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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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