"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation"
I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.
They have the power to do it.
I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.
They have the power to do it.
(you will reply "don't do that then")
But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.
Note that I agree with your point overall. My kids have phones for times when they are away and might need to contact me. I'm just saying it isn't as bad as it sounds.
This isn't very compatible with also teaching children that they can't trust the majority of adults, and that every stranger is a potential danger.
that's not even true for adults. Why would you assume it's true for kids?
People can be wildly reluctant to just hand over a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment to a teenager in a busy street and hope they don't run off with it. Smartphone theft is still a thing.
Who owns a $2,000 phone which isn't insured and should they really be leaving their house?
How about this, I'll pick a random day in your future while you're out doing stuff to show up and break your phone in half. How much is that going to ruin your day?
I take your point though, but I have to wonder who in their right mind would go to times square to ask to borrow a phone. Surely you'd go somewhere less busy.
I remember about 10 or 12 years ago, I'd answer every incoming call. Many were wrong numbers (guy who had the phone number before we was, I kid you not, some sort of wine salesman... people were wanting to order crates of wine). But I'd answer. Now, not so much. I get 15 calls a day some days, all are robots. I screen through voicemail transcription most of the time, unless I recognize the number. Blocking does not good. Numbers in my area code mean nothing... a surprising number of robot calls match my own exchange number (why? what's the point?). For 3 weeks a few months ago, one even matched my own phone number but for the last two digits being transposed, but it wouldn't leave a voicemail.
I no longer have the reasonable ability to answer strange phone numbers. If it were just mean, I'd chalk it up to some idiosyncratic neurosis and be quiet, but my own impression is that everyone else is doing the same thing. We not only tore down the old POTS network, we got rid of all the norms around it.
I have phone numbers in an area code that just seems to get flooded with spam calls. Even our unpublished numbers get them so it doesn't seem like directed attacks, just broadcast spam.
I also have a phone number from a different area and I blocked that area code and everything near it.
The robocallers have found that if the fake caller id given matches the area code and exchange of the number being called, that more of the recipients are willing to answer.
And from a robocaller's perspective, getting folks to answer is critical to being able to transfer them to someone in the scam boiler room for reaping.
Messaging, calls, maps, notes but no way to take or view images. Marketed simply from a global brand.
Shocker, but those are probably not the people you are going to give a shit about after you leave school.
Of course they do, which is why any sane (imo) parent wouldn't let their child on social media to begin with. Basically feeding your child's developing brain into the dopamine farm, along with the "it's on the internet forever" tax.
Social media is a cancer, not some bizare tool for their social or economic wellbeing or general happiness.
Personally I think no phones until 16 is a good rule.
Cell phone and social media addictions arn't inevitabilities they are choices.
That being said, I can’t imagine myself drawing pictures, or playing boardgames every day with my friends when I was 13. Wouldn’t be happy if my parents didn’t let me play WoW/AoM with my friends. Obviously everyone is different, and I’m in no place to say you’re doing it wrong. Just trying to say how it would suck if I couldn’t do something that all my peers are allowed to do.
This all is the main reason why I support nation-wide social media bans. Would solve the issue if no kids were allowed.
But yeah, I support the school-wide smarthphone bans. Not uncommon in Tokyo.
Social development is very critical during school-age years.
In general around this topic, there is a lot of post hoc rationalisation about choices already made. I've actually got a family member approaching her 30s who has spent the last 2 decades mostly staring at a screen, and has nothing to show for it. So for me the choice is easy, maybe less so for my kids.
It makes an enormous difference for transit.
Knowing when the bus is arriving allows you to decide to walk. Not every places has buses that arrive on time. In Rome a bus can be late by 40 minutes, in which case walking is an option, especially if you are young.
nobody stops you from limiting your kid to bunch of whitelisted apps, for instance whatsapp (it has parental controls as well), duolingo, wikipedia, phone, SMS, calculator, maps, flashlight, sudoku, chess, camera
not exactly sure why you wanna ban cameras
Isn't it pretty easy to set up a whitelist of apps/websites kids are allowed to use?
Whether or not that's a healthy thing for your parent/child relationship is a different question.
OP already gave you your answer, you just chose to ignore it
It's simpler to take the phone away. And iPad. And stop hanging out with your friends that have it.
Phone management is hard to solve for pre-teen and teens.
