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My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

• KungFuJohnny 6y ago
  Title is completely misleading. The problem has nothing to do with an iPhone. It has 100% to do with bad parenting. The author even acknowledges this, but I guess blaming the iPhone gets more clicks than "Poor parenting harms child".
  • echelon 6y ago
    That's a bit like saying addictive drugs themselves aren't a problem. Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit. It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain.
    • minusthebrandon 6y ago
      My wife and I both work full-time and we still stick to my daughter's iPad restrictions: only an hour a day, no Instagram or TikTok or YouTube at all, and she only gets it after homework and chores and other things are done. We never take it anywhere. It's important that parents set AND KEEP boundaries. My daughter now knows not to expect to be able to Snapchat her friends or anyone else because she's never been able to. When she mentions that her friends all have it, we remind her that our house is not their house and we have our rules in place for a reason, which we are always willing to explain. While I agree that screens and TV ARE very addicting, that doesn't mean that parents are powerless or that the majority of the problems brought up in this article are not the fault of the parents.
      • _zamorano_ 6y ago
        Yeah, it's doable and congratulations for achieving. But anyway, he is right. For most parents is an uphill battle against tech and social media they're bound to lose due to mostly exhaustion.
      • londons_explore 6y ago
        Lack of ability to snapchat friends might not seem important... But communication is key to nearly everything in life, and not being part of those snapchat rumours, disputes and controversies now will probably mean your daughter doesn't get as good at the skills to interact with her peers in 20 years time.
        • minusthebrandon 6y ago
          She interacts with her peers at school and with her family... by that same token, ANYONE who grew up before Snapchat or the Internet had or has lacking social skills. Also, she CAN FaceTime. I would not consider Snapchat or TikTok to be "socializing with friends" for an 8 year old.
          • NegativeLatency 6y ago
            I missed out on texting because of similar choices by my parents, at the time it was not fun
          • jjk166 6y ago
            > She interacts with her peers at school and with her family... by that same token, ANYONE who grew up before Snapchat or the Internet had or has lacking social skills. You know how we don't really get this whole social media thing the kids are into these days? That's because we lack those social skills. Just like how your parents' generation struggles with E-mail despite it being so simple, because you grew up with that. It might not bother you that you're bad at Telegram or whatever because none of your peers use it either. But her peers do.
            • minusthebrandon 6y ago
              My parents struggling with e-mail is no way the same thing as lacking social skills. That just seems a lack of technology skills. My point was that saying Snapchat or social media leads to greater social skills than what previous generations had is very hard for me to believe.
      • ccleve 6y ago
        How old is your child? Whether you can get away with this very much depends on the child.
        • minusthebrandon 6y ago
          She's 8. I'll grant that this works for us now. As she ages, we'll give her more responsibility for handling boundaries on her own.
    • jjk166 6y ago
      You clearly didn't read the article. Phones certainly can be a problem, but the problem here has nothing to do with the phone.
      • echelon 6y ago
        I did read the article and saw the author blaming themselves and calling themselves bad parents. It's not all their fault. They're fighting an asymmetric war. Millions of parents are.
        • jjk166 6y ago
          Oh, you read the article where a mother repeatedly says her 11 year old daughter is just like a crack addict because she prefers being on her phone to making her bed? The article where the mother admits to going into fits of rage and punishes the 11 year old child for doing nothing that isn't normally tolerated even in this already very strict household? The article where this mother of an 11 year old blames nothing but the phone for the fact that this girl entering into adolescence behaves differently than when she was a child? No, this article was written by a narcissist who can't handle her little girl growing up and rather than dealing with it in a healthy way is instead raging against an inanimate object.
          • goatlover 6y ago
            Nine hours on a phone during the day is normal for an eleven year old? That sounds like a problem.
            • jjk166 6y ago
              Having never been an 11 year old girl in a pandemic, I can't really speak to what "normal" is. Based on the the girl's behavior as described in the article, it certainly has had no noticeable negative effects.
              • onemoresoop 6y ago
    • justforyou 6y ago
      >> That's a bit like saying addictive drugs themselves aren't a problem. You clearly feel that statement is false but don't provide any support for your strange point of view.
    • dijksterhuis 6y ago
      > That's a bit like saying addictive drugs themselves aren't a problem. I mean... They're not. They're inanimate f----- objects. They've never maliciously set out to cause someone harm because they're inanimate f----- objects. They don't have an understanding of the concept of morals or ethics because they're inanimate f----- objects. When I ingest them into my body -- that's when all hell breaks loose. They become a problem for me when I use them. > Technology is designed to trick humans into engaging with it. They use us for profit. Who is this mythical "they"? Technology is designed to do many jobs. Some of them include gamification to "maximise engagement" or some other cringeworthy buzzword. Some of them are literally as simple as "turn the lights off at 10pm" or "wake me up at 10am". It's how we, as a collective species, implement and use technology that's usually the problem. "technology" itself is, again, an inanimate f----- object. > It's asymmetric warfare. One or two parents, with jobs and responsibilities, against kids with peer pressure and billion dollar industries hawking them on, claws in their back and brain. I think this is called life? Yes, lots of things all happen at the same time and there's alway societal pressures one way or another. But calling it warfare is pretty extreme and may be something useful to reflect on.
      • michaelt 6y ago
        > They're not. They're inanimate f----- objects. [...] They become a problem for me when I use them. In common usage of the english language, a thing can be a 'problem' without being sentient or unavoidable. A pothole in the highway can be a problem if it's damaging people's cars - even if they could avoid it by driving more cautiously.
        • dijksterhuis 6y ago
          I see what you're getting, and I like the pothole analogy. I agree with the fact that it can be used like that in the English language, but I disagree with the idea behind it. In the pothole analogy - it's like saying potholes are the reason for all these people's cars being damaged. If no cars were driving over the pothole then the pothole wouldn't be a problem as no damage would ever be caused! It's an inanimate f----- object. It's just there. It's the fact that people are driving cars on a road that has potholes that causes their cars to be damaged. It's some action that was taken that causes an effect to occur. Then we get into the murky world of who is actually responsible and what is the solution. Which I don't have an answer for.
  • cultus 6y ago
    Parents are mortals, and modern apps are specifically designed to be addictive. It's the parent's fault, sure, but it is also the fault of the unethical practices of social media. Also, when you're talking about older children and teens, there's really a limit to how much you can actually control them.
  • brlewis 6y ago
    What emotional chord was struck with you that drove you to use absolutes like "completely", "nothing to do with", and "100%" when the primary bad parenting the author acknowledges is buying the daughter an iPhone too early?
    • jjk166 6y ago
      Not OP, but buying an iphone too early was definitely not the problem here.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ccleve 6y ago
    As the parent of a twelve year old, I can tell you that it's not so simple. I gave my son an old computer a couple of years ago because he expressed a vague interest in learning to code like his daddy. That really didn't work out. But he discovered a great big world out there, and the computer was his window to it. And yes, the effects on his creativity were the same as for the child in the article. So we tried, and partly succeeded, in limiting his time on it. But the truth is, there is a great deal for him to learn on YouTube, and we often do it together. His Minecraft creations are incredible. He maintains relationships with friends, including a distant cousin, through Discord and gaming. He sets up offline playdates the same way. These are not bad things. Plus, with the pandemic, his schooling is all remote now. He has to log on in the morning and jump from Zoom class to class until early afternoon, and then all of his homework and reading is on Google Classroom. No, I can't limit access if we want him to attend school. The problem here is not one of addiction and weak parenting. It's that screen time is genuinely valuable, and figuring out how to balance on-screen and off-screen activities isn't easy.
    • souprock 6y ago
      It was a trivial problem until remote education. Simply remove the network connection. As a kid I had a computer and a few precious programming books. I could program, or... not much really. I guess I could have enjoyed WordPerfect. As a parent now, I really need an answer for the remote education. I've tried keeping screens visible to parents. That really limits the parents, who have other things to deal with. Parental availability causes a massive reduction in time for online classes. For reference in case somebody has ideas of a technical nature, mostly I'm dealing with Chromebooks going via DD-WRT, and I don't know much about either. There's also Android and Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Problems are web games, pointless videos, and reddit. Classes are at FLVS, EFSC, Khan Academy, and various textbook publishers like Pearson. Class video appears on all the popular video platforms, not counting the NSFW ones.
  • nineplay 6y ago
    I think it's more of a caution/commiseration article, with a bit of sadness at kids inevitably growing up. I'm not going to sit and pretend that I have iron-clad rules on electronics and my kids never get more screen time than Bill Gates might recommend. We're all figuring out how to navigate it, and most of us are doing it imperfectly.
  • natchy 6y ago
    During the rise of smart phones I wouldn’t have blamed parents. It was an unknown, assumed to be like tv (which the article states) But with everything we know now, there’s no excuse. Parents are being irresponsible letting their child have a smart device. A ten year old? Forget it.
    • alex_duf 6y ago
      I think it's easy to say, but harder to apply when the said ten years old is reporting all their friends has a smartphone and as such they're missing on social events, private jokes or made fun of. My niece went through that and my sister caved in. I get it. I'm with you in principle but the reality is harder than that in my opinion.
  • abfan1127 6y ago
    I think you're right. giving in to "keep the peace" is the road to hell. As a parent of a 4, 8, and 13 yo, boundaries are incredibly important. Draw the line. Grow a back bone, pay the short term price for the long term investment. Parenting isn't easy. But most rewarding things aren't.
  • y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
    > bad parenting Or is it? Maybe it's actually good parenting and they only perceive the outcome to be bad because of misguided ideas of what "good children" should be. Case in point: if it wasn't for my addiction to video games growing up and constantly finding ways around my parent's restrictions, I would never have become a software developer. That much is certain. Not only that, but I would have a horrid disdain for my parents much like my step-sister (now in her 30s) does for her mother (whom was always praised for being a "good parent") that restricted everything when she was growing up; so much so that she moved more than 7,000 miles away when she finally reached college age. Somehow everyone thinks they're an expert on parenting and that there's only one way to parent a child and it's a one-size-fits-all situation. Frankly that's asinine. People come in all flavors and sizes so to speak. What you consider to be "good parenting" might be viewed as bad parenting by another person. In that sense, there's a subjective component to parenting. I've seen a lot of parenting elitists here on HN and I doubt many of you even have children let alone understand the complexities that comes with parenting them at various stages.
