7 ms·

As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a s

• amelius 5y ago
  Show them movies and TV-shows from the 80s and 90s, and show them that kids and grownups were quite happy despite having no smartphones.
• jaspax 5y ago
  > You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid". Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse. > Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah I don't know anything about you in particular, so I can't say whether this is a good idea or not. But we have to recognize the tradeoffs: unfettered access to social media from a young age with all of its downsides OR being the only kid without a cellphone and those accompanying downsides. Which one harms your kid more? Think about it and make your decision, but once you've made that decision you have to bite the bullet and accept the costs.
  • yoz-y 5y ago
    I guess it's too early to tell. But even when I was in uni, "not being on facebook" (back when facebook was relatively new) was heavily penalizing. And we were adults.
  • lelanthran 5y ago
    > Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid". It's a trade-off - is peer ostracisation worth the benefits from lack of tech? Most people, myself included, would say "No". > Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse. It is not a moderate social constraint, it's a complete and utter exclusion from the set of peers.
    • cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Don’t forget that those peers are also being damaged and may not make the best friends. From my observation children are increasingly dysfunctional.
      • lelanthran 5y ago
        > From my observation children are increasingly dysfunctional. Hasn't every generation complained about this? We forget that we were children once too, and pushed at the boundaries as we matured into teens. This is what children do.
        • watwut 5y ago
          Some generations are worst then others. Some are more violent then others for example. Tho, afaik, children of our generations were way more dysfunctional then we are willing to accept in these debates.
        • cjbgkagh 5y ago
          Just because people complain about it, doesn’t mean it is not true. I think there are objective measures in intelectual ability, physical fitness, and mental soundness. And those objective measures appear to be getting worse. The big win of sanitation, nutrition, and general education appear to be long behind us.
        • hanselot 5y ago
  • hans1729 5y ago
    >Why not? Because it sets them on a track of social disconnect and isolation. No therapist in their right mind would support that path. The adequate response is culture. Teach your children how to cultivate their own attention. Teach them about the way dopamine works. If you can't, you don't even know what you're talking about yourself. Creating social outlaws never, ever ever ever achieves the intended goal. The opposite is the case, you're creating damage in areas that you apparently don't even realize, probably because you project your personality model and own experiences onto a kid that simply doesn't grow up in the world that you became neuroplastic in. > Once you made your decision, bite the bullet and accept the costs ...Or be open to rethink your decision?! That's just bad intellectual culture. It's perfectly fine to change your mind about something that you can't fully understand. And you can't fully understand this, because you can't see the world through the eyes of a now-12-year-old. Everyone tries to do the best for their kids, but almost no one knows what is the best for their kids. Setting them on a path to isolation and lack of connect certainly isn't the way, they'll never, ever, fully recover from it.
  • raverbashing 5y ago
    "Smartphones are harmful" are the new "videogames cause violence" (a bit justifiable, but blown out of proportion) And on average most people will use it, so a kid that can use better than it is already on top of the pack
    • mechanical_bear 5y ago
      Not at all the same.
    • lrvick 5y ago
      "Smartphones are harmful" is the new "Smoking is harmful". Smoking and football were once both pretty much required if you wanted to be popular, but time eventually revealed the interests of the cool kids often ended with lung cancer and brain damage. Teach a kid to build computers, write software, design and solder their electronics. They will be miles ahead technically of most of their tiktok scrolling peers.
      • raverbashing 5y ago
        The analogy doesn't stand. Some uses of social media can be "as harmful" as banging your head on a wall, but a smartphone is much more than that. > They will be miles ahead technically of most of their tiktok scrolling peers. Life is not only about technical skills. And I've had plenty of these "technically minded" people spewing complete BS about vaccines here on HN, so I guess they think they're technically minded but aren't
        • lrvick 5y ago
          When I say I would not give a kid a smartphone, I am saying I would not give them an iOS/Android device which is what everyone today thinks when they hear "smartphone". They would certianly have access to a portable device with a web browser like a small form factor linux laptop or tablet. I also don't have a problem with the concept of social media. Neutral social media and messaging services that has no profit motivated data harvesting and behavior manipulation algorithims like Mastodon, Matrix, etc, I have no problem with. I would never allow a kid to use TikTok or a Meta/Facebook product however, as doing so is literally allowing strangers to pay to manipulate my kid towards any desired behavior change. That is just lazy parenting, IMO.
