> whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age When I was 11, I spent large amounts of time playing with my peers, unsupervised, around my neighbourhood.

> whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age When I was 11, I spent large amounts of time playing with my peers, unsupervised, around my neighbourhood. In 2023, this is an impossible dream. Even in parts of the world where you wouldn't be arrested for child abandonment if you let a child that age roam unsupervised, general consensus is that it is simply not safe for a child to exist outside the home, school or a paid-for-by-the-hour supervised activity space without their guardian in the picture. As a society, we've taken away all opportunity for unstructured, unprompted socialisation in the real world. Kids must either learn to socialise online or not at all, since this is all we have left them.