  • ianseyer 6y ago
    Here is some peer-reviewed research on how little an affect parent control of phone usage has on phone addiction: https://journals.lww.com/jan/fulltext/2018/04000/does_parental_control_work_with_smartphone.8.aspx https://journals.lww.com/jan/fulltext/2018/04000/does_parent... There is a multi-billion dollar concerted effort by the largest companies in the world to get an iron grip on the attention of children at a level of granularity never before seen - don't pretend like that isn't a novel cultural force that should be reckoned with.
• akerl_ 6y ago
  It’s not clear to me how they’ve decided their child is no longer “a creative genius”. It sounds like she’s just creating things via the phone now, and so the content isn’t literally sitting on the floor in the living room. Whether it’s desirable for their child to be making digital content and publishing it is another question entirely, but the title premise never seems to be addressed directly. The article is a long-winded way to say ~“we keep making up arbitrary rules for the phone, and then we realize they’re arbitrary so we change them, but we never actually sit down and pick some sane and long-lived rules”.
  • Synaesthesia 6y ago
    I certainly agree and it is different. However sitting and watching TV for hours at a time wasn't good either! We can actually take technology and make it something worthwhile and enriching. It doesn't have to be this way. When TV came out there was actually a lot of hope that it could be used to educate people for example.
• Ishmaeli 6y ago
  Looks like correlation, not causation. Our precocious angels have been transforming into sullen monsters at the onset of adolescence since the beginning of time. Do we really think they would have stayed precocious angels forever, if only they had never discovered comic books or rock'n'roll or TV or video games or whatever the current teenage vice happens to be? Sure, there is good evidence that smartphones are more addictive than a lot of other pastimes and devices, but the fact that your daughter turned into a teenager isn't that.
  • berberous 6y ago
    I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then.
    • onemoresoop 6y ago
      She'd get a childhood without being a phone junkie. 9 hours a day is extremely worrying for an adult to spend on a phone but for a child it is way worse, they are in their formative years and that would turn into their baseline
    • Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then. I have 4 active mobile phones and I cannot understand the allure people who claim to be 'addicted' to phones have with them. I actually dread the time I spend on them, as the UX is so much worse when used to interface with Internet than a PC/Laptop in my opinion. I also grew up at a time before smartphones but I grew up on the Internet using computers/laptops and admittedly spend a large time of my Life on both, for work and leisure, but I still cannot understand this seemingly prevalent disease that has afflicted so many. And I do have what some may deem an addictive personality, specifically to adrenaline and endorphins. I think the common variable is the lack of time spent outside cities and their homes and have an almost pathological aversion to Nature. I can assure you that the latest Twitter beef seems incredibly insignificant after a 10 mile hike and watching the sunset in total silence, more should try it. Believe me I was there for its first incarnations and the forum 'flame wars,' of the 90s and early 2000s; they're only fun so many times until you grow out of them (ideally in your teens) and they all predictably start and end the same way. Its really not that interesting. > Im not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 As for this, I agree with OP; I went to private school most of my life with many helicopter parents who swore their children were supposed prodigies only to seem them 'throw it all away' after they left the 8th grade and got their first taste of freedom they discovered members of the opposite sex, cars, status, drugs and booze and many ended up in continuation schools as they did it all in excess. I'm personally glad I went to one night school class (as I always skipped morning classes) my freshman year of HS just to see what happens to people like that, it was massive learning experience but also a deterrent to not fall into those traps. It also got me interested in computer networking as I was in a class sponsored by Cisco and my fascination with tech went beyond just soldering/hacking Playstation and Dreamcast consoles and ripping games to sell at school. I think the bias and their views tends to lean toward their disappointment, but some people are just too easily susceptible and are often coerced by their parents into a certain path, and once they have any semblance of freedom they just rebel against it all. And I can understand that as I have a few cousins that ended up that way and we could all see it coming from a very young age. To be honest the people who I found to be most successful in Life, beyond just financial and material wealth, and over all well adjusted were people whose parents just let them become who they wanted after their toddler years and then nurtured and supported their skills and talents that way. They had very healthy relationships with their families, often after turbulent teenage years, and were very open and free thinking about problem solving and World views. Everyone is prone to peer pressure, especially in your early teens when you have no idea who you are and often are so quick to give into group think to fit in (we're biologically hardwired that way for survival), so I can see why some parents may want to wait until 14 or older. But I finis it hard to accept the consequences these devices are supposedly creating. Social Media 'balling' and the supposed depression that follows for so many seem insignificant when you grew up seeing what job your friend finished for Arab Shieks in Saudi Arabia and Dubai to a bunch Zonda Rs and Helicopters for a lark on a Tuesday morning. It was just funny, and kind of sad to think anyone with much money was that crass and had such poor taste. I personally think its a mistake, but I understand the reasoning. As, anecdotally, I mentioned I grew up on the Internet and I'm very grateful to my family that I was allowed the freedom and the opportunity to be subjected to all of those positive and negative influences in the early days of the Internet as it helped narrow down who and what it was that I really wanted in my Life. Sheltering your children from the harsh realities of the World may seem like the right thing to do, I still recall the aftermath online in the Columbine shooting to this day, but it has many unintended consequences; the World is a very messy place and being a *young adult) and having never developed any coping mechanisms for stress or dealing with difficult situations as you get coaxed into the World is one of the saddest things I have ever encountered. I think this what you are really seeing on many campuses in University in the US and Canada (I started to see the rise of it as I left in 2009) and the toxic rise in cancel-culture online that's bled into the real World. It's pushed by people who never learned to deal with the often very brutal realities, that the World is marred with conflict and filled with paradoxes and that its a constant battle for sanity and reason to prevail; but equally that it is your responsibility as a Human to navigate that and make the most of it and your Life. Because if you're a student and must have a job to pay for tuition, rent and bills you really aren't going to be getting riled up about the 'Sociological and degrading Epistemological implications' of not having gender-less/trans bathrooms on campus and need to riot and disrupt classes until the entire campus becomes a safe space in order to cope with those ramifications while you waste the next 6 years to write a dissertation on gender studies as a result of it.
• okareaman 6y ago
  Little girls grow up into tweens obsessed with pop stars and friends and then into teens who rebel to find their own way. No amount of sheltering can stop it.
  • plutonorm 6y ago
    And what hideous world it would be if we could. Who wants little clones? Narcissists who want to live through their children.
    • bradlys 6y ago
      > Who wants little clones? Narcissists who want to live through their children. Feels like that's most parents these days. At least - feels like it is within the bay area.
  • scott31 6y ago
    some of them don't
  • baq 6y ago
    and the grownups who aren't their parents know this and are ready to make money on that with nothing but cost for the user/product. i don't think it's strange that parents don't want their children to be products.
• nashashmi 6y ago
  Legos also harm creativity. Perfection also harms creativity. In fact there was a economic theorist who claimed that by introducing limitations in a system you also introduce entrepreneurship and innovation.
  • onemoresoop 6y ago
    Legos? Their innate limitation as simple bricks that can be shaped into many things is what makes them creative in my opinion. Though I suspect what you may be hinting at. If kids have no toys they'd use their imagination more or make their own toys.
    • nashashmi 6y ago
      Legos constrain creativity to simple objects that get stuck together. The creativity is not applicable in the real world and hurts imagination of the world that exists. Yes, what you said. And now after saying all that I realize when comparisons are made of US to developing countries the same harbingers to creativity and innovation appear where if a situation in America can be resolved through a particular means, the lack of such means become an obstacle to the similar rise of developing countries.
  • adaml_623 6y ago
    I would love it if you clarifies your point or found a name for the economic theorist. I will admit that a lego kit with instructions is very different to a collection of lego parts and I would encourage every parent to buy buckets of assorted bits rather than kits that might end up staying on a shelf once assembled
    • nashashmi 6y ago
      The gift of doubt article Albert O. Hirschman
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• monkin 6y ago
  How is this “iPhone” fault? “Smartphone” isn’t good for SEO anymore?
  • mzkply 6y ago
    The share of iPhone for today's teenagers is much higher than the regular population. Much of it from the natural progression from old iPod Touches, where they built their accounts, apps etc. Looks like 85% share in the US: http://www.pipersandler.com/2col.aspx?id=287&releaseid=18206 http://www.pipersandler.com/2col.aspx?id=287&releaseid=18206
    • monkin 6y ago
      It’s not about smartphones, same thing was years ago with “I bought my child a PC, and now he’s stop doing anything...”. It’s bad parenting, addictive social media’s or games that’s responsible for that, not device itself.
    • damnencryption 6y ago
      Interesting. Time to buy $AAPL
  • onemoresoop 6y ago
    I don't think it's about IPhone or smartphones per see but the technology/software running on them which turns them into skinner boxes and which are not even constrained to certain physicals spaces as they are being carried and used everywhere. And the 9 hours on the phone is an absolutely worrying thing.
  • m4rtink 6y ago
    It could be a deciding factor - modern smartphones and tablets are already very skewed to content consumption rather than content creation, and iOS devices even more so with their walled garden & app censorship approach. While its preatty simple to start coding on a Windoss/Linux PC, Android and iOS devices are not self hosting, you need to download an SDK, set device into developer mode, etc. - a barrier in itself. On iOS it's even more complicated if you wanted to write an app for your iPhone and share it with friends - expensive developer subscription & draconian app review! So my worry is we will loose a generation of developers who would otherwise get to coding and sharing of their creation on PCs if their first and only device is a locked down cosume-only device like an iPhone.
