Almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones
bbc.com
bbc.com
Where I'm torn is that I had access to technology early in life and in many ways it shaped who I am today for the better. I had a TI99 at age 4(ish), a C64 soon thereafter, and away I went. I'm a tech guy because of that, and being a tech guy has brought me a ton of opportunity in life.
So I want my daughter to have early, positive, deep exposure to tech in the way I did (where she chooses to take that is up to her). But I don't want her to be a screen-addicted drool.
The conclusion amongst friends we've come to is that screens are not inherently the problem -- even video games are not really the problem. The problem is Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I cannot think of a single positive benefit they offer to kids (or most adults really, with some narrow exceptions). I'll keep her away from them as long as humanly possible, and when not possible, I'll teach her how to use them responsibly (like sugar -- you can't avoid it, but you can manage it.)
I hope?
The main concern I have relates to professions made around optimizing engagement. Full-on studies leading to behavioral adjustment things.
The most immediate example I have: "infinite scrolling" to keep you lost in the feed.
The early internet was finite by comparison. There were some nuggets, but mostly trash. This encouraged creation or simply walking away when you've seen enough. This has flipped.
There was a bit of effort to pump the IV, not a constant drip. Heck, remember link sites? Many people created their first internet contribution by simply listing things they thought were neat.
The link sites had the unintended effect of making the pile to search through bigger, too. There was a certain nature to it that encouraged limitation where we do the exact opposite now.
All that to say - I think your difficulties are warranted. Focusing on the service may be a mistake.
Exposure comes, having guidance helps of course
Trade the pastime for substances. I don't worry about mushrooms being abused nearly as much as even alcohol. Oddly, self-regulation.
We live in a time of so much excess that people make a living by extracting attention/trying to convert it to money... for their employer. Not a lot. A tiny bit they never actually see.
Blaming specific social media platforms (that I’m guessing you don’t use) is not as accurate as you’d expect. For example, the worst offender I’ve seen in slightly older kids is actually Reddit, which many tech-minded parents don’t include in their “bad social media sites” mental list because they think it’s not as bad as the others.
Using your sugar analogy: The few people I knew growing up whose parents had severe sugar restrictions at home ended up having very poor eating habits when they were older. They would consume sugary foods and drinks at higher rates then normal when given the freedom because it was a forbidden treat and they felt the need to binge because they never knew when they’d be allowed to access it again.
A similar thing seems to happen with kids who are overly restricted from TV, games, and other content: They never learn to regulate or moderate, only binge when the opportunity presents.
In my opinion, setting structure, limits, and teaching moderation with consequences for breaking the rules seems to produce better results. The parents of today who impose harsh and extreme regulations on kids, even with good intentions, are discovering the hard way what everyone else learned about restrictive households in decades past.
> I had a TI99 at age 4(ish), a C64 soon thereafter, and away I went.
Tech toys at this level still exist. In fact, old Nintendo or C64 games are still fun for kids. Those old calculators are still available. You don’t have to try to substitute a smartphone with the whole internet and all the apps for a narrowly directed learning experience of your youth.
It’s gotten to the point where I am trying to keep him off it altogether because he seems to manage so much better.
I also want my kid to be exposed to tech. And in a way that’s not purely consumptive. I wonder if there’s going to be something he can get in at the ground floor on that can provide the edge early computing did for me.
> I wonder if there’s going to be something he can get in at the ground floor on that can provide the edge early computing did for me.
It's a great point and I wonder the same. Something to keep an eye out for sure!
I refused to give my daughter a tablet, but I have a laptop with Linux for her. It will take longer for her to learn how to use it
I only hope it’s not “YT Kids” on repeat/autoplay.
Not sure where I heard it, but advertising firms absolutely love to get their ~~~psyops~~~ ads in front of children in their impressionable phase. The idea is that years down the road, maybe when they are old enough. That catchy jingle they heard when they were young will be forever imprinted in their brain.
Subconsciously, when presented with the high number of options to them at the supermarket. They will pick the one that just so happened to be advertised to them heavily when they were young.
Parents are completely unaware of this (unless they are gamers) and research doesn't help because it bundles everything under screen time and even when it's decoupled into "videogames" it bundles single player and multiplayer games together, even though the latter incentivizes keeping you hooked to keep paying.
how else are nonsense videos get xx-xxx million views on yt/tiktok.
Given that I’ve never in my entire life met another parent who thinks giving 2-year olds coffee while this study is claiming 1 in 7 do it, I suspect something else is going on in this surveys. For example, parents who let their kids have a sip of a latte occasionally.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar was going on: I know parents who set aside old smartphones and an extra line for their kids to take on certain travel occasions, but they’re getting included with the parents throwing a smart phone to their kids and hoping for the best.
That said, as a parent I do run into a number of other parents who seem unable to resist any pressure from their kids. They have the exact same attitude as the couple interviewed in this article who said they felt “pushed into a corner”. There’s an uncomfortable abdication of responsibilities to vague societal pressures that many people use to justify the avoidance of their own responsibilities.
I have two kids, 5 and 7, and they use screens but sparingly. Mostly they use them to Facetime relatives and create art and animation with KidPix. They mostly color and play in the real world. They are well socialized, smart and I daresay they are and will remain ahead of any other kids who are addicted to screens by their parents. The problem is if screens rot an entire population of minds, the remaining few will be powerless to help the decline. Like the old saw, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it."
