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> Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. No, social media does. I think it's important to be specific about that

> Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. No, social media does. I think it's important to be specific about that because a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is (when I was a kid there was plenty of bullying that went on via AIM!) Having access to e.g. Wikipedia is of enormous benefit to young people. Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial. It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. > There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread IMO HN has always had a strong anti-censorship streak, usually for good reasons. But it starts to get a bit weird and fuzzy when kids are involved, as if protecting them from the harmful aspects of the internet is no different than big government censorship.

alexb_ 3y ago
Smartphones are what enable social media to ruin the lives of children. You can access Wikipedia from your computer. You can call your parents from a flip phone. And hey, you can sometimes engage with social media from a computer. The problem is that smartphones give children access to social media in literally every single waking hour of their lives, making it a constant that they must be extremely aware of.
- mordae 3y ago
  [flagged]
- branon 3y ago
  This is the reasonable middle ground, I think. No outright refusal, nor blind acceptance. Instead: separation of powers and reasonable barrier to entry. Dumbphone + stationary desktop PC would be much better for kids than a smartphone + tablet.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Smartphones are a force multiplier for social media. Social media waiting for you on the family PC at home is a lot different than sitting in class with your phone buzzing in your pocket.
wussboy 3y ago
> Having access to e.g. Wikipedia is of enormous benefit to young people. Unproven. I would argue it is enormously detrimental (reduces curiosity, reduces research ability, reduces perseverance, reduces skills required to determine truth, reduces social skills required to negotiate a position with others).
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  I know orders of magnitude more details since WP has existed. Could have found much of it elsewhere but benefits are clear.
jacquesm 3y ago
Smartphone = pushy social media in your pocket 24x7. In practice I suspect that amongst highschoolers the ratio of time spent between wikipedia and social media (and gaming as well) heavily favors the latter.
- afavour 3y ago
  Like I said: > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. The problem is parents who don't care enough to get actively involved in their child's lives to this extent.
  - swayvil 3y ago
    That's how the Amish do it. The wise old smart elders sit down and discuss the latest gadgets. If the gadget looks harmful then they say nope. It's a pretty good system.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    It's very hard though; particularly if you do want to give e.g wikipedia access. I am reasonably tech savvy and gave up figuring it out with the controls that Apple and Google provide, and paid for an MDM application. Also, it means banning most popular apps, as they are all building in social media features.
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    They care. That's exactly why they are thinking about the problems that having a smart phone would have. You are just drawing the line differently to others. There's a whole range of solutions. From no smartphone to letting them have a smart phone but lock it down. All have reasonable points and show strong involvement in their child's lives.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    It's not though, completely removing social media from children is also a problem because it's become nearly impossible to socialize without it... kids almost universally have social media access, so to tell yours that they can't have it ostracizes them in a lot of ways. I'm worried that completely limiting access to it is worse. I can relate to this with my own kids because I grew up with a kid who wasn't allowed to watch TV, his family didn't have one in the house. I saw this kid on my school bus daily, but I don't even remember his name because my friends and I were always talking about TV and video games and weren't emotionally competent enough to know how/why to include him. I'll forever remember him as "the kid without a TV."
dcsommer 3y ago
Smartphones are not a prerequisite for access to educational resources online. Having an old school computer in a public part of the house is great for such things. Kids should just hang out and focus on each other when they're out and about. No need for a smartphone.
rcme 3y ago
> No, social media does. This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Sure, smartphones are just a tool. But they're a tool used to access social media. Also, I'd argue it's not just social media causing this issue. AI filters that make you look more "beautiful" are commonplace now. Children see themselves through these filter and it may impact their self-esteem, e.g. "why do I look beautiful in the photo but not in real life"
- afavour 3y ago
  > This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. C'mon. Guns are dumb. Smartphones are smart. It's entirely possible to set up a smartphone in a way that blocks access to certain apps, limits how many hours you can use an app in a day, etc etc. The only way your parallel works is if guns had the ability to selectively target bad guys.
  - throwaway3838g 3y ago
    I’m not convinced that an enterprising kid couldn’t easily bypass these restrictions
    - Shared404 3y ago
      I'm convinced that barring kids who are exclusively homeschooled, every kid has a way to bypass these restrictions either by themselves or with a classmates help. Source: was a kid not that long ago.
      - cassac 3y ago
        That’s true of nearly everything though. That lock on your front door? I can easily bypass it but yet you still have it. Anyone determined enough can do almost anything. But throw a wide enough net and at least you can prevent the casual and lazy offenders. Also I think prevention is an ongoing thing not a one and done thing. You shouldn’t say “oh I put a dns block on YouTube so now I don’t need to follow up on my kids” and I feel a lot of parents do just that.
escapedmoose 3y ago
But the form-factor of technology necessarily alters our relationship to it. Compared to a laptop or desktop PC, a smartphone is a constant presence, always in your kid’s pocket or backpack, easily snuck under a desk for a distraction from a boring lecture, easily used by friends or bullies to record you unnoticed. Besides that, parents can learn to restrict their kids’ phones from social media use, but that seems like a weak protection (which many kids learn to break) and an unnecessary burden when you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use.
- tough 3y ago
  > you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use. I think you got it backwards, the emergency case is just the -excuse- parents use. In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I? Real phones, with apps and games and shit. FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    > FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively. This is such a 2010 way of thinking. Now they just hand their kids the YouTube app (signed into their parents' account) and let autoplay babysit their kid for hours a day.
    - f1shy 3y ago
      Babyshit, instead of babysit…
    - treeman79 3y ago
      I often tell people I was raised by NES and SNES.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
mc32 3y ago
