What Happens When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone? (2019)

vogue.com

35 pointsjjgreen86 comments

Sorry, I find it very hard to believe a 8yo (mind you, the author states these sentiments came years before their 11th birthday) formulated such observations and principles and lived by them so thoroughly for years. Seems like one of those “and then everyone clapped” stories.

Kids are not stupid and can show incredible wit, but the way the article is written and the kid’s thoughts phrased make me feel someone’s pulling my leg

Yea. This article also had some really weird stuff in it and often had the author projecting their beliefs on to their children... and full of cheesy quotes about how she couldn't remember what the year 519 was, and her son replied "thats the heyday of Constantinople!"

Its a very "wine mom" vibe, my kids are very smart! Smarter than adults and I just didn't realize that I could just *not* use the internet. like jfc. Also lmao at citing JK Rowling and Soledad O'brien as "luminaries"

She says she tried to give him the phone at 11 and he's 14 now. She also seems preoccupied with her phone, so I can see him deciding before that point that he wants nothing to do with it. (He may also have been influenced by the behavior of kids his age.)

More generally, pre-adolescents sometimes decide they're going to be vegetarian or Buddhist or Republican or whatever -- it usually isn't that the kid has some well formulated observations and principles (though that does happen), but more likely the kid is hopping on a trend or reacting against one.

Only on HN can everyone miss the parodic aspect to this article.

Context guys, she is a mother of 10 to 12 yo kids. Virtually all she hears about is how to delay or avoid smartphone for her kids. There are many voices that support that the suicide epidemic lived by teen girls is caused by social networks.

It's like the classic everyone is smoking around me and I'm desperately trying to start without success.

Sorry for taking an article seriously and reading it with genuine interest thinking it would actually provide some information!

The context here is that this was written nearly four years ago, the suicide epidemic was just getting started and many refused to even acknowledge the idea that technology could have any part to play in declining child happiness.

Maybe the kid was young Albert Einstein?

"He set himself certain tasks in his education, and he calculated that he couldn’t give up nearly seven hours per day—the national average—to phones and other screens."

That's exactly what you get in middle school these days - 5 or so hours of Chrome book use at school followed by 1-2 hours of homework in it.

I dunno why y’all are so anti-smart phone in the comments here. Phones are tools. I dunno why you would think disempowering yourself is a viable political strategy.

It’s like giving up your swords cause evil people are using swords to kill people and you wanna “protest.”

Much better to teach people to ignore sensationalist social media, which is the real problem here.

It's weird that you think that you're "empowering" yourself when you carry a device that you don't control and which records everything about you.

Keeping a cell phone involves massive trade offs where you have to give up a lot and expose yourself to tons of new risks in exchange for connectivity. There are other abilities you get with a phone but for most of those it would be better to use a device like a laptop which would be a little more cumbersome but less harmful and more powerful.

A cell phone gives you some things while also taking many things from you. Sometimes the most empowering thing you can do is leave it at home.

This is just learned helplessness. If loss of control is a concern for you, there are FOSS privacy-focused operating systems you can install to your phone. You do control your phone.

There are zero operating systems you can install on modern smartphone hardware that give you full control of your phone.

Even the most open of Android Roms still require giving a bunch of proprietary drivers, firmware, and applications root access for the most basic of hardware functionality.

A major reason I gave up on phones and got a tiny laptop to run qubes on.

There's a difference between avoiding the very-real tracking for targeted advertising that companies like Google do, and the paranoia that your camera blobs are tracking you just because they're proprietary.

> proprietary [...] firmware

Your tiny laptop has this too.

> proprietary [...] applications

There are plenty of AOSP-derived ROMs without this.

Show me even one AOSP based ROM that does not ship with proprietary software that runs on modern hardware.

The vendor partition is a black hole of poorly understood and mostly proprietary garbage that can do whatever it wants.

Also if you do not ship your ROMs without OMA-DM and similar malware, you are not even permitted to connect to some cell networks.

There are a comical number of apps and blobs copied from the vendor partition of stock roms to make most of those "open source" roms function on recent devices.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state/14...

