Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones?

newyorker.com

90 pointsfortran77153 comments

Maybe, if they’re provided with interesting things to do and fun places to go. Those both started drying up several years before smartphones entered the picture, with suburban areas becoming particularly desert-like. It shouldn’t be a surprise that phones filled the gap.

Suburbs have been a thing decades longer than smartphones. With the exception of helicopter parenting, nothing's changed with options available for kids to play outside.

Smartphones altered the meaning of "interesting things to do" to exclude everything that doesn't give a constant dopamine hit every couple seconds. Maybe people should detox and learn to live life without constantly needing something interesting.

When I was a kid just a few decades ago there were several things within my available area like arcades, mini golf, a small hill to play on, etc. today in that same area there is zero kids friendly entertainment except a theater that’s too expensive and the small hill was closed to the public by the HOA for legal reasons. Where are the kids supposed to go? It’s not an imaginary thing happening, 3rd spaces are drying up for kids and adults alike.

where do you live that there are no parks in your suburb? mine is chock full of them, there's a park every couple blocks. why has your HOA closed a hill, and have you gone to meetings to advocate for reopening it?

I don’t live there anymore.

What? Literally anywhere outside - are you saying most kids back then hung out at arcades and minigolf regularly in their free time? We couldn't afford that. I remember playing at the hill you're talking about - or a park - or just throwing a ball against a wall with friends when I was in the city.

Also who cares if the HOA shut down that hill? Are they patrolling it? Why would the kids care about that?

Then the kids risk having the cops called, and the parents risk having CPS called from a neighborhood busybody.

That's exactly the problem - even if the kids AND the parents are willing, the wider society makes it such an enormous hassle and risk. And there's no guarantee you'd win a legal case, especially if you can't afford to.

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/09/05/mom...

[2]https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-ran...

[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

[4]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-mom-accused-of-leaving-ki...

> Then the kids risk having the cops called

This examples are fairly extreme, but people calling the police isn’t a new thing.

A friend and I dug a hole that was pretty deep at the beach - police called.

We made too much noise late one night - police called.

We rode our bikes in places we weren’t allowed - police called.

We explored the haunted house - police called.

One kid pointed a cigarette lighter that looked like a gun and a helicopter - police called.

All in the ’90s. Children going too far and irritated neighbours have always been a thing.

Digging holes at the beach is very dangerous. Collapsing wet sand can get in the lungs surprisingly easily, and peope can sufficant long before getting it out.

The rule is no deeper than the knees of the smallest person who may be involved.

I'm not saying the police should be called for every hole. Just that it is a real risk. And generally I'd agree that people overreacting (sometimes myself included) is a tale as old as time.

> The rule is no deeper than the knees of the smallest person who may be involved.

Absolutely not. You are welcome to apply it to your family but don't come applying it anywhere near mine.

I am so utterly bored of absolute risk aversion being preached on every street corner. I'll take some risk and the constituent rewards for me an mine, thanks.

Oh 100% we were idiots.

The hole was pretty deep - we could only just get out with an extended step ladder.

I was replying to your other post, but I guess I can do it here... I would argue that there's a reason those articles were written about the incidents. They don't happen as often so when they do, news articles like to highlight the incidents and pretend that they're the norm. It's not.

You posted 3 incidents of it happening - do you know how many kids are out there with parents _not_ getting harassed? A lot more I would bet.

To turn your argument on it's head: are these types of articles rare because so many kids are out and about un-hassled, or are they so rare because so many people don't let their kids out enough for it to be a common occurrence?

I don't know if one group or another is in the _majority_ or not. I'm also not arguing it isn't still possible for some areas - an area I live some miles away from still has kids out and about - but for a great many people, it's an issue that exists, and it's not an issue that they can easily solve on their own without moving.

I've seen stories like this many times, sometimes accompanied by comments from police warning parents not to abandon their children. The problem is so bad that there's a whole movement dedicated to trying to stop or reverse this trend that is making (or has already made) it culturally unacceptable to let kids go anywhere or do anything https://www.freerangekids.com/

Did you read where I said the outside has been closed for legal reasons? In my area that was the only outside park available. It has a fence around it and are you just suggesting kids go get themselves arrested or perhaps worse for trespassing? I guess all is well as long as kids have a wall to bounce a ball off of!

The outside is more than that park or hill that was closed. Unless it's illegal just for kids to be outside, in which case I'd say yea that's unfortunate - but it's not the norm.

Also arrested or worse for trespassing on a hill? Please. The worse they'd get is a lecture by the cops the first time.

Where I grew up the outside is either a a park or a vast desert with pavement everywhere and heat that literally kills several people a year. Kids had the park or nothing, but now it’s literally nothing in that area. It’s sad that people like you can’t believe the actual lived experience of someone else, as if your life is how everyone experiences the world and growing up. Not every urban area is the same. Not every rural area is the same.

