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Comment by shaunsingh0207 | Hacker News Reader

telegram doesn't come by default on my phone. getting a teenager to download telegram or duo or <insert other platform here> is hard. The power of facetime is any kid with an iphone has the ability to immediately video call any other kid with an iphone.

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.

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Completely ridiculous. My kids didn't get phones until the last two years of high school. They used the home phone and their friends called them plenty. They got bullied for being white, should I have painted them black? I taught them how to deal with bullies and that the bullies were the ones with problems. Now I have three happy early 20 year olds with friends despite having no facebook (my boys didn't want one and my daughter deleted it because she didn't like it) and not always attached to their phones. My son who is interested in several subjects follows multiple discord forums and his brother follows more tech and open source stuff. My daughter simply prefers to talk to people in person. On a side note, learning to deal with frustration is part of becoming an adult. Life isn't fair, why would you teach your children to expect it to be? Instead I taught them to find balance, there's always some good with the bad.

They used the home phone

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.

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