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> in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.

I'm going to be that guy: this honestly just sounds like you're abdicating your parental responsibility and placing the blame on the tech. Yes, the tech is bad, but there's no reason why your kid should be subjected to the full weight of its awfulness besides that you let him.

Step one is to question whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age. I understand feeling the need to have them be able to reach you, and pay phones and school landlines are less accessible than they once were. But why a smartphone? Peer pressure is not a good enough answer.

If there is a compelling reason for a smartphone (like the other commenter whose school bus system inexplicably requires kids to have an app) then iOS has pretty robust parental controls from what I understand, but I personally would go further and buy an Android phone and install even stronger controls. There are FOSS Android apps that allow you to block everything except for a few whitelisted apps, and there are others that can impose time limits.

A pretty simple combination of apps can create an experience that is suitable to any age, gradually enabling more functionality as you trust him more. We've even done this with our 4-year-old and an old tablet, giving him access to Khan Academy Kids with a time limit.

There are companies out there like Gabb that specifically make phones for kids with comprehensive parental controls. You can even get them just a watch that lets them call and text approved contacts, if that's all you need it for.

> Peer pressure is not a good enough answer.

It absolutely is. Enjoy having an isolated kid, I guess.

I was raised to think for myself and avoid doing things just because my friends do them. It's worked out rather well for me, and I very much intend to help my kids learn the same.

Let me guess, that was long before smartphones. It doesn't work the same way now.

As someone who was raised in a home without TV, sorry, but this is nonsense.

I heard this dozens of times, but in reality, having a phone, a tv, a gameboy isn't going to make a difference.

On the contrary, a kid without the latest consumerist gadget will likely have to develop social skills, and also will have to form new tastes and do different activities, such as reading, sport, etc etc - that will make him less isolated and a better individual.

Anecdata, but my son is raised in a home without screens, and he's the most sociable toddler of the playground. Probably because his dopamine receptors aren't overloaded and that he's enjoying the stimulation of social interactions!

Wait until later on when everything is done via apps.

> whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age

When I was 11, I spent large amounts of time playing with my peers, unsupervised, around my neighbourhood.

In 2023, this is an impossible dream. Even in parts of the world where you wouldn't be arrested for child abandonment if you let a child that age roam unsupervised, general consensus is that it is simply not safe for a child to exist outside the home, school or a paid-for-by-the-hour supervised activity space without their guardian in the picture.

As a society, we've taken away all opportunity for unstructured, unprompted socialisation in the real world. Kids must either learn to socialise online or not at all, since this is all we have left them.

The true problem here is you. You are the parent. Teach your child properly. This is your responsibility.

Number 3 isn't a mystery after all, if you consider that some apps will tie features to notifications or re-prompt

This is very true. The simple explanation is your son is turning them back on without noticing. Uber Eats is the example I can think of, where in order to get notifications about arrival, you need to enable ALL notifications, including its spam ones. I'm sure this sort of lock-out + beg screen is happening in the apps your son uses.

You handed your 11 year old a smartphone?

That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.

I don’t know how long ago that was so it’s hard to say “things are different now”, but my 11 year old can’t take the school bus without having a mobile app for her ticket.

Holy crap, that's insane. Whoever made the decision that all middle school children need smart phones to ride the bus is an idiot.

Or a basic “product” person who will get their engagement metric met.

How is that even legal? School buses are provided in part as a service to low-income families. Who decided it was okay to require parents of middle schoolers to shell out for a smart phone for their kids?

If you are on benefits you can usually(in some countries anyway) get a basic smartphone and laptop free of charge.

As far as I can tell, someone has “digitised” the local buses by adding tracking and cashless payments to go along with the mobile app.

They’ve also fragmented the services even more in the process since each bus company has their own version of the app (it’s just a skinning of the base app). It means I need to check back and forth between two apps to see which buses are on time. Naturally you can only buy a pass that only works on one bus route. The ux is pretty garbage.

Dealing with public transport in rural England definitely made me appreciate the seamlessness of transport in London.

Oh, I was assuming a US-style school bus system where a separate yellow bus goes around and picks up the kids. It sounds like your kid rides a regular public transit bus to get to school? It's still unfair to have that system be inaccessible without a smartphone, but it's not as completely incomprehensible.

