Comment by jasonjei
12 days ago
I think many of the comments in opposition to this are coming from people that do not have children. Many of those in support do. I speak as a parent of a child, and I think “parent brain” will affect your thoughts on this. Having said that, I grew up on dial up and very low tech HTML. Not social media which is an entirely different beast.
There is a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. NYU Prof. Jonathan Haidt argues that the rise of smartphones and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness. Suicides for both teenage girls and boys are up.
I’m choosing to send my kids to a school whose parents have also agreed to remove or drastically curb the use of social media. Not eliminate the creative sense of electronic tinkering.
I think it comes from the "I tinkered with tech as a kid!" mindset. It ignores the fact that smartphones are about as low-friction and consumption-centric as it gets when it comes to distracting material. If you want kids to learn about tech, then do it in a higher-friction deliberate context like a desktop computer.
Totally agree. I regularly hear that students should use tablets at school as it gets them used to technology they will use in the workplace. This is technology designed to be easy enough for an 80 year old to pick up and use, no training is required! Much better to be teaching them real work based activity & creative problem solving.
As a father of a 4 year old boy, I plan to remove smart phones and pads from my son for as long as possible. He can watch TV or play console/PC games but absolutely no mobile games for as long as I can. He will get a dumbphone maybe with a snake game when he grows up a bit.
In the mean time, I'll try to bring him to hiking, camping and other outdoor activities. If he is very into electronics then I'll introduce gaming and programming.
I'm also considering a no smartphone policy for myself. I cannot persuade my wife who is deep into scrolling hell already, sadly.
> I plan to remove smart phones and pads from my son for as long as possible.
It seems that once you send the kids to school, you no longer have full control over these things.
The friction is too big if you're the only parent with this policy. That's why "multiple schools join up" is a good thing.
Educational dos games. You can't beat them.
Where they're at an age before knowing FPS, MMOs they will have tons of fun jumping up and collecting words.
Word Rescue, Maths Rescue the Fun School series all hold weight to name a few.
Just because the old don't have hyper-ai-raytracing graphics doesn't mean they're not playable for the younger generations.
I've started introducing retro handhelds that can emulate most older console games to my kids.
They really like games like Tetris, Pokemon and Zelda.
It's fantastic.
That's something I have in mind. Is 6 years old a good age? My father exposed me to games like Alley cat and Bigtop when I was 6/7. He gave me 30 mins every weekend day. I might do the same to my son when he reaches 6.
I’m a parent. My kids are not getting smart phones for as long as I can reasonably demand it. I foresee this going into secondary school age.
Haidt is a reactionary who makes grandiose conjectures about the Kids These Days with little real scientific evidence to back them up. He's the same guy who threw a fit over safe spaces in colleges and made them out to be a way bigger deal than the were/are.
40% of the book is references. That doesn't seem like "little real scientific evidence".
He can be reactionary, and I don't agree with all of his views. But he is spot on about the negtive effect of smartphones and social media.
> But he is spot on about the negtive effect of smartphones and social media.
According to this article, he's not. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...
At least you have a choice. Other parents have little choice but to send their kids to the same school as everyone else in the neighbourhood. London-based academies are not going to be as exclusive as independent (private) schools.
I’m grateful I have that choice to send her to a Waldorf school and I want more parents to have more options.
Isn't banning smartphones rather an example of overprotective parenting?
No, it is protecting them from 100's of PhDs spending their days optimizing their apps/websites for addiction[0].
This what I explain to our kids and they understand it very well.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39987490
IMO the problem with that argument is similar to the problem with arguing stopping the kids from touching a whirling sawblade is overprotective - you can let them learn that way, but there is a nontrivial chance they will suffer extreme lasting harm before learning their mistake, so the calculus becomes avoiding the cases where the probability of irrevocable harm is significant.
I'm all in favor of letting kids make mistakes rather than trying to stop them from doing everything, and that past a certain point, your attempts to filter what they consume are doomed in most environments.
But to the best of my ability to judge, not exposing children to unfiltered 0-friction instant gratification for some number of years is going to be somewhat practically necessary to allow them to develop enough experience with longer-term reward seeking to make such decisions based on actual information about the rewards versus just picking the easy button every time.
Otherwise, we've all seen the portrayals for many centuries before cell phones of what happens when you have people who have never had to do long-term planning for significant rewards, and are bored of the lack of texture in just taking the easy hit every time. Cell phones have just commoditized failing the marshmellow experiment.
Everyone’s definition of overprotective parenting is different. But we do know the harms of smartphones. Many of us have decided to curb it as much as we can, just as we want to mitigate pre-adult drinking and marijuana consumption (or at least demonstrate an environment that produces the least harms).
For me I don’t mind her running around in a forest school or climbing on trees. Modern playgrounds are surprisingly sterile and overly safe.
Where is the boundary between appropriately protective parenting and overprotective parenting?
It’s a boundary set by childless internet commenters.
100% agree. My daughter's school in Blackheath has special Faraday cage pouches for each student. Children deposit their phones in their pouches and upon crossing the school gate the pouches get magnetically sealed until the student leaves school for the day. Parents are loving it.
I believe it is Haidt himself who said bringing phones is analogous to a kid in the 90s bringing in a portable TV and putting on a show during class, and no one thinking that it is out of place. Of course it is! As a society we've made the determination that personal TVs and music players are unacceptable in the classroom, but phones, the single most addictive device ever made, is OK?!
My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.
it sounds to me like you are describing overprotective parenting