At least on a laptop I can run QubesOS to hypervisor isolate the rare hardware that requires blobs, like wifi.

Not Android but I think PinePhone and Librem 5 meet your standards. AFAIK they have proprietary WiFi/BT firmware, but they use virtualization (IOMMU) to protect themselves from it. I don't see how that's fundamentally different to your Qubes laptop.

Also I think you're ignoring my first point. I don't think any of this paranoia is reasonable. Unless you're being targeted by state actors, none of it is necessary to fill a reasonable definition of "controlling your device." This is all in response to an article about a child who doesn't like phones because he doesn't like social media. The adtech machine that powers social media is pervasive and it has its fingers in proprietary smartphone OSes, but it doesn't have its fingers in AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS, so installing one of those is an easy and achievable way of avoiding it. Whether it's possible to remove every last drop of proprietary software is a side-issue here.

For context, I run a security consulting firm focusing on high risk clients like fintech firms and my job is quite literally defending my clients from sophisticated adversaries which includes state actors. Your threat model is not my threat model.

Degoogling and solving for privacy from corporations makes CalyxOS a great option for many, but privacy and security against actors willing to more blatantly violate laws is not as easily an attainable goal on Android sadly. I spent months building the aosp-build project and compiling and signing my own AOSP roms from scratch but even then there are just an insane number of blobs with way too much power to ever be able to trust.

Binary blobs with root access to my devices is a non starter for my privacy goals, free software preference, and threat model. QubesOS is about the only OS that suits my requirements, and even then it only runs on hardware that is hard to trust. Ideally it can be ported to my ppc64le Talos workstation soon.

All of that is only half the reason though. I was addicted to connectivity and over reliant on tech to live my life. Giving up my phone means not having constant bombardments of information and notifications and distraction making it difficult to be present in and enjoy the real world. When I walk away from my desktop computers, or leave my home, I am offline.

The ability to confidently navigate the real world and be comfortable in my own head with minimal tech took a while to build, but it feels like a superpower now. I have no interest in going back. Giving a phone to a kid feels like child abuse to me now given how much control I feel I have over my own brain again. I want that for others, especially kids.

I would maybe carry a Precusor when it gets a matrix messenger as a single purpose wifi only device I use to coordinate with people at events, but in no rush.

> I was addicted to connectivity and over reliant on tech to live my life. Giving up my phone means not having constant bombardments of information and notifications and distraction making it difficult to be present in and enjoy the real world. When I walk away from my desktop computers, or leave my home, I am offline.

Why didn't you (want to) do this with your phone? Couldn't you turn off notifications, leave it on your desk, maybe leave it at home? Was it too much of a temptation at all?

If I am only using my phone at my desk, I might as well use my actual desktop on the same desk that has a proper screen and keyboard.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"

That's... not really it. Do you really think there are backdoors hiding in firmware blobs from reputable vendors?

100%. I have plenty of insider knowledge here I sadly cannot share, but search for supply chain attacks and the sheer number of public headlines of known attacks can keep you busy for days. State actors are constantly trying to get footholds in software supply chains, and often succeed.

Consider Intel ME firmware is a literal well documented backdoor we do not allow on US government systems... only civilians.

Most of the time our adversaries do not need to be covert enough to mess with firmware. Consider OMA-DM apps that run on most phones with insane permissions taking orders from cell towers.

https://gist.github.com/thestinger/171b5ffdc54a50ee44497028a...

We cannot even keep public open source repos like NPM free of supply chain attacks. Proprietary blobs make it that much easier to hide things.

Also all you need to backdoor every encrypted messenger is a kernel module that ensures /dev/urandom is a bit less random on the devices of targeted dissidents and journalists. Now look at how many proprietary blobs from piles of random vendors we load into modern phone operating systems, even "open" android roms, and think about SolarWinds for a second.

As another commenter pointed you, you don't have the ability to fully control your phone hardware, but also even allowing yourself to be tracked by the cellular network is a trade off. Your OS will probably not save you from stingrays and dirtboxes

Lots of research on why phones for kids generally ends their childhood at the age they get it.