Please don't misrepresent what I said. I didn't say you were lying - just that it's not the norm. Most people do not live in a situation where it's a desert with pavement everywhere with deadly heat.

A huge number do live in those conditions, some live where it’s deadly cold, etc. The point is, telling kids just to go outside isn’t reasonable for everyone and third spaces are dying.

Hard to do that when you're fighting against billions of dollars and the world's best engineers who are doing everything they can to keep you as a daily active user!

Fair point - it's definitely not easy

The key thing that died pre-smartphone was kids leaving the house and playing outside. Game consoles, cable TV, and computers all probably contributed to that, but so did the great crime paranoia of the 80s/90s.

> Maybe people should detox and learn to live life without constantly needing something interesting.

Yeah I think this is it and not the kids should be outdoors argument. If I were a kid today I’d be on my device all of the time. When I was young I sat around watching Night Court, Three’s Company, and Saved By the Bell reruns in syndication. I would have loved access to Roblox, Minecraft, and YouTube. I could have been outside (and sometimes I was) but I usually preferred to just veg out. Now my kids enjoy hanging around on their iPads and have a lot more options of things to do on those devices but they can’t just sit and stare at a wall like I did when I was young.

Maybe I've just grown to be a cynical ass, but I don't think it's just kids, even me and my adult friends lament how it feels like there's really not that much interesting to do outside of the home, and I am far from attached to a smartphone; often times I don't even bring a phone with me when I leave the house. The vast majority of the businesses in these parts are places where you either eat, or buy groceries. There used to be video rental stores everywhere, now they're rare. The malls are dead, the arcades are gone, the electronics stores are wiped out. When I was in California, I watched Fry's completely die over the course of a few years; I wonder how many nerds met lifelong friends just kind of hanging around places like Fry's.

Political polarization has harmed social interaction in the meatspace, too. I really generally don't mind or think about political affiliation if it's not relevant, but if I walk into a building and it either feels like I've entered a Trump rally or it's plastered in performative wokeness crap, I'm just going to want to leave, because politics aside, at best it just feels cliché and begging for negative attention, and I'm probably going to find the kind of people who like this environment to be insufferable.

Nowadays, I surprisingly often just see groups of kids aimlessly wandering grocery stores at night, seemingly not interested in actually buying anything, just kind of walking and talking. If it's because they don't know what else to do, I sincerely can't blame them, I don't even know what to do.

Tl;dr: Suburbs have changed even since the 80's, primarily sociologically but also architecturally, and combined with wider changes in overall culture has made alternatives to the internet less and less practical.

