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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this

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My 13 year old has a phone. Most of the apps are blocked. Messages is open, and we tweak based on expectations how much he has access per day, and when. Right now it's 8:30pm to 9pm (so after sports and homework).

He can call and text me and my wife anytime of the day. Thankfully the school bans phone usage, so it's not a lot.

A handful of his friends have no phone. Most have, and all apps are accessible (not sure how parents configure age restricted content/apps).

It's a lot of work to limit and tweak and even his 1 minute a day on Safari (because I couldn't find a way to cut to 0) allowed him to create a TikTok and Instagram account (on web). I am a technologist... and gee my 13 year is a genius when trying to find ways to circumvent the restrictions. Every other week I have to change some minor thing in Settings. But my point is that it's a LOT of work... I can see why some people either completely ban or allow. But to me it's worth. Messages is open because I believe he needs to talk with his friends, but fuck Tiktok and Instagram and Youtube.

I’ve been told from some folks who work on child safety features and are passionate about the space that the features are often ignored by parents anyways :/

That may be part of the reason for difficulty of configuration. You might be in a small cohort of people actually using them. That cohort should be larger.

Heh. My son found that deleting and reinstalling an app resets the time limit.

Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are the worst. They are all blocked on our kids’ wifi as well as their phones.

I would forgo all the benefits of a smart phone if it meant my kids could grow up without one.

To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.

There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.

....yeah but then, they found out how to build & deliver mobile ADS & co, so bandwidth need exploded, bringing us to the "mobile web" we have today. E.g. including YT Ads popping up after 15 min in a meditation class :-D

There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.

Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.

Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.

All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.

The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283320908_Net_Child...

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