• lnsru 6y ago
  Familiar teacher told me not to give any phone or tablet for school aged kids. I wanted to buy iPad for my son and then buy LEGO EV3. LEGO apparently does not like windows. But I’ll listen to the advice. She is in normal school in normal district, but there are enough cases of smartphone addiction. Kids are getting aggressive and need psychiatrist when the phone is being taken away. And these cases occur more and more often. So as a father I don’t want to open this can of works as long as I can. Schools should bad phones in the first place.
• remote_phone 6y ago
  “If only I never bought a phone...” Meanwhile, she self-admittedly said she broke all her rules regarding the phone. Also her child grew up into a teenager. Kids don’t stay the same forever.
• draw_down 6y ago
  Parents’ estimation of their child’s mental and creative acuity is famously reliable.
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  good! hopefully she lost all her creativity.
• asciimov 6y ago
  Sounds like two different issues: 1. A child that is growing up. 2. A parent that gives in too much. This lady needs to set rules for use, and then be firm with them. If you don't want your child to use a device for more than an hour a day, don't let them use it for nine. All this child is doing is learning that their parent is a push over. You gotta be firm and push back.
• aazaa 6y ago
  The article doesn't focus on what's going on outside of the phone. 14 is a pivotal age, because it's about that time that high school starts. A lot of what the author describes sounds like a girl beginning the process of detaching herself from her parents. But there could be other factors at work.
• whymauri 6y ago
  This is incredibly dramatic. Buy her some drawing and art apps. Lean into the TikTok thing and find her a local dance or drama troupe. This is what we did with my younger sister, who is the same age. Instead of painting on a canvas, she paints digitally. Instead of bemoaning her TikToks, we've taken her to singing and dancing competitions, which she's won. Or, perhaps, accept that during a pandemic, when your child's entire social sphere has collapsed, the internet, Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok, et. al. are the closest they can get to interacting with and making friends. >When friends visit, she occasionally asks them to watch her latest TikTok videos. Some are even funny and creative. Or so I tell myself. It helps with the guilt. I can't be the only person who finds this comment to be really sad. This isn't the iPhone's fault. This is someone failing to support their child's hobbies because they're not the perfect idyllic vision they had. End of story.
  • giarc 6y ago
    It's bigger than supporting her hobby. She's addicted to the phone, it's very clear, it drives her every action during the day. If her addiction was painting, and she had meltdowns from not finding her brush, or fighting with mom because she can't stay up late, her mom might have the same reaction. The author obviously wanted to allow for a balance but it quickly grew out of control to the point where the only thing that mattered was her phone. That's not healthy, and that's not failing to support her hobby.
• x87678r 6y ago
  I don't really like the article, but to me there is a problem and it isn't just teenagers but adults as well, everywhere you go people are just mindlessly phone out and scrolling. Games are sucking a bunch of time as well. Quarantining has made it worse. You'd hope people were more educated or exposed to cool ideas but given the debate on the election and the most popular videos on youtube it doesn't seem to be that way. Maybe its just a new normal and I'm old. I feel lucky the internet didn't exist when I was young.
• parksy 6y ago
  My dad smashed my computer around the laundry (where the computer lived) with my cricket bat because I was "playing games" instead of studying. "playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game. With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation. But just like my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots, who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    You are a lucky one, because at that time to your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities. I’m afraid it is not so with an iPhone. Our phones take without giving. Now excuse me I should probably log off and do something useful.
    • kemayo 6y ago
      My daughter has learned a lot about video editing, having fallen into the "Gatcha Life" community. It's a legitimate life skill.
      • Yetanfou 6y ago
        > It's a legitimate life skill. ...this month, maybe this year, until the next fad hits the 'net and all those influency types need to adapt or exit.
        • boomfus 6y ago
          Video editing has nothing to do with being an influencer lol. That is a very transferrable skill to a lot of industries.
          • Turing_Machine 6y ago
• stolenmerch 6y ago
  All of these things can be true at the same time: 1) They are bad parents 2) They are good parents 3) Smartphones are a qualitatively different addiction problem than TV, comic books, or other demonized technology of yore 4) It is correlation not causation 5) Her problems were partly caused by the iPhone
  • abfan1127 6y ago
    how is 1 and 2 true at the same time? It seems more like he set boundaries, then let his daughter run past them. Setting boundaries is hard, it takes strength, but you can't sacrifice boundaries to "keep the peace". Short team peace is long term hell.
    • shireboy 6y ago
      They are bad parents for not sticking to boundaries on occasions. They are good parents for caring enough to try to have boundaries,, thinking about the positive and negative impact the phone and apps may have on her. Sure, nothing can be true and false _in the same respect and same time_ (Law of Non-Contradiction), but I routinely feel I'm both a good and bad parent.
      • abfan1127 6y ago
        I agree on all points. I assumed you meant it that way, but wasn't sure.
• deleted 6y ago
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• anonunivgrad 6y ago
  The problem isn’t the phone, is that she’s being socialized into adulthood by a bad influence: the crowd. Not just her friends at school, but the national and global crowd she can access through the phone. You can stop it, but you won’t. The messages we give to girls now are awful. They are taught by the crowd to freely wield their sexual and social power instead of being taught to use it thoughtfully. This power is intoxicating and can only be tamed by strong values. They will be indoctrinated against your “outdated” parental authority. Their “heroes” will be criminals and bad women like Cardi B. If you really want to stop that, pull her out of the school she’s going to, find a ‘conservative’ school to send her to, and spend time teaching your values at home. You probably won’t do any of this. It’s not the phone, it’s the values and who is teaching them. And right now, that’s not you.
• kemayo 6y ago
  > Somewhere along the way, I realize that apps like TikTok and Instagram are impervious to Apple’s Screen Time limit. They work even when the rest of her phone shuts down. To keep the peace, I let it slide. The author is completely wrong about this, so I can only assume that their kid is indeed being creative and has manipulated them into believing it. Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends.
  • onemoresoop 6y ago
    > Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends This time it is so different. On the landline with friends you could talk but not be manipulated by external actors. Landlines are not exactly skinner boxes and also they cannot be thrown into one's pocket and be with them virtually everywhere. This time it is different.
  • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    2000 years ago and Plato would say that books ruins creativity.
  • ianmobbs 6y ago
    I actually noticed this the other day. I set a 10 minute time limit on Instagram, and while I'll get the "5 minutes left" reminder, it won't kick me out of the app the way it does for other apps. Running iOS 14.2.
    • kemayo 6y ago
      Also 14.2, I went and checked this on my own phone. It both gave me the 5 minute warning, and then locked the app when the limit expired. Could be a bug somewhere that I'm not being hit by, of course. Also, could be the article writer using parent-controlled screen time limits and having accidentally(?) unchecked the "block at limit" option in the rule, which would let the phone-user hit the "ignore limit" button for it.
• synaesthesisx 6y ago
  "A real public health issue is widespread apathy, likely as a byproduct of enough easy to access content to basically numb you in a cloud of short-term dopamine hits in exchange for long-term lack of fulfillment and motivation." - @nikillinit "The modern devil is cheap dopamine." - @naval
• adamzapasnik 6y ago
  I think a lot of people are missing the point. That could be attributed to the poor title, though. The way I see it, pre-phone their daughter was probably much more engaged with her parents and was doing more manual creative stuff. After the phone appeared, she distanced herself and got absorbed by it. I don't get why so many people here are trying to defend smartphones/social media? Isn't it pretty obvious they are addictive? And to a young kid, that doesn't know any better, it can get really bad.
  • sequoia 6y ago
    Agreed that these can be bad (my kids have some socials but I keep an eye on them and have lots of talks about pitfalls to avoid), but for the sake of argument I can't help pointing out that what you're describing is a normal process of individuation that teens all go through. Social attention focused inward toward family --> Social attention turning outward towards others + establishing an identity apart from that of the family. This is totally normal.
  • Jyaif 6y ago
    Is being addicted to creating tiktkok/instagram content to get likes such a bad thing? The fight to stand out on those social networks forces you to be creative.
    • sibeliuss 6y ago
      I'd argue that the fight to stand out on these networks forces you, rather, into a low-level depression.
  • JoeCianflone 6y ago
    Its the job of the parent to set limits.
  • donmcronald 6y ago
    Some apps are addictive, not all of them. The biggest problem IMO is that "no phone" isn't an option. Kids need a phone to participate in society. That's just the way it is. The problem I see is that phones have super addictive apps like TikTok that target young kids, so giving them the "good half" of a phone means you also end up giving them the "bad half" and kids aren't good at understanding why the bad half is bad for them. It's like serving a kid a plate of food with vegetables and meth side-by-side and the meth dealer is making every effort they can to push the meth into the vegetables.
• Dig1t 6y ago
  > A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone. I don't think it's the phone itself that was the problem here, I think its allowing your teenager unfettered access to social media. TikTok, Facebook, IG, are not particularly healthy IMO. There is something to look at here with the loss of interest in reading and being creative. iPhones are in fact very good outlets for creativity, its just that children need limits within them just like anything else. Parents should be engaged with what kids are actually doing on their devices and be able to set boundaries for their digital lives. I'm all for being creative, and I think digital tools can be a real boon to it. Making games, videos, digital art, programming etc. are all awesome, character building experiences. Scrolling through feeds for 9 hours a day watching celebrities do hand-jives and gossip, not as much..
  • sequoia 6y ago
    > A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone. SCHOOL! SCHOOL! A thousand times: school! Of course a child who likes reading for leisure is going to do it less readily when they are told what books to read and forced to read them on someone else's schedule and analyze rather than enjoy them. I have no idea why people are blaming the phone and not school here.
