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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

If kids were addicted to solving math problems and watching educational videos on their phone at age 12, would we still disapprove?

I think framing the problem as "smartphones are bad" isn't as easy or effective as "certain categories of apps are bad".

One practical way to implement / enforce something like this could be similar to the movie rating system in the US: G, PG, PG-13, R, etc. "R" rated movies ban kids < 6 completely, but allow kids 7 and older to see the movie if accompanied by an adult.

Similarly, companies could sell versions of their smartphone that have parental controls enforced by default, with all app categories disabled by default, so that parents have to explicitly opt-in to the features and apps they allow kids to use.

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How are parents supposed to exert control over their users when they can't control themselves?

I don't use social media (other than HN, if you will), but I have dozens of friends with kids that are unable to detach from their phones, even for a 60 minute dinner. Their kids are dozed on YouTube videos, not for the parents to have a break from work life, but instead so they themselves can doze on social media.

What a clown world. I don't have kinds, if I do have some in the future, they will not be allowed to be nowhere near a phone before they can put up an argument for it.

>If kids were addicted to solving math problems and watching educational videos on their phone at age 12, would we still disapprove?

We should disapprove. Saying an addiction is fine because it's educational is like saying being addicted to working out is okay.

I'll admit. I'm very addicted to eating.

I've tried to stop a few times, but the withdrawals get so bad I end up in the hospital with doctors telling me I have to keep this addiction for the rest of my life because after using food for so long, the withdrawals would kill me at this point.

You joke, but food addiction is very real and, like the aforementioned addictions, is a challenging thing to come to terms with because it's something we all need to do in moderation.

Maybe? Parental controls aren’t a panacea. We set them for my older kids during high school. The older two pooled their allowance for three months and then had a friend at school order them an unlocked phone that they left in a locker they shared. Life, uh, finds a way…

Most of the research I’ve seen suggests pretty clearly that it’s social media, and it affects girls more than boys. (And, yes, the effect appears to be causal—see [1] for a summary with citations.) The hard part is that the research also shows that the correct amount isn’t 0, it’s just that above a certain amount is really, really bad.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

That's actually kind of impressive. Sad that this energy is going into getting a phone, but shows admirable drive.

I agree. I wasn’t even mad, exactly; and I was impressed with the effort. It led to a conversation about _why_ they had the screen time limits in the first place, and how they should take responsibility for those decisions for themselves.

When I was in high school (1990s), my friend Mark removed the top sheet-metal ceiling from his locker and discovered a phone line going past. So he tapped into it and, to my knowledge, became the only kid in school with a phone in his locker. It was used for prank calls, of course.

Yeah and if my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

This is a real 'the medium is the message' situation here. What you're describing is possible but then the device stops being a smartphone as it is commonly understood and sold as.

A smartphone is a distraction device designed to keep you engaged as long as possible so that someone can make money by shoving ads in your face. That's what it's for. Everything else is secondary.

If you changed that it wouldn't be a smartphone.

Learning takes effort, you can't be addicted to that. What gets you addicted is fast gratification with little to no effort, and that's not really educational even if it pretends to be that.

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