privacy and how they wish to be treated.
Public policy is based on aggregate behavior patterns of the overall population. If every policy were to account for outliers like your teens, nothing would ever get done.
My teens aren’t outliers, and we’re not talking about public policy. We’re talking about an influence campaign that actually doesn’t have reliable evidence about aggregate behaviour patterns, it just has an agenda.
We have a house phone, which is normally in the unihertz "student mode" which prevents installing apps and only allowing use of some apps.
When our kids ask for their own phone, the answer is always an easy no. I have no problem with computers. But the internet is not your friend. Endless content is hard for me, a developed adult to resist at times.
If they want to stay up late, their forced to sneak a book into their bed.
> Endless content is hard for me, a developed adult to resist at times.
Remind me of food
Would you give your kid endless access to chips and sweets?
No to both - but it’s important to teach kids self-moderating, both when it comes to food and to internet stuff. Withholding either is in my opinion solving it short-term while leaving kids unprepared for dealing with these things themselves.
As somebody who grew up right when the smartphone wave was starting, I feel extremely uneasy about ideas like this one.
I have had almost unrestricted access to a computer since the age of 9, and to a smartphone since the age of 12, and I can definitely say that I wouldn't be the person I am right now without that access.
It's sad to see people lament the demise of the "hacker spirit" on one hand, while denying their kids access to the devices necessary for that spirit to thrive on the other.
I've known several kids in my age group whose access to technology was severely restricted, and I strongly believe that all of them were significantly worse off and have had serious mental health consequences because of that. Not to mention that the restrictions didn't actually accomplish much in most cases, and, if anything, caused a form of Streisand effect when it came to e.g. explicit content or talking to (older) strangers online.
Unrestricted (and even more importantly, unmonitored) access to tech provides an "escape hatch" against abusive families. Yes, it may have somewhat of a bad effect on some kids, but for the kids that do need it, it's life changing to an extend that's hard to overstate.
English-speaking countries have always seemed more uptight about this though. I live in eastern EU, and we have never really done the whole "kids shouldn't have access to porn / swearing" thing much either, to the point of not having a word for "explicit" in my language, and using the word "censored" instead.
You had access to a computer for 3 entire years before you had access to a smartphone, that's what contributed to your growh. Had you had the phone forst, I doubt you would've attained the same growth.
Smartphones these days aren't tools that promote creativity and curiosity; they are passive consumption devices. They promote brain-rot and short attention spans, extremely hostile to curiosity and tinkering, promote walled-gardens and siloed ecosystems as they are designed to funnel you unto the specific add-ridden attention strip-mining facilities they call "Social Media" ala facebook, instagram, tiktok, and all that crap.
I would feel more at ease sendingy kids to a red light district.
You may have a case if there isn't access to any other tech. My five year old son and I use the PC and 3D print to make cool contraptions. We use a computer for Xlights to make light shows for the holidays. He isn't quite ready for online gaming but that could be an option in a few years. There he would, hopefully, be able to have communication with people around the world. This link references smart phones and the unfettering access kids have that rewires the brain due to the short quick dopamine hits of social media.
> Unrestricted (and even more importantly, unmonitored)
As someone who grew up during the beginnings of the web, and started playing with programming when I was about 7, I'd agree that access to technology is important. As a parent that has the responsibility of making sure my kids develop good habits and stay safe, I believe that access to the internet should be restricted and monitored.
> It's sad to see people lament the demise of the "hacker spirit" on one hand, while denying their kids access to the devices necessary for that spirit to thrive on the other.
When I was young devices weren't connected, so you could fiddle and not get yourself into too much trouble.
My concern isn't letting my kids loose on the computer, its letting them loose on the internet.
I would liken it to letting your kids go to a night club. theyre likely to be exposed to inappropriate content.
Ultimately these are tools, I wouldn't stop my young child using a knife, and in fact encourage them to learn how to use it safely, that doesn't mean Ill let my 5 year old keep a pen knife in their pocket.
My son is in high school. He has a smartphone. He doesn’t have social media accounts. I was just honest with him about how such companies make money, how they actively encourage addiction, etc. He chose, like me, to not have accounts with those companies. I am not sure why people believe that they cannot explain things to their children. My son was in middle school when we had this chat.
I congratulate you, for having a son, who is able to be so principled about things like that. It is great that you had this informing chat as a parent with your child, and that he was able to understand and draw his conclusions.
That said, I think for many kids that social pressure or network effect is quite a motivator to get social media accounts. Say all their friends have one and they have a group, where they usually organize. Or say they are interested in someone and wants their contact info, but they only give them their social media details. For many people traditional ways of communication are somehow not their way any longer. I am talking about e-mail, phone calls, SMS, letters, and whatever else.
It is a sad fact, that most people become supporters of the big tech data sharks, even if unknowingly, by creating peer pressure. I wish you and your son can both stay strong in your resolves and that your environment is not too excluding.