• greysonp 6y ago
  A lot of the comments here seem to be saying that (1) kids getting addicted to phones is no different than getting addicted to TV, books, etc, and that this is just the latest iteration of a complaint parents have had for generations and (2) this person is a bad parent. I used to agree with (1), but lately I'm inclined to think that this time, it really is different. Very different. And the primary reason is that unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more, on a scale we've never seen before. Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. TV isn't a bi-directional communication platform that has thrown teenagers into an arena where they're communicating with thousands of people at a time when they're still figuring out how to communicate in small groups. Regarding (2), I think people are being far too critical. The author acknowledges many of their own missteps, and they're also going through a time where, iPhone or not, their daughter is growing apart from them, and I imagine that's very difficult emotionally. I also feel like they really humanized how budging a little bit on rules here and there can spiral out of control, and how that feels. I really appreciated that perspective.
  • analog31 6y ago
    "Bad parent" can be applied to anything that goes wrong, and is an empty assertion. And it seems to be asymmetrically applied to mothers, not fathers. Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat." This bias in the literature makes it look like there are some brilliant parents out there, who have found the secret for success that the rest of us can "just" follow. There are of course parallels in the business literature. The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents. I overheard a discussion between two friends about the effects of TV on behavior. One friend's argument: "Of course commercial TV affects behavior. That's its purpose." This stuff is designed to manipulate us. Maybe that's possible with books too, but books have just not risen to that level of sophistication.
    • nemo1618 6y ago
• xtracto 6y ago
  This article reminded me of my dad, who in 1991 desperate because my brother and I spent a lot of time playing Nintendo bought this book: https://www.amazon.com/Video-Kids-Making-Sense-Nintendo/dp/0674937090 https://www.amazon.com/Video-Kids-Making-Sense-Nintendo/dp/0.... The problem is not the technology, the problem is as she mentions in passing bad parenting. If it wasn't an iPhone it would be "talking through the landline" (remember ALF's starting scene? it was an issue for us kids in the 80s/90s) Cable TV, or marijuana or any other addictive passtime.
• zubspace 6y ago
  I believe this is a huge problem in our society. And I recommmend everyone who downplays it to watch "The social dilemma". There are a few aspects which are worrying: - Social pressure to be connected constantly increases for children below 14 years. - Sites like TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, etc. are designed to be addictive. Children at such a young age do not have the same level of self control like you. - The longer kids spend time on these platforms, the smaller their bubble gets where they live in. I understand that as a good parent you can try to explain such things and guide them. But many won't. Recently I was invited to a school meeting about screen time. I was shocked at some recommendations, for example, age = hours of screen time per week. Also many parents trust tablets and phones way more than desktops. This also worries me, because arguably there are more ways to be creative on desktops. I also spent endless hours playing video games when I was young and chatting about them on forums and irc. But social media is on a whole other level and I think most people do not even realize it.
  • dba7dba 6y ago
    One big recommendation for all to watch "The social dilemma" on netflix also. The social media apps on the phones are specifically agonized over, tested, and refined continuously to increase interaction, aka make users into addicts.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    > Social pressure to be connected constantly increases for children below 14 years. This is absolutely a problem, but I don't think it's a problem that can be solved at an individual level, and denying this privilege to your child would IMO do more harm than good as they'd miss out on social events or provide a reason for bullying, etc. Withdrawing from social media and the bullshit rat race of the "attention economy" is absolutely the right thing to do, but it has to be a voluntary decision. I don't have a link to it but I remember reading an article which was saying something alone the lines of everyone having a limited amount of "weirdness points" and that we must spend them wisely. In today's society, being isolated from social media is a "weirdness point" (whether we like it or not) and it's up to each individual to determine whether it is worth for them to take the hit. I have withdrawn from social media as an adult because I am at a stage in life where I don't have to prove anything to anyone, don't have to be "cool" kid and have other ways to play the "status game". However for a typical teenager social media popularity and the "cool" factor is probably their biggest assets when it comes to status and I don't think it's fair to be putting them at a disadvantage by denying them access to it.
• smaryjerry 6y ago
  Labeling the phone one object causing the problem is inaccurate. It is a world of possibilities and the unlimited aspect of it is what make it’s so addictive. It would be like if I said walking was addictive because we always do it. Social media is the actual culprit. Think about how much attention it takes just to baby sit a toddler. Now online they can get 100x more attention than any parent could ever give, not only attention but appreciation. Everything is liked or hearted online a hundred times over. They need to understand love from family is worth more than a million likes from most online friends and strangers.
• npapag7 6y ago
  I am addicted to. And probably deoressed. Only physical activity helps.
• skee0083 6y ago
  God what an uptight protestant asshole. Just give the girl a phone you aweful chud.
  • dang 6y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• EGreg 6y ago
  Somewhere along the way, I realize that apps like TikTok and Instagram are impervious to Apple’s Screen Time limit. They work even when the rest of her phone shuts down. To keep the peace, I let it slide. Wat?
  • pgib 6y ago
    Yeah, pretty sure that's not accurate. I seem able to set app-specific limits for my kids. But I guess I better double-check!
• sequoia 6y ago
  Buried lede: > My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed. Perhaps it is not just the iPhone, but school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention that is preventing her from pursuing creative interests? As a homeschooling parent whose kids have been in school at times, I see this first hand. School is exhausting. Between rising unnaturally early (which leaves kids tired), rushing and bustling kids on their daily commute, most of the daylight hours blocked for school then homework when you get home not to mention whatever homework the teachers decide to assign to parents, and did I mention the kids are exhausted by the end of the day due to early wake-up? Compulsory daily full-time school for children may be good for some things but it would take a lot to convince me that it increases their creativity. When my kids home school they will spend a lot of time playing roblox or whatever, but then they'll spend hours playing outdoors, decide to do a cooking project that takes all morning–currently one of mine is getting into "bushcraft" and he'll watch hours of videos about making fires, carving etc. before putting the tips it into practice (safely) during times outdoors, where he spends hours and hours. Then he'll come back, play roblox for an hour, then help clean up and put the younger kids to bed. I am concerned about over-use/addictive nature of computers & phones, but I think it's myopic to see your otherwise creative child tired and craving mental distraction and say "aha the phone is the problem." Step back and look at the whole picture. Edit: I must admit I commented after reading only half the article (shame on me). It does in fact seem like her daughter has a phone-use problem. What I say above remains true, however.
  • ttul 6y ago
    I have done home schooling and regular public schooling. If you can afford to have a parent be at home full time with your kids, you are amongst the wealthiest in the world. You are fortunate.
    • rekabis 6y ago
      Or the poorest. Especially if you cannot find a job that pays more than daytime child care costs. Then it’s cheaper to have a parent stay at home, despite the poverty level, because any daycare available costs more than any available job brings in.
• cosmiccatnap 6y ago
  This is such a boomer mentality. You haven't been young in a long time evidently but let me help you out. 1. You are spending all your time now on homework that is actually demanding, if not in difficultly at least in volume. 2. You are just handed the collective knowledge of all of humanity, forget about hormones for a second which are already a struggle, you get to learn that half of america thinks there was a conspiracy to kill jfk, you get to learn about goulogs and consentration camps and you get to come to the conclusion that being creative is a struggle in a society that would pay an accountant over an artist any day and you somehow think this is the fault of the device reading the history back to her. 3. You add all that to the crazy changes your going through in terms of social conduct and physical appearance, along with that desire to be cool and noticed and it's not hard to see why this is a rough time for almost everyone. Just keep her away from the hard drugs and try and take her out to do things she wants to do when you can find the time and it will probably all turn out alright in the end, but running around blaming iphones is a good way to make sure when a problem really does happen she's less inclined to bring it up for fear you will take the phone away
• helen___keller 6y ago
  We have a natural tendency to worry about kids, if the technology really is different this time, and dangerous to be giving kids. Here's another perspective: are there socially well-adjusted adults who get sucked into it and ruin their lives? We're inclined to care about the kids most, but kids are resilient and continue to grow and adjust and change over the years. What about their parents? Are there adults who get sucked into social media addiction and it ruins their lives? If yes, how common would you say it is? (I'm not trying to lead an answer here. I thought about it for a couple minutes and I haven't decided for myself.)
  • souprock 6y ago
    Lost years as an adult might be more easily replaced. For a kid who blows off high school, where is the recovery? Many paths in life are more-or-less closed off.
    • helen___keller 6y ago
      I'm not suggesting it's better or worse for an adult to be addicted, I'm suggesting that if social media is dangerously addictive we'd see addicts across the age spectrum, and I'm asking whether people feel like that is happening.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• yayr 6y ago
  As others pointed out, there are some solutions: - use screentime to understand the issues and set guidances or restrictions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982 - have open discussions about behavioural patterns in your kids to make them understand better what is good for them To find the right balance between convenience, social pressures and the things that are actually good for oneself even if inconvenient is an everlasting struggle. This is best to be addressed early in life with good guidance.
• JoeCianflone 6y ago
  What a load of shit. I’m sorry I have an 11 year old who has an iPod touch the real problem here is lax parenting. My son cannot use his phone alone in his room alone, he doesn’t have TikTok or any social media apps. He cannot take it to school (not that there’s a school to go to at the moment) or take it out of the house unless he asks first and 95% of the time we don’t let him. Kids test—that’s like an iron law of childhood. It’s your job as a parent to set boundaries. Set the rules and set the consequences and then FOLLOW THROUGH on the consequences. This is the equivalent of lazy parents in the 80s blaming “death metal” for their children’s problems, or lazy parents in the 90s blaming video games, or 2000s parents blaming the internet. It’s you—all these problems are your fault.
  • devenblake 6y ago
    I had parents sort of like you when I was younger, which is why I attempted suicide at 14. Strict parenting puts weights on your kids' backs. Eventually they'll snap in half.
    • JoeCianflone 6y ago
      1 I’m sorry about your attempted suicide and I hope you’re ok now. 2 We are not that strict, my kids have limits but they are known and they know what happens if they break the rules. But you are right there is a balance and this parent seems to not be balanced at all and they’re blaming the phone. She said her daughter wore her down and she caved and allowed her TikTok—I’m sorry but as a parent that is on her. Limits do need to grow and change as the kid gets older but unfettered access to everything at 11 is not the phones fault.