Phone aren’t tools anymore. They are digital slot machines designed to increase usage. It’s well researched and established and an easy google.

Using tech for creating instead of consuming is for kids and young people.

“Hammers aren’t tools anymore. They’re just another way to smash peoples faces in.”

"Every thing is the same because I made an analogy"

I wish there was a way to bookmark individual comments

There is: the link is the timestamp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38156326

Sweet, thanks!

Using hammers for their intended purpose doesn't cause people to get sick and harm or kill themselves. Neither does hammer manufactures find that this happens and yet try to hide it and then do everything they can to cause more harm.

I was literally just hammering a thing back into shape, and I'm glad the hammer doesn't have an interactive feature suggesting other things I might like to hit.

> They are digital slot machines designed to increase usage

You made me think about how when I started using the internet (early 2000s), it wasn't optimized like that and it was still so addictive. I can only imagine the damage it does to kids minds nowadays.

A big difference between then and now is there was more creating and much less to consume.

This feels so much like 80s parents lamenting how comic books are ruining kids minds.

Do you have kids? I've got kids, and addiction to tech is a real thing. Being a parent is so so hard, and then you add this thing that is designed to trigger every impulse. Every parent I know says "I'm so glad I didn't have to raise my kids with smart phones."

And, I love comic books, and this is different.

I notice a big difference in behaviour between even old games (think SNES, PS1) and modern games. There's definitely something in the new ones.

Seems like a 4 month old spicy throwaway take account.

Comics of the 80s felt designed to let kids imagine a world bigger than the one they were in they had a place in a bigger world.

Stan Lee has some great interviews on it.

Except everyone knows it is true. Especially Meta, but a brave whistleblower made sure we all know. Well, at least I thought everyone know.

Parents lamented about comic books? Link?

I was wrong about the era, apparently the height of the comic book scare was the late 1950s, but it continued to the end of the century as far as I remember.

It's all based on this book Seduction of the Innocent: https://www.amazon.com/Seduction-Innocent-Frederic-Wertham/d...

Here's an article about it: https://slate.com/culture/2008/04/the-campaign-against-comic...

The scare went all the way to Congress.

Here's a book about the history of the comic book scare: https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Cent-Plague-Comic-Book-Changed-Am...

If you far enough back parents lamented chess.

Found a link for that: https://gizmodo.com/chess-was-once-deemed-a-menace-to-societ...

Doubtstorming doesn’t make it legitimate or not

Not really sure how the previous posts relate to social media and mobile use in children which is well established

Agreed.

My kids have restricted mobile and no social media access.

But parents did use to think that comics would ruin their children - I'm responding to the disbelief in that.

That's it: phones for kids generally ends their childhood when they get it. Yep.

Social media on a smartphone deeply affects children.

Leaders of the tech companies don’t let their own kids use it. Easy google.

You have to ask people who grew up both with it and without it at the same time, not people who didn’t have it at all, or had nothing but tech.

Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media: https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teen...

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/dangers-of-social-media-f...

An interesting in between, look at the world as it’s changing way: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1...

Ah yes, we generally think it's a good idea to give children swords to play with unsupervised.

You don't have to use every tool in the world just because they exist. It also doesn't mean you're "disempowered". Choosing one or the other is a personal choice, for personal reasons, and doesn't necessarily imply something about that person, their morals, reasons, or abilities.

One person could use a gas-powered weed whacker, while another weeds by hand. I'll bet you money the second person is a better gardener, knows more about how to get rid of weeds, enjoys themselves more, and is healthier. But they're shunning technology, oh no!! They must be a fool, to be pitied and judged.

There's nothing wrong with giving up violent weapons for pacifist ideals. And "the real problem" is taking one person's life decisions and boiling them down to something inaccurate to fit your own narrative.

I run a tech company and owe a lot of my success, social life improvements, and mental health of recent years to giving up cell phones so I am always present in one thing at a time.

I am online only when I am in front of a desktop computer, or rarely a laptop when traveling.

