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.

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.

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”?

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.

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.

> 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?