      • devenblake 6y ago
        Yes, but if you read the article you can see that much of the phone's interruption in their lives is their kid making videos. That kid is creating content. Children under the age of 13 certainly shouldn't be on TikTok but that's not the parent's fault, that's the platform's. Preventing your children from accessing social media is taking away their support network. If you're as strict as you say - and refusing to let your son take his phone out of the house is strict - he's certainly not going to trust you because _you don't trust him_. Your job as a parent is to let your kids grow, not to put these kids of boundaries on them. Let them look up to you for advice, not look to you every five minutes to see if what they're doing is allowed. If you were parenting well you wouldn't need to put more than a couple rules on your kids because they'd be good people anyway. They won't have those kids of rules on them as adults. There are two people I know in real life with parents more strict than mine (and my parents aren't as strict as you); one of them has grown to develop anger issues and the other has such little life experience that it's sometimes hard to talk to them ("what's X?", "what's Y?").
• tomcat27 6y ago
  I find it hard to think this is not causation. I had a habit opening LinkedIn every now and then to glance at the content. Sometimes I would quickly close, sometimes I read a bit and close, sometimes longer.. anyway that's a distraction from whatever I am doing. I did a small experiment recently on LinkedIn. I unfollowed everyone. My LinkedIn feed is empty. I don't open LinkedIn as much now, think about it.. it faded away. I really like having no feed. Then I wondered what Facebook would be like without a Feed.
• 0xdky 6y ago
  It is my store too as a parent of a single child losing creativity to instant pleasures and doom scrolling on an iPhone. To add salt to injury, the dance team at school she is part of encourages them to post on Facebook and Instagram. They have study groups on Facebook, Discord, Slack and even Instagram. When I demand they use simple old style text messaging, she has friends with fancy phones but no SIM card and depend on Instagram messaging for everything. I have given up after going through frustrating, helpless and endless hours of convincing. Lack of ability to focus will be the serious limiting factor for innovation and creativity. I see it at work where you get engineers cannot persevere to solve hard problems. Agile has become them excuse to do some quick hack and throw it across the wall.
  • 0xdky 6y ago
    Apologies for a response riddled with typos.
  • 0xdky 6y ago
    Wish folks down voting would provide the reason. As a parent, I would love to learn if I am not solving the real problem.
• throwaway1723 6y ago
  We all are yet to see what this current youtube-raised generation of iChildren will turn out to be. And I already don't like what I see, even though they are still only 5-10 years old: zero attention span, inability to be still and contemplative, useless hyperactivity, zero respect to parents yet enormous fear of police and other powers that be, lack of personal responsibility, whole life documented and filed in the cloud, total dependency on internet and electricity, so much that they are at the fringe of going insane or commiting a suicide when there's an outage... And oh if it were only their parents who'll reap what they sow.
• transreal 6y ago
  As a technologist and parent myself, I find the biggest problem to be the lack of fine grained parental controls. Yes, technology in of itself is not the issue, it is the highly addictive nature of certain software, but on different devices, limiting what they can/can't do is very difficult. When school started online, my 8 year old was initially really engaged, but then started getting a bit bored once she got into it, and would watch Youtube videos. I was fine with an hour after she finished her school work, but the time she spent watching slowly increased until she wasn't even doing her homework. She'd erase the history on her browser so I couldn't tell how long she was watching for (but fortunately I know the tricks, and was able to figure it out). This led me to blocking Youtube (and all other video sites) on the router. I looked into Youtube kids, but I can't limit it in the ways I want (certain times of day, certain videos), and so I just outright ban it. I also found Youtube too addictive with its short videos, and so now only allow Netflix Kids at certain times. The best solution IMO would be that I could say something like "these apps/sites need my permission", and then every time she tried watching a video or opening that app, etc, I'd get a notification on my phone asking if I should allow it. That would really put the control in the parent's hands. Could apply to tik tok too - I may be OK with it if my kid has to get permission to post a video, and get permission after every 20 mins of use/watching 20 videos. Until such controls are available, I just saying a blanket 'no' to some of these apps/sites. She can use them how she sees fit once she's emancipated.
  • nikisweeting 6y ago
    Learning to jailbreak and flash routers to get around these parental controls is what got me into programming. I had managed to get myself unrestricted internet access from pretty much age 10 onwards using a "broken" laptop I had secretly fixed, and the "restricted" iPod Touch that I had unlocked by editing the Springboard.plist. At age 14 they had a talk with me where they said they finally were going to give me some restricted internet access and I almost burst out laughing because I had been online hours per day for the last 4 years, but managed to keep it together. Ten years later and it's a fun story we all laugh about. I wonder what I would be doing today if it wasn't for those parental controls motivating me to break systems.
  • donmcronald 6y ago
• martokus 6y ago
  The forbidden fruit tastes best, right. My theory is that like everything this requires a balance and gradual introduction. Start early, let kids make mistakes, punish them for said mistakes, let them learn lessons. Enforcing super strict rules has never helped anyone I think. 1h a day is quite strict in my opinion especially if consumed in multiple sessions. If I had just started doing something and it took me 15min to get fully absorbed and in 15min I had to call it quits I'd be pretty angry myself to be honest. I can make an analogy with access to sweets here. Our boy aged 6 now has had unrestricted access to a cupboard full of variety of sweets since he was 3. And believe me he loves sweets! Technically he can go and take as many sweets as many times as he wants to and no one would probably understand. But we've said it is 2 sweets a day, reasonable quantities. This was strictly enforced early on and now we can 100% trust him to pick whatever he wants when he wants. Because he knows when is a good time and what is a good amount. He'll even come home from school some days and say he'll only eat one sweet today as they've had chocolate cake for pudding at school. So cut your kids some slack and let them learn themselves rather than locking everything behind locks - physical or digital.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • nikisweeting 6y ago
    This seems to be a growing trend in parenting literature, enforce things more laxly, teach good habits, and let kids self-regulate. https://www.mother.ly/news/should-you-let-your-kids-eat-as-much-halloween-candy-as-they-want https://www.mother.ly/news/should-you-let-your-kids-eat-as-m...
    • nikisweeting 6y ago
      nvm, sugar seems to be a special case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFyF9px20Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFyF9px20Y
• a4444f 6y ago
  Their pet girl uses her phone to have some contact with real people.
• racl101 6y ago
  No offense, but the author / parent sounds pretty passive when it come to parenting. It could've been an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch or whatever or a Macbook. The point being: the parent never enforced the limits nor stood their ground. Of course your kid is gonna plow you over once they know all they need to do is just ask. You gotta set those limits and stick to what you say. No matter how awkward or unpleasant it may seem. They'll eventually understand, and on some level, respect you more for being a disciplinarian. Sometimes kids act out though they secretly crave rules and boundaries.
• paxys 6y ago
  Can also just write - "My daughter is growing up". Kids at 9 years old and at 14 years old are really from two different planets.
• fish44 6y ago
  stop posting medium links - they are now behind a wall - the point of medium is to expose content - not hide it bwhind a wall
• nartz 6y ago
  The key is NOT the phone itself, but the APPS and the Use of the phone. Author seems to be struggling with the connected-kid culture around apps like Instagram and TikTok - which are transforming the school-based culture to something where to be popular, you have to be connected and posting. This is what needs to be controlled IMHO. As many mention, there are MANY positive uses where the phone is a 100% better medium to teach or learn than old school books or otherwise. With my kids, I focus on installing and limiting the games and videos to ones that I find productive and educational.
• stunt 6y ago
  Seriously!! I’m sure we all have something to say about this. But, this isn’t the type of content that we normally discuss here. I hate to point out something is off-topic, and I know even that is against guideline. But, sometimes I feel that HN must add a checkmark to the submit form to confirm what you are posting is relevant as a reminder.
• mattdeboard 6y ago
  > But some days I get so angry, I rage against the phone. I say the iPhone is evil. It’s stealing her childhood. > ... > The worst part is that our child has changed. She used to rush to our bed as soon as she woke, demanding cuddles and to “Talk Friends.” We played with puppets and stuffed animals in the morning, getting the “friends” to sing and act out scenes from plays like Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast. We all got involved. Those days are gone. I understand she’s probably too big for “Talk Friends,” but it’s heartbreaking watching her race into our room each morning to grab her phone. The problem is not the phone. The problem is making the child choose between attachment and authenticity. She doesn't run to you anymore because you're constantly fixated & raging about the phone. Not because she prefers her phone to her parents. You've told her it's not safe to be herself around you.
• pavel_lishin 6y ago
  > She used to rush to our bed as soon as she woke, demanding cuddles and to “Talk Friends.” We played with puppets and stuffed animals in the morning, getting the “friends” to sing and act out scenes from plays like Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast. I'm sure this sucks to experience, and I'll experience it in my due time, but - your kid has friends now, and is no longer wholly dependent on you. It's life. Before cellphones, this person would be lamenting that her kid was spending all her time at the mall with her friends, or off in the woods running around with the neighborhood children. You gotta let Rapunzel out of the tower.
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  Quote: "If she’s eating dinner early and by herself, I’ll let her keep watching James Charles on YouTube" Well, that right there is your mistake. Instead of James Charles introduce her to VSauce or Primitive Technology or any number of youtube channels that are truly related to creativity /mind inquiry. I used to watch a lot of Discovery Channels on TV when I grew up in the 90's. Some stuff I've learned back then it became gateway drug to tinker with electronics, which led to my current profession as programmer.
• tmaly 6y ago
  I pick up my daughter from school at 2:30. I always ask her what her favorite part of the day was and she says recess.
• g42gregory 6y ago
  iPhone is designed to be as addictive as crack cocaine by the best Computer Science PhDs in the world. It would be hard to resist that. While I am not ready to produce a moral judgement on that, I do think it’s a real problem.
• TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
  Yes, at some point during the day, I take the electronics away, and enable wifi parental controls (which pretty much blocks everything like YouTube, etc.). This is usually followed by a brief meltdown, then books/paints/whatever come out and the analog world is revisited.
