This story, for you (as a soon to be parent) and for me (a new parent) might be great timing - it certainly makes me never want to get my child a cell phone that could even start them down this path.
Threatening to kill yourself should have serious consequences. Because it's either a very serious threat, or it's perniciously bad behavior that needs to be corrected immediately.
If you take your kids phone away and they threaten to kill themselves, take them to a mental health professional.
That might work on a 9 year old. It doesn't work on a teenager.
> Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there.
You have it backward. As a parent you HAVE to teach kids to own a phone, and not let it dominate them. If instead you just take it away, then when they are old enough to get one themself (around age 14-15 I'd say) it will utterly consume them, since they have no ability to resist, and no parents to help them.
Later on when we got a computer my folks would only get construction-set games (e.g. Pinball Construction Set) or simulations (Flight Simulator, M.U.L.E.). Later they expanded and got some strategy and role-playing games. If I wanted arcade games I had to use my own money or type them in myself from the magazines (printing game source code was a thing for a bit in the 1980s).
I recently discovered a book from the 1980s that my folks must have read, and which handles media literacy really well: "A kid's TV guide : a children's book about watching TV intelligently", by Joy Wilt. Yes, I'm just as annoying to my kid as my parents were to me.
I don’t think i’d be motivated enough to do that with html. The iPhone / modern smartphones are very much designed to be consumer devices. You can’t do much creation.
There’s something about building. You feel so accomplished. Even more amplified if other people want what you’ve created.
They have no screen time and start this at a very young age so it is not questioned later. Anything with a bright screen is not allowed during certain times of the day.
The most interesting feedback I heard over lunch at work was this: That kids do better with no screen time (complain/argue/fight less) when their parents ALSO abide by no screen time.
If you tell your kid no screen time but sit on the couch perusing your iphone all night but don't want your kids playing games on their ipad, what are you teaching them? Furthermore this example was used by a dad with an 18month yr old girl. He says she is very entranced as any child would be by a bright screen. It's very mysterious and alluring of course. While she has not screen time she is very interested in the bright lights coming from his screen, so now during no screen time he also puts his iphone away.
So my advice is implement no screen time as a standard habit in the house, and also try to abide by it yourself. So maybe the best way to prepare for kids its to start by training yourself to have no screen time. (just an idea, I don't have kids what do I know).
1) A smartphone is increasingly required for getting by in society. My kid doesn't really need it, but I worry about him navigating the transit system to/from school and extra curricular activities. A smartphone takes some of the parental anxiety away here.
2) Sadly, a flip-phone is a sign of poor status and it invites bullying at school.
I feel there is a genuine need for parental controls on smartphones, but getting it right is, from an engineering standpoint, not as trivial as we might think. It's also probably not as profitable either (we have a lot of battles over the phone in our house, but a lot of parents just don't care about setting similar boundaries).
It would be great if there were a way to flip this, so that having a flip-phone were seen as a sign of having super high-tech parents who could afford any phone but chose to get this instead.
I live in Silicon Valley and am curious to see what happens when my daughter starts school. I'm sure there are other parents who will want to keep their kids off devices, and many of them would be very wealthy. I'm terrible at branding, but this seems like a branding challenge. Like if you're the kind of parent who would enroll your kid in an SAT class or after-school tutoring, this is a thing that will have more impact on their eventual growth.
Maybe a less socially-wasteful solution would be to create an OLPC-like model, where you give your kid a phone and simultaneously signal that you have enough wealth to donate a phone to a kid in need elsewhere.
If I weren't already running a couple early-stage startups, I would seriously pursue this — for the good of kids in the US, and kids elsewhere.
Really, though, the thing that I want (and I'm probably not thinking through the ramifications too deeply, so bear with me), is a remote kill switch that is physically manifested as a FOB.
Without such a device, our option of last resort is to temporarily cut service to the phone via the cell provider. This is not a process that lends itself easily toward doing and undoing, and its also only available to the primary account holder, which makes it sub-optimal. Though it has been done more than once...