I’ll be a bit hyperbolic here but this is close to saying: “Dirty water isn’t the issue, the issue is the pathogens in the water”. I mean, yeah, but it’s hard to separate.
tootie 3y ago
Purely anecdotal, but my kids don't use social media at all and aren't interested. They were, however, both part of a years-long group text with a dozen of more classmates. I only peaked once or twice, but it was mostly mundane and at least once saw kids gang up on the side of social justice.
sb057 3y ago
>>Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. >No, social media does. Social media (and other mindless media consumption) is perhaps the defining role for smartphones, especially for children.
- mordae 3y ago
  Uh-uh. Calls. SMS. Family (and friend) chats. Maps. Language translation. Camera. Shopping lists. Calendar. Weather reports. School email 2FA. Public transportation app. Possibly payments. And then some educational / misc stuff on top like PlantNet. All of that is there and convenient to use. Literally the only two problems are unmoderated antisocial platforms and gambling.
  - Perenti 3y ago
    Yes, but none of these require you to stare at a phone most of the time. Social media does, as it incessantly screams for your attention. I don't know anyone other than me who uses their phone for as little as you list (I look at the sky for weather reports) though.
adamwong246 3y ago
An important point: It's not the "smartphones"- Its the APPS, specifically the social media apps, but really this applies the vast majority of apps. Rather than selling value, most are attention-parasites which inevitably harm the user. They become skinner boxes designed to keep us engaged, by any means necessary. To me, it highlights a key point of FOSS, which is that we should not harm our users.
- Perenti 3y ago
  To be more precise, it's the model of engagement that bombards the eyes, ears and brain that's the problem. We need social media models that don't require 24/7 engagement.
c22 3y ago
My kids rock Punkt MP-02s. They pretty much just make calls and text (with t9!) but they can also be 4g hotspots if they need to connect a laptop. They still have access to social media and other garbage but it's not 24/7 and I do believe that makes a difference.
- f1shy 3y ago
  Thanks. Good piece of advice.
colinrand 3y ago
Having a teenager, I've seen the bullying and caustic behavior without social media. One classic example is for a group of friends to be on a iMessage thread together, and suddenly nobody posts to it anymore because they've created another thread and left you off.
- swayvil 3y ago
  That's harsh. I cringe to think I was ever a teenager.
- nancyhn 3y ago
  That seems close enough to classify as social media, for all intents and purposes.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  That’s always difficult, but exclusionary slights between various clicks happen and have happened just as easily in person.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I can totally see this happening, and have wondered whether it would make sense to get my kid a cellular enabled Apple Watch instead of smartphone or dumbphone. She could use it in emergencies, and she'd avoid the green-bubble stigma that dumphone/android users endure (at least in my geo area, where most of my peers have iDevices).
jader201 3y ago
> It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. Unless you can block all of them, then I don't think so. And blocking them is a game of whack-a-mole, where every time you block one, they find another one. And even if you manage to block them from engaging with social media, a lot of similar "damage" can still be done via read-only sites (e.g. Twitter and Reddit). > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. You can't rely on technology to block social media. In addition to the whack-a-mole problem, most parental control integrations are buggy and hackable. My personal experience with Screen Time has been pretty bad. At best, it's very easy to work around, and at worst, it's completely broken. I'm wondering if you may not have teens with phones, as you may have come to the same conclusion yourself otherwise.
boring_twenties 3y ago
> Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial. Dumbphones satisfy this requirement just fine
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Should kids smoke? Obviously not, it's bad for their health. Is mental health less of a priority than physical health? My case rests.
yamtaddle 3y ago
I do think the Internet-connected pocketable camera deserves some of the blame.
kergonath 3y ago
> No, social media does. I think it's important to be specific about that because a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is (when I was a kid there was plenty of bullying that went on via AIM!) This sounds like a “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. (Edit: I am not rcme, although I saw they posted along the same lines a couple of posts below.) We know that children crave validation and group belonging. They cannot avoid social media in general or anything that looks like one (from Tiktok to multi-player online games) if they have any kind of access to it. > It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It’s possible if you are mature enough to restrain yourself, or if your phone is completely locked down. The average adult does not look mature enough. > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. Limitation does not change anything. The same issues will show up the second there is anything that can be used to exchange messages. Hell, people used to do it in Pokémon Go with their pokémons’ nicknames. On top of that, you assume that the average parent is competent enough to do it, and that the average child is incompetent enough to not get the password or work around the lock. Both assumptions seem very flawed to me. Again, the pull is huge. I’ve done much more complicated than avoiding parental controls at that age with a much lower motivation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hindsightbias 3y ago
What's a computer? -- 2017
lisasays 3y ago
No, social media does. It's smartphones + social media then. The main point is, before phones, SM didn't have nearly the reach and toxicity that it has now. Don't be so snarky.
ihadatinyturtle 3y ago
>It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. I would argue that it's very hard to limit access to the web versions of social media outlets. I would also first broaden our terms a little, as it's not just social media that's so harmful, it's the wider attention economy. If we include that, it is practically impossible to own a smartphone without misusing it to your personal detriment.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  It's quite easy to control Safari and other apps with Screen Time on iOS.
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
I take your point, but would like to ask about: > Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial. In a true emergency, yes this is of course beneficial. But in general, I'd bet the ability for a parent to always be in touch with their child is not as obviously beneficial. I know first-hand about the types of parents that are always calling or texting to check-in with their kids - it can stress the kid out (let alone the parents), and I imagine that never being disconnected from the parents can be a bad thing for the child.
m463 3y ago
> It's possible to use a smartphone without social media kids find a way, and some solutions aren't solutions. Sort of like in school where they took off all the bathroom doors. "problem solved!"
Aerbil313 3y ago
> a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is I can no longer believe any modern technology is just a neutral tool. They are neutral if you think about them in isolation, but not when they're used commonly. See https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...

