Taking away iPhone made daughter a better person
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Reaching for your phone is an example of what psychologists refer to as avoidance behaviours. We look at screens so that we don't have to deal with difficult thoughts and emotions.
Sure, without a phone that person had no other choice but to face whatever they've been avoiding. But more often than not leaving someone to their own devices when they clearly can't cope with the situation by themselves makes them look for a different source of distraction that in turn will make you wish they were "just" addicted to social media.
A person doing well mentally has no need to avoid anything. The right thing to do is help them get there, not play whack-a-mole with their coping mechanisms.
It's true that addiction is ultimately a psychological problem. It's true that people engage in addictive behaviors as a coping mechanism to avoid difficult emotions.
It's also true that the Internet has enabled a lot of deliberately addictive content. Phones keep that content constantly at hand. And it's difficult to avoid having a phone since they also provide utilities.
I'd like to live in a world where everyone had such great mental wellness that they were impervious to the temptations of their phones. What are some serious tactics to make that happen?
For parents, this could take the form of doubling a child’s pocket money/allowance on the condition that half of it is donated to charities - encourage the child to research charities and talk about them.
(The latter isn’t an original idea - I originally read about it in the form of tripling the pocket money with 1/3 to keep, 1/3 for charity, and 1/3 to invest. If your kid has to do some chores to get their pocket money, then this sets them up with a pattern for a good life (work, then give and save).
By 2008 when I saw him he had totally fallen off from computers and couldn't care less.
I'm engrossed in tech still and I do waste wayyy to much time on HN, blogs, reading, YouTube, Twitter and the like. No doubt I have a problem..
My friend though died last year of heroin/fentanyl overdose. He had been struggling with it for 5+ years. Same as I have with modern phones. I wish he had gotten addicted to YouTube shorts instead.
Divorce, drug addiction? Sorry; addicted to code, I no longer have time for relationships nor the ability to relate to normal people nor the brain cells to spare.
COVID lockdowns? Ha; I've been living under lockdown for the last ten years; it's my optimal lifestyle.
YouTube requiring brain scans with which to inject targeted ads directly into your videos? Too bad; I've already downloaded the Warcraft 3 and StarCraft playthroughs I watch over and over locally.
Microsoft integrating an AI into Windows which will predict the exact moment you're about to be racist and brick your machine? Nice try; I've already moved to Linux years ago.
It is the gift that keeps on giving.
But that may be because of the low relationship effort count. Probalby hard for two people of that type to ever meet
Often though, some issues in life are not resolvable through some simple analysis and avoiding thinking about the issue might really be the best course of action.
True. People doing well mentally should start heroin and meth right now since they have no need to avoid anything. Why should they miss out on that experience since they can just quit.
A thinly veiled pro-social media post. The quote highlighted alone is very dangerous. It's almost as if people have developed a form of Stockholm syndrome to appeal to social media addictions vs the boogie man that is a "different source of distraction".
avoid what exactly?
that needs to be qualified. do they avoid talking to their friends in school? do they avoid facing the fact that they have no friends?
or are they using it because their friends are doing it as well? what are they avoiding then?
and and let's not brush aside those harmful effects. some kids may use the phone to avoid facing things that feel worse, but as others mentioned, so do people using drugs or alcohol. the problem is that the harmful effects of the phone/social media are much much less obvious, so many more kids are at risk. drugs and alcohol are so much easier to avoid.
I said it already: difficult thoughts and emotions. Teenagers naturally have a lot of that and little to no ability to process them on their own.
What are we to do? Banning phone use on an individual basis is a recipe for social suicide. Some kind of collective action is needed.
Legislation against phone use for minors is one option, but I wouldn’t expect it to receive widespread support. Banning social media for minors might be workable, but it wouldn’t fully resolve the issue.
So basically, having a PC at home was more than enough.
Just checked, I'm still in the largest school-wide FB group from college. It ceased posting in 2019 despite technically having over 100K members still. Gonna assume FB groups aren't a thing anymore and it's moved to Discord, but I'm still curious.
deep 1-1 connections for the most part because yeah i was texting and messaging people but other than that...i think it's probably only worse now. there are group chats/discords for each social group probably and not having a smartphone would mean you can't participate.
and i think it's even worse now.