It's like taking heroin away from an addict. They hate you for helping.
They are both very bad at things like my kids listening to Spotify with the screen off.
Qustodio also has no way to mark an app as "allowed even when they run out of time", or "this app doesn't count towards screen time" (like Spotify, for example).
Then on the PC it gets MUCH worse. I want tracking and blocking on my PCs for my kids' profiles, but if ONE kid runs out of time, ALL the PCs lock everyone out. No message, either. Just bounced to the login screen. Took me like a whole day to figure it out.
It's a legal loophole where the seller requests the check but the person delivering it has no binding liability to do so and they simply will not because it takes extra time. The economics practically guarantee the check won't be performed and the interface mechanics of carrier-seller means there's no practical way to prosecute either party when the carrier doesn't perform a requested ID check.
https://www.periodpaper.com/cdn/shop/products/EM2_315_1200x1...
The last time I ordered some tobacco a major, non-shady, licensed vendor literally had USPS pick it up and drop it straight in my mailbox.
Moreover, the point of these laws isn't to prevent any particular illegal sale. It's to eliminate the market and reduce the volume. In-person, cash transactions are difficult for parents to track. But most kids aren't going to risk their parents finding credit card charges from mail-order alcohol and tobacco vendors. If a large fraction of kids were actually using that loophole, then enforcement of those laws would be a higher priority, like it is with in-person sales.
Product bans do, in fact, work. For example, sports betting has skyrocketed since the Supreme Court overturned a ban on online gambling: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/01/sports-bettin....
It's not hard. If they need to be contacted get them a dumb phone. And yes, my kids will miss out. They will miss out on their attention span being destroyed, their ability to critically think destroyed, body issues, radicalization, horrible influences, etc... My children will miss out on all that and I'm very glad that will be the case. I'm not sure why other parents are rushing to destroy their kids brains but that's their choice.
I ran a summer camp for teenagers. They know how to get around that stuff if they want. They know how to hide it from their parents to keep access.
You’ll do far better to explain how these things are harmful, and help them make decisions that are healthy.
Below a certain age I’m sure it works for a time, but you will eventually have to find a balance.
That’s why parents want bans. Their kids are going to go where the other kids are. If they are all banned on instagram, they won’t care about finding a way onto a platform where none of their friends are.
>You’ll do far better to explain how these things are harmful, and help them make decisions that are healthy.
Yes. And the healthy decision is to not have a phone. That's like saying I should let my kid eat ice cream for dinner every night but talk to them about how it's better to eat healthy. I'm a parent. It's my job to make some decisions for my children.
Best of luck.
Sucks that we’re stuck as parents running an experiment on children where the only beneficiaries are corporations, and there is no correct answer.
2 of my 3 have never touched social media are are healthy, functioning adults with jobs and friends.
FOMO chasing Jones family bullshit.
If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.
In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.
Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.
I am sympathetic to the idea that social media may also have social development impacts separate from their negative social impacts, but my experience in life is that actually people appear to socially degenerate with overexposure. Thus we probably need some regulation analogous to forbidding smoking in restaurants but for social media or limiting gambler's access. But indeed, maybe on top of that we also need bans for minors.
It's not difficult.
Her and her friends don't need social media.
A kid that cant use a phone will sit home alone while others meet up. And I am actually glad my 13 years old has friend group she does in person things with.
2.) And yes, organization among 12 years old means that someone writes "lets do X" and other write back "cool". Those available show up. Those not available sometimes talk back and negotiate different time.
3.) If 5 12-16 years old kids organize in a group chat, not being on that chat means missing out spontaneously organized actions. Even if they are unusually serious and recall to call your parents instead of just jumping into action, you are not there to have input into agreements. So, the meetup will be when you are not available and it will be too late for you.
4.) And yes, even among adults, if others have to jump through special hoops to join you specifically whereas everyone else does not have such requirement ... you will miss out.
Yes, 12-14 years old act on impulse and organized spontaneously without creating org chart around it. That means forgetting to do extra steps so that people not being in chat even know what you are about to do.
I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my parents honestly about stuff I went through. It would have been much better to talk to me about things and get honest information about dangers.
Not doing something isn't enough. If your kids know about something, it isn't always going to matter what you do. If I were smart enough to know different folks did different things, I'm guessing other children are as well.