It sounds like they definitely need better UX, and the buses around here very much accept cash still (or special tokens if you buy ahead).

The one that she takes in particular is a school bus, in a weird kind of way. Seems that it’s run by a private company but it only services kids travelling to and from a couple of schools.

But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.

Are you sure? I don't have a smartphone and I also live in England. There are lots of services where the happy path expects a smartphone but I'm yet to find a service that actually requires it.

They don’t take cash and in theory you can pay by card but it doesn’t work.

Complain to the school board. In person, at a meeting. Post about it on social media - you'll find you're far from alone in objecting to that ridiculous requirement.

Force the change, don't leave it up to others.

My kids are 6 and 2. Right now the wife and I are trying to hold off getting them phones until they are driving. I'm sure that could change when they're in middle school and high school, and whining because all their friends have phones. But, I'm going to try my best to hold the line.

When you buy your kid a smartphone you are literally inviting a squad of marketing PhDs to stalk him 24-7.

When is the right time for your kid to learn how to deal with modern life problems?

You can protect your kid for a while, but sooner or later your protection becomes a bigger problem.

You start teaching them at an early age how society may see it as no big deal, but society is wrong and it's a very big deal. Show them through your actions that life is better lived without such distractions.

And be prepared for everyone to call you a conspiracy nut. But you eventually let that roll off your back when you see how happy your kids are just being kids.

I suspect that there are several "big deals" in our society that are trivialized because it's normal, common, approved of by authority, etc.

What brutal modern life problems require smart phone with unlimited access?

Most problems we face in our lives haven't changed a zilch - its simply interacting with people for whatever reasons. You don't need phone for that, in fact you should first work on handling face-to-face interactions and only then move to remote ones.

Kids can grok how phone and app works in few weeks through and through and much faster than you or me currently, so that they are not missing anything if they start later. There is very little to 'learn' by further usage of it, just feeding addictions.

I'd love that option, but highschool mandates a smartphone, go figure: let's give attention deficit teenagers an always on distraction device and then complain about how hard it is to keep them focused.

Granted I’m still very early in my parenting years but if my child’s high school requires a smartphone I feel like I’m going to be viewed as a kook because I’ll turn up to meetings shouting at them about how they’ve failed the kids from a social development standpoint.

You'll be battling 29 other parents as well who see their phone as a necessity for life.

Not only that, many of them will be themselves glued to the phones while you execute your elaborate speech about child development, missing your point entirely and consider you some medieval crook during those 2 seconds they will be focusing on you.

Lets not act like parents are stellar in this, because more often than not they aren't and most issues with kids come from this direction (as a parent of small kids I really can't blame anybody else if we mess up something, not at this age)

I hate to do a bit of snooping, but you list your birth year on your socials. We're of a pretty similar age; I also only got a smart phone in high school.

I really do think the expectations from your friends when you're in your early teens in the current year, is that you have a smart phone. It's probably a major part of social life now, which would leave a kid pretty excluded. Not even touching the things in life that REQUIRE a smart phone now. (Restaurant menus, transit, maps, etc)

Our childhood is pretty much gone from existence, despite how modern it feels. I feel for the GP author, best you can do is make things as protected as you can.

I list my birth year on my socials? Time to take that off, that’s unintentional. :P

But yes, I feel your sentiment is right. Although there has to be some moderation—I wouldn’t expose my children to the excess of social media. Internet addiction has messed enough with my life, the last thing I’d like to do is pass that on.

I'm a parent of extremely well adjusted kids who have no smartphones, and it's only isolating if the parents aren't involved. By that I mean we can coordinate with friends and friends parents for our children, which is just a good practice anyway.

Call me a helicopter parent if you'd like, but we've found that our kids have strong friend support groups, and all the parents are now friends as well (or at least friendly), thus creating a healthy sort of community.

Not only that, he's using my Google account, so it's managed as one of my devices :) With full access to unrestricted YouTube premium, Google Play, etc.

He's only got limits with respect to the time he spends on the phone or PC. So far hasn't discovered or been interested in "naughty" content.