Another jumping-off point: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/05/utah-governor-absolutely...

~~~~~

As previously commented on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39259629

>let yourself spend less time and energy on your kids

>The fact of the matter is the world is a safer

>and more prosperous place than ever before.

Sadly, it's often not even a matter of safety from "danger", but safety from the law. Getting CPS called on you[1][2], or getting arrested[3][4] as a parent is not good, even if you are fortunate enough to win.

Then there's the whole angle of disappearing third places, lack of places that can be reasonably visited without driving privileges, nobody's outside because of all of the above so there's nobody to "hang out" or "play" with, desire to funnel kids/teens into more "productive" activities like academics and sports (depending on affluence and interest, this isn't AS bad as the above points), places outright banning[5] young people, etc etc.

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/09/05/mom...

[2]https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/living/feat-maryland-free-ran...

[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

[4]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-mom-accused-of-leaving-ki...

[5]https://www.businessinsider.com/teen-bans-curfews-malls-them...

I see kids outside playing in the street and in yards and in my neighborhood park all the time.

What suburbs are you folks choosing to live in?

also some of your examples, like the CNN article about Maryland, seem like they may be targeted harassment from CPS against parents who they dislike for other reasons. the article is also nine years old -- why didn't you post something about how that story ended?

> In June 2015, Maryland officials clarified their views about children playing or walking alone outdoors in a new policy directive, saying Child Protective Services should not be involved in such cases unless children have been harmed or face a substantial risk of harm.[3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents

The investigation went nowhere. So who cares? this is an isolated incident that caused a set of parents to have a single bad encounter with police. surely that's a problem with police more than anything?

I don't understand the motivation for posting misleading links like this

A few years ago I visited the U.s. virgin islands for a work trip with a client. The clients nephew is 23 and lives and grew up there. He's a marine biologist and a spear fisher. He makes money ferrying people between the various islands on a small dingy boat and showing them fishing spots. He works in a small lab besides that. He's tan and in great shape and has a random beater phone. He watched almost no TV or movies. He knows a ton of interesting people. His life is just out among the islands and water and people and its richer than anything i ever experienced.

It's one of the most profound moments when I was like THIS is what the dream you'd have of what your kid could do sans social media and smartphones. It's a shame every kid doesn't have the same access and opportunities though because of how we're building our "modern" society.

It sounds like the equivalent of driving for Uber while working a part time job, but with nicer scenery.

Nice scenery could be all we're lacking. Isn't an aircraft pilot just a bus driver with nicer scenery? A tenured professor a teacher with nicer scenery? A corner office an office garden with nicer scenery? What makes a house expensive, the scenery.

In the end we're all dwelling in the same way, if I could do that with mountain-ocean view, that'd be great.

So the question is what formed this person in this way, private schooling, right teachers at a public school, parents?

I grew up well before the internet and devices. Atari 2600 was the hotness. I grew up well outside suburbia out in the boonies. We were never bored as you seem to imply kids will be. The was nothing to dry up, there just was never anything there. Outside. That's where most of my time was spent.

Well that's just the problem isn't it? The "outside" you're probably thinking of doesn't really exist anymore in a lot of places either. Suburbia especially is a hellscape of empty flat crab grass lawns and sidewalks and tarmac. There isn't any fun nature to explore. If there had been where I had grown up I would have loved it.

My childhood was in a rural area the US known for lagging behind other parts by a decade or more, so I can relate even though that was in the 90s. Lots of quiet evenings doodling away in a notebook, getting lost in my imagination, pondering something, or goofing around in the yard, because there wasn’t that much else to do. Two OTA TV channels which frequently weren’t airing anything interesting, VHS tapes that’d been watched many tens of times over, no consoles, and a family computer that my parents were usually using.

Boredom didn’t bother me too much back then, but I doubt I’d be able to say the same if I were a child today… personal entertainment is simply too easy and ubiquitous to deny. Probably would’ve also had a very different experience had I grown up in a city instead.

> with suburban areas becoming particularly desert-like. It shouldn’t be a surprise that phones filled the gap.

The suburbs I remember from the 70s were just the same as the suburb where my child is growing today. So that's not it at all.

Yes because your suburb is representative of every suburb obviously. You’ve solved it!

I think you’re on to something. My local mall doesn’t allow teenagers anymore, and the skating rink shut down during the pandemic. the only arcades are bars that turn 21+ at like 7 or 8 pm.

Along the same lines, didn't the rise of mosquito tones to discourage kids from being in malls start in the early 2000s?

"Maybe, if they’re provided with interesting things to do and fun places to go."

I think this is the wrong impulse.

Instead, we should (feign) indifference to their interest and boredom and allow them to invent their own outlets for joy and happiness.

It is magical to watch this occur - and it does occur.

We as 21st century parents seem to find the interim period of angst and protest impossible to bear ... but we should bear it because it is surprisingly short lived.

How I spent my suburban middle school years

- walking around

- hanging out at friends' houses. (Video games and tv)

- going to the movies

- lots and lots of books

