You protect them by not giving them a smart phone. My daughter is 2 and she hasn’t seen a screen yet.
w.r.t. "what will you do when they get older and jealous?", learning to deal with jealousy is a good lesson to teach kids. Giving a kid everything they envy and demand is how you raise an entitled brat.
Overdoing it either direction can be a serious mistake.
It's better to instill in kids early that it's important to cultivate deep rather than wide social connections. Teaching your kid to stand up for themselves and make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary. Because there's always gonna be some group you're not going to be cool enough to be a part of. Maybe you're not pretty enough, athletic enough, maybe your parents aren't rich enough to send you on the holiday trip the other kids can go on, sooner or later everyone's going to learn the lesson that this isn't how you build genuine connections.
I noticed this even as an adult in my 20s, people who hadn't ever learned to deal with social rejection carry that teenage group behavior into their own adult life and can't deal with exclusion.
But they aren't standing up for themselves. They're standing up for decisions forced on them by their parents.
> make friends that don't care about blue chat bubbles or fashionable clothes is necessary
It has nothing to do with being cool (and I've never heard of anyone referencing blue chat bubbles that wasn't using it derogatorily like you are). It's about not being unable to communicate with people. Like, they may have friends who want to invite them to a party but don't because they put the event on (whatever app is cool). Your kids don't see it and therefore don't go to an event everyone wanted them to go to.
They're learning how to deal with adversity created by circumstances beyond their control.
there is a reference to this in TFA, it's a real phenomenon
That is quite literally the point of being a parent. They're children. They're not supposed to be raised by other children or by social media personalities they want to be like, but by you.
If that means having to be the bad and unfun parent who they get mad at because they can't get to do the thing everyone else is doing that's the job. Good parents give children values that last a lifetime even if the kid doesn't understand it or like it.
The chat bubble thing is a reference to a surprisingly widespread clash between kids with iphones and kids with android phones (https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...)
This is similar to alcohol or smoking. It is worth not giving it to your children even if "they will anyway try it later".
Some of my friends with kids gave them cell phones around 12-14. But most of the kids had iPads prior.