I linked to this thread, only because it’s what got me thinking about this topic again. Me and my SO talk about phones occasionally, regarding our kids. Neither of them are anywhere close to an age where they might have one. However, as time goes on, we find ourselves so repelled by the idea of the kids having a fully fledged smartphone.
Given the reality that all social media apps are effectively skinner boxes, training you to use them more, the idea of allowing kids on them feels like offering a 10-year-old a cigarette. I have to remind myself that the internet I grew up on is dead and gone. I may have been exposed to some weird ass shit in AOL chat rooms, but there wasn’t any kind of algorithmic content feed keeping me itching and scratching.
So far, the only time the oldest uses an iPad is when they use mine, and the only apps they use are Procreate for drawing, and an app that helps kids learn to write letters and words. Watching TV is probably the worst thing we get into at home when it comes to just pure content consumption, but we keep the list of watchable stuff pretty small, and regularly axe shows we feel don’t meet our standards when we venture off that list.
I guess this has evolved into a larger discussion about media consumption as I have typed this out, but at the end of the day, that’s what’s happening on these phones, right?
The Internet is demonic but at the same time you can’t expect to keep kids off when all their friends are on it. I’m lucky that my kid is in a tight knit school where all the parents know each other so I’ve been meaning to make a class pact to do no smartphones until 7th grade or something. It only takes one.
I honestly think the majority of people don’t fully comprehend what they’re fucking with when it comes to this stuff, social media in particular. The fact that most of these kids will end up face id’ed in a database before they reach the age of consent is horrifying. Let alone the addiction potential, higher value activities bypassed for mindless scrolling, cyberbullying and like legit stranger danger.
I will probably end up getting a desktop PC in the living room for research and homework assignments etc. but when it comes to carrying a computer around in your pocket the bad outweighs the good.
Yeah, the cat has entirely escaped all conceivable bags at this point. Kids are going to have their lives fucked up by media, best you can do is give them weapons to fight back. I strongly advocate stealing as much decent media as possible and putting it on local storage for them. Old music, movies, anything you can get so they can watch shit without ads. Ask them what they want to see then pull the torrents and give it to them to engage with on their own level without being exposed to algos and adverts.
It feels dystopian when I see children today so young they can’t speak yet, already hooked on a tablet watching the crappiest content imaginable and a myriad ads in between. Capitalism has left kids with the cheapest to produce entertainment while also being scientifically designed to be as addictive as possible, terrible for their attention spans and development of critical thinking, with a touch of capitalist and atomistic propaganda.
I don’t have kids but if I did I would also try to delay any access to the internet for as long as possible. Maybe until 13 at least idk, I can imagine that they get very frustrated if their friends are allowed while they aren’t. It’s important to show them as many activities as possible so they can find interests aside from that, it might keep them from having such an urge to get a mobile device.
This subject is easily one of the biggest and most frustrating realities of doing parallel parenting that I have to deal with being divorced. Kiddo is 9 and unlike mom I straight up refuse to give him smartphone access at my house until 11, at the earliest. He has access to electronic devices for his hour of screen time a day which are heavily moderated and controlled at both a device level and router level. PG-13 content is totally acceptable to me and I’ll even allow R rated depending on the circumstances and provided we can engage with it together. I am not a fan at all of trying to shelter your kids entirely from the outside world and definitely believe in talking to kids about difficult subjects like violence, sex, drugs, et al.
Straight-up though: I think you’re making a huge mistake if you give your kid a smartphone and let them raw dog the internet when they’re in single digits. There is just so much goddamn awful trash, gross inappropriate memes, and parasocial relationships which are going to give them tons of weird ideas about all kinds of shit you’ll eventually have to work with them through. Media literacy is a complicated subject even for a adults. That isn’t even getting into all the shit designed to fuck with their dopamine levels.
I do think the comparison of giving a kid a cellphone to giving them a cigarette is probably a bit hyperbolic…but I definitely would liken it to giving them a soft drink or ice cream or something. At a certain age its ok and totally normal to have it…but the internet and smart devices are treats which as the parent makes you responsible for handling moderation until that blasted prefrontal cortex comes in.
I think the net is potentially much more dangerous than cigs. The worst thing cigarettes can do is kill you. And between when you start smoking at eight and when you die of lung cancer smoking will introduce you to all kinds of cool weirdos and you’ll have good taste in music.
