Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrThunder | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet. She might be a weird outcast but oh well, it's not worth the possible damage to her mental health.

I think in few decades we'll look back at this generation of parents who just shoved smart devices in their kids hands with no filter akin to handing kids cigarettes.

It turns them into sociopaths. I have some younger Gen Z cousins and it's just weird to watch them film everything they do and post it to social media. Oh, I'm meeting a friend I haven't seen in months, let me set up my phone in the driveway and film us hugging like it's an all natural reaction that we totally didn't film multiple times.

View on HN

I don't think kids will be outcast just because they don't own a smartphone. Based on what I can see around my own circle, most kids have 2 or 3 "close" friends with rest being mostly varied degrees of acquaintances. Those friendships usually start one-on-one - maybe there will be some sly smiles and minor jibes/comments about the phone situation initially but then like everything else, people take it into the stride and both parties adjust to the "difficulties" pretty quickly and figure out workarounds within the limitation (or they don't and the friendship doesn't carry forward). Eventually the close circle forms where everyone has come to terms with the rough edges of everyone else. Like that one friend in the circle who doesn't have a smartphone.

Also, providing "low-intensity" options like dumbphones just for messages/calling and laptops with age/time-restriction etc helps significantly.

If you've got the money for it, some private schools have significantly different phone culture than the current US norm. Stricter rules, and parents that are OK with that (if they're not, they can leave; there's an admissions wait list anyway). A tendency among parents to give their kids phones much later, and to restrict their use more.

There are probably some public school districts like that, but I expect they'd be harder to shop for.

> Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet.

i can tell you how this goes. when it becomes socially important to get one, she's going to do everything in her power to get one behind your back, turning her into an extremely skilled liar (since her entire life will revolve around this lie), a skill which she will use whenever an opportune moment comes up.

This is totally what a healthy and non-addictive thing does to children, right? Children being socially pressured into lying to their parents and hiding what they do is something that happens with drugs. The fact that it happens with smartphones as well should tell you something.

it happens with any socially normalized thing you attempt to withhold from a teenager.

lmao just go ahead and try, doesn't matter to me.

Except drugs aren't the main means of socialization among today's children.

You can stay off the grid, and deny your kids access to it, but you can't stop the advance of technology itself. Eventually your children will be left behind, ostracized by their peers for being weird/lame. Maybe even paranoid for life as a result of your helicopter parenting. And of course, when they finally get a smartphone, they will have zero experience in managing its "addictive" capabilities, which probably won't help their adult lives either.

Source: anecdotal evidence of a friend who lives with depression and severe social anxiety as a result of similar experiences. Of course, there were other deciding factors that turned said person into what they are today. Make of this what you will.

> She might be a weird outcast but oh well […]

Which totally won't affect her mental health.

Damned if you don't, damned if you do.

> Which totally won't affect her mental health.

There's really no data on that. If anything, the data in the article suggest the opposite, although it may come from different groups with different patterns in social media usage.

>There's really no data on that

I find it extremely unlikely that there's no data on how being an outcast affects one's mental health

That's not the question, is it? You just jump to the conclusion that a child without a mobile phone becomes an outcast, and equate that to the classical outcast picture.

It's not a huge leap to think that someone that abstains from such a crucial piece of social lubrication will be an outcast.

Yeah maybe.... but I'm noticing a lot more parents going this direction. You just have to get them into the same groups so they don't feel social pressure to be on smart devices all day.

Also, teaching them to not care so much about others perceptions is sort of a big part of this. A lot of these kids are being thrown a smart device and not given any parenting on coping with emotions.

I saw a student pepper spray their teacher for taking her smartphone the other day. It's a drug.

Might be good to research kids that are the social outcast and see how that affects their mental health compared to a control group.

Weird is in the eye of the beholder and most people suck and are dumb, so good on you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com