We humans are just not built to be efficient when constantly context switching.

Neither smartphones nor swords are appropriate tools to be given to a 10 year old.

You carry a sword?

The modern equivalent would be carrying a gun…

I do that.

I spent a lot less time being self-destructive with it than my phone.

I am also scared by the amount of comments here saying that it is objectively good to grow up without the best technological advancement of recent years - supercomputer that fits in your pocket and you can lookup everything humanity has done in seconds.

I understand the boomer sentiment of „phone bad”, but let’s be realistic.

You can’t do banking, communication with friends and family, looking knowledge up without a phone. Some countries’ services also de facto require it (unless you want the process to take 3 months longer than it will using a phone).

Best to educate the kid like parent comment said

The flip side is children do not need to be exposed to tech at a young age in order to natively learn it. Many of us grew up with VCRs, limited computer access, no phones. And we have learned how to both use and directly build some of the most sophisticated digital technology in the world today.

You could raise a kid in a cave for the first 10 years of their life before giving them their first glimpse of a screen and by age 13 they’ll be on the same level as every other kid regarding technological literacy. It’s totally a valid parenting strategy to be skeptical of the value of screens for children.

I can do all those things on my laptop which I've never picked up and then wondered why. (granted, I've opened browser tabs and then wondered why I just did that)

> You can’t do banking, communication with friends and family, looking knowledge up without a phone.

And this is the proof of why people need to use smartphones less - you actually believe this, don't you?

You can do banking through mail or at a bank office, you can communicate with family and friends a variety of ways without a phone, and you definitely do not need a phone to look up knowledge. Sheesh.

> good to grow up without the best technological advancement of recent years

A technological advancement is not necessarily a social or human advancement. Often we don't know at the time how it's going to pan out. Take the situation around "AI" right now, around which there is at least significant caution. No doubt you will disagree, but a great many people including myself think that smart-phones have been a great loss for society and individual health.

> supercomputer that fits in your pocket and you can lookup everything humanity has done in seconds.

This contrived retort is actually getting very jaded, because almost nobody uses it to "lookup everything humanity has done in seconds" - they use smartphones for TikTok and to order a pizza. Meanwhile "everything humanity has done" is still in any encyclopedia.

> I understand the boomer sentiment of "phone bad"

TFA is about an 11yo who decided "phone bad"

> You can’t do banking, communication with friends and family, looking knowledge up without a phone.

And that's a BIG PROBLEM. Not a desirable feature. Fortunately we have 11 year old kids who are bright enough to see that too. With a few more of them we'll get a society where you can do banking, communicate and learn using a wide choice of humane technologies.

We still believe in things like markets, right? That human needs and demand drives technology, rather than the other way about?

You cannot educate a kid out of harms way from algorithms on Social Media like Instagram.

Before I read this article, the headline reminded about how some children are considered “old souls”. I might be wrong about this, but it almost seems to me like all smartphone users have this tension between using it to mindlessly consume media for hours instead of using it to fulfill their goals and projects. Also, it would be very interesting to try to relate this article to how people argue that Instagram use is correlated to poor self-esteem.

It's sad. We live in a world we call free, yet most are forced (by jobs, governments, banks, etc.) to use a smartphone, but not just any smartphone, no it has to be an iOS or Android one, because you need you bank app to run, your government stuff to run, and so on. To do so you typically have to create accounts with these companies and accept their ToS. Why then do we not forget about that whole nation/country/state thing and simply declare the Dual Monarchy of Apple and Google?

[/rant]

I think with such hard requirements for so many things it would make sense to create rules to democratize smartphones, banks, etc. similar to other infrastructure. Right now it just means that Google and Apple have government sanctioned, yet international monopolies. You cannot compete, because al these institutions won't just create apps for you and you won't get users without that.

So in the end you have capitalism without the free market part.

At least they don't effectively make us use a landline from one company (AT&T). But, fortunately, they were a regulated monopoly that only charged 20 cents a minute or so outside of your very local calling area.

