Comment by cmeacham98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmeacham98 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to post the same comment I did last year when this showed up on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207142), as checking the website it still seems to be true:

Literally none of the evidence on the website's own "Why" page supports their suggestion: https://www.waituntil8th.org/why-wait

All of the studies (bonus points for linking to news articles instead of directly to the studies) have something to do with "time spent using screens/a phone/social media", but nothing to do with age of first use.

How can anyone trust this website has any basis in reality when they wrote a whole page explaining why and none of it was applicable?

Of course parents should regulate how much time their kids spend on electronics (similar to how parents of previous generations would prevent kids from watching TV 5 hours a day) - but this website presents no evidence that giving a kid a smartphone in 8th grade rather than 5th grade would make a meaningful difference.

Sigh. Sometimes you don’t need 10 peer reviewed articles to just know when something is bad. Were you the guy in the 60s saying smoking was totally fine because studies? Sometimes you just know inhaling smoke everyday is probably not good for you.

Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.

Yes, you do. I fundamentally disagree with you and don’t think you have reliable evidence to back up this claim. This reads like the pseudoscientists that are convinced aspartame causes cancer.

Sounds like contrarian nerdism to me.

Or a parent that's tired of the alarmism and peer pressure to parent a certain way, like abstinence pledges? The whole premise of these sorts of campaigns are based on flimsy evidence.

We had a mountain of data to show that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it. Same with asbestos and most of the other examples people point to.

We don't have that data for smartphones. It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms. As far as we can tell, the association between smartphone use and poor mental health is strongly concentrated in a minority of people with very high usage. There's a strong probability that the causality behind this association runs in the opposite direction - troubled people spend lots of time using digital devices, because they're escaping their troubled lives.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6883663/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01825-4

> the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it

> It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms

So... you're saying it's similar.

> Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.

The shape of the computer doesn't magically make it bad: It's what kids do that's the problem.

We took our kids tablets away because they weren't disengaging. But that's because they were into Youtube, which is highly addictive. If they were just using the tablets as e-readers, it would be a different story.

But they weren’t using them as e-readers. Why would they, kids books with beautiful illustrations are 1000x better.

That's for when they know how to read.

There are also e-readers that read along with the book, which are good for very young children who are just learning basic words.

How many kids use it for non-addictive purposes and put it away after an hour of use without raising trouble when it's taken away?

8th grade may be somewhat arbitrary, but as children grow older you trust them more with things that you didn't when they were younger, teaching them responsibility and independence over time.

I don't need a website to provide some type of evidence (not sure what kind of evidence you'd be referring to) to understand that. It's parenting 101. This is just applying it to social networks (that's the issue more than the phone itself) just it would apply to any other type of social interaction (going out with friends by themselves, TV, gaming, etc.)

The entire point of this website is to advocate for the arbitrary 8th grade cutoff. Additionally, an arbitrary hard cutoff is the opposite of gradually teaching kids responsibility and independence.

Either your child has a phone or they don’t have a phone. This is one of many binary actions along a progressive line during which you are teaching them responsibility and independence.

IMO it's not the phone itself that matters, it's what the kids do on it. Phone can be good to communicate with parents, bad for nearly anything else at a young age.

Kids entire social lives run on their phones. Covid accelerated this and pushed down the age for where this was true.

Denying your kid a smart phone is basically denying them a social life nowadays. It simply doesn't work unless everyone does it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/

You may be confusing what happens with a phone with what is required.

Certainly kids can have a social life without a phone. It’s not required. I just had a kid who didn’t get instagram until 14. They claimed that their life was ruined, but they had a healthy social life without it (and without a phone).

I think people generalize what will happen without things they think are common incorrectly. Just because phones are used for many things, it doesn’t mean those things are impossible without phones.

I do think it works better if more parents did it and it was so nice to find other parents (super rare) who felt similarly.

This counterpoint feels like it needs just as much scrutiny as the position it’s refuting.

Isn’t “but everyone else has one” the appeal kids make to their parents about most everything? (I know I was guilty of that as a kid myself)

Why is this a new level of “denying them a social life”?

Because if you deny a kid a Nintendo, even though "everyone has one", it doesn't kill their social life, because they can still go over to a friend's house to play (arguably, this is better for their social life).

