This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can't imagine how it's like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent's garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today's youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can't imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I'd said, he'll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.
Nobody can multi task. I wish this stupid myth would die.
"I'm good at multitasking" is just another way of saying you can't focus on one thing at a 🐿️ SQUIRREL!
Multi-tasking should rightly be called “context switching”. Your brain is alternating its focus between two things in extremely quick succession.
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There's no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven't got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It's one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don't have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children's technology access, but I fear such groups' 'useful idiot' value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
I'm disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires."
—Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren't an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren't adults it's a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
*when I use the term young adult I mean ~16. Apparently young adult can also mean 18-25 but I've never seen it used in that context before.
Uncool boomers be like: "It's the damn phones", when they've created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They've created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, "It's dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I'm talking to you?"
It seriously is part 'those damn phones'.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void" and "to not feel left out" is the correct solution at least for me.
a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void"
So a dumb phone and a stationary computer or laptop for internet access...exactly what most millennials grew up with.
After the SORA AI reveal today I'm starting to see that luddites have a point. I don't think we'll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I've seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I've seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don't even know how to use a phone. I don't see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn't teach you what a file system even is.
The goal is to change the norm, Fernyhough said, so that when children come to the end of primary school, the class “bands together and says, ‘Let’s all delay until at least 14.’
Yeah right that's going to happen: p
They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them
Older people forget that the norm of childhood has changed. And assume that children should do the same things they did instead of learning how to moderate what they do
"Why don't kids play outside nowadays" Look out the window. What outside? How do they play there? They could go to a park, but how do they get there? They could play in the city, but would that be safe? They could go bush, but how? They could play around the neighbourhood, and then what, make a tiny bike ramp by digging and gathering a bit of dirt from a drain and then get reported and then have the council send letters to everyone living in the area to ask if they'd seen the kids and if so please say who they are and then put up signs saying that the area (ie the big drain they got the dirt from and the bit about it) may be under surveillance despite there not really being anywhere to put cameras? (that last one is a true story from where I live btw)
Exactly! Much easier just making something as "evil" than actually solving the issues around.
Children shouldn't be using their cells that much, but this is not solved by restricting access to it. It is solved by making communities and spaces child-safe and interesting for them.
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don't want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren't is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
Humanity never changes, adults still think we know better what's good for young people than they themselves do. When I was a child and teenager, I hoped that this attitude would die out over the generations, seems that that isn't happening.
I think part of the issue is that there's a lot more predatory shit on the internet nowadays. I say this as a person who has had unfettered access to the internet since my tweens. Social media and The Algorithms have changed the internet, and not necessarily for the better.
Just as a for-instance, if you go to YouTube on a freshly installed browser without logging in, the front page is kind of wild. Then the algorithm will pull you down a rabbit hole and kids who haven't been taught that they're being manipulated are going to start taking everything as fact from people like Tate.
We didn't have things trying to get in our heads to this extent; while I do wish the kids had their freedom, I also recognise that the internet has become hell. I can understand why parents would try to shield their kids from that.
Generally they do. Of course they are responsible for all the dumb shit in the world, but also most of the good and interesting.
Young people don’t get dumber as they age. They get smarter, wiser, better able to cope with adversity. Setting sore back and knees aside adults are doing alright when it comes to raising the young.