May not be the most exciting life, but all the prereqs still exist.

Actually, on reflection, I also spent a lot of time at the local tabletop gaming store, a "third space" that seems to be gone now.

I'm more convinced that getting kids involved in team sports is probably the best way to go, and honestly those are things are that are more common/practical in suburban environments than urban ones because sports facilities are cheaper to build and more plentiful.

Can't be holding a cellphone while practicing a sport, requires effort and concentration, and face to face socializing.

This a worldwide phenomenon, nothing to do with American suburbs.

In the same sense that the epicenter has "nothing to do" with an earthquake yeah.

How so? In Europe there seems to be plenty of stuff fot kids to spend unstructured time.

In Europe, smartphones are a problem for kids too.

Im not sure there is a direct correlation but US urban areas were mostly planned for cars and in the EU urban enviroments inherited their layout from the times before cars so they are more sucseptable to urban planning that is more humane

And yet European kids use their phone as much as American ones.

Parents get in trouble for letting their kids get hurt these days. And healthcare ain’t cheap either.

It was much more fun playing outside in nature when you could grow your knowledge of life and consciousness by playing with friends.

Now that has taken a back seat. Growing your consciousness by observing videos, learning and playing games is the norm for kids.

Simply knowing that you could be expanding your mind tenfold on a phone, while you're outside throwing sticks and climbing trees, kind of ruins the fun of exploring outdoors.

Oh please with the karma-farming.

Suburbs, for better or for worse, have been around for a long time. They cannot explain the massive decline in Generation Z's mental health compared to its predecessors.

PS, next time try to link to housing costs -- that one gets better karma yield. Bonus points if you can somehow denigrate cryptocurrencies while you're at it.

No they haven't! Suburbs as we know them developed as a result of land made available cheaply post-WWII and the automobile enabling the sprawl. Sure there's a bit of a spectrum of how badly developed a particular suburb can be, but without car dependency they could not exist and don't make any sense.

By “a long time”, I’m sure GP meant “a lot longer than smartphones,” given the topic of this thread

You're an LLM, right?

You might want to take another look at the calendar. WWII came to an end a long time ago.

I think they're saying post WW2 was just a turning point that coincided with auto culture. Eisenhower saw the highways in Europe and worked to bring similar infrastructure in the US. This facilitated more people living outside the city one worked in. Hence the sprawl and unwalkable suburbs.

They said "No they haven't!" in response to "Suburbs, for better or for worse, have been around for a long time." But if they haven't been around for a long time, then you have to accept that WWII was a recent event. On the geological scale, okay sure, but on the human scale it happened a long, long time ago. We've raised several generations in the meantime. It does not begin to explain why this is apparently only affecting a group of people born within a narrow set of comparatively recent years.

> This facilitated more people living outside the city

Most people lived rurally prior to WWII. And of those who lived in urban areas, most were in urban areas of the small town sort. If we accept the lack of excitement suggestion, what was so exciting about said rural and small town areas? Why can't people today engage in the same excitement?

Disclaimer: I have kids.

Reading the comments, I’m shocked people are resigned to it being an inevitability. As if we all didn’t grow up before internet and smartphones. (80s kid here) All those things are still there: museums, arcades, amusements parks and kid centers. Nevermind all the free stuff like parks, playgrounds and hiking. Or simply going over to a friend’s house. Did coloring books, legos and puzzles disappear? No. Hell, even TV is better than smartphones.

Kids on smartphones is a choice. I think the problem is that modern society has forgotten that it is ok to be bored. You don’t have to be entertained every second of the day.

> even TV is better than smartphones.

Why? My intuition is just the opposite. TV is passive, smartphones are interactive.

Hanging out in between jobs with a coworker, in between topics of conversation, he pulled out his phone to scroll. And so I asked if he remembered anything he'd scrolled past yesterday... and he could not. Nor could he remember anything he'd scrolled past more than 15 minutes ago, after we set the bar lower.

Notably, this wasn't TikTok or Instagram, but Facebook posts. Messages, postings, photos from friends (with a profitable amount of advertising). And I call that out because I'm confident TikTok and other social media is worse. It's mechanical; flick, forget, scan, repeat.

I don't think he's unique in this either. If you ask your friend or kid what they scrolled past yesterday, I don't think you'd get a real answer. So maybe you're a cut above, and you use your smartphone differently. But I don't think they're as interactive as you think they are.

I couldn’t tell you the articles I read on HN yesterday either.

I do however remember them when something relevant comes up in daily conversation.

For instance, today I was scrolling on TikTok and learned how to properly hold a bunny. It’ll stick with me. Will I be able to tell you that I learned how to hold a bunny tomorrow? Probably not. The retention will remain though.

Same way I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday. Maybe a muffin? Idfk.

That's social media you're talking about. Not smartphones.

Smartphones can be a vehicle for social media. As can laptops. But they don't have to be.

I agree, up to about junior high you can restrict smartphone/tablet usage. At about 12 it really seems like the social pressure to have a phone becomes really intense, unless there's some school wide restriction.

I guess one question is how you introduce it in a way to inoculate them against the addiction without just allowing it. Mostly, I've just seen temporal restriction, but by 16 or so they can afford to have a "burner" so it's much harder to restrict at all.

