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Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand. Though not entirely

• lrvick 1y ago
  100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    I'm expecting a newborn soon and thinking the same. What did you change?
    • hvs 1y ago
      Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example. Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
        • internet_points 1y ago
          Another problem is that this tool is constantly trying to distract you. As jwz nearly said, Every app attempts to expand until it is social media. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. See: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/spotify-is-no-longer-just-a-streaming-app-its-a-social-network/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/10/spotify-is-no-longer-just-... https://www.wikihow.com/Hide-Channels-on-WhatsApp https://www.wikihow.com/Hide-Channels-on-WhatsApp (tl;dr there is no way) https://www.thepearlpost.com/1342/tech/pinterest-is-now-a-social-media-player/ https://www.thepearlpost.com/1342/tech/pinterest-is-now-a-so... https://gearandgrit.com/stravas-evolution-the-journey-from-activity-tracker-to-social-hub-with-new-messaging-feature/ https://gearandgrit.com/stravas-evolution-the-journey-from-a...
    • Tade0 1y ago
      Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions. Don't neglect that part of your life and you won't be tempted to scroll, or at the very least you'll be resistant to it. No other way out of this, especially because you're in for a very emotional time in the near future. But don't fret: becoming a parent forces you to find strength you didn't know you had. Sounds cliche but there's really no other way to describe it. Before kids I was glued to my phone. Now when we go to the playground I just stare at the sky like a chimpanzee released after years of indoor captivity.
      • reaperducer 1y ago
        Phones are just a means to avoid processing one's emotions. I see them more as pacifiers for adults. Whenever I see some adult doomscrolling in public, I hear Maggie Simpson's little suck suck suck sound in my head.
    • jdshaffer 1y ago
      I have three kids, now just turning adult. My wife and I took the point of view that we are modeling a healthy lifestyle for our children. So, we only used technology as tools -- looking up stuff, scheduling, reading PDFs, etc.... AND we made sure they could see what we were doing -- no "hidden" screens or hidden computer time. After doing this for the last 15+ years, I think it's turned out well. The oldest two seem to have a healthy relationship with their devices (as tools) and are just as happy to put them down and go outside or spend time with other people. The youngest is similar, but still needs to use tech a lot for his studies (by curriculum design). However, he'd also prefer to go outside or watch a movie than be on a device.
    • RyanOD 1y ago
      Congratulations! Who knows what the world will look like when your kids are in middle school / high school, but I would recommend strongly resisting social media / phones before they are in high school. This can be tricky if all their friends / school communicates through such mediums as your kids may feel isolated. And yes, many schools promote the use of apps / social media as a shared means of communication for clubs, sports, etc. - which is maddening. And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone.
      • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
        > And, as parents, model reading physical books, not your phone. Speaking as a Dad of two (5 and 2), this is really hard, not because I don't read (I read a lot), but because every time I bring a physical book out the kids start grabbing it, so it's much easier to use my Kindle. Additionally, I'd probably end up getting divorced if we needed to find space for all the books I read in the house (I've acquired about 1100 books on Kindle over the past ~decade).
        • 0_____0 1y ago
          An e reader seems obviously a different type of device than your phone. Spiritually closer to a book than other types of screen.
    • quadragenarian 1y ago
      Separate from the phone and screen time discussion, you are at an important juncture of your life, a transition to parenthood that could change everything. I say "could" because I fundamentally believe that half of people who have children don't have the self-awareness to change and adjust their habits and emotional state. One of the monumental realizations for me when I became a parent (not necessarily the first day but over the first 5-7 years) was distinctly what my parents did right and wrong. My dad told me on the phone one day that I shouldn't show my child my feelings, that I should hide any negative feelings and only show positive feelings. And now I see that this is what my father did to me and it constrained my ability to share negative feelings with my friends and family, instead leading to me bottling up negative feelings like anger and sadness.I realize that this is not the correct way to parent, your child should see the full range of human emotions from their parents and although you want to be careful to not put too much emotional burden and stress on them to create an anxious child, you want to also be sure they see you at your best and worst. They should see you discuss your feelings with others and with them and when you lose your temper, as we all do, you should also afterwards rationalize what you were feeling with them, apologize if necessary (and it's usually always necessary because there is no need for any human to lose their temper with another human that's been on the Earth for only a few years). Any way, I think of parenthood as a journey of self-reflection and improvement, much like childhood. Just like some people have a negative painful childhood, parenthood can be similar. The goal for you is to be open and honest with yourself and your growing family, and to be constantly looking for ways to improve. Apologies if this sounded like a lecture but wish you the best in what may turn out to be the most important job of your life.
• zdragnar 1y ago
  At what point did school districts change? When I was in high school, right about the time that cell phones were becoming common among adults but not yet among kids, our school had a blanket policy that all electronics other than calculators and simple watches were to remain in lockers or at home. Having a CD player, pager, pda, cell phone, or pretty much anything else in class was forbidden. Teachers would take them away and you'd get it back from the principal's office at the end of the day. I've seen a lot of talk about schools banning phones, but I don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place.