Today he told me the son was banned from phone use for two weeks as a punishment for something. Son hands the phone to the mother last night but she doesn't look at the phone. He asks her to check the phone screen and wouldn't you know - it was missing its sim card. Kid sim swapped to an old phone a friend gave him. Didn't work, mother confiscated his sim card. WiFi? Well the Unifi system he has setup in his house has a separate ssid for the stepson and his gadgets that gets shut off after 10PM on school nights and if he is punished, remains off until the sanctions are lifted. Kid is blacked out on personal devices but is still allowed to - watch TV if he is done with homework or go out with friends in meat space with strict curfew.
The son deals with it because he has no other choice. And I have heard no complaints that he is dying a social death. Just stick to your guns and show them who is in charge - you, the parent.
...Seriously I have a hard time seeing it your way. Can you elaborate on your rational? Change my mind?
Smartphones have many other very useful functions.
The real problem is social media.
I don't wish her only social interaction to be on her phone but the fact remains that if I took it away forever it would mostly impact her ability to play with her friends. I don't personally believe that it would be good for her mental health.
My kids have a Facetime video chat they all jump on while they game so they can see each other and talk, pretty great actually.
And it's one of the few activities you can do with friends when you're stuck home on a school night.
They've really become digital third places, especially when IRL third places have been overly monetized or destroyed.
(They weren't allowed actually at school though, weren't even supposed to be in your locker, so I always think it's a bit weird when it occasionally pops up debate about banning them from schools or that X school has banned them - curious when and why they allowed them, or maybe they were just always allowed to begin with?)
Why make plans in the first place then? Changing plans at the last minute is really inconsiderate behavior.
Of course you are, but tanseydavid thinks he's meeting you in town and doesn't have a phone...
I imagine now it's just straight to the latter, (albeit with less txt spk and more memes & emoji) because children get phones and start making their own plans at about the same age. (And not by coincidence probably - they're arranging to meet friends and going out alone, so parent wants to be able to contact them, to stay in the loop, etc.)
if you find out about something interesting that you didn't know before, why should you not be able to change your plans to go see or do it?
hey, i just got some free tickets for that show, so how about we cancel dinner and go there?
Imagine being a teenager and trying to include someone lacking a cellphone to your social group. It adds a huge amount of friction.
Including someone without a cellphone means you give up the ability to be spontaneous (assuming the kid needs to adhere to an agreed-upon schedule to be picked up by a parent), and trivial things become a literal telephone-game ordeal.
It also means almost invariably that the kid is relying on a friend's phone to communicate parents / a ride, unless that kid is so privileged as to own their own car.
Could you imagine if every time you hung out with a friend, they asked to borrow your phone, open Facebook Messenger (or whatever sensitive messaging app you use), and to contact a parent?
It also means the kid isn't included in group chats, which means they just aren't part of conversations other kids are having. You can't have a rich social life with someone you can only talk to in classes you share and for 20 minutes during lunch break.
The "green bubble" phenomenon is bad enough as it is. I don't like it, but for all practical reasons, owning a cellphone is necessary for a kids social life in the United States.
What if the parent could handle such eventualities - based on trust in the child - with no freaking out ?
The point of this quotation is that a cell phone is a very personal thing. It's anxiety inducing and burdensome to hand over your cellphone to someone.
And that's not the mention the power dynamic between the kids with the cellphone and the kid without.
This kind of independence might be a social plus for a kid. Something like "I don't need a phone cos I can go where I want until dinnertime". No helicopter parenting.
Assuming neither, they're probably getting picked up and dropped off by a parent or other family member, with dropoff/pickup schedules arranged in advance.
It's less, "I don't need a phone cos I can go where I want until dinnertime," and more, "My mom will be driving 25 minutes to pick me up at 4PM, and my friends spontaneously decided to go bowling. I can only ask her when she gets here, but that would mean she needs to drive another hour and fifteen minutes."
I grew up before smartphones and I spoke to people around my own age. I arranged my own travel without parents checking in on me. Bullying assholes didn't need groups to amplify their message which was a good thing.
How are things better now exactly?
I'm describing how things are, not how I want things to be.
In fact, you'll likely have to deal with this as early as elementary school.
My kids are fine. Even with their parents fighting tooth and nail to keep them off devices as much as possible, they will still be on them sometimes (in your home or out of it). Maybe my kids are just weird to not be craving social media - just being able to send text messages to her friends seems to be enough for my 14 year old currently. Is that the same thing? My observations say "definitely not".