The more I read the more school wide bans seem the key. Anything done at the home is pointless in comparaison. Imagine how can a kid stand idly by their pairs in free time if they are all on their smartphones and only interact there? It’s more than pressure.

Fully agree! Here in Austria some schools started banning smartphones and I hope more and more will follow (or even be required by law).

I'm convinced kids who are in team sports end up more well adjusted as adults especially in the smartphone age.

There are parents who don't put there kids in any extracurriculars and then there are parents who have their kids in sports growing up. With team sports at least you force your kids to put down phones/games and work on something that requires team effort and concentration and practice and social skills. Seems entirely underrated.

I think it is even highly desirable to be bored once in a while. Completely agree with everything.

Kids are just mirroring what they learnt from their parents. Phone at the dinner table, phone out as son as you step into the elevator for literally a 20sec ride, phone out on a date or when hanging out with friends. These started more than a decade ago.

Well, I guess one big part was gaming arcades, back then. They no longer exist, or are rare and derelict.

Can we get ourselves off smartphones?

I'd settle for "while driving."

Yes please. The amount of people flying blind for minutes on end is insane.

Came here to comment this

Yes, we can. The age of smartphones and traditional computers is going to come to an end.

Instead of a computer or smartphone with a UI, everyone will have an AI assistant they can interact with naturally as if they were another person.

If you need visuals, you'll be able to ask your assistant "Show me the latest stock prices for MSFT" they will wave their hands and a graph will appear, similar to what you'd see if you used a stock trading app or site manually, but a much faster and more natural interaction.

For this to happen, smart glasses need to become more compact, like normal glasses and visual AI avatars need to become a thing first. We already have the base of the brain in LLMs, large action models will only get better.

My bet is that we'll have to wait for implants before this kicks off and makes mobile phones obsolete.

I'd never talk to my glasses in public, and Google burned the popular image of those.

There will probably still be the option of typing with a keyboard as an alternative to speaking out loud. No need for a mouse though.

Typing in the air feels just as bad as talking to your glasses.

It won't sell.

I was thinking of an actual physical keyboard. I guess some people might go for the air one, that will be interesting to watch.

What if subtle gesture controls that you can even do with hands in pockets controls the glasses HUD?

If you run around with your hands in your pockets, you'll have another problem soon.

No, gestures are just not good enough. I can make gestures on my already existing device.

Make it more convenient than a touchscreen and maybe, also make it so you don’t look like a complete ass when you use one

This feels like worse than the current situation, though.

To you, yes. Just like today, there will be retro enthusiasts who will keep doing things the old way.

We already have some evidence of how bad it could get if what they describe just becomes normal: the Replika AI companion.

People have always been weird and obsessive with fake tech "relationships" I dont see how AI assistants would be any different than any previous iteration of technological interaction

What if I want to look something up without speaking my search terms out loud? It would be good if I could carry around a small companion device I could type my search into, if I wanted some privacy.

Yes, a small keyboard for the purposes of typing as an alternative to speaking would work well here. No need for a mouse though.

Can we please stop preaching this never coming assistant era. The tech exists to bark commands at computer for decades, it's not happening. People want to control their devices themselves, not making the bigger/louder mental juggling of forming commands all the time.

Adults can't even get off smart phones, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for kids.

I plan to teach my I kids category theory as a condition of getting access to technology

Solve the problems in one chapter of mac lane, and as a reward, you get to read the next chapter of mac lane. Rinse and repeat, and you get a smartphone, laptop, and a military surplus drone with an anti tank laser! And I get an award for Best dad ever!

It's the perfect scam - once they know categories and drone warfare, they can intuitively transcend any technology or conflict!

I've toyed with the idea of having them read through Kandel's Principles of Neural Science until they can explain to me exactly how dopamine reward circuitry, addiction, and the neuroscience of attention and concentration and memory work as a precondition to getting a smartphone.

I wish more parents were like you!

No, it’s so bad that high school teachers presume that everyone has a smart phone, and if you don’t, you can’t participate in some parts of the classes. Complaining to school administrators falls on deaf ears.

Can you explain what activities these are? My kids are not high school age yet and I didn't think it was that far gone.

My guess would be quiz-games like Kahoot or similar.

On the other hand, some schools started to ban smartphones on their grounds (at least here in Austria).

I wish there was a mobile device that ONLY had age-appropriate and educational content.

Add in a well-aligned AI, and I'm sold.

Think of the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" in Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age."

There are very many such devices - at least every Android phone (but I guess Apple has the same). I installed Google Family Link the other day. Whitelisted 7 or so apps with what I consider age-appropriate content. Everything else is disabled.

Here's an article about an entire town where all the parents agreed none of them would get a smartphone for their kids, and so no kids felt like they were missing out, and then none of them pined for one.

Sounds like a great plan.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/03/much-easi...

They’ll get off their phones just after the adults.

Let's start with providing them with more healthy and natural reward systems. Not what they get in school for example.

