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Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can't imagine how it's like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent's garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today's youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can't imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
That's still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
He may not have been bullied, but he may have missed out on bonding and closeness that his peers enjoyed. There was a study that showed life is way better for kids if they don't have a phone, but only if their peers also don't have phones
This fact alone makes me conflicted about this. I don't want my kids to walk around having phones from an early age, but I know first hand that being excluded as a kid is not a enjoyable experience. And kids are vicious creatures to each other too.
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I'd said, he'll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there's literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can't do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to "vandalism" i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn't given us any money since 2014.
My neighborhood has the same problem. There's absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They're on the playground, they're biking on the sidewalks, they're playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they're f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.
Nobody can multi task. I wish this stupid myth would die.
"I'm good at multitasking" is just another way of saying you can't focus on one thing at a 🐿️ SQUIRREL!
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There's no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven't got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It's one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don't have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children's technology access, but I fear such groups' 'useful idiot' value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it's scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don't see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When's the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we fought valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it's a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be "cool" online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
Lol, I would've been bullied in school if I didn't have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
This, tbh. You don't get bullied for something, you get bullied because bullies want to bully.
I'm disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires."
—Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren't an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren't adults it's a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
*when I use the term young adult I mean ~16. Apparently young adult can also mean 18-25 but I've never seen it used in that context before.
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void" and "to not feel left out" is the correct solution at least for me.
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
After the SORA AI reveal today I'm starting to see that luddites have a point. I don't think we'll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I've seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I've seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don't even know how to use a phone. I don't see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn't teach you what a file system even is.
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don't want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren't is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
Uncool boomers be like: "It's the damn phones", when they've created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They've created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, "It's dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I'm talking to you?"
It seriously is part 'those damn phones'.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