Screens need to be regulated like cigarettes, sooner rather than later.
I also would prefer to see the average kid spend a lot less time on screens. Interestingly I have a totally different take on the "how" though.
I don't thing regulation will do a damn thing in the long run, nor do I think we should accept the few people in charge making such a fundamental decision for us.
We didn't need cigarette regulation, we needed informed consent. People choosing to smoke needed to know what the known risks were. Regulation of cigarettes themselves were a cop out when those in charge failed to hold cigarette companies liable for lying to the public. Had it not taken decades for the truth about what was known, and covered up, by cigarette companies we would have been in a much better spot in my opinion.
What's that mean for screens? For starters, I'd say anyone in a leadership position at major tech companies that leverage their wealth and power to shield their own children from the very tech they sell to everyone else's kids should be held criminally liable. If, for example, major tech leaders happen to send their kids to private schools designed specifically to minimize screens and technology in the classroom, they damn well know its a problem and are keeping that from the public.
My dad was an alcoholic and, unfortunately, died young and alone. No level of regulation would have helped him. Sure, when he could stay away from drinking he was better off during those periods. But his problem wasn't access to alcohol, his problem was an inability to deal with traumas going back to his childhood when his own dad, also an alcoholic, died even younger and left behind a widow and 6 young kids.
I hope that anyone with an addiction can get whatever help they need to hold off their addiction long enough to discover and deal with the underlying problems manifesting as addiction. I also hope, though, that our concern for anyone with addiction doesn't lead us to think that forcing regulation on everyone and further growing the power of our governments is a brute force solution to problems much deeper than the symptom of addiction.
If you know smoking can cause cancer and decide to bury the research and lie, that's a huge problem. If you know it can cause cancer and make that clear, and people still decide to smoke anyway, what's the problem exactly?
More importantly, we only know what industries to regulate and how to regulate them after the fact. When an industry, like the cigarette or oil industries, has first access to data that is damning of that industry and buries it, how do we know what to regulate? If we can only intervene after the fact anyway, my proposal is to hold accountable those who lied and buried evidence and educate the public on the newly discovered risks. Let people deicide for themselves once those risks are clear.
If I had kids I'd only break out tablets / mobiles in Offline mode with content I approved of for trips.
Everything else needs to be on a PC or big TV that's around to be seen and thus reviewed by nearby adults. There's just way too much bad stuff online, including content that might look fine at a glance but could be horrific if the audio track is on headphones.
I used to have thoughts like this. To turn the phrase: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
That’s said, the iPad we have is so old it doesn’t do much. Its obsolescence prevents a lot of the danger.
Remember newspapers and comic books and magazines and those junkie magazines by the cash register that talked about celebrity scandals? What about parents who would come home from work and just watch TV all night?
That kinda stuff is nothing new really lol.
Unless we want a society where people are only allowed the things sanctioned by government, we will always have to accept bad things will happen until we stop them. I think that's ok for most things.
I wonder though if they’d count my 7 year old who uses a very old iPhone to access YouTube Kids (which shall never be deleted because it cannot be reinstalled again!) for craft-along projects.
Not OP, but I'm guessing the latest version of the app requires iOS version X, and the phone will only run iOS X-1.
The Internet, amazing as it is, it's also the home to the worst possible content imaginable and believe it, kids always find a way to neutralize parental controls and the like.
Also, I don't understand this notion that "tech" (in the most vague definition possible) actually brings any future advantage.
It's like teaching kids Excel or Python and hope they will win a Fields medal. If parents teach them critical thinking, reading books and love math and logic, they'll pick up any problem, language or "tech" easily when they're older and run circles around other kids that "know programming".
Like many people on this site, I personally benefitted from having access to computing technology and the internet as a child, starting at age 5 or 6. This gave me opportunities to build a career in tech that was simply not available to those less fortunate. I've heard similar stories from people in a lot of STEM fields.
I cannot imagine what he’d be like when he possesses something like that full time.
/s
I would say that Apple Watches are more common (but still less than 15% of kids) and that the few kids with phones have them in order to coordinate between divorced parents.
Around a third of families have one or both parents working in Big Tech. Maybe they know better!
But outside of us uppity coastal elites, America doesn’t even look that badly on cigarettes. People still smoke them — over 10% of adults! You can buy them in nearly every gas station. If we hated them that much they’d be banned.
I don't say this to make a false equivalence, mainly in jest - I recognize TV is fairly mild and internet is a firehose by comparison.
Yet, we keep ignoring parents... and really, personal responsibility and simply the environment/impact that has. He raised himself like many of us do today.
This movie was a bit of a warning, then - decades ago. Except now we have phones, schools are even closer to day care/prison, and so on.
To avoid doing this will just perpetuate the idea that a child is the property of the parent and deserves to be the victim of their failings.
We can't control everything, but we can control how we react to it. He's a product of his environment, parents, and choices.
That's not to discount disadvantage. I get it. None of this is final or complete, it's a fucking movie metaphor
Maybe it's that TV was manipulative (advertisements), but those manipulations were limited and not very effective. Video games were an honest transaction, you pay $60 and you get a game, and our focus has been on making the best game we can, we hope you enjoy the game.
Now, social media is much more manipulative and addicting, and video games are more likely to be designed around manipulation and micro-transactions rather than simply being a good game.
Tiktok and similar apps are completely different.
It's not going to corrupt the youth, but the kids deserve better.