In my area it's becoming very popular for schools (middle and high) to restrict phones. They put them in the pouch things. I'm a bit surprised how much the parents support it. Talking to a local journalist he said he couldn't find parents with good arguments against it. One of them was "my son runs an online business and needs access to his phone for it".
I couldn't get a cell until I had a driver's license, which I think made sense at the time. Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone.
> Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone.
That's really the point of a program like this. A lot of parents think smartphones (mainly social media, really) are a net negative for their kids, but we have this tragedy of the commons situation where no one wants their kid to be left out / socially isolated. Having this "wait until 8th" thing is basically parents playing the prisoner's dilemma getting together and agreeing that it we'd be much happier if everyone cooperates rather than defect on this issue.
"Today, a kid might be alienated without a phone." Might ... but more likely not. I can't understand why this irrational fear of potential social problems if not tethered to a phone is outweighing the clear evidence of actual social problems when tethered to a phone has so much traction with adults.
Indirectly related to smartphone usage - it’s incredibly hard for teenage kids to actually _find something to do_, at least here in Germany, where I live. Going to watch a movie is very, very expensive - without snacks, you pay around 10 EUR, while the recommended amount of pocket money is around 30 EUR per month. There are less and less public swimming pools, playgrounds usually don’t appeal to teens and are frequently neglected (on top of that, teens who meet at a playground are often chased away since they tend to leave litter behind, and the playgrounds are for younger kids).
The list goes on. In my opinion, we shouldn’t focus on taking smartphones away, thus limiting the options to do something even further, but instead focus on creating compelling, affordable alternatives, and teach kids to use their smartphones responsibly.
I applaud the initiative. I waited until the beginning of 7th and it was pretty hard, honestly. We don't give them free access to it, though (but ironically it's most valuable to ME for them to bring it to school).
The waiting was hard, or your child having the phone in 7th grade was hard?
lol, both?
everything is over text now, and excluding them from that was difficult
Why is it beneficial to you? Did you have a dumb phone before for calls/texts?
easier to see where they are and let them know things. Otherwise they are normally home so it doesn't benefit me for them to be on their phones
Among my children, my oldest got an iphone for Christmas in 2007 when he was 17. The other four got them spread out over the following ten years but progressively younger in age. I cannot say that I see a big difference in their phone usage, grades, or social development. It seems to me that they all just got more attached to the phone the longer they had it. I am starting to see some push back from my 16-year-old after reading "Stolen Focus" a few months back and I hear that other kids her age are doing the same.
Very interesting. Was wondering, are there any differences in how independent they are at the same age? Have read that there is a possibility that the smartphone may be contributing to the development of children to be delayed by a year or two. For instance, are your younger children less interested in driving at the same age and doing things on their own.
... although, even if this is true, this could just be that kids seem to be more attached to their parents then they used to be (have read this as well).
More discussion from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207142
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Wait Until 8th pledge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207142 - June 2023 (244 comments)
Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284217 - March 2019 (146 comments)
I really had to reflect a bit on this site, and show it to other friends with kids, to come to the conclusion.
This is helicopter parenting. Specifically, the way that the pledge requires that kids share all passwords and only install approved apps.
Kids need a degree of independence that they've lost in how structured modern day youth has become. An important part of growing up is being exposed to people who have different ideas and beliefs than parents and extended family, and making decisions and having real consequences.
I think it's more important to talk to children about what they encounter in their day-to-day lives, and find out about their struggles. It's important to remind children that they can turn off their smartphone, or delete an account on a social media site, if it doesn't bring them joy. As parents, it's our duty to tell children that they have the choice, but not make that choice for them.
Anyone have any takes on the Fitbit Ace LTE vs the devices listed on their approved devices list (https://www.waituntil8th.org/devices)?
I don't see a reason for my children to have smartphones until they're driving themselves to their own job and social functions.
As a father of a young child with diabetes, I have mixed feelings about this issue.
While I believe small children shouldn't carry smartphones, it's currently our only way to monitor their health when they're outside our immediate range, such as in daycare.
My child is quite small and not yet interested in the phone, but I expect that will change eventually. We've established ground rules: the phone can’t be used for watching videos or playing games and is intended solely as a medical device. However, maintaining that restriction may become challenging as she grows.
is it for uploading glucose diagnostic results?
Yes, that's correct. It uploads data from the continuous glucose sensor to the medical device provider, allowing us parents to access that data on our smartphones. But it's not just about collecting statistics. For instance, delivering alerts to us, such as low glucose levels or pump malfunction, requires the phone to be present.
Additionally, it allows for remote monitoring of glucose levels. For example, during winter, when the child is bundled up in overalls, daycare staff can check the values without needing to undress her in freezing temperatures.