I bet after Gutenberg revolution people expected that society will elevate itself reading all the classics and instead it settled on cheap thrills. That means that if you want change you need to implement it inside your family / company and not rely on larger constructs such as government to solve this. Which is sad.

back in my day we just sucked the time release off oxycontin and popped a few xanaxs we stole from our moms and dads. Middle school was a wild time.

Things are looking up for our kids now. There a couple more plasma clinics, and a new suboxne clinic right down the street.

Rural america 2000-2024

I hope so...

On one hand I think what Florida did banning social media for kids is a great idea, on another hand I wish it didn't have to come with government overreach and parents could be responsible enough with their kids. I really feel for these younger generations.

One thing I'm really interested in is if/how a generation "banned" from anything finds a way to circumvent and/or improve upon things.

Of course many will, and they'll have a head start in life being internet literate relative to those who don't find a way to get online, and the latter will also have to figure everything out abruptly when they hit a certain age.

It's as stupid as trying to legislate that kissing can't happen until 18. It's not practically enforceable and trying creates unintended consequences.

> trying creates unintended consequences.

Not trying creates the unintended consequences of a double suicide rate.

Maybe it's worth trading one set of unintended consequences for another.

Double the suicide rate compared to what? Look, I'm not saying social media isn't bad for you, just look at what HN has done to all of us, but in what universe is it possible to create an even vaguely controlled study on this? You can't measure across time, you can't measure across cultures, the confounding variables would ruin your results. And suicide is rare enough that you can't manufacture a control group on teens you get to not use social media.

I've searched around and can't find the numbers that you're referencing. I can't even find a study that confidently asserts even correlation. It's just "the suicide rate went up in 2010's and we think it might be social media?" So to not only say that this is the problem but also this is the magnitude of it implies a level of confidence that is simply not supported by the data.

They'll have no advantage.

Kids who start using a phone when they are 6 have no curiosity for it. It's always been there, so what? On the contrary, they'll be the one who don't understand that what's put online for 5min is literally there forever.

They probably shouldn't be on smartphones to begin with, rather than asking how to get them off smartphones.

Then again I'm not a parent who puts their smartphone in a stand with full-blast volume when dining out so their kids are distracted from... something.

So it talks about smartphones but all the drawbacks seem caused by social media.

What is the problem with smartphones for (somewhat sensible) games, looking at family photos, and watching pre-downloaded fairy tales? (no YouTube with its toxic recommendations!)

This is my parenting philosophy.

I let my children use my old smartphones in very limited ways for tasks I consider beneficial.

Listening to podcasts made for children before bed. Listening to music. Sending monitored discord messages to their cousins. Using a toothbrushing app. Etc.

Typically no more than an hour or so a day.

My hope is that this teaches them how to use the technology in helpful ways, and this time typically replaces time spent passively watching TV.

A two pronged attack: One, adults encourage permissive smartphone use and also become authentically engaged in all the relevant online spaces. Two, adults just stop paying attention to kids at all in real life, no safety, liability, regulation, best practices, bureaucratic systems, nothing, unless informally as an urgent matter of certain loss of life and limb. End result is online stops being the place for kids to a brief respite from overbearing busybodies.

There's a pretty wide swath of normal in the middle of all of that. I hate to break it to you, but in the "good old days" - parents didn't "stop paying attention to kids at all". Half of the reason kids could run around "unsupervised" is because stay-at-home-mom was the norm for most women. Which meant if your kid was a mile away from home, you knew that someone else was still making sure they weren't getting into too much trouble and if they were you'd get a call letting you know what was going on. I remember more than one occasion where I knew there was a 50/50 chance I was going to be grounded before I walked in the door for dinner, despite "being unsupervised" for the entire day during the summer.

We will look back at kids using smartphones the same way we look at kids smoking and wonder why we were so careless.

https://archive.is/flHfq

https://web.archive.org/web/20240329182352/https://www.newyo...

We certainly can't. And should not try, as this would make it worse.

Damage is already done, and it might worsen, but I am 100% confident that this generation will adapt, and the next ones.

Meta cognition at the collective level is very powerful, even if slow.

I have a similar opinion about conspiracy theories and the management of information and trust on the internet. The transient effects can be nasty, but it is worse to over-react.

Don't treat people like children.

I am not as confident. At some point, the barrage of ads and media and intrusion will cross a breaking point. You already see the cracks, people are experiencing a postmodern disassociation with reality.

Echo chambers, doomscrolling, hype cycles, misinformation, AI/Photoshop fakes, state level disinformation warfare, propaganda, and good old advertising are simply overwhelming people.

The forthcoming fake flood of AI is the next possible breaking point.

I think some people are starting to reject media, and I think the drumbeat is increasing.

> I think some people are starting to reject media, and I think the drumbeat is increasing.

So why are you not confident? You're already seeing the immune system reaction.

Rejecting media is next door to rejecting science, society, any and all rational argument etc. It’s not an immune reaction per se, it’s a preamble to shutdown. Basically we want people to choose what they believe judiciously, not to get overwhelmed and believe nothing.

Two very random notes that may be helpful to someone ...

