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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, I never failed to recognize it.

I just failed to be able to do anything about it.

You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends.

This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless.

So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down in this forum. Just imagine across the whole polis.

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Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it I see are either “it’s too hard for the parents” or hypothetical (“they would have no social life”). There were tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of course things I did despite them but phones seem like a simple one for parents to control given teenagers can’t afford them otherwise until they start working at 16+. Allowing instant messaging via a computer seems like a nice middle ground.

I would have strongly agreed with you if we were talking ten years ago but with everything using two-factor authentication these days it pretty much a requirement to have a phone. Even for children to do school work.

Like there are parental control systems and all that you could set up but that requires you to be pretty tech savy as a parent. I think you are already doing great if you keep your child away from phones and tablets until they are of school age but keeping teenagers away from smart phones seems very unrealistic if you don't live in a remote commune or something.

I really, really wish it weren't the case.

Only if you're willing to ban them from ever going to friends' houses, where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

> where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

That'd already be much, much better than using it at every possible moment.

Why do people just give up proactively? Yes, you can't prevent it 100%, but you can still try to restrict it as much as possible.

> Why do people just give up proactively?

Because we're up against trillion dollar companies that employ armies of experts with the goal of inducing addictive behavior. We're deeply outgunned.

Because kids have a genuine need for socialization, and being the one without a phone means you just don't get invited to shit. Birthday parties, hangouts, random trips to the ice cream shop.

Because kids are smart. I'm very technical - I had a pfSense firewall, Pihole, and Apple's screen time on my kids' devices. They found ways around that within hours; kids at school swap VPN/proxy instructions and whatnot.

Because kids these days get a school laptop, on which I have zero admin rights.

Because I don't want to be a jail warden, I want to be a parent.

Yes, I understand all of that. What I meant was: refusing smartphones as long as possible. For example, as long as only ~50% of your kid's friends have a smartphone, it should be possible to still resist. Just don't be one of those parents who (unknowingly) help create the problem in the first place by succumbing to Big Tech on the first occasion.

A cell phone is available 168 hours a week. A friend's phone might be available, say, 10% of that?

Friend gets a new phone, gives you the old one. Neighbor has open wifi. Hide it deep in the giant pile of laundry in your bedroom.

Whack-a-mole is fun at an arcade. It's not fun when it's your kids.

That's still significantly better than having it available at the dinner table, no?

The goal of parenting is to raise good kids. Unfortunately, it's not always going to be fun.

We don't permit phones at the dinner table, no. Nor in the bedroom.

But we've learned things like "no Snapchat at all" make for a social pariah, which is frequently worse than the problem it's trying to solve.

We can always take the phone away. As a parent of a teenager, sometimes I have to make hard choices. This is one of them.

Kids don't need cellphones. We want them to have one often because of our own insecurities.

> We can always take the phone away.

Kids are… resourceful.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...

Last week, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy looked at the smart fridge in her kitchen and decided to try and talk to it: "I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my electronics again." Sure enough, it worked. The message Dorothy said out loud to her fridge was tweeted out by her Twitter account.

(And before that, she used her DS, her Wii, and a cousin's old iPod. There's always a friend's house, too.)

I'd posit that social media restricted-solely-to-a-fridge is still significantly less harmful than social media literally-always-within-arms-reach.

This was the best they could come up with on short/no notice.

$50 (or a hand-me-down from a friend) will buy you an Android burner phone that can hop on the neighbor's wifi.

Confiscate the hell out of it. That's what parenting is for. How much money is a kid going to spend on burner phones before deciding to just stop bringing them to the house?

> Confiscate the hell out of it.

People in prisons manage to conceal contraband (including cell phones) in their cells, and they have substantially fewer hiding spots.

Turning your house into a prison with random room tossings has consequences, too.

I don't really understand what you're arguing for here. Obviously prisons understand they can't catch everything, but they try anyway because it's still better than letting prisoners bring in whatever they want.

They try, and they fail comprehensively, and that's despite being very willing to do things that would be extremely clear child abuse if I tried them on my kids.

The prison warden doesn't care if the prisoners love him 20 years from now.

I ran a secret Ethernet cable to the router to circumvent parental Internet restrictions, that was in the early 2000s. Teenagers will be teenagers.

My dad took away my PC when I got bad grades and put it in his room.

I took the mobo, CPU, RAM, hard drive and PSU out of the case, put them in my backpack and went to my friends house. He never noticed.

That said, I still couldn't use the PC when I was at home. Physically taking away the machine wasn't really the punishment.

This would apply to cell phones and such too. Sure they might figure out some workaround that works sometimes, but it won't be the same.

> You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time.

Actually, I remember the opposite. I had problems with screen time so my parents put a password on the computer. It wasn't 100% effective, of course, but it was closer to 90% than 0%.

> You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time.

There might be bias here if one remembers one's own teenage years, because I'm sure many teenagers _think_ their parents don't have influence over them. If you ask the parents though I'm sure many would agree aren't fully in control, but do notice they have a lot of influence still.

Personally, the older I grow, the more I realize how much influence in general my parents actually had over me.

I want to add it is important to show that you are against those things as well, too many people react by shifting blame when they stand to gain more by saying, "Yeah, I don't like that either."

Regulation of social media probably polls pretty well, I think polls have even found that most high schoolers want to reduce or end their usage of it

Phone use during class time is banned in my kid's high schools.

Makes no difference -- it's completely unenforced by the teachers. They're practically physically adults, teachers don't want to risk the confrontation, etc. And the kids suffer for it.

And my youngest uses no social media but their mind is still eaten by constant phone usage.

More than social media, the problem is the device. The form factor.

The "smartphone" is a malevolent technology.

Petition to build Faraday cages into every public school classroom in the country

Phones are banned on school ground here and its working. My kids have never been allowed social media here at home, and they don't see friends doing it because phones are not allowed at school at all.

Neither give a shit about their phone and we have to force them to take it if they are going out so we can call them if we need them.

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