  • tiberone 1y ago
    generally speaking I don’t think they were ever really allowed, but if you tried to “take them away” the kids would just put it in their pocket and not give it up. and that was it. the difference now is that we have things like the magnetic pouches so students physically can’t use them. the rule is the same, but now it’s actually enforceable.
    • sokoloff 1y ago
      Enforceable for kids that won’t buy a $10 magnet or open them with a couple of pencils and banging the pouch to dislodge the pin.
  • ergsef 1y ago
    When smartphones first started coming out a high school teacher took mine away - there was no blanket ban but I had undiagnosed ADHD and I wasn't paying attention during class. As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars. I wasn't a rich kid and I got it on a contract with the phone company. I remember she got really stressed out and cried about it during class. If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.
    • 1y ago
• mschuster91 1y ago
  Kids can't do it right, eh? They can't go outside any more - third places (aka, places where one can be without consuming something) are sorely lacking, doubly so for youth who are driven away by "mosquito" teen-repellent devices, and you need to be able to get there without being in danger of getting pulped by a SUV so tall the driver literally cannot see a child. Oh and parents don't want their kids go out alone lest they be charged with neglect by some HOA busybody snitch siccing CPS on them. They can't be at school after hours because it's closed or because school is an unsafe place for them (e.g. bullying). They spend too much time in front of computers, their Boomer parents cry about violent games turning their kids into killers or porn turning them gay. They can't be on their phones because Boomers cry that they're not doing anything else. Tell me, what are kids supposed to do? It's like an inverse Schrödinger's cat.
  • mb7733 1y ago
    I don't know but you're a little behind the times. Kids these days don't have Boomer parents.
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      The crying is done by Facebook neighborhood groups, newspaper comment sections, HOAs, school boards etc. - all heavily Boomer infested.
  • rhinoceraptor 1y ago
    Those mosquito things are awful, I'm in my early 30s so I can't really hear 17.4 Khz tones anymore, but my neighbors have this awful animal repellent device in their garden that goes off during the night, it's about 12-15 Khz and is infuriating.
    • herbst 1y ago
      That's a great way to make sure to have zero bird population around your place very soon. Which will come with a new peak of insect population.
• sjw987 1y ago
  This is it. You rarely see a grown adult making the decision to cut down their own screen time (including on the phone), so there's next-to-no chance they do anything for their kids. Most people seem to be in a mass trance with smartphone usage. Everywhere I go, the majority of people I see at any given moment are on their phone. It's spooky. I don't look forward to the inevitable mental health crisis we're going to hit when generations who have always lived with a smartphone hit mid-life.
  • dpassens 1y ago
    There's no need to wait, just look at the current mental health crisis.
    • 4ggr0 1y ago
      it's a bit disingenuous to assign this solely or primarily to smartphone usage. lots of reason for todays teens to be depressed etc., maybe smartphone-usage is a symptom, not the root-cause.
      • reaperducer 1y ago
        it's a bit disingenuous to assign this solely or primarily to smartphone usage. He didn't. You're the one that brought "solely" into the conversation.
        • 4ggr0 1y ago
          yeah, my interpretation went too far, but even just attributing The Mental Health Crisis to smartphone usage, as if this really was a significant core-reason, is not right to me. "Teens are sad because they spend all their time on their phones", then maybe ask yourselves why teens flee to their virtual spaces. (maybe look at what seems important to them and is at the same time being dismissed and ignored by the people older than them, while being told not to be idealistic and naive.)
          • 1y ago
• reactordev 1y ago
  It wasn’t that big of an issue at first. While my kid had a cellphone from middle school onwards, it wasn’t until social media boom that she started spending more and more time glued to the screen. Around Junior (11yr) year. I definitely think the scrolling scrolling scrolling has done something negative to society.
  • conductr 1y ago
    The social media boom timing pretty much matched the popularity of iPhones. So the problem is really they began to have a full computer/screen in their pocket at all times. The usage trends are always going to change when the new tech enables them, social media and constant messaging wasn’t really enabled on dumb phones that existed previously.
    • reactordev 1y ago
      I don't agree, we had about 5 solid years before she was doom scrolling and using social media. The first iphones in the home were the first gen iphones of 2009. Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones. It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015 and by then we were on our iPhone 6's. This is when it started but it didn't become a "problem" until 2018...
      • adithyassekhar 1y ago
        I'm from a lower middle class family in India. We didn't even have access to smartphones, just a core 2 desktop. My friends had one as well. It was 2012, we were 12 years old and we all had accounts on facebook through the desktop. Feature phones had the actually good java facebook app as well which ran on 2g.
      • giobox 1y ago
        > It wasn't popular outside of college until 2015. This just doesn't hold up - FB ended Q1 2014 with ~1.3bn MAUs. I don't know when I would argue FB exploded beyond colleges but by 2014 it had already happened, long before. > Facebook was still called The Facebook in 2013 when we were on our 3rd phones. Facebook dropped the "The" and became "Facebook" in 2005. I'm prepared to accept an argument that social media has contributed, but these dates don't make any sense.