alexb_ 3y ago

Smartphones are what enable social media to ruin the lives of children. You can access Wikipedia from your computer. You can call your parents from a flip phone. And hey, you can sometimes engage with social media from a computer. The problem is that smartphones give children access to social media in literally every single waking hour of their lives, making it a constant that they must be extremely aware of.

mordae 3y ago
[flagged]
branon 3y ago
This is the reasonable middle ground, I think. No outright refusal, nor blind acceptance. Instead: separation of powers and reasonable barrier to entry. Dumbphone + stationary desktop PC would be much better for kids than a smartphone + tablet.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Smartphones are a force multiplier for social media. Social media waiting for you on the family PC at home is a lot different than sitting in class with your phone buzzing in your pocket.

wussboy 3y ago

> Having access to e.g. Wikipedia is of enormous benefit to young people. Unproven. I would argue it is enormously detrimental (reduces curiosity, reduces research ability, reduces perseverance, reduces skills required to determine truth, reduces social skills required to negotiate a position with others).

mixmastamyk 3y ago
I know orders of magnitude more details since WP has existed. Could have found much of it elsewhere but benefits are clear.

jacquesm 3y ago

Smartphone = pushy social media in your pocket 24x7. In practice I suspect that amongst highschoolers the ratio of time spent between wikipedia and social media (and gaming as well) heavily favors the latter.

afavour 3y ago
Like I said: > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. The problem is parents who don't care enough to get actively involved in their child's lives to this extent.
- swayvil 3y ago
  That's how the Amish do it. The wise old smart elders sit down and discuss the latest gadgets. If the gadget looks harmful then they say nope. It's a pretty good system.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  It's very hard though; particularly if you do want to give e.g wikipedia access. I am reasonably tech savvy and gave up figuring it out with the controls that Apple and Google provide, and paid for an MDM application. Also, it means banning most popular apps, as they are all building in social media features.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  They care. That's exactly why they are thinking about the problems that having a smart phone would have. You are just drawing the line differently to others. There's a whole range of solutions. From no smartphone to letting them have a smart phone but lock it down. All have reasonable points and show strong involvement in their child's lives.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  It's not though, completely removing social media from children is also a problem because it's become nearly impossible to socialize without it... kids almost universally have social media access, so to tell yours that they can't have it ostracizes them in a lot of ways. I'm worried that completely limiting access to it is worse. I can relate to this with my own kids because I grew up with a kid who wasn't allowed to watch TV, his family didn't have one in the house. I saw this kid on my school bus daily, but I don't even remember his name because my friends and I were always talking about TV and video games and weren't emotionally competent enough to know how/why to include him. I'll forever remember him as "the kid without a TV."