• zo1 5y ago
  It's a fine line and you have to go with some of it safely. However, there are items that are 100% toxic and as parents we need to decide what those are. Things like rap/hip-hop music as an example, or TikTok. There are some things that just can't be consumed safely by impressionable minds. When they're older they can get into them if they so wish, but my hope is that their brains by that point would at least be mature enough to see how toxic these things are. My job as a parent is not to make the world appear peachy perfect for them, but to give them the tools to deal with the world when they're adults
  • hans1729 5y ago
    This is sarcasm, right? A music genre is categorically toxic? What? They will see TikToks anyway, at latest on the devices of their peers. The only sane course of action is to teach them how to deal with it, not to ignore the consequences of every control-freak-parent we've seen in the last 40 years and cosplay a fantasy-world where those things simply don't exist.
    • Gigachad 5y ago
      A lot of it is fine. Most of it is safe if you just treat it as music with no depth. But the culture and people behind it massively glorify crime and violence. So being actually in to hip hop and the people behind it is dangerous for children.
      • micromacrofoot 5y ago
        guess the moral panic has moved on from rock and roll
        • abledon 5y ago
          I didn't hear much classic rock and roll back then about murder gang shit though... lol [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWISiHcGoNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWISiHcGoNg
• verisimi 5y ago
  Honestly, in this age where we all have the same culture, experiences, etc - is following along with the crowd a good thing? Is the crowd the best of us, or the worst of us? Are we are herd animal? Its so easy to go along with whatever is making the headlines. Isn't it better to be that kid who is at least thinking independently, and having the childhood that humans were designed to have.
• rglullis 5y ago
  As someone also with two young kids, my hope is to instill the idea that they can and should use the internet for their own expression and communication, but that they need to do it with tools which puts them in control, and not the other way around. There are "indie web" alternatives to the big social networks which everyone can use. Social networks without the algorithms that make you doom scrolling, messaging apps that do not track you or read your messages for ads, photo apps that do not have likes and do not gamify karma-whoring, and so on. To make it even better, these apps are not exclusive to smartphone platforms, so they won't need a smartphone just to participate. At least here in Germany, even my non-techy friends that are totally addicted to Instagram and Facebook don't publish anything with their kids. I am hoping that by the time their kids have grown a bit, these tools will be more popularized and accessible so that their kids don't fall into the same trap as their parents, and perhaps even the parents take the opportunity to do the switch themselves.
  • samhw 5y ago
    > do not gamify karma-whoring Christ, I'm not really on the 'complain about social media' train, but this resonates with me so much. The way people pose and mug for upvotes on Reddit - or mortifiedly delete their comments when they get some downdoots – is, well, it's self-abasing. I can't believe the effect it has on people. For kids I can only imagine how destructive it would be, in the already insecure and reputation-centric environment of school. I don't know what the solution is. I believe it lies _broadly in the direction of_ better clients, rather than different networks. The latter is a fool's errand. The former is still hard, but at least practicable on one's own: to find or create [apps / web clients / browser extensions / etc] which don't surface the karma component as much. HN is a good example of that: it still has upvotes and downvotes, but the design (especially not showing you others' downvotes, beyond binary indicators of positive/negative) centres them much less. It's an illustration of how you can substantially reduce this through frontend changes alone, without needing to change the core logic of the product.
    • nonplus 5y ago
      Re HN: I've had a hn account for 7 years, and I still can't downvote, and I think I like it this way. If I feel strongly enough I can start a dialogue instead. Conversation threads on hn are also nice in my opinion, they are not compulsory, if you forget a discussion was happening the platform allows that. Instead of throwing it back in your face to encourage engagement.
• KptMarchewa 5y ago
  >Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah. As someone who had similar experiences, thanks for letting your children be in control of at least some part of their lives. You're doing the good thing.
  • b112 5y ago
    While this may backfire, I would say installing tracking software on the phone, then doing many subtle things which gives this away, would be an awesome learning experience. "Creepy?! What? Google, Facebook, etc do it. What's wrong?" I feel like hacking the phones of parliamentarians, then setting up a website showing their daily activities, would be excellent. Double effective if it just keeps happening, even when you say you'll stop, no matter how often they reset or reconfigure the phone. "What?! Everyone else does it!"
    • ruune 5y ago
      Nah definitely not. Privacy is important. When you give your data to Google, you're one in a billion database entries. Google doesn't care what porn you're searching, they care about selling you stuff. A real human being, someone close to you, knowing what you are doing on your phone is something completely different
• JodieBenitez 5y ago
  > "must have apps" There is no such thing. All these are dopamine manglers fueled by low-quality content that have no real benefit. > "my child becoming a pariah" If having no smartphone is all it takes to be a pariah, I think it's a good thing to be a pariah ! Or more seriously: there are much better ways to socialize than socialize on the phone (like participating in real/non-virtual activities with other people). I guess as the generations goes, people will eventually forget that the notion of social network largely predates telecommunications.
  • rhn_mk1 5y ago
    Good luck socializing in other ways when your group of peers doesn't.