They complain about it sometimes, (and I complain about their usage sometimes) but nobody is really angry and everybody is really reasonable. Your mileage may vary.
It almost certainly does. People are wildly different in their susceptibility to alcohol, gambling etc. We should expect the same wild variability when it comes to social networks.
Fussellian middle class in a suburban school: will call your kid poor and bully them if they don’t have a recent phone by 6th grade (often much earlier)
Fussellian upper-middle in expensive private school: may not have a phone themselves until high school (handy for keeping in touch when at college-application-building extra curriculars), won’t make fun of kids whose parents don’t give them phone.
When I was a kid I moved from a rich suburban New England town to one that was considerably more working class. When I lived in the rich town, no one talked about how much money the other kids' parents had, I guess because everybody was rich. When I lived in the working class town, everybody knew who the rich kid was and who the poor kids were, and where you shopped could get you admired or bullied. Wearing clothes from K-mart was a fast track to becoming a pariah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_A...
His “Middle” is characterized by a lot of class-anxiety and especially the twin characteristics of wanting to appear like the upper-middle or upper classes, while having very wrong ideas about how those two classes “signal”.
His upper-middle is basically professional-class (doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, finance) prep school sorts. Same as the main demographic covered in Birnbach’s The Official Preppy Handbook
I already forbid my kids from using any social network.
They can use youtube with supervision.
Social media is poison for young minds. Older minds too but thats another issue.
As I quoted elsewhere, any extremist or reductionist position makes things worse for them.
What do you mean by variety is the problem?
A lot of the lack of curiosity is because so many kids are taught to view curiosity as boring, rather than fostering that curiosity as just another form of play.
There are even things like minecraft plugins/servers where text is translated to a language of your choice, and everyone is encouraged to use only that language to collaborate which can be such an exponentially fast way to learn languages without ever feeling like it's a chore.
So don't be afraid to seek out things that blur the lines between education and play! Foster that creativity and curiosity.
Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if parents are seen zombie-scrolling through Instagram for hours, and then they tell their kids not to zombie-scroll because it's bad for you, well the kids will know their parents are totally full of shit.
It's impossible for parents who are themselves addicted to smartphones to tell their kids not to be addicted to smartphones. The parents need to cure their own addiction first.
In the 90s, if you were a nerd in high-school, you get a chance to re-invent yourself in college, and another at your first job. Heck, you can re-invent yourself between different groups of friends. Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.
Tons of kids grew up glued to their Nintendos. I played an _insane_ amount of Starcraft. Our generation did not have the same negative effects that the current generation is having with social media.
What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.
For what it's worth, none of this has been my experience at all. I'm not even really sure what the first sentence means exactly.
That’s a really interesting suggestion. It reminds me of haolez’s comment yesterday (abridged by me) [0]:
> I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on.
> The group became popular and the admin […] merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. […] What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point.
> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties).
———
Both of you get at the same point - private and manageable (and moderatable) communities are probably a much better option to allow everyone freedom to interact without feeling insignificant (due to size), and with the right moderation, can be a place which allows healthy conflict, discovery and rule-bending, and the other things that we were able to get up to as kids without our parents knowing, while maybe being moderated by a third party who isn’t acting as an authority figure (people won’t get in trouble for reasonable rule-testing), maybe even some sort of private task-specific bot which looks only for egregious bullying, hate, and scheming?
I really like your suggestion and would love to see it fleshed out.
The one thing that I feel differentiates from current-day is that I would like to see automatic enrollment (or ability to enroll) for everyone from the target audience, e.g. not student-run and only one clique, but nothing wrong with it also allowing private sub-areas. There shouldn’t be a technological or social barrier to entry, it should be up to each person (child, in this example) to log in and participate. That would probably help a lot of the shy or socially awkward kids bridge the gap.
That's why I'm pretty wary of some other comments along the lines of "you just need to teach your children to think of phones as tools and regulate their screen time". I feel that's like telling kids "You just need to keep it to 3 or 4 cigarettes a day."
Sure, some kids may do OK with this (I happen to think they're really in the minority), but social media is fundamentally designed to addict people. That is literally the goal of social media companies. So I'm just a bit dubious that kids, especially young kids e.g. in middle school, have the ability to regulate that.