If you don't give them a smartphone, and all their peers use their phones to communicate, as well as talk about TikTok videos, your kid will be excluded from all that. If that's where the majority of interaction takes place, then yes, it does deny them a social life.

And even if most of the social life doesn't happen on phones, appointments and figuring out when/where to meet absolutely does.

Many kids need access to group messaging to even be told that there's something going on at foo's house at 6.

I grew up before smartphones and if somebody took away my very normal corded phone I would have definitely been had a much time communicating with my friends. I wouldn't have been happy about that at all. I did spend hours talking to friends perhaps even to the detriment of my studies.

What are we really trying to stop here? Are we really just trying to stop all the addicting apps? if so.. maybe we should be focusing on that at a higher level.

At least below age 12 or so, our kid's social life consists entirely of classmates that she sees 7 hours a day at school during weekdays, after school and in weekends playdates with classmates that she likes, sports, music and swimming lessons,and some time with parents in somewhere between. Where does the phone come on?

In our class we were the first to give our kid's a phone. She doesn't find it very interesting and barely spent any time on it, since she the only ones that she know with a phone number are her parents.

I’d say cell phone penetration is sitting at about 25% with my 6th graders friend cohort and that seems to hold up when I talk to my friends with kids.

I don’t know if that will hold until 8th grade but for now my kids social life seems to revolve around the neighborhood, school and his activities.

I was under the impression phones/social networks were becoming unpopular. My kid certainly has a dim view of the latter.

Assuming that's true*, it honestly isn't good reason to give your kids a smartphone. Your job description as a parent is pretty much to stop your kids from doing things they don't understand will hurt them. There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life. Like, if all the other kids were shooting up heroin it would be considered insane to say "you have to let them do it because all their friends are junkies", and I don't see it as being different for phones.

*It's also not clear that your premise is even true. Plenty of parents in the past have reported how their kids' friends adjusted just fine to not being able to use a smartphone to contact them, and that they still had healthy social lives.

Please provide links to the "plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids".

Google exists

There's a lot of people making claims based on paid research with agendas to sell fear. If you think you have some real empirical evidence that will standup to scrutiny, by all means share.

It comes up all the time in the news, studies on the affect of smartphones on childhood depression and anxiety.

And everything I've ever delved deep into how the studies were conducted, what were the real conclusions drawn, the type of content being shown, etc. never leads to what the news would have you conclude. It's basically a terrible game of telephone where parents just end up getting fear mongered into limiting device time to 2 hours a day because someone said so. Utter nonsense.

> There's (imo) plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids, and therefore it's a parent's job to crack down on it even if it costs them in their social life.

From personal experience, being isolated as a kid can also be profoundly psychologically damaging and stunt development of normal life skills. Sure, see if the kid can get by without a smartphone for as long as possible, but if they do wind up completely excluded it's time to reevaluate the cost-benefit analysis and potential ways to mitigate smartphone overuse, not just think that the isolation is "okay" cause you're protecting them from phones.

The point of the pledge is that you take it and you encourage other parents in your school/neighbourhood to take it. So this helps solve the coordination problem:

"By signing the online pledge, you promise not to give your child a smartphone until at least the end of 8th grade as long as at least 10 families total from your child’s grade and school pledge. Once 10 families have pledged to delay the smartphone, you will be notified that the pledge is active! You will receive a list of families who are delaying from your child’s grade and emails for the parents."

I think most social activities can be done on computers, no? Using Google Voice / VoIP service of your choice and whatnot

The only exception to this I see is WhatsApp (which I’ve always hated for expecting all users to have a phone and try to avoid for that reason)

> It simply doesn't work unless everyone does it.

I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but it bears repeating: that's the whole point of this program.

Parents are playing the prisoners' dilemma here. Many (most) feel like cell phones (social media in particular) are a net negative for younger kids. But they don't want their kids to be left out / socially isolated. So it's really easy to get into a situation where we all defect because "I don't really like this but everyone else is doing it". This "wait until 8th" thing provides a framework for parent to agree to cooperate on this issue.

TBD if it actually works. I certainly like the idea that we have some control over our culture/community and don't just need to passively accept a "tragedy of the commons" on an issue like this.