Recently, many insulin pumps, although not ours, have also evolved so that the algorithm controlling the pump operates via a smartphone. This means having the phone nearby is not just very useful; it's essential.
that's pretty neat
Our school says that every single time a kid gets a notification or call, everyone gets distracted, and that's why they are not allowing any one carry phone/smart watch.
Which I totally agree with.
Not allowing something at school is a lot different than not allowing something anywhere.
Even better, try to convince them to wait until at least their eighth wedding anniversary if at all possible.
It's weird to not give people access to the Network, which so far as I can tell is the core idea here.
It's extremely weird to assume that the specific age matters. This is always a bad idea and where it is necessary for practical reasons (e.g. licensing laws) that causes friction
I assumed this site was about waiting until they are eight and I thought huh, well, that's probably not a big problem for most kids and maybe if you don't think about it too hard that's an OK rule. But now I find it means high school age which is entirely crazy.
My wife and I adopted two severely abused and neglected children and held out until they were 14. But the thing that we quickly realized is that our children's online life was only as secure as their friends most permissive parent. It still boggles my mind how many elementary-aged children had unfettered access to the internet. I suspect a lot of them unwittingly traumatized themselves.
If we've built something harmful here, why are we only protecting the kids from it? There's got to be a way to handle this more directly.
Fair point, but there are a couple of reasons why we would only apply this to kids. First, something can be harmful to children and not to adults. Second, even if smartphones are harmful to adults, for better or for worse we let adults ruin themselves. It's a necessary condition of freedom, that you have the ability to make bad choices as well as good.
Smartwatch without apps but with limited phone, texting, and location sharing to trusted contacts appears to be the way out offering most technical benefits without becoming a firehose of horribleness, addiction, and distraction.
Dumb / kosher phones seem like another idea but have the disadvantage of being another thing to loose and break rather than something that's strapped to them.
Another thing is to role-model and reinforce smartphone etiquette by not pulling them out to waste time when around other people.
I applaud keeping smartphone, social media, screen, and computer privileges minimum age as high and restricted as possible for as long as possible.
Wouldn't it be simpler to implement an Mobile device management app / overlay that restricts all actions but the select few.
Phone calls / SMS to 5 numbers Clock enforce GPS on until battery is less than 20 No smart phone functions No data access
That sounds like the opposite of simple
"Dumb"-smartwatches for kids allow the kid stay in touch and be located, without getting sucked into anything addictive.
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.
Idk, I bought my kid e-ink smartphone. Black and white screen. 10 fps if you don't mind ghosting. No play-store. She manages. If she wants to play games we have switch and pc and if she wants to watch whatever, we have google-tv stick.
So far it works out.
We don’t wait. We tell the kids they can have once when they can buy it themselves. In our experience that usually happens when they are about 17.
Who will teach them how to (not) use them once they have one? I mean things like privacy, phishing, social media risks, addiction, subscription fees, etc.?
I think the possession of a device isn't the risk itself.
The parent has failed if the child can't teach themselves by that age. Besides, as you say, it's not so much the phone itself -- those risks can be learned or taught separately from the phone. (I didn't have my first phone until I was 23, but I'm not a tech-clueless zoomer and grew up with message boards.)
Researcher Jonathan Haidt advocates for children not having a smartphone until age 16.
https://fortune.com/well/article/rules-for-curbing-kid-smart...
What an insulting and futile approach. You'd think a trained psychologist would know better than to think kids wouldn't a) find this laughable b) develop a severe and justified resentment and c) find a way around their comparatively less-tech-minded parents' arbitrary restrictions. I don't know his background, but it reeks of a person who "studies" kids instead of actually working with them.
Maybe off topic, but is that AI gen gore on the image of the small child looking down at his phone on the left?
Oh wow that is surprisingly spooky, looks like something out of Coraline.
And then the very next picture, a stack of hands, which just is a cruel ask for a LLM
It honestly looks more like a really, really bad photoshop cutout to me (weird but consistent edge, nose issue my be a blowout). AI generators I've used tend to get lighting more or less consistent but with edges that can waffle between blurry and sharp.
I totally get the rationale, no need to convince me.
We've raised the bar even higher than 8th.
Our kid won't have a phone before they are driving.
We have a landline for when they're at home, but there's no reason to rush.
They can wait.
So can we.
We waited until our kids were 14 to get their phones and they couldn't take them to their bed-room at night until their senior (last) year of high school. They are both in college now and it seemed to turn out OK so far.
So I guess that's a +1 for the idea.
> Initial results from a groundbreaking study by the National Institute of Health reveal that MRI's found significant differences in the brains of children who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day.
Reminds me of "Every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying".
Jokes aside: "more than 7 hours a day" is a _quite little more_ than the 0 hours the site is asking for. Also I'd guess it might make a difference whether the kids are using a drawing app, tiktok, learning a foreign language, reading an eBook, playing a shooter, gambling, …
I’d like to see something for this for travel sports.
