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As someone who was bullied as a child, I'm very thankful that that the bullying was mostly limited to the hours when I was physically at school. I would go home and I had a whole other world I built for myself out of books and my own imagination, and I think that made my bad experience at school tolerable.

I can't imagine if I'd felt like the bullying could always reach me through my smartphone or computer.

I feel very lucky to have grown up on the cusp of all of this. I was born in the early 80s and my dad worked in technology, so I had a computer and a modem back in the BBS days, and got to discover being "online" when most kids weren't. It actually felt like a refuge, and something special. I wonder what feels like that to the weird, outcast kids today.

OTOH, how do you defend yourself/your child from smartphone frenzy, when every other kid at school has one? Are you forcing your kid into (virtual) isolation from other friends or give it up?

Just say no. If you want a reason, phones and data plans are expensive. They can see their friends in person.

You've never had children, have you?)

If the kid is old enough to need a phone, they're old enough to be a caddy or babysitter or something legal for kids to do and buy it themselves. You don't have to facilitate the purchase.

You do realize that nearly every single person at a middle school has a phone? They are about 10 when they start where I live.

I think there's a strong class component to it, too.

I've got kids in public schools and one in a slightly-fancy private school.

The public school kids all get phones super-early and are prone to mocking kids for "being poor" over stupid shit like not having a phone (one of mine was so-mocked for "only having one backpack"—JFC, was Fussell ever right to shit on the class-anxious, pitiful, absurd Middle, give me "High Prole" over that crap any day).

Meanwhile, the private school kids whose parents are doctors and attorneys and VPs and related to major local politicians, get phones later and don't regard them as a status symbol. Phone ownership rate is maybe 50% by 7th grade, while I'd say it's that high (maybe higher?) by 4th or 5th in the public schools, and more like 95% by 7th. The private school also has much stricter rules about phone use during school (I gather all the area public schools have totally given up on stopping all but the most egregious use of them in class, as the parents who gave the kids the phones won't back them on enforcing anti-phone rules, and will in fact throw tantrums over any such enforcement)

At the current prices (and climbing up), good luck with it.

Actually I have 3 children from elementary to high school age. Only my eldest has a phone. We got it for her for our convenience as she is often participating in activities with unknown end times.

Well, huge respect for raising reasonable and well behaved kids. What makes it hard, imo, is that kids chase status and conformity (social school dynamics, probably). What could be worse than seeing everybody in class with a shiny new smartphone and not having one? Also, them being precisely engineered addiction machines doesn't really help. Which makes me curious, how did you manage to pull it off?

My daughter started asking for a phone at 9. After just saying no a few time she stopped asking. Before we got her a phone she realize why we had been saying no. Her friends that had phones younger were already addicted to them to the degree that the phone was more important than friends that were physically present. It is my job to protect my children from danger. I see device addiction to be as dangerous as drugs. Peer pressure is tough to deal with but that affects all aspect of growing up. Not just keeping up with the Jones. It takes help to navigate that feeling of missing out.

Why it is not expensive for their peers though? Are they piss poor?

What if they have no friends and nobody want to be friends anywhere but Snapchat, etc?

I can see you are using 4 yo arguments for 13 yo teenagers, perhaps you do not have any children and are wasting our time.

This is epitome between theory and practice.

My oldest just went to middle school this year. He has always had his own computer at home since young, so he's not new to technology. Personally I have not wanted to get him a phone mostly because mobile gaming is basically the worst thing ever invented. But I digress.

Do you know what happens in middle school? The teacher will give you time to do some assignment, and then you know what they let you do when you are done? Play on your phone. You know what nearly all kids are doing at lunch? Playing on their phones and chatting with their friends about it.

Now what happens if you don't have a phone? You get to sit there like the idiot without a phone. In middle school. Where kids are already learning just how much of little jerks they can be.

It would be glorious if the school had a no-phone policy. But they don't. So you want me to say "no" to my son so he can be the one that gets to twiddle his thumbs while every other single person around is playing on their phone and chatting? Yeah, makes sense.

Not to mention- the main reason we also had to get him a phone was for communication. That was our idea before we even realized how much they let kids use the phone at school.

Also without even the above, your idea of "they can see their friends in person!" is really cute. Yeah, because it's that easy. We live in an area that you can't walk to anyones house. So your brilliant idea is they can't communicate with friends unless they are taken to see their friend? And who does that? What if neither family can make it work?

I guess you don't know until you know.. but you- don't know.