• lameiam 6y ago
  isn't everyone's kid a creative genius?
• 4pple33 6y ago
  I'm definitely considered a part of this generation of kids that grew up on the Iphone, and though I disagree with this blog on a lot of areas (as listed in the top comments), there definitely are things that this blog really hits home for. Iphones and social media are a vice on my generation. I used social media a lot a few years ago, but I had to quit it because I learned about nosurf[1] and how horrible for the mind these new technologies can be. However, many people I know are stuck in this addiction - scrolling on Instagram 4+ hours a day, sending streaks[2] to 10 people at once on Snapchat, who screw up their sleep schedule just to get another anime episode in. They obsess over the number of likes they get on each post and send empty platitudes to each other on their birthdays. Of course these things I just listed are not the fault of each and every person, but a product of what happens when you bring together a billion dollar company who wants people to spend as much time on their app as possible, and an impressionable generation whose brains haven't even finished developing yet. From reading this, you may come to the conclusion that I'm some jaded teenager who hates technology and social media. But I understand the magnitude of technology and the potential it brings. I'd say I'm much more not only intelligent but wiser because of the countless podcasts, debates, lectures, articles, and music I've consumed in my 'internet life'. But that is beside the point - This parent's experience sent a chill down my spine because it is almost exactly how my parents must have felt when I got my first phone. We originally had a contract (not using it after 10, not using it in bed, etc.) but little by little my addictive brain pushed those boundaries, and when I didn't get what I wanted I had tantrums. And though I've curbed on my screen time (at least on my phone), There's always that pull, always that invisible string that attaches me to my phone. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this experience that this parent had with her child almost exactly mirrors my parent's experience with me, and most likely many, many other parents.
• kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  I am in my late 30s. Our generation had very little access to computers growing up but we used what we had to tinker and experiment with them. I mean sure many people just played games but there was enough to do for those of us who were interested. The current generation is basically digitally connected from the day they are born and yet the 'general purpose computing devices' they have access to are walled gardens like phones and tablets. And with the way Apple is going about it, even Macbooks will soon join the ranks.
• threepio 6y ago
  I was a creative genius, and then I bought myself an iPhone That's worse
  • craftinator 6y ago
    I was a creative genius, then I went to boring high school classes for 8 hours a day and lost interest in anything that looked remotely like learning. Once I picked up an Arduino however, I found my passion in programming and motion control, and went and got myself a degree.
• gnicholas 6y ago
  I wonder how much parental behavior can improve outcomes, either in the short run or long run. Do kids pick up on parents' habits and mimic them? If a family had strict rules that even parents followed, would kids be more likely to feel that the rules are fair and/or appropriate. Even if this doesn't work in the short run, it's possible that after kids grow up, they would adopt healthier habits based on what they saw their parents doing when they were kids. I have seen similar things happen with eating habits, where kids initially rejected parental rules but as adults they adopted healthy habits that their parents modeled for them when they were growing up.
• shakezula 6y ago
  I have two questions: 1) How much of this behavior is just a young child growing up and clashing with their parents? The author seems to blame the iPhone for their personality change, but it just seems to me that it coincides with a common period of rapid emotional and physical growth. 2) As others have pointed out - why not try and find a better medium between technology and creativity? Seems to me this is just the classic battle between tradition and technology.
• anonu 6y ago
  This resonates with me as the father of young children. The older one is two and already is a pro at using my phone. She knows where all the apps are and easily switches between youtube, netflix, spotify, various games. Initially I was amazed at the exploration and learning. So I let it happen. Of course, its easier to just have no phone time with a 2 year old. So I sympathize with parents of older kids where the dynamic becomes one of peer pressure. Not really condoning phone use with teenagers and I'll play the devil's advocate here: If "everyone is doing it" - is that OK? Why have your kid be the outlier in these situations? I actually had to look up James Charles, referenced in the article. James is 21. The iPhone came out in 2007 - so presumably James has had access or been around a smartphone well before his teenage years. Yet, the videos are creative and immensely popular. The point is, creativity is less in physical space and more in cyber space now...
• deleted 6y ago
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• lqet 6y ago
  > I realize with horror that she’s spent nine hours on the phone that day. She was only awake at 11. > My daughter doesn’t make collages or jewelry or sew anymore. A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone. > Getting her to make a card for a family member — something she once did for fun — is like getting her to clean her room > Yet still, each day is a battle over only one thing. > And little by little, our daughter has chipped away at our rules and resolve. Congratulations, your child is now in puberty.
  • hartator 6y ago
    > Congratulations, your child is now in puberty. Yes, it's like they are despair to find a simple explanation for their child disinterest in things they want her to be interested in when it's just their child growing up.
  • disown 6y ago
    Did no one besides you read the article? FTA: "My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14..." People are arguing about everything from extended school hours, excessive homework to climate change in this thread. Could it be that the daughter was raised in a highly sheltered environment and once she hit puberty, she had other interests besides collages, jewelry and sewing? I wrote this in another comment... "It's a tale as old as time. Every child is a genius, angel, perfect until they hit puberty. Then we find "rock 'n roll", "rap music", "radio", "MTV", "television" or other culprits for corrupting our youth. Today it is social media. Tomorrow it will be VR. God knows what comes after that." The entire article is about an overprotective and controlling mother complaining that her daughter is now a teenager. Instead of blaming rap music, she's blaming the iPhone.
    • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      That might be true, if electronic gadgets were the same as previous obsessions. But they're different. They change from second to second, providing a level of stimulation unprecedented in human experience. It's possible we're not going to adapt well to this e-world. There's no reason to think an evolved ape has the wiring to make the transition without trauma. Imagine if the iPhone were heroin. Would we be so casual in dismissing it?
• xg15 6y ago
  This thread exercising various mental gymnastics to find other causes for her behavior honestly reminds me of a bunch of climate change deniers arguing why human activity has nothing to do with atmospheric heating. Being cautious with assuming causations is usually a good idea - but it falls flat when we know the causal chains that are at work. In the case of climate change, we know for a fact that humanity is releasing ever-growing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and we also know the physical chain reactions this CO2 will trigger. Predicting climate change in broad strokes is not statistical guesswork, it's just applying physics. Likewise, we know apps are addictive because they are actively being designed that way. Maximizing user retention and engagement is what app developers do. It's how they make money and it's one of the core metrics that investors use to estimate the value of an app. So you have someone showing signs of addiction after using a device that was specifically designed to be addictive. Occam's razor really doesn't give a lot of room for alternative hypotheses here.
  • e_tm_ 6y ago
    100%. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
  • disown 6y ago
    > honestly reminds me of a bunch of climate change deniers What does this have to do with climate change? Ever consider getting help for your climate change addiction? "My daugher was a creative genuis, and then we introduced her to climate change." Apparently for some people, climate change isn't a science, it's a religion. > So you have someone showing signs of addiction after using a device that was specifically designed to be addictive. Occam's razor really doesn't give a lot of room for alternative hypotheses here. Could be that. Or maybe it's something else..."My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14..." It could be that the mother controlled her daughter's life and once she's hit puberty, she got a little bit rebellious. She wasn't so interesting in sewing as when she was 8 and needed her mother's approval. But now her priorities is friends, boys, etc? It's a tale as old as time. Every child is a genius, angel, perfect until they hit puberty. Then we find "rock 'n roll", "rap music", "radio", "MTV", "television" or other culprits for corrupting our youth. Today it is social media. Tomorrow it will be VR. God knows what comes after that. Maybe it's climate change. That's what causing these teenagers to become moody and rebellious.
• samatman 6y ago
  So she used to do collages, and now she builds dream homes in Roblox and makes Tik-Toks? Spends less time dreaming, and more time hanging out with her friends in virtual environments? Congratulations, your creative child is now a budding creative teenager. She'll be fine. You're cruising to do damage to your relationship with her with all this pearl-clutching, though. Might keep an eye on that.
• khazhoux 6y ago
  My 12-year-old daughter is also obsessed with her devices! She spends at least 3 hours a day writing on her laptop (she's on her 7th 150-page+ fantasy book), drawing and making comics on her ipad (taking full advantage of layers and other techniques), and animating on her phone ("Gacha" characters).
  • giantrobot 6y ago
    Oh no, her creativity!
• deleted 6y ago
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• ElijahLynn 6y ago
  This is the reason we send our children to a Waldorf school. Most of the parents don't buy their kids phones or let them have unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet and devices. This means our kids are not desperate to fit in with the other kids. Our kids are very creative as a result and are constantly doing things and playing and have good social skills.
  • selimthegrim 6y ago
    My ex gf went to a Waldorf school. She proceeded to CU Boulder and promptly failed out of pre engineering classes because she didn't know how to use a computer.
  • smabie 6y ago
    I had a friend that went to Waldorf school. All in all, he ended up not knowing anything and got such bad SAT scores he couldn't go to college. He was really upset, blaming his parents for ruining his life by sending him to a school in which you don't end up actually learning anything.
  • ElijahLynn 6y ago
    I am a high-school dropout myself and am mostly self-taught. I started a locksmith business in the Denver metro area when I was 21 and taught myself how to pick locks, open vehicles and service locks on homes, automobiles and businesses and a ton of other things as well. I did use books and videos to learn. I switched to software engineering when I was 30 and did the same thing. I don't think learning specific material in school is really that important but more so the learning how to learn combined with "creativity". We have far too many people in this world who are good at following instructions but what we really need in my opinion is people who are creative and can solve tough problems, not follow instructions. Learning things along the way is easy if there is a solid creative base and persistence. I suppose there can be some highly specialized areas where you need to be in school the whole way and get certifications etc (e.g. surgeon, law). But in practicality, I want to have creative children who grow up to be multi-talented and have confidence that they can learn whatever they need to learn to solve problems of the modern world. This is why we send them to a Waldorf school.