Grew up with a few guys who made pro teams and travel didnt help any of them or any of the other schlubs like me. Many of the best guys didnt even do travel for money or other reasons. We would have been better off playing at the park on the weekends.
I see the good intentions, but it's too idealistic. In many families both parents work and kids are expected to get home by themselves (such was the case for me from 3rd grade onwards). Smartphones are simply a necessity for communication and Google Maps. I can only ever see this working with upper middle class nuclear families with a stay at home parent.
Why would you need Google Maps to get home from school? I have an absolutely terrible sense of direction, but even I can memorize a single route after walking it a couple of times.
I walked the mile home from school from the age of five. Why would anyone need a map? And I spent all day outside away from home from the age of about eight in the summer with of course no phone of any kind and no maps even though I was tramping for miles through fields and streets. What has changed in the last sixty years that makes maps and communication a necessity?
Google maps is completely unnecessary to go back and forth between school and home. And communication can be done easily with a dumb phone.
Our oldest at 7 goes alone to school and has no problem memorizing the path.
Or ... we could continue doing what worked for all of us before being tethered to phones. Communicate beforehand / afterwards / using shared phones (which still exist) and learning to navigate the world using brains.
So, no flexibility, spontaneity? So far we had:
- "I'd like to stay with a friend after school - they'll drive me home after dinner", "Sure, thanks for the info, have fun"
- "Fire alert, I'm fine but bored"
- "Had to help a friend with an accident, will be home 1h later approx"
- Bus didn't turn up, uses app to improvise an alternative connection
- asking teachers about details from the lessons
- getting a news-feed from school
- looking up the schedule if things change
- manage their calendar and todo-lists
- set an alarm/reminder
So basically "everything" an adult does with their phone to make their lives easier.
After that there's enough brain left to learn that social media is something that needs special attention
Almost all of that can be done offline. Pen and paper still exist. Example 1 is more difficult without a phone of your own, I was able to use a pay phone back in the day. Everything else you listed can be accomplished offline, on a computer, or by asking to use the school's phone for 1 minute. I mean, if the accident happened at school, the office may very well contact you themselves.
Yes, it can be more convenient but it absolutely isn't necessary.
how do you think we lived before the smartphones were mainstream?! None of what you listed was a problem before smartphone. Literally none of it.
source: I'm older than 30, I was there.
The parent comment is almost an advertisement for waiting to give kids a smartphone until they're older. If one truly can't imagine doing any of these without post-2010 technology, then it would be good giving kids a little bit more time building their independence from both parents and smartphones.
Aspirational at best I'm afraid. What happens when the other partner/parent/family member isn't responsible, smashing your plans? Or if the event has a variable end time with no safe care or phone in between? How do you deal with emergencies like school closures that now require every child to line up to use available landlines (my personal favorite experience)?
Landlines are becoming scant in my particular part of my country, YMMV. I rarely even see them in my workplace anymore.
What does the “8th grade” mean?
8th school grade in the US which equates to around 13 years old.
I remember recently reading about a town where all the parents in the entire town agreed not to give their kids smartphones, so then none felt they were missing out.
I think that could work really well
> none felt they were missing out
Exactly. It seems obvious to me that the vast majority of social media is junk and I'd prefer to keep my kids from getting drawn into it for as long as possible, and I think a ton of parents feel this way. The main counter-argument I hear is that "that's where socializing happens these days, and if you keep them away from it they'll just be left out / isolated from their peers".
An initiative like this acknowledges that we have some control over our culture. We don't just need to put up with a shitty status quo because "that's the way it is".
It takes a village!
I grew up in a town where kids used yo-yos as economic status symbols and needed adult chaperones to resolve Pokemon card trading disputes that ended up in tears. In my sophomore English class I watched two kids fight after one accused the other of wearing a fake designer sweatshirt.
You can lead a horse away from water, but you can't stop it from getting thirsty. Reckoning with disparity is what helps kids grow up and shed the solipsism of childhood - take the smartphones away and you're leaving them even less equipped to deal with modern life. It's a catch-22, but I don't think banning everything digital is going to improve anyone's quality of life, kids or parents.
> take the smartphones away and you're leaving them even less equipped to deal with modern life.
I grew up without a smartphone and have done just fine as a software engineer. I don’t think access to a smartphone before age 15 would correlate to better life outcomes.
Seems pretty strange that this eccentric political campaign is allowed to flood HN with posts and comments on a near weekly basis at this point.
Why do you need to 'pledge' that. What BS. As a parent you can just decide to do so, no need to get anyone else involved.
Personally I'd make it dependent on the child's maturity. I was very mature at young age and my parents would let me travel on the train to other cities.
No phones in the classroom.