dcsommer 3y ago

Smartphones are not a prerequisite for access to educational resources online. Having an old school computer in a public part of the house is great for such things. Kids should just hang out and focus on each other when they're out and about. No need for a smartphone.

rcme 3y ago

> No, social media does. This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Sure, smartphones are just a tool. But they're a tool used to access social media. Also, I'd argue it's not just social media causing this issue. AI filters that make you look more "beautiful" are commonplace now. Children see themselves through these filter and it may impact their self-esteem, e.g. "why do I look beautiful in the photo but not in real life"

afavour 3y ago
> This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. C'mon. Guns are dumb. Smartphones are smart. It's entirely possible to set up a smartphone in a way that blocks access to certain apps, limits how many hours you can use an app in a day, etc etc. The only way your parallel works is if guns had the ability to selectively target bad guys.
- throwaway3838g 3y ago
  I’m not convinced that an enterprising kid couldn’t easily bypass these restrictions
  - Shared404 3y ago
    I'm convinced that barring kids who are exclusively homeschooled, every kid has a way to bypass these restrictions either by themselves or with a classmates help. Source: was a kid not that long ago.
    - cassac 3y ago
      That’s true of nearly everything though. That lock on your front door? I can easily bypass it but yet you still have it. Anyone determined enough can do almost anything. But throw a wide enough net and at least you can prevent the casual and lazy offenders. Also I think prevention is an ongoing thing not a one and done thing. You shouldn’t say “oh I put a dns block on YouTube so now I don’t need to follow up on my kids” and I feel a lot of parents do just that.

escapedmoose 3y ago

But the form-factor of technology necessarily alters our relationship to it. Compared to a laptop or desktop PC, a smartphone is a constant presence, always in your kid’s pocket or backpack, easily snuck under a desk for a distraction from a boring lecture, easily used by friends or bullies to record you unnoticed. Besides that, parents can learn to restrict their kids’ phones from social media use, but that seems like a weak protection (which many kids learn to break) and an unnecessary burden when you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use.

tough 3y ago
> you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use. I think you got it backwards, the emergency case is just the -excuse- parents use. In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I? Real phones, with apps and games and shit. FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively.
- judge2020 3y ago
  > FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively. This is such a 2010 way of thinking. Now they just hand their kids the YouTube app (signed into their parents' account) and let autoplay babysit their kid for hours a day.
  - f1shy 3y ago
    Babyshit, instead of babysit…
  - treeman79 3y ago
    I often tell people I was raised by NES and SNES.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

mc32 3y ago

I’ll be a bit hyperbolic here but this is close to saying: “Dirty water isn’t the issue, the issue is the pathogens in the water”. I mean, yeah, but it’s hard to separate.

tootie 3y ago

Purely anecdotal, but my kids don't use social media at all and aren't interested. They were, however, both part of a years-long group text with a dozen of more classmates. I only peaked once or twice, but it was mostly mundane and at least once saw kids gang up on the side of social justice.

sb057 3y ago

>>Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. >No, social media does. Social media (and other mindless media consumption) is perhaps the defining role for smartphones, especially for children.

mordae 3y ago
Uh-uh. Calls. SMS. Family (and friend) chats. Maps. Language translation. Camera. Shopping lists. Calendar. Weather reports. School email 2FA. Public transportation app. Possibly payments. And then some educational / misc stuff on top like PlantNet. All of that is there and convenient to use. Literally the only two problems are unmoderated antisocial platforms and gambling.
- Perenti 3y ago
  Yes, but none of these require you to stare at a phone most of the time. Social media does, as it incessantly screams for your attention. I don't know anyone other than me who uses their phone for as little as you list (I look at the sky for weather reports) though.

adamwong246 3y ago

An important point: It's not the "smartphones"- Its the APPS, specifically the social media apps, but really this applies the vast majority of apps. Rather than selling value, most are attention-parasites which inevitably harm the user. They become skinner boxes designed to keep us engaged, by any means necessary. To me, it highlights a key point of FOSS, which is that we should not harm our users.