• edcastano 6y ago
  In our family I use the Gryphon router/app combo and Apple Screentime to monitor and enforce limits and Rooster Money to create incentives for kids to do chores and make good choices. Twenty years from now, this could make a big difference as to whether my kids are disciplined, independent, employable adults, or screen junkies. As a society, I believe screen addiction is creating a reversion to the mean scenario where mean focus and productivity is decreasing over time as companies continue to optimize how they manipulate people for profit. This is another case of socialize the costs, privatize the profits.
• treeman79 6y ago
  Same experience. Got a teenage girl an iPhone. She became a horrible person. She lost it for a month. Became the Sweetest happiest person ever. Gave it back. Exact same mood shift. Repeat for years. It caused her such horrific depression. Mostly from social media drama. As an adult she’s finally realizing how her mood shifts because of it. Younger kids can get iPhones when they move out. They are quite happy in life, although Dad is very unfair about phones.
• jedberg 6y ago
  The rule in our house is no electronics when the sun is up (on weekdays, we're a little more lax on weekends). So in the summer, that means very little TV time, and in the winter, a lot more. So far that seems to work pretty well. But they are only single digit ages.
• flerchin 6y ago
  Is the reason I took away the phones and gave my kids PCs. They create far more.
• johnfn 6y ago
  I started reading this article really really wanting to agree, but ended up thinking that a large part of the problem here is that the parent is not making enough effort to understand her child. The parent says "my daughter was a creative genius, and then..." as if to imply that she isn't any more. But it sure sounds like she has creative pursuits to me: * "She wants Roblox. All the kids have it, and it seems harmless enough. She’s building her dream house" This sounds like a creative pursuit to me. * "She wants to talk with her friends. I don’t see any harm in FaceTime." She's talking with her friends. * "She says she wants to do a TikTok while we’re in the “aesthetic” woods" She's creating TikToks! How cool is that, and how creative! Again we see she's not a passive consumer, she's still a creator - it's just that the medium has changed. The real problem here is that the daughter used to pursue creative activities that the parent approved of (sewing, drawing). Now she does creative activities that the parent does not approve of or understand. The parent should bridge the gap by trying to understand the things their daughter spends time on. Instead they lambast them from a distance! It's such a shame to me that the article ends with a note about how the parent will try to convince themselves that creating tiktok videos is creative. What?!? Creating videos isn't creative?? Of course it is! You should be encouraging and reveling in this sort of behavior! I guess it particularly rankles because my parents did the exact same thing when I was young - they constantly tried to get me to stop using the computer. They never took the time to understand that I was using it creatively - I was coding games, writing books and poetry, learning python, modding warcraft 3. But of course they never saw the creativity in modding warcraft. "Oh, he's playing video games again..." P.S. and as I suggested, I do agree with the premise - phones definitely can destroy creativity, they definitely are addictive, they definitely shouldn't be given to kids... These are critical problems, well worth addressing and being worried about. But if I had to choose a single thing that was even more important, it would be fostering understanding relationships between parent and child.
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
    > It's such a shame to me that the article ends with a note about how the parent will try to convince themselves that creating tiktok videos is creative. What?!? Creating videos isn't creative?? Of course it is! You should be encouraging and reveling in this sort of behavior! My seven year old runs around with my old iPhone 5. We've locked it down to essentially be nothing more than a camera, but she'll still make videos for her whole screen time allotment for the day. I used to wonder if this was a "good" use of her time. Then she discovered iMovie and now edits videos, adds transitions and music, makes her little sister an actor in movies... and I remembered when my parents worried about me spending hours in QBasic making little sine-wave art with music playing in the background.
• indymike 6y ago
  Father of five kids (2 adults, 2 teens, 1 almost teen) here. The iphone isn't the problem. It's the scapegoat. The real problem is what other people have said: too much time on school and she's a teenager. How much time is she really getting to do things she WANTS to do. With my kids, they seem to turn to the phone when they are lonely, sad, anxious or angry. It's a painkiller, not the pain.
• deleted 6y ago
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• muyuu 6y ago
  This also happened with teens in the last couple of generations. Exhausting school/activity schedules and availability of passive or semi-passive outlets (TV, meet-ups with friends, playing with the computer/console, etc). Some worse than others. You can't expect too much from kids creatively when they're subjected to such lifestyle. Some kids will either manage to be on top of things enough to have some extra energy in them, but not all. I'm not dismissing the fact that smartphones and social media are extremely addictive, of course. That's a major problem. But the symptoms you are describing go beyond that.
• techsin101 6y ago
  for what it counts, at age 10 i had no internet... i read physics books, dabbled in analog electronics, carpentry, drawing and other things.. But one day i got internet, then I spent next 10 years playing video games, and watching youtube. So there is certainly an opportunity that was lost somewhere. It helped me learn programming for sure. But could I have watched 5000 hours fewer of youtube videos and spent 9000 hours less on multiplayers games and instead focused on something else? who knows, but i can't rule it out.
• optimalsolver 6y ago
  Can't remember the last HN headline that made me literally lol.
• ohgreatwtf 6y ago
  this is dumb. everyone arguing about this is dumb. the parent is also dumb. The reality is that there is an economics of utility algorithm programmed into everyone and we innately seek out whatever makes us fit in with others and whatever entertains us with the least effort. It is a projection for the parent to assume their child has creative potential or a great creative enthusiasm when they, devoid of other ways to gratify their desire for novelty and expression, use the materials at their disposal. Now that her daughter has been given a device that satiates, at least for the moment, her desire to be popular, cool, and in-group, as well as provide her exponentially greater conduits for gratification and effortless creation-interaction, she is just like the rest of us. If this parent is frustrated at all they should, instead of being conceited about vicarious passions, be mournful their child has fallen prey to consumerist joys and will likely never develop a true adult passion for enriching experiences and pastimes. If my child asked me for something everyone has i would get her the things everyone DOESNT because when she is older she will appreciate the novelty of her personal childhood more than she will remember being just like everyone else. I would get my child a basic feature phone like a light phone or a flipphone, and i would get them an e-ink tablet and, yes, a customized device for watching television and youtube, possibly an android tablet heavily locked down. I would prohibit the use of apps like tiktok, snapchat, and instagram, all of which any in-touch millennial knows are the key platforms driving this soulless era of contact appreciation and gameified approval from others that really makes generation z teenagers look like a bunch of zombies, far more than we or our parents did at the same age.
• ericol 6y ago
  TL;DR. If you plan on giving a child a phone, make it very clear that it's not "her" phone - just as like with cars when they are learning to drive - and that you are lending it for certain activities, and that you can impound it whenever you feel like, for whatever reason. Also, that they should expect a certain level of privacy invasions. I have 3 daughters from my first marriage (ranging from 26 y/o to 2). When they were growing up I was a single father, and their phones went from brick-like nokias to Androids in the time it takes you to snap your fingers. At the time I didn't give it much thought, and when I realized what was going on the harm was done. I really wish I'd knew better; I should had. My youngest daughter is 7 now, from my 2nd marriage. And phones in particular and technology in general is something I give a lot of thought, and have discussed at length with my partner (Thankfully, we're on the same wavelength here). She is also really creative; she was learning violin before lockdown, and while in lockdown besides her violin classes, she took singing and piano lessons (Obviously, at the level a 7 y/o can take then over Zoom / Meet). We only let her watch around 1 hour of TV per day. Being strict here is a constant struggle, but we keep it more around that amount of time. She also plays with the computer (Or phone, or tablet) "only" 1 hour a day, with the tablet or phone restricted to only weekends, and a particular game - Star Wars Battlefront - only 2 days a week. Besides that, something that we haven't been able to manage - namely because it can go from 15 minutes a day to several hours - is phone usage for video calls. But I have to admit that I struggle here because I don't have a decided opinion regarding what to do here. She does sometimes hour + video calls with her grandmother on the mother side; they are very close, and due to COVID she haven't seen her since February - she lives 1500 Km away, with travel almost impossible in this country (Argentina) - when usually she would travel frequently, say every two months. Same happens with her friends that she hardly sees nowadays. and I gotta reckon that the video calls are usually on the creative side, for instance with a friend that lives in the same town as my MIL they would play using local toys similar to legos. Both my wife and I dread the time when we'll eventually have to give her a phone,because just like TV and tablets and computers, it's going to be a constant struggle, made worst by the "but my friends do it / have it" line of reasoning. As we do want to be prepared for this, what we decided is that, would the moment arrive, we are not going to give her "her phone". We are going to lend her a phone, that is not going to be hers, and she will be allowed to use under certain circumstances. And we would have the right to inspect that phone whenever we fell like it. The reasoning here is that from our point of view, having a phone is not very different from having a car. If you would not give a 10 y/o a car, why would you give her a phone in an uncontrolled way? Wish us luck.
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  For parents who want to stay in touch with their kids but don't want to give them a phone, cellular Apple Watches are an excellent option. They can make and receive calls anywhere with a cellular network. They are cheaper than phones and the plans are well priced too. Around $15/mo for service. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/apple-extends-the-apple-watch-experience-to-the-entire-family/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/09/apple-extends-the-app...
• m0zg 6y ago
  ITT: people who don't have children telling people who do have children that this is not a problem.
