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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc.

Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as catastrophic as many predicted. Our kid was in 7th grade during COVID and teachers each year report the effects are still being felt across many students. Of course, naturally great students recovered quickly and innately poor students remained poor but the biggest loss was in the large middle of B/C students.

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I followed a different approach with my son. We gave him a phone pretty early, and didn't even have a lot of rules around it (no family controls, etc).

The agreement I had with him: "Scroll all day, play video games, etc. That is my side of the agreement. And you also do your school work, learn, practice for exams, homework, etc. That is your side of the agreement. I'll trust you. If your grades get worse, i.e. you need help managing device time, we'll review/change this agreement."

We also sat down many times looking at content together, in attempt to teach him what's trust-worthy and what isn't, what's "healthy" and what isn't, etc. And of course we do other things together as well.

So far (knock on wood) my son has managed well - he is 16 now. He organizes his own time, and has learned when to play and when to work. And crucially he has learned when to disconnect from his devices to do what's necessary.

No kid is the same. I am not saying my approach is best or even right, I just offer it as another data point.

We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.

Why is that a bad thing? Choosing to be bored instead of mindlessly scrolling is great. Boredom was an important part of growing up for me.

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this?

We should do whatever they do.

On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.

In Japan and China, high-stakes entrance exams come earlier and play a stronger role than in the U.S. In China, the zhongkao (high school entrance exam, around age 15) and gaokao (college entrance exam, age 18) largely determine access to selective schools and universities. In Japan, competitive entrance exams for high schools (age 15) and universities (age 18).

That's really underselling it. Gaokao determines where you can live, where you can work, who your friends are, occasionally how much your family values you. They shut down airspace and conduct military/police patrols during examinations to sniff out cheaters. It's only the very wealthy who can just uproot their lives and send their kids to an Ivy/Stanford/Oxbridge/MIT and just skip the whole thing.

Responding to the OC, this is a downright awful solution to the current education problem in the U.S.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/PDF/9780674295391_sam...

I grew up a white kid in a very (90+%) Asian community. IMO, the biggest difference I observed comparing my white friends from other communities to my Asian friends in my community was the expectation of excellence. For the Asian kids, either they were succeeding, above and beyond, or they were a failure. "B is for 'Better not come home tonight', A is for 'Adequate'", as the jokes went.

And some of those kids still struggled. But the response was to push harder. Didn't get adequate grades that school year? You're not doing anything fun this summer, you're studying. Needless to say it was a culture shock going to college and meeting people who were shockingly cavalier about potentially failing classes.

https://youtu.be/q9ijfnlF_24

Steven He demonstrates what happens when an Asian kid tells their parents about getting a B.

There were some responses about educational expectations, but I would love to hear how folks in these Asian countries specifically deal with cell phones, social media, and these general media/online distractions.

Cultural pressure towards education, and phone bans left and right. Also, people are still addicted to their phones, including kids. But more controlled, I guess.

I only know through cultural osmosis and not real data but it sure seems like the expectation is for the kids to be up till midnight grinding away on homework.

As someone with difficulties early on in life and thus showing behavioral issues (what you describe as bullies and underachievers), I went through a system like this and I despised it. N=1 but segregating children at early age based on the behavior they're showing, i.e. the difficulties they're having, felt kinda cruel. It worked academically I guess, I ended up ok, but for many it just meant they just simmered in an environment of mediocrity and rarely made it out.

I get it especially with younger ages, but on the other hand if the student is persistently disruptive they should be removed for the sake of the other students. It's also unfair that 1 student hinders the education of 20+ others.

We did something similar. My daughter got her first phone last month, just in time to start high school. And I'm happy to say that the school district adjusted their mobile phone policy this year from being pretty restrictive, to an outright ban. I completely support that.

We're seeing more districts ban cell phones in the classroom. It makes sense; in my day, the most you could do is text and play Tetris. We didn't have apps that were weaponized to capture our attention and memory like the kids do now.

People keep talking about how catastrophic it was to close schools during COVID. We keep having catastrophes and no one does anything about it. If the kids missed school, make them go back longer. Large chunks of the country still have 2-3 months where the kids don't do anything; send them back then. If they are already doing year-round schooling, cancel after-school athletics and make them learn with that time instead.

It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.

This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.

To be very blunt: trashy parents with too much time on their hands will become enraged and raise a huge stink if their kid can't text them or answer their calls(!) while in class. So many will do this that schools just gave up.

That's why it's nice when states just make it a law. That shuts those people up (or at least forces them to go complain somewhere else, where they're more easily ignored and it takes more effort so they'll probably just give up).

(That's the middle-class schools—in really rough schools, teachers have to pick their battles because actual violence is on the table as a response, even among lower elementary kids, and admin's too busy dealing with things way more serious than some kid texting in class to back teachers up on small stuff like that)

I think as a general societal change, we need to stop catering to people simply because they "become enraged."

To be fair, there’s also a set who think their kid needs a phone on them at all times so they can make a call if there’s a school shooting. This doesn’t make any statistical sense as a justification (it might if more “school shootings” were indiscriminate mass shootings, but only a very tiny fraction are—not to downplay them, at all, but there are a couple statistical sieves here filtering for “a personal cell phone a student had saved a life” and the very first one is already filtering it down to almost nothing) but it’s a little easier to sympathize with the basic impulse, at least.

We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

Great onservation and great Fussell reference.

Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.

Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.

Fussell was such a fun read, and so useful in little (also fun) ways.

I distinctly remember seeing, several years ago, a photo of one of (I swear this is going to be basically apolitical) Trump's kids with their family, including one or more kids with toys, sitting in some kind of living-space with this perfectly spotless mirrored-on-all-sides table, and I was like "FUSSELL!!!!". Or all the gold in photos of that family in their home environments (a signal aimed squarely at Fussell's "Middle", which thinks "gold shit everywhere" is an "upper" signal, which it is not—unlike the mirrored table, which is Upper, because nobody who ever does their own cleaning would willingly deal with a fingerprint-magnet like that)

I guess one could quibble about the effectiveness of testing, but the longer trend was… upwards. Eyeballing the math graph, we’re at 55% basic competence. The peak was 65%. But doing a totally informal eyeball projection, we ought to be above 70% by now.

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