That's now every child. Also, that was very much an intentionally designed effect -- it's no secret. Let that sink in. Your 10 year old is up against multi billion dollar companies who control the very tools you want to use to curb her addiction? (No, she is... We all are.)
People forget that the purpose of Social Media is to spend more and more time. "User Engagement" is the key.
When kids hang outside of school, as was always the case, they usually live nearby. Notwithstanding that dumbphones and managed social media use are options, unless you think teens are all monsters (which would not be solved by phones anyway), it's not a lord of the flies situation of shunning people without phones.
I think there's a culture of inactive shut ins and we're acting like this should be cause for FOMO. I expect kids would be happier if they actually physically see some friends more regularly anyway.
Maybe 45 minutes before school each morning and 1 hour the evening or something.
Everybody I've spoken to thinks its a great idea. Even the kids. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-06/mobile-phone-ban-canb...
If you have both, your friends are always there to let you know how much you are loved.
Learn safety, responsible usage and set limits. Let them demonstrate they can handle it before unattended use.
Is it really? Or is this one of those irrational fears?
A technological solution is to have complete control over the computing devices we "own". But that goes against the interests of trillion dollar corporations and so we can't have that.
Like I was figuring out if there is a way to let my kid use Youtube with a select set of channels, but no. Youtube needs to keep showing suggestions on what to watch next. I would gladly pay for the ability to control what content my kid sees, but Youtube stands to make more profit by getting the kid addicted to their app.
Another option might be a custom Youtube frontend or browser extension for filtering.
Also, install Unhook Youtube - it allows reducing YT to pretty much just subscriptions and watch later.
Personally, I think the most likely and best solution is better social media. Currently, social media is regulated to shield kids from explicit content and predators, but it should also be regulated to shield them from negativity and mindless engagement, and to promote positivity and healthy behaviors (including not spending too much time on it). Recommendation algorithms for kids should be strictly controlled by the government; keep in mind that the government already strictly controls what kids learn in school, and it doesn't have to outright ban "non-explicit harmful" content, just down-weight it enough that kids don't find it without intentionally looking. Plus, a social media with healthier recommendations and discourse may become popular for adults as well, even though they wouldn't be locked into this version like minors (I can imagine a system that requires consent like adult ID but then lets adults stay anonymous, which could be bypassed by dedicated minors, but most wouldn't care enough to do so).
I think this is obvious to any parent, right? Too much screen time bad. I know it's bad for me as well, though my current bias is heavily against technology in general - I will admit that.
Watching YouTube? Reading blogs about favorite subjects?
YouTube is basically as bad as any social media IMO since it has an endless stream of stimulus that's artificially easy to consume.
Putting faith in any app to curate or restrict content in Youtube and the like; for this one I think doing the human thing of talking to her regularly and even making it clear that we will be checking out what she's doing is preferable.
I am despite what the media says, a digital native.
that being said, I don't think kids should be on social media. By that I mean instagram/tiktok/snapchat
I have been talking to my kids (10/7) about "the internet". The normal stuff: no real names, no photos, no giving away details to anyone. They have a shared iPad, but it has time limits, and it stays in the living room.
and as an adult leader for a "uniformed organisation" for kids, one of the badges is about staying safe online. Some of the shit that I hear from them leaves me a bit worried. Roblox is a fucking nest of paedophiles. Instgram isn't a place for kids, and neither is youtube.
But, the biggest issue, apart from google and facebook not having any commercial incentive to stop kids from using their stuff: is parents not talking to their kids to find out whats happening.
Who are they talking to?
How long are they spending online?
What are they watching?
You as a parent have to be involved. You can't let your kid wander alone on the internet. You need to set barriers.
You don't need to be a helicopter, but you do need to take an interest.
You also need to have a strong fucking password to stop the kids getting round the parental controls.
For the record, none of this has been "normal" for 15+ years. Sharing personal details - either publicly on social media or "privately" online is absolutely normal now.
Where there are humans, there are problems. Where there are humans, there is crime. Where there are humans, there are pedophiles. The physical world is the same story.
After being sexually abused repeatedly as a kid and teen, both at school and online, don't get complacent in thinking background checks mean teachers aren't pedophiles—background checks and lists only tell you who has been caught so far.
Digital grooming is nasty, but the prioritized danger is anyone physically close.
