You handed your 11 year old a smartphone?
That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.
That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.
Force the change, don't leave it up to others.
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.
"Normalizing" it akin to normalizing cigarettes - some kids could indeed manage to smoke only one a week, but most won't.
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.
You can protect your kid for a while, but sooner or later your protection becomes a bigger problem.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.