Great way of ruining your child's relationships.
I had a similar conversation with my wife a few years back. Her sister's teenage kids insisted they needed iPhones "because all our friends use them."
And my wife explained this to me like this was a perfectly rational reason.
I started laughing and told her "If our kids said that to you, they'd get a long discussion about how that's a 'follower's mentality' and you're letting people who don't have your best interests at heart control your life for superficial reasons."
That being said, I think it depends on where OP's child is "at" mentally. It may be important enough to the child to still buy an iPhone simply because you don't want your kid to be miserable. But if that's the case, you should also try to have a conversation with the kid saying
"That's fine--it's obviously important enough to you right now, so we'll get an iPhone. But you might look back on this when you're older and think the brand of phone wasn't as important as you thought."
Internet and texting is where everything happens these days and you can't force your understanding of the world on your kids.
In this day and age, how can anyone even begin to have a relationship without being able to contact them when you want to? It is not something fancy, it's a basic necessity if you want your kid to not turn out a social pariah.
the original message was "i need an iphone" not "i need a phone".
my response specifically addresses the request for something they shouldn't need since they already had a phone (i could not find any specifics about a tracphone, but i guess it is android based)
and since this was likely not clear, by not giving my kids a regular android phone, i meant one with a manufacturer provided android. they will be getting something with a version of android customized for privacy, like /e/ or something similar.
They came out together ten minutes into a two hour drive and five minutes later he was asleep because I said, I will talk about it with mama.
And later that same day while he was doing his soccer things, I did on my Windows Phone. And then we all talked some more over the next few days.
Mostly about the girlfriend. Because it was awesome to see him reach that stage of his life…we were that age once.
The iPhone came eventually after a few weeks. I think it turned out a positive tool for social navigation in his circumstance.
Other kids have other circumstances. But they are not my kid for better or worse. Your kid certainly isn’t.
and it's wonderful that your son can talk to you about his girlfriend. i could not talk to my parents about that. i hope my kids will be comfortable to talk with me when the time comes.
We all start with lots of theories about parenting. We end with experience and memories. Hopefully, the kind that make you miss them (it's hard to wish that your child would miss you). And we all have the option of not parenting like our parents.
The iPhone was a tool for social navigation. It replaced a flip-phone.
We got the flip-phone as a tool for the just-in-case cases. There's a lot of growth between fourth and seventh grade...the girlfriend uhm was an obvious example...anyway, a big part of that growth is peers bove into the center of a child's attention. The parents are still there, but they're not the only thing there anymore.
Just like it was for me. Maybe like it was for you...it is for a lot of people, but not everyone (I wrote that because I took what you wrote at face value).
It's easy to read things into what people write that provide an excuse to express outrage...expressing outrage is often a form of socially acceptable creativity. It's ok to say "I wrote because they wrote something outrageous."
We all need creativity, but telling someone "I write because I like to write" feels unsafe. One thing I learned from HN is to read what people wrote charitably.
But for the record, I don't give a shit whether or not buying my kid an iPhone is ok with you.
ok, that's a lot more reasonable than replacing a recent android phone, ignoring the iphone vs android debate.
in written communication it is a lot easier to take something personal that wasn't meant to be. it is also more difficult to make clear that something isn't personal.
my outrage in this thread is targeted at the idea that an iphone is required for youth to fit in. a point that several people here have accepted and supported. the reason to share this outrage is to gather support against this idea and to get ideas how to deal with it and how to talk to my children about it. it is good to know that there is support, but also interesting to see that this is quite controversial.
i appreciate your measured, insightful and quite personal contributions to this topic.
... are you really going to use email or irc in high school
To use WhatsApp/Duo/etc, all it takes is a phone number and maybe an email address (or a Google account you already have), and a few minutes of time.
If someone's girlfriend is like "I would rather just use FaceTime and call you 'by phone number', instead of spending that few minutes to set up an account for an app we can both use", I would agree with the person above -- this is too toxic.