First, non-data cellular plans exist - which is to say, you can get a SIM card[1] that has no capability for data. They are text and talk only. If you feel like your child needs a mobile phone for (reasons) they can have one without tiktok or insta available in every free moment.

Second, you can create a wifi network that is "imessage only":

  # rules to allow dhcp and dns to work
  allow icmp from 10.0.0.0/8 to 10.0.0.0/8
  allow udp from any 67,68 to any
  allow udp from any to any 67,68
  allow udp from any to any 53
  allow udp from any 53 to any

  # imessage rules
  allow tcp from 17.0.0.0/8 to any
  allow tcp from any to 17.0.0.0/8 80,443,5223

... which means a 14yo daughter can still do "teenage girl talk on the phone" stuff but not allowed to doom-scroll instagram for hours.

Yes, works for facetime as well.

[1] Tello and USMobile both offer this IIRC ...

Here's a radical idea:

Rather than blame it on the latest kid obsession (in my day it was the TV) maybe look at the world they are growing-up in.

Maybe they're depressed because the world is burning down.

This is a common and ridiculous take, that could only be seriously proposed if one totally is ignorant of history. The burning-down-ness however measured has been as high and worse many times in many places. I mean, your great grand parents lived through the Great Depression and WW2.

Obviously, the issue isn't more burning-down-ness today, but rather, the fact that many people feel that way is itself a symptom of a cultural problem, maybe driven by media/technology pushing the most controversial, depressing arguments possible, since that's what drives clicks and ad impressions.

Hm. As far as I'm aware, we did not have the technology to destroy the world back in WW2 or the Great Depression.

Today, we have several avenues to destroy the entire world, including one that is merely incidental. And we continue to develop more.

So no, I don't believe it is a ridiculous take. I believe your denial is the ridiculous (and naive) perspective.

1) Maybe not "the" world as currently defined, but certainly _your_ world, ie your entire city or country, in a time in which it was hard to escape from or imagine much outside of that. So subjectively I don't see how I (or even my family or community) am/are much worse off than a Pompeiian.

1b) I can tell you are not very well aware of previous environmental catastrophes. There's historical evidence they've happened before, including in the Roman empire.

2) Nuclear weapons were first used in 1945. The big drop in mental health happened around 2012. Uncorrelated.

3) I'm not in denial because I haven't denied any _objective_ reality. The problems are real and they deserve equally real action, just as previous historical problems did. But our subjective _feelings_ about them are out of proportion. You just spend too much time reading about these problems -- and not enough time actually doing anything about them. That's why you're so depressed, yet nothing gets better. I'm not in denial, I'm not saying things don't need to get better. But wallowing and ruminating does not help anything get better, it's just pointless self-harm that's temporarily been normalized because we're in a weird cultural moment where big tech has rapidly able to colonize our culture for the sake of clicks and eyeballs.

4) I mean, considering how debilitating the "the world is ending so nothing matters" philosophy is, even if it's correct, absent total extinction, it will be selected out pretty quickly as most of the subscribers to the philosophy avoid reproducing. Or to put it another way, raising kids is inherently an act of radical hope, making that hope an inherently transmissible characteristic.

5) I really don't see how any of us are supposed to be able to successfully take action to contribute in any way large or small to fix the world or prevent the problems you worry about, if we're too busy being depressed about being hopeless about it.

LOL. You're definitely in denial. You have no idea what I do but here you are telling me all about it. That's very rational behavior.

We can destroy the world in multiple ways, we continue to develop more, and many people are justifiably horrified by it.

You're absolutely right, tho, the ones who are in denial will definitely not be upset about it. Congratulations.

Can We Get Everyone Off Smartphones? (corrected)

Maybe this moral panic will be the one that finally proves justified. Anyone taking bets?

It's not a moral panic? The problem isn't that they're evil it's that they're unhealthy. Lots of unhealthy things have been legislated against, to great effect.

So is car exhaust. Probably an order of magnitude worse than phones.

That's why we have emissions standards.

Emissions standards per vehicle. Doesn't regulate how many miles get driven or how close to people.

Fuel is taxed massively, which will reduce miles. How close to people is based on where the government builds the roads.

Like alcohol or cannabis?

Hey, just because it looks, smells and is written exactly like every other moral panic ever, doesn't mean Concerned Mothers shouldn't go lobby for a law to Change Things for the next generation. Surely it won't lead to a generation that is praised for lower [drug use, comic book fascination, dungeons and dragons, sci-fi, etc, etc, etc] during the enforcement period who then suffer from massive relapse in later life, sometimes with disastrous- but more often just revolutionary- effects on the world, man.

Almost everyone in the age group in question is aware of these problems. It doesn't seem like a moral panic. It is a truly radical change in human life to have so much information in one place, so accessible, all the time. The newspaper changed society, the telegram changed business and war, but none systemically changed human behavior and thinking for every human it comes in contact with like a smart phone.

It has changed childhood behavior, and parenting behavior as well.

I really don't think this is a standard fear of something not understood, it's pretty clear it's affecting people and there should be a change.

... and that's why the King's war against pamphleters is just! Kids are learning morse code at an alarming rate! Ban AI art, if not all art! No, okay. Just no.

My pet peeve: people saying every previous moral panic was unjustified because "after all, our generation turned out alright!"