I was forced to live in the "middle ages", communist Romania with no TV, no electricity, go to bed at candle's light, half an hour of cartoons on TV per week when that wasn't canceled to show the achievements of The Great Leader instead. I won't deny my kid access to entertainment and technology in the name of some dreamed up "Amish lifestyle / return to innocence" because there's no such thing.

That’s fair enough.

You don't have to pick between leaving your kid completely unsheltered from exploitation by capitalist forces and being Amish.

You yourself have seen that your kid isn't ready to fend off the exploitation by himself. Setting up parental controls on the phone is in exactly the same category as providing him with food and clothing and shelter—you're supposed to do for him what he can't yet do for himself.

You can work on teaching him how to resist exploitation over time, but it's irresponsible to expose him to the worst excesses of capitalism while he's clearly so unprepared.

There's maybe a compromise between no electricity and youtube premium then?

My kid got a smart phone at age 7 when they started school.

It's still mostly in their backpack and they regularly miss calls and messages from friends because it's always on mute and still in the school bag even though it's already evening =)

You need to normalise these things and teach how to manage it from an early age.

Like screen time is a completely normal thing in our family, it has been activated since the second they got the phone. Every app category has a specific daily screen time - the only ones with no limits are communication tools and educational apps.

The problem is that modern smartphones and app are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers and rewards. The younger a kid is exposed, the most likely he will be affected all of his life by the addiction.

"Normalizing" it akin to normalizing cigarettes - some kids could indeed manage to smoke only one a week, but most won't.

The point is to teach them these things from a young age. If you don't let the addiction build, it's less likely to happen later.

And don't let your 7yo use "apps are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers", that's a given. Get them using apps that don't have that so that the move to "tuned addiction apps" is jarring even to them.

There's a corollary with alcohol. In countries where even kids get (diluted) wine at a young age with food - because it's part of the meal - they don't get the need to get f'd up with the strong stuff.

They get a mental association that alcohol is something you drink for the flavour and in moderation - it's not a tool for self-medicating mental issues.

Same with ads, we've been a DVD/BD/streaming-only household for ages so now ads on TV are a curiosity to the kids. We actually have a competition who mutes the TV fastest when the ads starts in the few occasions we watch something that has any.

>in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.

Yet you continue to pay his phone bills.

If its an iPhone, have your son add you as an emergency contact and enable overrides for text and phone.

I had the same problem with my son running his phone 24/7 in DND, and this helped a lot.

Aren't you able to solve #1, by locking down your kid's ability install anything?

Yes. IPhones (and android too iirc) also have a robust screen time system we use for our kids. Problem is that Apple doesn't make it very easy to use if you're not familiar with tech... and I've seen several frustrating UX/sync bugs with it. Could be a lot better, but it's there - especially important to limit them charging in-game purchases to your card without prompting for approval.

A radical idea - maybe kids, if they really have to have a smart phone, should not have any credit card stored in it? I've only heard about fuckups when this is allowed.

Unless they have to pay ie for their bus rides or lunches via some idiotic app, then... some extremely limited debit card with no chance going below 0 maybe?

Sure, but apple requires one to be linked to use the phone. So…

Apple does not require a credit card to use an iPhone.

What? Can you provide a citation of such in the apple.com domain?

Several of the replies to this comment are disappointing. They provide no evidence that they know anything about the commenter, their situation, or parenting, and yet they feel qualified to jump to the conclusion that the commenter is to blame for this situation.

Why not be more respectful? Parenting is hard. Maybe ask some polite, open-ended questions before jumping in as yet another judgmental stranger from the internet with zero skin in the game.

> I call him and he doesn't reply. Why? Coze he turns the sound volume off, just so he can have some peace of mind. Otherwise it's "ping ping ping ping", relentlessly throughout the day and night.

Same for me. I usually call people back after an hour or two when I check my phone. I fucking wish Android had an option to disable ALL notifications BUT all calls.

Not sure about stock Android, but my eOS phone has a toggle in sound preferences "link notification and ring volumes", and if I disable it, I can manage ring volume and notification volume separately.

Could you get him a dumber phone? Maybe one of those minimalist e-ink phones. They're nice.