• funkaster 6y ago
  phones/tech are of course a problem if you don't set limits. But to me the biggest issue is not being able to connect to your kid. I have a 4yo and he loves to play on his tablet, and he even plays some videogames with me. But I try super hard to do other things with him as well, and try hard to enjoy them as much as I can. We play (non-digital) games he wants to play. We build legos. We also started playing some tabletop RPGs that are super simple for kids and he loves them. He asks me at least once a week to play (we actually always play the same scenario and he doesn't care, he still has tons of fun). The parent in this article is struggling with too many things at the same time: kid becoming a teenager, tech, and lack of connection with your kid. Having kids and growing them to healthy human beings is super hard. I wouldn't blame the daughter's behavior to any single thing, it looks more like a combination of multiple issues. Hopefully they both can find a good path moving forward.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  Phones are addictive. But we can't just call that the beginning and end of it. I read books on my phone. I've probably read hundreds of thousands of pages, I've got a library that is a very respectable size on my phone. Is reading them a sign of addiction to my phone? Or is it the same as reading paper? Am I just using my phone as a tool? I don't take pictures except to document things. I don't have any of those social media accounts people use to share photos or videos of themselves or whatever. I see women (and men) on the beach (or elsewhere) who's goal is to get a cute photo. I feel like they're wasting such a wonderful experience on a narcissistic persuit. But I spend hours on sites like this one talking to other people. Talking to people I don't know, people I do know, people I only know online. Sometimes about stupid stuff, sometimes about interesting stuff. It's not something I use for passive entertainment really very often. If I'm pondering life, making bonds, questioning my own beliefs, is that as simple as a social media addiction? Is it constructive? I know I am addicted to my phone and the internet in general. And it has detrimental effects on my life. But it has been very intellectually constructive for me. I have expanded my vocabulary quite a lot, I have learned to articulate my thoughts very well. I have learned to write code and about quantum particles and I've read research papers. I've talked to some very interesting people, even some very important people. So is it all bad? I think the trick is to not make it your life. Go outside, dig your hands in the soil, grow something. Immerse yourself in the moment where what is going into your senses is not curated by you or someone else. I do a decent job of not touching my phone when I'm out there. But I'd say I haven't struck that balance quite yet, because I don't go out there enough. I used to go out there every day and get dirty. I need to do that again.
• henry_bone 6y ago
  I could have written that article about my own daughter. To those of you suggesting that "maybe it's the schedule", you are wrong. I got my daughter to sit with me and watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix, and she still wouldn't leave her iphone alone. I could not believe it. Her exact behaviour is being acted out in front of us, and she's busy maintaining her streaks. I pause the show and "Really? Are you seriously using your phone right now?" She's totally addicted to snap. so much so that she will even make little snap poses during a normal face-to-face conversation, which prompted me - the first time I saw it - to say "Did you just pose for a snap photo?" to which she embarrassingly agreed that she had. Just as the author of the article related, my daughter cannot be without her phone and exhibits many of the same behaviours described in the article. Sounds like we've had the same arguments.
• dionidium 6y ago
  We didn’t want her to be like one of those people who are denied TV or candy in childhood, only to become addicts later. Is there any hard evidence that "those people" exist? Or is this just something people say?
• onecommentman 6y ago
  If my mother called me a “creative genius” in a highly public forum when I was a teen, I would have given her the Mother of All Teenage Rebellions. So where is the data that quantifies the intellectual value of each single concept taught to children, on a concept by concept basis? And where is the data that the techniques used to teach any individual concept is worth the loss of that amount of childhood? Seems like a lot of effort for any given lesson topic, but when you multiply any waste of time by the number of children and value of their childhood, it’s not so big. Maybe give a teacher a child time budget...the amount of off-campus time you can take from a child’s life. Exceed that...and you can “buy” more time, but your contracted time would be extended without compensation as well. A slow kid may need more time, and additional support from another resource would be made available at no budget expense to the teacher. But do your homework, kids...
• satori99 6y ago
  I think boredom is a key ingredient for initiating creative activities. It is simply less likely to happen when you have a smartphone.
• munificent 6y ago
  I'm afraid to wade into this given the negativity and judgementality of the comments here, but I could have written nearly every sentence of this article myself. My kids will consume unbounded screen time if given the chance. They will forget to sleep. They will ignore requests to hang out with friends. I don't know if they have ever willingly got off their tablets of their own volition, except sometimes to eat. Now that the kids are schooling virtually, they spend their day staring at a laptop. When they get a break or schools over, what do they want? To stare at their tablets. I try to regulate it. I'll tell them to get off and do something else. Twenty minutes later, they're back on. "Didn't I tell you to get off?" "Mom, said we could." "Did you tell her I told you to get off screen?" "No..." They are like junkies, pitting us against each other. But it's not like I can just kick them off. Because some fraction of the time, they're playing Minecraft which I think is pretty creative, and they're playing with their friends. Given how little social interaction they can get right now, I'm loathe to minimize that. But as soon as their friends sign off, they switch to YouTube without saying anything. "Weren't you playing Minecraft with Alice?" "Oh, that was hours ago.". Sure, if my wife and I were better more disciplined parents maybe this would be less of a problem. But it really sucks having to essentially live in a house that has a big bag of candy-coated heroin right next to the breakfast cereal and have to constantly be vigilant about not letting them have it. And then when someone points out "Hey, maybe we businesses shouldn't be able to leave bags of heroin candy in our houses," all you get is comments like the ones here judging people for letting their kids have it. And, no, this isn't the same as when we played with our computers as kids any more than caffeine is the same as heroin. A difference in degree is still a difference, especially at this magnitude. Parenting is hard enough as it is without having to fight a personal uphill battle against the trillion-dollar capitalist attention acquisition industry.
• ficklepickle 6y ago
  A take exception to the repeated use of the pejorative term "junkie". Apparently people suffering from addiction is the last group we are allowed to be prejudiced against. Spoiler alert, the phone didn't break your daughter. You and society did. The major issue this brings to light is the complete ignorance around addiction. It is not caused by the substance or the activity, but rather other underlying issues (trauma, unmet needs). This mom sounds overbearing. This poor kid has probably been on the Ivy League track since preschool. School until 6:30PM, I can't imagine what is wrong. Addiction problem? Find the needs that aren't being met. We have such a lack of knowledge about mental health, as a society, that most people don't even know where to start. The end of the article brings no reprieve. The mom basically throws her hands in the air and we can only assume that she will double-down on her overbearing, unhelpful approach. You can ban phones and vaping, but it won't do anything to address the underlying issues. Until we learn to proactively address mental health, it will only get worse. This article gives me zero hope. Although it may not sound like it, I have a ton of compassion for the mom and the daughter. I used to have severe addiction issues, I was a real mess. I had to figure this stuff out by evaluating available information and (dis)proving it to my satisfaction through trial and error. With a lot of support, I managed to unfuck myself. I think I'm just frustrated with society in general. So many issues, so many simple ways to make headway on them, so little action or even understanding of the problem space. I can tell you one thing for sure, this lone autist is not going to save the world.
• ummonk 6y ago
  Does she have ways to socialize with peers outside of the phone? It seems like her peers are all on social media and she's interacting with them the only way she can.
• dorkwood 6y ago
  > Even when she goes to the park with friends, she spends half the time making TikToks. > Some days I get sad thinking about what happened to the little kid who used to corner visitors and make them go page-by-page through her art books. It sounds to me like the daughter is doing the same thing she's always done, except now she has a new creative outlet -- TikTok.
• ajit_singh 6y ago
  This is a story of every second household. My wife's nieces are stuck on phone practically 24 hours. The day their internet balance gets exhausted is when they peep out of their phone screen and raise all hue and cry forcing their parents to recharge their phone immediately. Their sleep cycle doesn't exist and if their kid brother even if playfully hides their phone then he risks getting killed by them. Another toddler in my extended family just had his eyesight treated because of addiction to mobile phone. There is a reason why tech billionaires are sending their kids to schools devoid of screens. The general horde who are making these billionaires even richer by buying their phones and seeing virtue in being able to afford it should introspect the damage they are doing to their kids.
• deleted 6y ago
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• Senonymous 6y ago
  I may be misjudging the author, but this awfully reminds me of my childhood and makes me angry for this child. Everything I did had to be approved. They were always on my back, watching and controlling everything. If I wanted to do something they did not approve, they were angry or mocked me. They forced me on activities I hated because THEY liked it. Never aknowledging my wishes or needs. Never had privacy because they always had to check everything I was doing. Even closing my door made them angry. God save me if I dared to actually lock it, hell would loose on me. When I asked for help, they never really bothered, they even laughed at me and made me feel like I should be ashamed to ask a question. I lived under ridiculously strict, completely non-logical and arbitrary rules in everything in my life. Even daring to ask an explanation made them angry because I was defying their authority. Want to get this nice book you like? Too bad, you don't have money. But mom does not think this book is interesting, so we'll get this other one instead. What, you already want to buy something else? We already bough you a book last week, you should be grateful. They moved in the countryside because they are completely antisocial. What, you want to visit a friend? I'll have to drive you, you are so annoying. We'll do this another time. What, you want to go to disneyland? And a shopping center? Do you even know how much it costs and how many people are there? What, you don't want to spend every sunday with us visiting completely uninteresting places with us? What's wrong with you, why don't you never get out of the house?! You got punished again at school? [hell looses on me] I was sure your friends were not very frequentable, stop stop meeting them. Seriously, why didn't the teachers see that? Parents and teachers are so incompetent nowadays. Fortunately you have parents giving you a good education. Computers were the only place where I could escape from this hell. I could have my own virtual world and they could not control it. I could subscribe to a PhpBB forum and talk with actual human beings about things I actually liked. I could choose any video game, movie and music and get it on Emule without asking permission. This had and still have devastating consequences on my well-being. You should be listening to what your child wants and teach her how to make her own smart choices. You should give her freedom, love and care, not arbitrary limits without even un explanation. If I did not have my computer that my parents did not understood, if they had the power and knowledge to control and choose what I am allowed to do with it, I probably would have ended-up killing myself or something.
• ryankrage77 6y ago
  The forbidden fruit tastes best. When my parents had a say in my technology usage (amount of time spent in front of a screen, turning off the router at midnight, etc), I would want to find ways around it, such as jumping onto a neighbors hotspot, or saving up and secretly buying myself a second phone so they couldn't take it away. Sometimes I could get away with pulling an all-nighter on my phone. Before I got into technology, it was books. I read for hours every day, and my parents complained that while reading was good, I was doing it in excess. Once these limits relaxed, so did my desire to exceed them. Now I've moved out and live on my own, I find myself wanting to spend far less time on the computer.
• imtringued 6y ago
  > My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed. Uhm... There was a period in my life where I had to work part time and go back to school and even that only took 11 hours per day including a 30 min commute both directions. This girl is doing this in her teenage years...