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.