This is exactly what I think about the story. Smartphones are now part of our lives, the only solution would be a global school banning of phones, but it isn't practical.

If you want to give your kid as a present a bad life experience, don't buy a phone, but then live like a person in a cave, while the world goes on.

The real lesson is to be a good parent and define clear screening times, at least at home, where you can, more or less, control it. But a total ban isn't possible IMHO

My teenager bought their phone using gift cards accumulated through Christmas and birthdays. A phone plan through Ting costs them about $20/month.

By the way, do you know what they do with their friends in person? Sit around on their phones watching tiktoks and browsing instagram then making comments to each other about it. They have no idea how to socialize without their phones.

I mean look at the example they have to follow though, it's literally all around them. Adults do the same thing constantly. The social pressure to conform to it is ridiculously high and for an easily influenced teenager, astronomical. A child or teen that's outside of this norm is instantly visible and vulnerable; they are bullied relentlessly.

As someone just out of adolescence and born in the tail-end of the millennial generation it's hard to know how to interpret takes like this.

On one hand, I do think social media is deleterious to mental health - I can vouch, for the positive impact on my own the more I distance myself from it!

On the other hand,

>Sit around on their phones watching tiktoks and browsing instagram then making comments to each other about it. They have no idea how to socialize without their phones.

Sounds so similar to the complaints levered at my friends and I for "not knowing how to play outside" because we wanted to shoot bad guys on the PS2 in the basement on the weekend. Or "not knowing how to socialize normally" because we talked over AIM all the time. When my oldest brother was a little kid, similar complaints for sitting in front of the TV. Or the older TV show trope of the teens tying up the home phone line.

I think there is some unique evil to the algorithm/recommendation driven social media of today, but it's hard not to also see that these criticisms all fit a pattern that seems to have been ongoing for decades, and wonder where on the spectrum the truth lies.

I'm of the "Oregon Trail Generation" and I can relate to the things you said about video games and instant messaging because we had them as kids and into our teens also. I was still able to disconnect from those things and socialize without the devices aka "go outside". In fact my friends and I would get bored after a couple hours of console gaming or instant messaging, so we'd need to disconnect just to keep sane. That aspect of it has changed these days to where if you remove the devices, it's like removing a vital organ and they can no longer function as human beings.

Screen time and don't (let them) create accounts on services with age limits.

You need to get them used to the concept of screen time and the rules by which you get more of it as early as possible in life so it becomes ingrained.

When they're old enough to buy their own phone and pay for their own phone bill, they can have free use of their device.

This isn't just about the devices. It couldn't possibly be so simple of a problem.

Everyone is approaching this situation as if the status quo of education before computers was perfect. Bullshit! How naive are we?

These children are upset because you are taking something from them that they don't even have the words to ask for: liberation.

Without liberation, school was 8 hours a day of boredom. It was sitting at a cold hard desk waiting for the end. It was prison, and it still is.

Children misbehaving in these circumstances is not new! We talked to each other, passed notes, chiseled the "cool s" into our desks, and brought toys. Did you forget doing these things yourself? Have you really forgotten what it is like to be a child in school?

These behaviors were easy for teachers to manage. Toys can be taken away, and vandalism directly criticized. Loud conversations were competing with lectures, and lectures can win. The rules made sense.

Computers are not so easy. Toys? They are only software. Vandalism? It's a drawing app! Conversations? Silent. What moral ground do you have to stop these behaviors? Kids aren't doing "something wrong" anymore: they are doing "something else". Teachers are fighting them from a totally different position now: vain authoritarianism.

That's the difference: children feel the liberation from prison, and it is arbitrarily taken out of their hands. What value are you giving them in its stead?

It's time to confront the failure of traditional education. No child wants it, and every child has readily available alternatives now; made of flashing lights and tactile switches!

Education is failing to compete with children's attention. Why? Because it could only ever just barely compete against boredom itself. That's gone now. We have been liberated from it. The bar has been raised as it should have been at the very beginning. Wake up and get with the times.

“only software”

facile and reductive.

Are you going to take it away and put it in a drawer? Not without the rest of the computer.

You are the one being reductive. You have lost the context, and that context is the entire point.

> Attention span is out the window. Prying away devices is like pulling a toy from a toddler, often with the accompanying screams and wails

Its not just the children though - adults are the same.

One a side note, school does not help ones attention (boringness)

I've found the opposite. I can be 100% tuned-in and focused in the classroom because I don't use my phone because it's disrespectful to the speaker.