One of the exercises was to check out what you can and can't do with a locked-down smartphone. Several minutes later the kids figured out how to bypass parental controls using ChatGPT and the method spread like wildfire.
I recall defying my father's orders regularly. Teenagers who set their mind to something can be amazingly persistent. Most parents don't have the sort of resources required to control every aspect of their child's life like that. It's also harmful in the long run.
You can't fix a behavior issue with tech, just like you can't fix your computer by being good.
I can't imagine taking it away from my older kids (14,11). They use it to chat with friends and play games with them, do homework together, make plans and share common experiences and videos.
It's not as simple as you think. You have no idea how shitty screentime is how much of a cat and mouse game it is. It's pretty easy with a two year old, you just wait and see though...
Anyway, let's not assume everyone is a parent and ruin the whole online world with rules to "protect the children" made by the same people that never arrested any Epstein clients. We know they're not doing it to protect children. Let's not even pretend they are.
I live in Israel where kids are given a phone at an extremely young age (partially because of the security situation). Teachers give homework over WhatsApp, schools announce changes to the schedule, etc.
What I'm saying is it's almost not just up to you anymore, it really depends on your circumstances.
If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.
Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.
I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.
Wanting the government to levy a society-wide information tracking system because you don't want your child to be upset at you is incredibly selfish.
You don't have a problem with age verification for drivers license, or buying a gun, or buying alcohol. Why is social media so different?
Because of what that ban entails that the others don't.
With this said, if the government doesn't ban cellphones/tablets at school all of your blocking kids at home from electronics is fucking useless.
My daughter pulled this crap as a teenager where we banned her from social media... so she got an old tablet from a friend and setup all new accounts. It was only months later that we caught her at it.
Kids are way more resourceful than you think.
They'll do this kind of stuff even if we require spybotting the entire internet. Kids already lean on sketchy older siblings or friends or stolen/fake credentials to acquire booze illegally. Getting them to sign up for and verify online accounts would be next. Or paying/doing favors for random sketchy adults. Or buying them online, as the original article mentioned.
Anything more than the equivalent of "mark this device account as being PG/PG-13/Adult" isn't buying more security for kids, just more intrusion into the lives of everyone else, while pushing access into a black market that will create new dangers for the kids entering into it.
A device flag enabling an http header indicating a device account is "PG-13" could still allow a kid to sign up to non-adult sites online, but then have appropriate restrictions on usage etc applied to the accounts. Kids can access their friends, maybe the media cuts off during school hours, but they don't feel the need to escape the system, and are more likely to stay within it.
Requiring invasive overbearing authoritarian systems be put in place with the excuse of saving the children won't accomplish the stated goal, just the unstated one.
Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].
Some choice exerpts:
> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.
> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.
> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”
> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”
[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/inside-the-anti-tech-rebe...
e.g. How effective it will be: less than they might think, software is not infallible magic
What the side effects might be - more than they might think - excluding the underage means verifying the age of everyone.
So articles like this aim to raise awareness, all of this is clearly spelled out in the article.
"Of the parents and carers of children aged 21 and under who responded to Question 12 on the full-length version of the consultation, 89% supported “a legal requirement for social media services to have a minimum age of access”."
Caveats and limitations
Users should note the following when interpreting these results:
Self-selecting sample
The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics.
Question routing
These questions were only presented to respondents who wanted to respond to Chapter 2: Interventions for safer, more positive experiences. All questions in this section were optional. Finally, Question 13 was only presented to respondents who answered “Yes” to Question 12 (i.e. those who supported a legal requirement for a minimum age of access in principle). The 96% figure therefore relates to the level of agreement with a minimum age of at least 16 among those parents and carers who opted to respond to this Chapter and already supported some form of minimum age requirement. It does not represent the views of all consultation respondents, nor all parents and carers who responded.
Full consultation only
The figures relate only to the full-length version of the consultation, not the streamlined parents’ and children’s consultations. These figures should be treated as provisional. A comprehensive analysis of all consultation responses will be published separately.consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristic
The representative study isn't published yet. The provisional headline 90% number is.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/educatio...
apple's parental controls are total joke, per app blocks are not good at all, what you want is content type blocks, which of course is impossible.
example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254480754?sortBy=rank
Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.
The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.
Apparently parenting "its too hard", you "dont know how hard it is", and the alternative of "not having kids" is somehow impractical.