I'm not sure why the parents didn't take a harder line earlier in the process, but I have my suspicions. By the time a child is 15, parenting tends to become more results oriented. They are going to be on their own legally inside of 3 years, and parents have to take the training wheels off. Kelly's parents may have been attempting to get her to see the deleterious effects of the phone. If an 8 year old is spending too much time on screens, you take them away. By 15 Kelly's parents probably want her to take more ownership over behavior. The parents can point to the failing grades, lack of social progress, and missed opportunities and say "are you proud of this? Is this what you want?" Some kids have to learn things the hard way via personal experience rather than parental instruction. Parents may want their kids to make this sorts of mistakes before adulthood hits them and raises the stakes. After all, the real world has phones without any screen time limits.
Remember there is a selection process that led to this story. It is an extreme, not the norm. It is likely that Kelly had a mental illness of one sort or another, as evidenced by the fact she was committed for a time. If not that, then there is some other reason this is an exceptionally extreme story.
Statistically speaking, you are unlikely to end up with that. (Not that that stopped me from coming up with some pretty bad genetic hands with my children. But it was still stastically unlikely....)
There are ways in which it is easy and people make it hard, but there are ways in which it is legitimately hard, too. My oldest is 10 and has made only the first initial noises about getting his own phone, but I won't be able to defer the matter forever. But I will say the current plan is to wait until he shows some understanding of what forces are arrayed against him before he gets anything of his own. To some extent, I suspect the average youngster is going to have to get stung a few times before they really get it, partially because I did myself. But to be stung "properly", you need to understand what is going on and why you were stung, not just be sitting there looking at your empty bank account one day wondering where all the money went, when the answer is "gems for some mobile game", and then doing it all again next week.
They are trying to fix her thinking. I mean they could also just lock her in cage right?
But that's not the issue, the issue is how she thinks and behaves.
> How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions?
Very very very very hard. Take a phone away, and a kid will borrow one from a friend, or buy one, or steal one, or go to the library and refuse to come home.
You can't fix these things by focusing on the item, you need to focus on the person.
> This is not a rhetorical question. I will be parent soon and stories like these, terrify me.
They should. Phones are destroying society and rebuilding it, different. Not just kids. Adults too.
Will the new world be better or worse? Time will tell I guess.
And in the article, they mention that the defining event was when the parents went to take the phone away. So they did try to take the phone away.
Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS?
That's the real solution here... start demanding with your wallet that you would pay for these counter-measures.
One thing I've always appreciated about iOS (and contributed towards my brand loyalty and sales) is better security permissions (no, I'm not going to grant my flashlight app access to my microphone). I hear Android's gotten better about it, but even just the other weekend, an android-using family member asked me if I can figure out why some annoying ad appears somewhere on her lock or home screen (aka who is the spammy app). A walled garden does have its benefits if the gardener is incentivized with devices sales not eyeballs...
Similar attention-control features wouldn't even be for kids -- it's something I would even use myself. The brain-hacking dopamine drip strategies talked in the article don't only affect kids, after all. Start showing there's profit in counter-measures.
> Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS?
Yep, and it's happening.
https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-t...
First, it's “nip...in the bud” (cut off before it flowers) not “nip...in the butt” (annoy it by biting it's backside.)
More to the point, the kind of sharp cutoff you suggest is exactly equivalent to what the parents did here, and would likely produce the same result.
The parental problem is that they let the problem go on too long.
When your kids grades start to drop, you take action. Now. You don't let it go on.
Taking the phone away now probably does feel pretty traumatic because their daughter has integrated it as her social life. She interacts with friends who interact with their phones the same way. etc. At this point, yanking the phone means hitting the reset button on her social circle at the age of 15--in the middle of a bunch of established social cliques.
They probably need to change schools for her.
I am reminded again, however, that the single characteristic that a parent seems to need is to be more stubborn than their children. If your children 100% believe that in a genuine conflict with you that they will lose, lots of things simply never get started.
I'm not a parent, but in friends of mine who are, I often see the scenario play out in reverse. They use technology as a way to pacify their rambunctious kids or otherwise get a few moments of respite - and so they foster that tech addiction without knowing it, until its really taken hold.