I feel like every sentence on this website has a missing <sup>[citation needed]</sup> next to it.
I had the same sentiment when reading.
It all looks like B'n'W opinions and mixing devices and services. I completely miss the "parenting" aspect. It's all about prohibition.
My goal is to see if I can get my kids all the way through highschool with just an Apple smart watch and an iPad for home and school stuff where it is required. It seems completely doable.
So what would parents suggest?
I'm 40, so got a phone at 17. I had rubbish internet in my teens, and anyway, didn't really 'discover' it. So I've never grew up in the connected world.
My eldest is now 7.
It seems to me secondary school is about the age for a mobile.
And at this point its basically supervised education
Good start ... but it should actually be "Wait until 18". I did this with my son and, now at 25, he has a much more normal perspective on connectivity and social media than most his age. There was ZERO downside (for all you worrisome types who think not having a phone is bad for some reason). Thinking kids "need phones!" for safety / socialization are making that shit up entirely.
Without legislation, this is hopeless.
Despite everything points to the necessity of keeping kids away from the Internet.
Neither parent nor child has control over the device. That we let these valent swirling forces in someday is semi surprising.
I mostly wish there were empowered options parents & children could negotiate & navigate on their own. But all we get is cloudified software, that we don't have direct view of or insight to.
Every single popular / well-funded take on this topic seems to focus entirely on quantity, and not at all on quality.
There are many wonderful things for kids - even very young kids - to do on the internet, in collaboration / supervision / concert with a caring adult.
My now 9yo has been playing games like Monument Valley, Lost Sounds, Dragonbox, and the SNES randomizers since he was three (maybe two for some of them). And I have no doubt that these have been enormous boosts to his cognitive and behavioral development, and have given him (and so many kids his age) super powers compared to us.
It's one thing to ward off social media and FPSs; it's another entirely to suggest that refraining from use of a phone or computer is likely to lead to better outcomes.
Indeed, these debates always seem to lack any sort of nuance. Probably because it's about children, and it becomes really emotionally charged.
Teaching responsible use of technology is, in my opinion, one of my duties as a parent. That includes how to responsibly use a phone, ideally with the goal of improving my kids life.
I don't allow social media (which, I think is really the core of this issue), but I do allow other things like games (in moderation, with approval), communication (with approved contacts), as a dictionary and thesaurus, as an encyclopedia, etc.
Wait until 8th? No wait until they drive...or later!
I find it fascinating, that hacker news, the literal community for people tinkering with stuff seems to be full of people who want to gut their kids instead of teaching them how to use stuff responsibly.
Probably tons of people here know how to code since they've learned on their own.
Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone. Also kids have a lot of time that could be used to learn stuff. And even playing games is... not that bad.
But I guess kids should learn chinese or what is the current fad now or torment the kid with 50 extraculliculars.
> Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone
I grew up in the 90's and my parents were strict, particularly compared to a lot of my peers. Things like watching television was heavily restricted. I remember making similar arguments to my parent's deaf ears "I won't fit in, all the kids at school will be talking about what they watched on TV last night, I'll be a loser" etc.
My experience was that most of the kids didn't care that I couldn't understand their Simpson's references or whatever. If anything they were sympathetic, I would get a lot of "man your parents really suck" and then kids would shrug and move on.
I did resent my parents growing up. Looking back I think they were pretty clear examples of "tiger parent" stereotype. I felt immense pressure and stress to achieve good grades and it honestly felt like nothing I did was enough to make my parents happy. I get along with my parents now as an adult but as a teen my home life felt very unhappy at times. I can remember the relief I felt when I left home to live on my own.
So I think it is more likely your child will resent you, then them being ostracized by their peers.
> Reality is that the kid will be a loser / outsider due to no phone.
That is supposition, not reality, and there are parents here who have shared their experience with kids having a healthy social life without a phone. More importantly, a very important role of parents is to make good decisions for their kids when the kids are still too immature to do that. "But all my friends are doing it" is literal child reasoning and should not be the only factor in parenting decisions.
>and there are parents here who have shared their experience with kids having a healthy social life without a phone.
And there are others who have shared their experiences of responsibly teaching their kids how to coexist with technology. There's probably a lot more that aren't willing to say so, because they'll be roasted in the comments for being a "bad parent".
I don't let my kids have unfettered access to social media. But I let them have a smartphone. And I took the time initially, and continually, to have conversations about having a healthy relationship with technology.
Somehow this debate is always completely lacking in any sort of middle ground or nuance.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I think it's more important to talk about the services they use than what device they're on.
And most problematic services already have an age limit. It's the parents' damn job to make sure their kids are prepared for the usage of those services.
I'm more worried about the youtube-consumption on the PC than chatting with class-mates about school-related questions via smartphone.
If the kids are "parented" by terror, not actual teaching, they will have a problem once they leave their bubble.