Passwords aren't stopping teenage determination and they never have, not now devices are cheap and easy to come by, and lots of peers have drawers full of unwanted yesteryear stuff. Twenty years ago, we were using proxies, hacking WiFi APs, giving people old devices and even buying each other phone credit.
I know I can't protect either my kids, or the kids I look after for ever. I just want to give them enough of a heads up to stop the 95% attack. As in, if I've done my job well enough, they won't be sending photos of themselves[1], or giving out home addresses, or believing that the other person is someone to be feared or obeyed.
You're also spot on about passwords. As a reformed Sysadmin, who used to work in a place with airgapped networks, I will be more than a little proud when/if my kids break part of the security. (assuming its not just social engineering my partner) I'll also be worried.
One of the teachers who I looked up to at school was acquitted of sexual misconduct with someone who I knew well. One of the worries is that someone who is a family friend(other other privileged position) does something like that to one of my children. Worse still either me missing it, or most painful of all them, not feeling able to talk to anyone about it to stop it.
Please read this as me casting judgment, minimising, solutionising, disputing or dismissing what happened to you. That is very much not my intention!
[1] perhaps a forlorn hope in the longrun
And I know a large number of teens that are honor role, on sports teams, and gesticulate, all while having a phone and actively use social media.
I also know teens with depression, insomnia, and poor grades, even though they don't have a phone or social media.
That's not to say phones aren't harmful, but clearly it's not everything.
> "It's literally impossible for me to influence my child's behavior, so we must enact legislation to ensure no kids can use these evil devices!"
This makes sense if her daughter is presently 25 years old
And if one considers messengers like ICQ/AIM (or even IRC) as a form of social media then teenagers were commonly (in my area) using social media in the late 90s.
What do you think they're supposed to be using them for if not that? Socialization is the point. I was every bit the teenage girl annoyingly on her phone constantly but I was constantly talking to my friends / boyfriend.
So much of being a teenager is being dragged places you don't want to go and being forced to be around adults you don't care about talking about insurance or escrow or whatever. But online was a place that was mine, where my friends were.
Just because modernity has social nonsense baked into it by default doesn't mean that they were social experiences to begin with. Entertainment, utility and creativity were valued over social e-peen points once upon a time. Shocking, I know.
Adding this kind of friction to be able to communicate with family and peers is a recipe for a teenage dropout that's more focused on chump change just to have a phone than further education.
I left school at sixteen, I was never given pocket money. You bet having a girlfriend, cool clothes, a phone, an iPod and video games was more important to me than anything my dad had to say, especially when what we were being taught was nothing I had any interest in.
The final straw was needing a new computer to run Boinx to make stop-motion animations (my hobby at the time before CG movies really took off). Having the things you want and need is a big deal to teenage brain, especially when they're attainable without much effort and make you happy.
If a parent isn't giving resources or nurturing interests and is instead adding friction to something a teen can actually have for themselves, that parent is losing all leverage over a teenager because they can't threaten to take away pocket money and thus their source of "cool" and pleasure in life.
Kids should focus on their studies if their parents can facilitate them being able to do so.
"I wouldn't allow my kids to leave school at sixteen", in the UK at the time, they were legally adults, but also didn't stop plenty of kids dropping out at fourteen to work and get the things their parents weren't giving them. Neither parent wanted me to leave, but neither parent was relevant in any way anymore to me, they were just obstacles between me and my teenage bullshit.
I think the cell enabled watch offers better mobile function than carrying around a full phone and its baggage of capability.
Calling and location often don’t work, even though there is perfect mobile signal. Updates must be managed from a phone, so you need one anyway. Maps are not easy to use, you can’t do simple stuff like a google search or look up train times.
Remember the days when iPhone updates had to be managed from a desktop and cell data wasn't so great? I have an appreciation for the format even if I'm not a user of it.
Obviously in theory stock Android can do that but they don't really take child locks seriously because they have the wrong threat model for it - they think "it only has to be securish because most children aren't going to be smart enough to circumvent it and it's not serious if they do anyway", instead of "it has to be actually secure because you only need one smart child out of thousands to figure out a bypass and it is serious because it affects peoples lives".
So maybe you could have an Android distro where it literally white-lists a few apps and servers at the OS level.