But your generation didn't. 70 years of television destroyed the minds of the boomer generation and is responsible for a lot of today's ills, as traditional culture was replaced with manufactured content pumped out for the sole purpose of engagement -- much like social media today, but weaker.

We didn't survive TV, we just got used to and normalized it.

Same thing is happening with smartphones and addictive feeds now.

Some of the same people who say TV clearly didn't hurt us and is normal and OK, are the same who skewer the boomer generation. Don't they ever put two and two together? Of course not, that would take an attention span, which was reduced by TV and is now being finished off by TikTok

> But your generation didn't. 70 years of television destroyed the minds of the boomer generation and is responsible for a lot of today's ills, as traditional culture was replaced with manufactured content pumped out for the sole purpose of engagement -- much like social media today, but weaker.

I think you can say that of a lot of the social experiments of the 20th century. Was teaching kids to “question authority” and “think for themselves” such a great idea? Maybe that’s why we got so many nutty anti-vaxxers and Alex Jones watching nuts.

Do you have kids?

I have kids. This is absolutely an overblown moral panic. I'm sure screen usage is a problem in extreme cases, just like TV watching was back when it was the moral panic du jour. For most kids, it's just not gonna have a huge effect, and at any rate I'm not convinced it'll be a net negative.

Just like with so many other iterations of "X is ruining kids these days", if X fills a void it's probably better to focus on the void instead of X.

I'm with you here. It'll get worse as my kids get older, I suppose. With any luck I've taught them well enough by then.

Didn't kids get in trouble for staying up to late reading books? Then it was TV. Then it was those damn video games making us all violent. Now it's smart phones?

Like most things, don't abuse it and it's not a problem.

none of those other things were personalized with algorithms and psychological hooks designed to keep you in app for longer

Smartphones aren't personalized with algorithms to hook you. Social media and gacha games, which can be installed on smartphones, are. A smartphone is just a pocket computer. It's an extremely powerful tool and forbidding the next generation from learning to use it effectively would be terribly misguided. Purposeful psychological attacks could do with some regulation however.

Even the linked article blurs the two. I tried to read it to find out why smartphones were bad, and it only talked about why social media is bad. I know social media is bad, everyone does by now!

You don't play many video games, I take it.

modern video games are much more akin to social media than games 20-30 years ago, especially internet based ones. and many have a gambling element to it which makes it even worse in some aspects.

This is likely why I play a lot of older or single player games.

I've certainly noticed a difference with what the kids want to play. Random garbage, daily drops, pay to win. Even the pacing is different.

I have a hard time believing I'm talking to someone arguing in good faith when they say books are just like social media a few decades ago.

I don't recall saying books are like social media. I was only vaguely stating that kids and their media of choice have been "a problem" for a long time.

Is this one different? Certainly, but every new problem is different.

I'm positive we'll figure it out. The world never collapsed when GTA came out.

Part of me reads these no differently than those articles where "nobody wants to work anymore". If you change a few words, you could have written the same piece 100 years ago.

This will come off as passive-aggressive in text, but it's a sincere question: How do you make sense in the rapid increase in mental health issues, including suicide, that seems to correlate so closely with the adoption of smartphones?

I'm absolutely not saying that it's conclusive proof of the article's position, but I do think it's a powerful data point.

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-and-age-summ...

> In many but not all regions, the young are happier than the old. But in North America happiness has fallen so sharply for the young that they are now less happy than the old. By contrast, in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the young are much happier than the old. In Western Europe as a whole happiness is similar at all ages, while elsewhere it tends to decline over the life cycle (with an occasional upturn for the old).

This seems to be a phenomenon uniquely present in the Anglosphere. I don't think smartphones are the culprit.

Even if we can ultimately attribute it to the smartphone, that does not imply screen time is the culprit.

What about, for example, the loss (or stagnation, as it is sometime thought of) of culture we've seen since the smartphone? I think it is fair to say that the smartphone – or a closely related technology – is why that has happened. Take music as a prime example: When I was young, you pretty much had to listen to the same music as everyone else as it was very hard to discover anything beyond. The music everyone was listening to defined a culture. These days, with the change in technology, we could very easily never hear the same song. But someone who has never touched a smartphone in their life is not excluded here.

There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that suicide rates are higher amongst those who don't find a shared identity. Interestingly, youth suicide rates also dropped precipitously during the COVID period. I expect screen time shot through the roof during that phase! But, perhaps, knowing that everyone was dealing with the same COVID experience provided something to identify with.

The denial of the parental right to shield their children from the harshness of the outside world and the human condition, until an appropriate age and level of education. Homeschooling was one form of backlash, along with the alt-parenting movements, and all the rest. All doomed to failure, but the resistance continues. Started long before smartphones. Encyclopaedia salesmen used to have to contend with the "I don't want my kids getting wise too fast" problem. We'll say the same thing about implants. The exo-cortex is good, actually.

When it comes to understanding kid's mental health and trying to improve it, Silicon Valley is probably the last place on earth we should go to for advice.

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