Never met that guy who drank every day at university or that opressed girl who fucked 50 people in the first year?
Sheltered and not parented kids end like that. Breaking the chain syndrome.
meanwhile millenials had full reign over the internet as kids cause their boomer parents didnt know shit. back when everyone did the famous A/S/L questionare from randos online lol.
It's not just about internet access , it's about the medically recognized highly addictive and predatory nature of social media. It is designed with the same principles as slot machines, to draw you in and keep you engaged for as long as possible. The internet we grew up in was much less centralized and not yet optimized for this kind of manipulation.
I think you're right, plus there was a solid wall dividing online life from "IRL" back then. When I asked and answered "A/S/L" among randos, we were all anonymous. It was an escape from the social dynamics among my peers at school, sports, church, etc.
For a while, there was some consensus that anonymity and talking to strangers was the danger. So we got real name and photo policies, and the expectation that we'd have an online presence that was an extension of our real selves. Now that every kid's online persona is indivisible from their IRL identity, and their popularity can be measured with likes and followers and inclusion / exclusion from group chats, it just allows the social dynamics among their peers to play out 24/7 on steroids with no escape.
> 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 walkman, a calculator, a stopwatch and small handheld battery-driven games. Later a tamagotchi and whatever was trending. Also we were taught to use the phone-booth in case of an "emergency". While you do not have to agree that all of us needed all of this, nobody would've said to "wait until the age of 13" with all of this.
The phone I gave my kids were retired Android smartphones with Lineage OS installed. Almost all Google Apps removed or disarmed. I preinstalled Apps like: a calculator, camera, a secure messenger (Threema), clock, navigation (OSMAnd), a few educational games, a paint/drawing app, a calendar and added the most important contacts (Parents, siblings, grandparents) to the address book. We added more apps over time when we felt they might benefit from them.
We agreed upon usage duration and modalities. We mostly moved their TV-time towards their phones. We explained how to ask before taking a photo of a person.
What happened? My Kids started to get interested in how to read/write, used the navigation software during road-trips to find the next possible stop to have a break or try to find POIs along the road and wait them to pass by. They played with the calculator, started to learn English (non-native if that wasn't obvious, yet), started to "program" robots, send me "good nights" when I was late at work. Call me if they spontaneously decided to stay with a friend after school. Take photos during their holidays, listen to audiobooks during road-trips. Play with the torchlight in the tent.
The older one is now 12. She got access to our family calender and contact list, so she can plan her appointments with friends around ours, manage her ToDo-lists, make stop-motion videos, research all sorts of stuff on wikipedia, gain a very good understanding of how those devices work. Learn to take care of expensive gears and how it matters to have control over their own data and that backups are important. She learns how to manage her data plan by moving audiobooks for offline-usage. Also she helps her grandparents with all sorts of technical problems they have with their phones.
Yes, it's more work to teach a kid how to work with all this stuff than just throw an iPhone at them when they turn 13 and say "whoa, finally old enough to figure this all out." What could go wrong. Sorry, that I'm a bit salty on this topic (and I sometimes might not find the right words due to the language barrier), but just saying that a smartphone is bad because parents do not care for what their kids are doing with the device just feels plain wrong to me.
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.
LineageOS was just the easiest for me personally (was already installed anyway). But aren't there parental tools to lock down phones for non-tech people?
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.
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 approach. They should emphasize it being like an intro to high-school gift or something.
till I read it, i thought it meant the 8th of November,† and I was thinking "does this have something to do with the election?" I was a little afraid to click "take the pledge" for fear of what I might be supporting
† obscure trivial point of US law for fer'ners, US elections are held on "the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November" which puts them anywhere from Nov 2 to Nov 8, so that's why "wait till the 8th" is an election trigger. (I don't keep track of the date of the election this year, I just need to know it's going to be on Tuesday)
I initially thought it was saying we should not expect to have the results of the election sorted out until the 8th.
So the second Tuesday of November, or am I missing an exception?
If November 1st is a Monday then the first Tuesday after that is the first Tuesday of the month.
yes, or to put it another way, it's the first Tuesday of the month unless the first Tuesday is November 1st, then it's the second Tuesday, November 8th
pointing it out because it's always the first Tuesday unless that 1 out of 7 where you have to wait a week -1 for the first Monday.
I think the reasoning is something like "we need to have a full business day in November before we have an election, that will give us a chance to fix problems or something"... not sure if under the old county/shire system months made a difference or something.
Agreed 100%. Additional factors on top of all those is some countries start year 1 at age five, and others at age 6, and of course there's a variety of actual ages within a grade as well.
"Wait Until 9th" would have definitely helped a lot. "Wait until 14" might be even clearer. Or even "wait until high school".
I mean as a non American, I think this is one of the most American sites I've seen all week, and do not get the impression that they will particularly mind if it's ambiguous for other people in other countries
That's fair, it's certainly very USA-centric (although they should still call it "Wait Until 9th"!).