I've looked at https://sunbeamwireless.com, which runs their Android variant, BasicOS. Haven't purchased yet though. Light Phone is similar.
Gabb and Pinwheel sell phones oriented at kids, and both have OSes based on Android.
Unfortunately, as you say stock Android as well as iOS don't make effective locks. What they offer is passable for parents managing their kids' phones, although in practice kids often find ways to bypass.
It's very difficult for an adult who wants to self-regulate. There are some hacks you can do, like MDM, but it's not at all straightforward.
I'm looking to connect with people about this topic. In fact I want a business partner, although I'm also interested in people who just have input.
Absolutes on either end of the spectrum just lead to extremism which helps no one. This headline (the article one and the HN summary) are just extremism via reductionism. You can reduce this entire thing to a point but it deprives them of their instinctive tool using and building mentality.
Teach don’t preach.
I hear this argument a lot, but I'm yet to hear an essential purpose they hold for anyone.
While not essential for any of these, it's a tool which you can leverage for all of these to improve things.
Edit: not to mention the iPad+apple pencil which is just another way of creating art...
However none of them are essential, and I'm not convinced any of the benefits of these conveniences outweigh ingraining this device dependance on children at critical habit forming points of their lives.
Note that the trend of how addicted to their phone they are seems to directly correlate to their exposure when they were young.
Boomers+: Barely at all
Gen X: A bit
Gen Y: A real problem
Gen Z: I'd be surprised if 5/100 can watch a full length movie without looking at their phone
If you consider at what point in life each group gained access to engaging modern tech, there is a clear correlation. Causation is a reasonable path to follow here, and it much too likely to risk young childrens exposure - in my opinion.
The article conflates that with not having a phone at all, but that doesn’t make it invalid.
Luckily for us, we can just blame tech and sidestep any responsibility.
Good practice delivers health, sensitivity, kindness. Bad delivers bad health, bad behavior.
Pleasure, habit and popularity is a bad guide here. You might actually have to fight for your sanity.
I don't use my phone a lot, all I got for entertainment is Retroarch, Lichess and a generic sudoku app I got from F-Droid, so obviously my opinion is highly subjective, but it feels like having a supercomputer that can only run MSDOS. One thing at a time in fullscreen with maybe a few passive resident processes. I know some phones let you split things in two or so, but not all of them and the implementation is never flawless or limits what apps can be split.
If you mean hating the phone as a social thing, I am a bit self-conscious about being seen using it too much or taking it out in front of someone unless warranted. I wouldn't do stuff like crossing the street or driving with my eyes glued to it. But that's a people problem and not a phone problem, I think.
If only they were designed by "the smartest people in the world". This is a journalistic trope. They were designed by people with social problems not to help address their problems but to feed an unhealthy addiction to computers as an escape.
I think what was intended was "happier, healthier" person.
The behaviours the daughter was exhibiting though (lying, desperate attention seeking, etc) are probably why the article author frames it that way.
I also suggest that they lock-down the settings of the kids' watch (the customisation/locking-down is very good) just add a few contacts (papa, mama, sis/bro) and that's it. Nobody else can call them, and they cannot call anyone else (except emergency services).
ps: I personally run on Android. I absolutely despise and I dropped every Apple-thing I had on the battery-gate scandal)
It sounded like a great plan, but I’d definitely not recommend it (yet).
The article starts by blaming then iPhone and social media and goes on to show how the child is a victim of poor parenting and divorce.
Maybe the child’s depression, anxiety, and longing for acceptance comes straight out of the broken home and not social media.
My take is less nuanced, because I already see some addiction in my kid to screens ( I would blame my wife, but I am to blame as well ), which prompted me to crack down on it. I think there is a lot of blame to share, but I don't think parents are more to blame than a corporation with nation-state level of resources to overcome objections, force trends and so on.
From what I remember of middle school, having constant 24/7 contact with my classmates would have been detrimental, so I buy it.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
I think this quotation captures the sentiment the best: "She assessed her worth within a system where she was simultaneously attention-addicted and attention-starved. She’d internalized an algorithm where provocative content wins"
Make sure she lets shine through that her child distrusts her so much that she lies and keeps secrets. The relationship between parent and child has broken down, and the child is not to blame.
Let the reader realize in not so subtle ways that the phone isn’t the actual issue, and let them realize the author is an unreliable narrator.