The problem here is one of inertia. Companies and government offices can’t support platforms they can’t readily and affordably hire devs for. It’s why there’s historically only been room for two popular platforms, leaving others to fall by the wayside. (Though in the case of mobile, I think we could’ve had three had Microsoft not shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.)

That said there could stand to be standardized APIs for things like banks, which would free users to develop their own apps.

>So in the end you have capitalism without the free market part.

This is what “capitalism without the free market part” looks like:

>it would make sense to create rules to democratize smartphones

You seem to be arguing against what you argue for? I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need to create rules to democratize smartphones, and that is because I'm against a free market. And Capitalism.

[not sure, why my original comment doesn't seem to have posted, so sorry for potentially having double posted]

> You seem to be arguing against what you argue for? I wholeheartedly agree with you that we need to create rules to democratize smartphones, and that is because I'm against a free market. And Capitalism.

I am against having the worst of two worlds. There's effectively a government supported monopoly of iOS and Android, when you need one of them to do your taxes and governments mandate 2FA apps. If there was a free market, in the sense that competitors can... well, compete that would be a different story. But unlike when those companies became big today you cannot even hack compatible solutions due to copyright laws. So even there you have the government acting anti free market.

You could also go on tight regulation, maybe even force let's say APIs, heck even create a government competitor just to have a solution not built around purely squeezing out money and data of customers. You could make sure/mandate that this works for all banking, tax filing, every day stuff, and leave the rest to Apple and Google if you must. Just have that digital (maybe super secure, because specialized and minimal) way to interact with the basic stuff you need every day.

Just like every house needs to have water, waster water and electricity whether it's some government supported living or some luxury villa. The basics should be possible.

Of course these are by far not the only two ways to go, but like I said my point is that right now the worst parts are taken and that's what I meant with capitalism without free market. Google and Apple can go for maximizing profit, but without real fear of competition.

> I only recently acknowledged that it will never be what a phone should be—someone’s steadfast companion, a guilty pleasure, a fetish object alive with the hallucinatory wonders of the entire angelic and demonic internet.

What is wrong with this parent? She wants her 11 year old wading into the internet? Yikes

Where is he going to get his porn from? The woods?

You say "fine", and both of you are happier for it.

Another one of these "let me tell you about this thing that happened to me once" article. Do we really need to read people's diary in an "article"?

Also, kudos to this kid, must have been tough keeping it so real with a mom that seems so self absorbed.

Yeah the article was framed as being about her son, his choices, and the results of them, but was somehow turned into her mostly writing about herself. Poor kid.

Lol, do we really need an article about this healthy behavior?

"When kids are smarter than their parents"

the son is cool and the mom is not

One is a start.

Let's go for a billion

Something I wrote in Digital Vegan that a few people said made them sit up, was about Greta Thunberg's climate protests encouraging kids to "boycott school". I always thought that was counterproductive, and... well, basically nobody cares (except the odd headmaster or ambitious parent). So I wrote that instead;

  """ If Greta Thunberg could get a billion young people to switch off
  their phones for a week then we'd see some action. """

I guess what I meant was, if young people wholeheartedly rejected what is "on offer" symbolically by dumping their smartphones... by sacrificing somethg that mattered to them but really represented the interests of "control, surveillance and capitalism", it would send a powerful message and actually be immensely disruptive.

Besides, instead of being harmful to themselves, like skipping classes, it would actually be heathy and good for them.

Having done so, it would be hard to reverse, because how would the proagandists and apologists reach them?

I guess it has to start with one brave, intelligent child who says, "no thanks".

Hey Andy, just want to say thanks for writing Digital Vegan. It's been very influential in my decisions for myself and my family, and I appreciate your work!

Thank you.

“Greta”’s message would never be “stop looking at me”.

Sadly, I think you're right. And so many kids are hooked into "influencers" who, for the same reasons, would never criticise or suggest abandoning the platform that underwrites their existence.

That is one cool kid.

(2019)

Per another recent thread, I don't know if I'd mandate a kid today had a smartphone/smartwatch. But the reality is that, as an adult (or even an older student), it's pretty hard to opt-out and still participate in modern society.

thanks

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