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.
Denying your kid a smart phone is basically denying them a social life nowadays. 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.
*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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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”?
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.
Many kids need access to group messaging to even be told that there's something going on at foo's house at 6.
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.
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.
> 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.
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-...
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)
So on the matter of re-opening schools, there was no need for it that was related to their social well-being?