> Kids entire social lives run on their phones.

> Denying your kid a smart phone is basically denying them a social life nowadays.

Wow, what country is that true? Thankfully, not in the country I reside. None of the children I know have social lives that revolve around the phone.

Wherever you live, if the phone is already the central aspect of a child's social life, that is a great tragedy.

Pretty much secondary school in the UK (12+). I'm guessing middle schools / high schools in the US are the same? Yes, literally every kid in secondary school has a cell phone. Kids have whatsapp groups and communicate all the time with their friend circles.

According to an Ofcom survey in 2023, 9 in 10 kids aged 11 have a smartphone in the UK.

1: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-...

> Kids entire social lives run on their phones.

So on the matter of re-opening schools, there was no need for it that was related to their social well-being?

Why is texting friends bad?

My daughter has autism, and struggles to connect with her classmates. She gets overwhelmed in groups, and is shy talking in person sometimes.

Now that her classmates started messaging each other, she is actually being included a lot more. She has started messaging and setting up online play dates with her classmates. I was so proud when I found her playing Minecraft with a class mate while FaceTiming. She was playing with a friend!

I don’t care what anyone says, that is good for my daughter.

I don't know why, but your message moved me. Thanks for sharing! I'm happy for your daughter and wish her many friends, as many as she wants.

I haven't really read the research, but yeah, I don't think texting is bad and as you mentioned, it really is helpful to keep connected with friends. The one thing we found though is texting didn't last too long as they moved on to different apps (like Snapchat). I hope your daughter and friends can resist that change and just stick with simpler things like texting and FaceTime.

Your child is a special case. Speaking from experience, most kids get too sucked into the social aspect of phone use, to a detrimental degree. Group chats end up being the location of cyber bullying, for example.

There were no smartphones when I was young and I got bullied a lot. Kids bully wherever they interact. It's not the tech that's the problem.

Right but the tech creates some new forms of bullying, and they're in addition to the traditional forms of bullying. All of which still presumably exist.

For example, you can now bully people anonymously.

And you can bully people at any hour of the day or night - not just in public, in the brief periods between classes.

And with widespread camera phones you can not only make someone cry, you can video them crying, keep it forever, and send it to lots of people.

And don't forget that very fragile $300-1000 bit of electronics the kid is carrying, would be a real shame if something happened to it.

The fact that you can never escape the bullying is a huge differentiator from the before times, where coming home after school was a sanctuary (assuming you didn't come from an abusive household).

These days kids are 24/7 connected to what is going on in social media and group chats, and it never goes away.

If the “non-special cases” had parents that didn’t allow them to have iMessage, my daughter wouldn’t have anyone to FaceTime with.

Sure, and I'm sorry for that, but in general technology introduces severe social and learning challenges. Extreme enough to induce a measurable increase in teen suicides since the introduction of social media and mobile phones.

Yeah for me too. When I was young I was very active in chatboxes on local BBSes. There was no internet yet for normal people.

It would have been terrible if my parents would have banned that. But they were very progressive luckily.

As someone put it, that's from a time when the Internet was a place you went to (usually a corner) and, more important, a place that you could leave whenever you wanted. The dynamic is different.

As someone who didn't like school thwt much the thought of having to deal with some of those people 24/7 fills me with dread.

Presumably if time spent using these things is bad, then ensuring children spend no time on them till 8th grade will be an improvement. What am I missing?

I regularly see gangs of e-bike groms with cellphones terrorizing my town.

I'm not sure having a smartphone has at all impacted their outside time.

What age did you allow your kids to have a smartphone if you don’t mind me asking?

The path they took to get to this pledge feels very similar to the path anti-vaccination advocates took (ie something intuitively "feels" bad -> look for evidence to support that). If a study came out that showed evidence that having a smartphone at an early age actually improved educational outcomes, do you think these people would reverse their position? I would guess not because above all else, this is a value judgement ("These devices are quickly changing childhood for children. Playing outdoors, spending time with friends, reading books and hanging out with family is happening a lot less to make room for hours of snap chatting, instagramming, and catching up on YouTube.").

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a value judgement. But trying to foist your values onto others is not something feel the need to support.

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