> If someone's girlfriend is like "I would rather just use FaceTime and call you 'by phone number', instead of spending that few minutes to set up an account for an app we can both use", I would agree with the person above -- this is too toxic.
On principle, I agree the hurdle is not high to get another app/account. I even stand with you to not give in and succumb to this behavior.
The social aspect is harder. It may be easy to convince 1 person (the girlfriend) to do this, but what about her attached network of friends and all the group chats that come with? Will it be easy to convert all her friend groups and setup all the group chats to replace the existing ones?
I'm not sure anyone has that strong of a network effect unless they're at the top of the heap. In which case the girlfriend would have probably just downloaded the app and setup the account.
Even if they convinced the girlfriend and not her network of friends to get the app and new account, it would essentially still exclude and make them a "second class citizen" in that group. All it would take is not opening the app or seeing the notification or acting upon it to be relegated.
I think those not as tech friendly would want multiple 1 to 1 chat apps where there was one or very few people were on the other side. Just easier to convert people to the majority.
this is also an issue of social justice and exclusion of lower income families. anyone who is arguing that not getting an iphone means depriving their children from getting friends is missing the point. if that is what is happening in a community then that community is seriously broken, and we need to address this problem. excluding others because they don't have the necessary tech gadget is something that should not be allowed to happen.
if my kids do this to others then i failed as a parent.
This is kind of like saying, “Yes my house is on fire now, but rather than put it out right now, we should research and develop fireproof houses.” Cool idea but your house still burns down. You can work on the bigger societal problem but if you can, address the immediate issue, which is you kid getting bullied. And yes it sucks if you can’t afford it, but if you can, buying the iPhone is a simple way to resolve the issue your kid is facing (albeit not the underlying problem).
so then what is your suggestion to put out the fire?
to stay with the comparison: there is no water.
if your idea of putting out the fire is getting iphones, then that simply is not an option. and then you are getting back to bullying. giving in to bullys is not an acceptable solution. the iphone will not solve the problem here at all.
bullying needs to be addressed differently. but that is not even something i am worried about. simply the inability to participate is already a problem. and it's going to remain a problem for those that can't get those tech gadgets. so what do you propose that we do about this? run a fundraiser and donate iphones to poor kids? legislate that kids have a right to communicate and are thus entitled to get an iphone? force apple to lower their prices?
here is one that might actually work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993823 require apple to make imessage interoperable, or at least force them to support imessage to run on android. it would not make the FOSS advocate in me happy, but that at least would be putting out the fire.
Of course it is! It’s called picking your battles and sometimes you give in and sometimes you don’t. Everybody loses sometimes.
This is the literal definition of picking your battles.
Never "picked my fights" at any time in my life... make me feel treated unfair (or observe someone treated unfair) and i go full psycho mode. Yeah, i got stomped in the ground many times in my life (lost a few teeth, got broken bones, where fired or thrown out of places) but i am just too stubborn and stupid to give in.
Congrats.
Plenty he didn’t get for philosophical.
i simply can not accept defeat on this issue
For me doing something nice isn’t defeat, and his desire for an iPhone wasn’t an issue.
We were fortunate to be able to get him an iPhone. And fortunate he wanted an iPhone and not his own bong.
It might have worked out the same if we hadn’t. By working out I mean FaceTimeing with him now that he’s a grown ass man.
I'm not saying its a good thing. I despise that its practically impossible to have a social life without an iphone in a lot of urban american schools. Just know that by not budging and not getting your kid an iphone, you are causing them frustration and potentialy making them lose out on a significant part of their childhood.
the trouble is of course, today there are no home phones anymore. the last one i saw a few years ago in china. but even when our internet service came with a phone we didn't bother connecting it. sooner or later home phones will be extinct.
there are laptops and internet but then it depends which messaging services work with out a phone. telegram, signal, whatsapp, wechat all require a phone.
i suppose a shared family mobile might work for calls, but not for messaging where surely everyone should have their own account.