It's not social suicide for a kid or teen not to have a smartphone (or to limit usage), so it's solvable individually.
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.
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.
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?
...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.