You work with the domains you have/can register.
https://www.whois.com/whois/waituntilhighschool.com
waituntil9th.org isn't taken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Let 'em whine until ninth" just didn't have the same ring to it.
Maybe it’s intended to use ambiguity as a means of generating a conversation that sticks.
It's supposed to be vague and confusing, it's part of the clickbait.
Clickbait is always to sell you something, this is the opposite. But I think the ambiguity helps, it’s not a specific cutoff date that is important but delaying the inevitable. Smartphone use at that age could bad, I’m thinking scammers paradise type of bad but with a different context. Middleschoolers aren’t scams targets but are perfect for being primed with nefarious things, think crypto and nfts, porn, gambling, addictive gaming and bad culture. I turned a blind eye on memes for a long time just because people do and like silly things but I’ve seen some disturbing memes out there. My kid is definitely not getting a smartphone till he understands some things.
Clickbait is always to sell you something,
Where did you get this idea?
People put something on the internet and they want attention and engagement. Then people use click bait to get people to look at something because they are curious or confused instead of knowing what it is from the title.
They sell you attention to something you didn’t expect. Click and bait says it all. In this case it’s something benefic, not selling you a device or service to help you in advertised ways. It’s just campaign to get kids away form smartphone and social media harm. I would not classify this as clickbait or self promotion. When you have kids you’ll think this more deeply and escape the knee jerk reaction that I don’t condemn at all. The web is mostly clickbait for self promotion.
In this case it’s something benefic,
Not sure what this means.
not selling you a device or service to help you in advertised ways
Again, click bait means getting you to click on something in ways other than telling you what the article is about. Anything published on the internet wants readers. I don't know where you got the idea that 'clickbait' only applies to direct advertisements, but you should move past that.
If keeping kids away from harm doesn’t mean anything to you then I can’t help you. But you probably don’t have kids or know anyone with kids nor you care.
This thread was about the title being click bait because it's vague and confusing. You took a hard left into "you don't care about the kids" territory and it has absolute nothing to do with what is being talked about here.
This is not clickbait, it’s like a movement with a catchy name so it sticks. You seem to be stuck with clickbait but at the same time you don’t understand what clickbait is.
This is not clickbait,
This is clickbait.
it’s like a movement with a catchy name so it sticks
No, it's a title with no information, because we're talking about the title.
You seem to be stuck with clickbait but at the same time you don’t understand what clickbait is.
No, you seem to not understand what clickbait is because you think it has to do with selling something directly, which is bizarre and not backed up by anything other than you claiming it.
An intentionally sensationalized, vague or misleading headline
https://copyposse.com/blog/clickbait-or-catchy-hook-how-to-w...
Explain to me how "Wait Until 8th" isn't intentionally vague. If you knew nothing else, what would the title tell you? Nothing. That's vague. There could be more information in the title but there isn't. That's intentional.
You fundamentally misunderstand what clickbait is.
No, you fundamentally misunderstand what clickbait is.
The difference is that I explained myself and gave an external source instead of just repeating the same claim over and over.
Despite doing what you claimed you are still wrong.
Prove it
I really like this program but yeah, the very first time someone told me about it my initial reaction was "Wait until 8??? That's way too young!"
I'm in the UK and have no idea what age 8th grade even is.
Same as Year 7
No, in the UK, Year 7 is 11-12 year old, In the US, Grade 8 is 13-14 year old
I am from Switzerland, does this mean 13-14 years old ?
Yes, but because it's actually "wait until after 8th", it's more like 14-15.
Yes exactly
IMHO, this feels like another wave of nannyism that follows after a new technology matures. Being a 90s kid, discovering porn, violence, warez were all normal part of growing up that I don't think has had any negative impact nor do the puritan panic about pornography.
Matter of fact the internet started speedrunning censorship and monopolization post 9/11 without much of a fight and I think this triggered the default in people to just shrug and seek other ways to access and share data.
It's as ridiculous as suggesting Bittorrent is harmful for kids because of its unrestricted limitless amount of data. What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
There's just so many things outside internet and smartphones that even adults struggle to balance, the last thing I think kids need are adults taking away that trial by fire and allowing themselves to develop their own sense of moderation.
The 2000s-2010s was incredibly rewarding for curious kids, not just because of what was out there, but because of the effort required to get such payoffs was high.
The reward of watching porn on the family computer was sneaking down the stairs at 3am, hoping no one heard the dialup tone, finding the right website, and waiting for the pixels to load.
Later, that moved into bedroom and with faster internet, and the result was slightly less pixelated boobs. And it was just out there, to be watched.
The internet today is not there to be observed. It's to be consumed, and then to stalk you even after you've left. It's not even at your fingertips anymore; it's in your bed, at full resolution, recommending you products that you actively ignore but passively absorb.
