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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

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.

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.