But the net can destroy your conscience, your will, your ethics, your sense of self.
Death of the body is nothing to death of the mind. Cigarettes never made anyone in to a fascist or a democrat.
Straight-up though: I think you’re making a huge mistake if you give your kid a smartphone and let them raw dog the internet when they’re in single digits.
Yeah, this is specifically what I’m talking about. I have friends whose kids are just a few years older than mine, and they have access to YouTube kids. One told me he had to take it off the iPad because a creator can flag anything as “for kids” and it just gets added to the app, so he was playing cat and mouse with brain rot all the time. Another friend of mine had to collect the Nintendo Switch at night because their kid figured out they could watch YouTube from the built-in browser on the device.
I see comments here in this thread about how “You gotta also talk to your kids”, which, I feel, is implied, but maybe I’m wrong. However, over a decade of working in K12-IT has taught me that kids are a relentless force of nature. If you’ve implemented a block on something like “YouTube”, they will collaboratively work towards finding a way around that block (and they will find a way, they always do). They will even create black markets to distribute videos from YouTube!
Most of that doesn’t really bother me, though, I was doing that kind of shit in high school. One thing that stuck with me is someone from the same group of friends told me recently that his oldest (high school age) told him about a year ago, “Thanks for keeping me off the iPad\Computer, and pushing me to do my work, instead of letting me become an iPad kid.” He’s also in a parallel parenting situation. He told me that his kid and his friends “Can tell which kids are iPad kids.” Whatever that might mean. It’s not isolated, though, because I hear the same thing from Teachers I work with, and even daycare workers at our daycare.
I should say, it’s not a scientific classification, and I recognize how anecdotal it is, but it’s enough to give me pause.
I understand and share all your concerns. I am dealing with a kid of a similar age, and it is frustrating to know what’s out there. That’s why “his” phone is his “mom’s” phone that he’s “borrowing”. It’s logged on to her stuff. Sure he can (And does) sometimes get around that, but ultimately he is responsible to her for all he does on the phone, which has limited what he does on it quite a lot.
And ultimately we can’t really do a lot of other stuff that we can enforce when he’s at his father’s place, or just enforce at all really. Ultimately he has to have a phone and that phone needs the internet, so we can only create an environment of responsibility for what he does with the phone.
But he basically can’t exist without a phone. He gets his homework on an app ffs.
the idea of allowing kids on them feels like offering a 10-year-old a cigarette
Pretty much yes. Like you I was lucky enough to be on the internet before it turned into an engagement-maximizing hellhole so my brain had time to develop its defenses as things deteriorated and I matured. It wasn’t without its mis-steps, I got hooked enough on an MMO to fail some of my classes in university but managed to recover and permanently swore off multiplayer games. Throwing kids right into the deep end of that pool is honestly bordering on criminal neglect.
These are my guiding principles on the subject:
- Kids need to not be alienated from their peers by excessive restriction
- Kids need to be educated on how to safely and smartly engage with the internet and tech, which they can only get through experience and regular guided discussion
- Kids need to see digital hygiene modeled for them by their parents
They sometimes conflict with each other and they can be hard standards to meet, but the more ambiguous parts are things we can feel out as we go since that’s de facto what everyone is doing on the subject anyway.
I’m skeptical of the narrative that tech companies push where they’ve created mind control rays which force people to engage with their content. Super convenient if your entire business model revolves around content engagement. If your kid is at risk of addiction (mental health, family history, etc) then yeah don’t let them download the slop machine apps. I authorize intense parental controls for my kids stuff. I also have Pihole set up to block ads on our entire network. I also tell my kids that it’s not healthy to enjoy something so much that it makes other things boring. And then I model taking breaks.
How often would you say your kids attempt to bypass the parental controls? I operate what amount to “parental controls” for over 1000 kids every day, and I regularly encounter the new, interesting, and funny ways kids find to get around those controls. No one shares paper notes anymore, they share Google Docs and use the Chat feature built into the doc interface.
Either they ask permission when necessary or they just tell me that they bypassed something because they’re proud of figuring it out. It’s definitely a different dynamic than doing tech for a school, for example. Might just be a thing with my kids idk. I don’t get mad when they bypass stuff. There’s just a lot of reinforcement about why the rules are in place and validation of their emotions around that.