At that young impressionable age, the passive inputs are definitely the ones to monitor
You're interpreting this as nannyism with respect to the internet as a whole, while I think the pledge is really just about smartphones. If kids want to go and watch gore and porn on their laptops they should be free to do so.
The smartphone that is always on, always fighting for your attention, and always in your pocket has proven to be harmful to the development of most children.
> What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
I really wish kids would still learn self-balancing on their own. But the odds are stacked against them in the current age. TikTok and Instagram have gotten too good at this, backed by teams of scientists and ML models working with passion to fight their self-control.
I dunno. Growing up, both my parents and the society did moderate (i.e. censor) the content I had access to. As an adult, I'm definitely glad that this was kept away from me as a kid. I was a pretty reasonable kid, but I'm definitely not confident I would have handled it well.
That having access to (some) of those things was overall harmless doesn't seem to be a settled question.
With smartphones, the thing that stands out to me is a survey they did of parents. For those who gave their kids a smartphone before they turned 16, literally every parent regretted the decision (and some of them gave them the phone willingly).
Granted, N was probably not huge in that study, but it's a rare study that has no variance.
Some fears in this genre are well overblown, I agree. I also like the idea of kids learning for themselves, but it depends on whether they can learn before it becomes unmanageable. There is probably middle ground between no phone and phone here, and a less spoken about factor (IME) is that some kids and parents just have different dispositions and outcomes. Whether that is nature or nurture, it's hard to isolate or alter much right now. There is definitely nannyism following a new technology. I think it becomes gradually more true not because technology is inherently dangerous or something, but because we are producing technology that likely is more and more dangerous. Of course I don't consider social media addiction and Bittorrent on the same level.
>What's more harmful is preventing discovering adaptation and self-balancing on their own in the face of endless entertainment wish diminishing value.
Afaik theres pretty strong evidence of the negative effects of short form content on kids, and how addictive it is. We don't let kids eat as much candy as they want because we know they wont self regulate, I dont see how limiting online media consumption is any different.
Agreed its pure nannyism marketing and helicopter parents fueling such things.
Tubgirl, Goatse, LemonParty, Ebaumsworld, Rotten.com, LiveLeak had some of the most fucked up shit 90s teenage me could find and consume. Parental controls on electronics were an afterthought nor just didnt exist much then.
Its on parents to get involved if they want their kids to live in a safety bubble or like, you know, just have a conversation with them.
Honestly the 90s internet was peak internet imo, it was so pure and awesome. AOL, AIM, IRC, all the good times had. Captchas didnt even exist yet.
I see where your coming from (and I'm an indepedent since you mention Trump in your alias, so would like to open to both sides of an argument). But I kind of agree with keeping smartphones from kids. Yeah, like anything that is "really good" to an extreme degree, it's addictive.
And you do mention this that kids should learn to get a sense of moderation, but like other addictive things (hard drugs, alcohol and actually porn is supposed to be restricted), we keep them away from kids until they're at an age when they can handle it better.
also, I personally think spending an entire day watching tiktok is just so wasteful, feel like you've lost a 100k brain cells by the end of it, blah!
But to each their own.
I think this post from another thread is a good answer to this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41930275#41931671
Tldr:Seeing shock content is like eating a spoon of salt. The mind has defence mechanisms for it. You consume it, you are disgusted, and you never want to do it again. Consuming social media is like eating fast food
Then block social media. Don't let the kids install apps, don't let them access the web, control who they can message. Why is the phone itself the problem?
Exactly. All of this screen time is bad for kids and the phone is the devil reincarnate is ludicrous. The type of content they are consuming is what parents should monitor. Allow kids to use the device appropriately. If they do something with the device that you deem as inappropriate, then talk to them and correct the behavior. It is through mistakes that kids (and adults) really learn. Sheltering and avoidance will do nothing to prepare them for the real world once they reach early adulthood.
For non-americans: Apparently this corresponds to 13-14 years old.
Which in America is the year that it becomes legal to use social media, if anyone’s wondering (not like it’s specifically illegal under, but collecting data from users under this age isn’t allowed so the networks don’t allow it)
Year 7 in the UK, which is the right age.
Other way round -- 8th grade is UK Year 9.
And they're advocating for the end of 8th grade, so coming into Year 10. i.e. start of GCSEs.
the beginning of secondary school, if that phrase is more known outside US
Doesn't help if secondary school starts at a different age!
Two years after the begininng of secondary school; in general lower-secondary starts around age 11, and in the US it usually begins with Junior High which is often, but not always, 7th grade,
In the UK ages 12-13 are typically Year 7 of secondary school.
Year 7's regular age range is 11-12: you're 11 going into the September that the school year starts and will be 12 by the end of the following August.
So it is, oops miscounted. Never was any good at math.