Perenti 3y ago
To be more precise, it's the model of engagement that bombards the eyes, ears and brain that's the problem. We need social media models that don't require 24/7 engagement.

c22 3y ago

My kids rock Punkt MP-02s. They pretty much just make calls and text (with t9!) but they can also be 4g hotspots if they need to connect a laptop. They still have access to social media and other garbage but it's not 24/7 and I do believe that makes a difference.

f1shy 3y ago
Thanks. Good piece of advice.

colinrand 3y ago

Having a teenager, I've seen the bullying and caustic behavior without social media. One classic example is for a group of friends to be on a iMessage thread together, and suddenly nobody posts to it anymore because they've created another thread and left you off.

swayvil 3y ago
That's harsh. I cringe to think I was ever a teenager.
nancyhn 3y ago
That seems close enough to classify as social media, for all intents and purposes.
dv_dt 3y ago
That’s always difficult, but exclusionary slights between various clicks happen and have happened just as easily in person.
gnicholas 3y ago
I can totally see this happening, and have wondered whether it would make sense to get my kid a cellular enabled Apple Watch instead of smartphone or dumbphone. She could use it in emergencies, and she'd avoid the green-bubble stigma that dumphone/android users endure (at least in my geo area, where most of my peers have iDevices).

jader201 3y ago

> It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. Unless you can block all of them, then I don't think so. And blocking them is a game of whack-a-mole, where every time you block one, they find another one. And even if you manage to block them from engaging with social media, a lot of similar "damage" can still be done via read-only sites (e.g. Twitter and Reddit). > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. You can't rely on technology to block social media. In addition to the whack-a-mole problem, most parental control integrations are buggy and hackable. My personal experience with Screen Time has been pretty bad. At best, it's very easy to work around, and at worst, it's completely broken. I'm wondering if you may not have teens with phones, as you may have come to the same conclusion yourself otherwise.

boring_twenties 3y ago

> Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial. Dumbphones satisfy this requirement just fine

gjsman-1000 3y ago

Should kids smoke? Obviously not, it's bad for their health. Is mental health less of a priority than physical health? My case rests.

yamtaddle 3y ago

I do think the Internet-connected pocketable camera deserves some of the blame.

kergonath 3y ago

> No, social media does. I think it's important to be specific about that because a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is (when I was a kid there was plenty of bullying that went on via AIM!) This sounds like a “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. (Edit: I am not rcme, although I saw they posted along the same lines a couple of posts below.) We know that children crave validation and group belonging. They cannot avoid social media in general or anything that looks like one (from Tiktok to multi-player online games) if they have any kind of access to it. > It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It’s possible if you are mature enough to restrain yourself, or if your phone is completely locked down. The average adult does not look mature enough. > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. Limitation does not change anything. The same issues will show up the second there is anything that can be used to exchange messages. Hell, people used to do it in Pokémon Go with their pokémons’ nicknames. On top of that, you assume that the average parent is competent enough to do it, and that the average child is incompetent enough to not get the password or work around the lock. Both assumptions seem very flawed to me. Again, the pull is huge. I’ve done much more complicated than avoiding parental controls at that age with a much lower motivation.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hindsightbias 3y ago

What's a computer? -- 2017

lisasays 3y ago

No, social media does. It's smartphones + social media then. The main point is, before phones, SM didn't have nearly the reach and toxicity that it has now. Don't be so snarky.

ihadatinyturtle 3y ago

>It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. I would argue that it's very hard to limit access to the web versions of social media outlets. I would also first broaden our terms a little, as it's not just social media that's so harmful, it's the wider attention economy. If we include that, it is practically impossible to own a smartphone without misusing it to your personal detriment.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
It's quite easy to control Safari and other apps with Screen Time on iOS.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

I take your point, but would like to ask about: > Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial. In a true emergency, yes this is of course beneficial. But in general, I'd bet the ability for a parent to always be in touch with their child is not as obviously beneficial. I know first-hand about the types of parents that are always calling or texting to check-in with their kids - it can stress the kid out (let alone the parents), and I imagine that never being disconnected from the parents can be a bad thing for the child.

m463 3y ago

> It's possible to use a smartphone without social media kids find a way, and some solutions aren't solutions. Sort of like in school where they took off all the bathroom doors. "problem solved!"

Aerbil313 3y ago

> a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is I can no longer believe any modern technology is just a neutral tool. They are neutral if you think about them in isolation, but not when they're used commonly. See https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...