> My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed.
Perhaps it is not just the iPhone, but school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention that is preventing her from pursuing creative interests? As a homeschooling parent whose kids have been in school at times, I see this first hand. School is exhausting. Between rising unnaturally early (which leaves kids tired), rushing and bustling kids on their daily commute, most of the daylight hours blocked for school then homework when you get home not to mention whatever homework the teachers decide to assign to parents, and did I mention the kids are exhausted by the end of the day due to early wake-up?
Compulsory daily full-time school for children may be good for some things but it would take a lot to convince me that it increases their creativity. When my kids home school they will spend a lot of time playing roblox or whatever, but then they'll spend hours playing outdoors, decide to do a cooking project that takes all morning–currently one of mine is getting into "bushcraft" and he'll watch hours of videos about making fires, carving etc. before putting the tips it into practice (safely) during times outdoors, where he spends hours and hours. Then he'll come back, play roblox for an hour, then help clean up and put the younger kids to bed.
I am concerned about over-use/addictive nature of computers & phones, but I think it's myopic to see your otherwise creative child tired and craving mental distraction and say "aha the phone is the problem." Step back and look at the whole picture.
Edit: I must admit I commented after reading only half the article (shame on me). It does in fact seem like her daughter has a phone-use problem. What I say above remains true, however.
This exactly. That she's returning home from school at 6:30! The author didn't give their daughter's age, but we can assume it's right before 14, so maybe 12-13. I'm in high school, and I take a couple HL IB classes, school always gets out for me at 3, and then I do cross country until 5. That is already a long day. Then I go home, eat, do homework, and depending on the workload it could be anywhere between 8:00-12:00. Finally I'm able to go to bed, and redo the whole thing. I am a high schooler, and I'm taking high level classes for credits in college. The author's daughter is probably a middle schooler.
The issue is the daughter doesn't have time to be creative. I program, edit videos, etc., but all of that I have to save for the weekends. The daughter probably doesn't have the energy to be creative and just uses their phone during some downtime.
With my generation we are not always on our phones like many would believe. Pre-covid we would gather and talk after school, during lunch, in class. If I went with my friends to lunch it is acceptable to check your phone but we would never find it acceptable to be on your phone the whole time.
The issue is probably not the daughter, but the workload.
> Pre-covid we would gather and talk after school, during lunch, in class. If I went with my friends to lunch it is acceptable to check your phone but we would never find it acceptable to be on your phone the whole time.
I'm 40.
This gives me hope for our species. I lost a very good, old friend several years ago because he was constantly on his phone. Several of us were home for Thanksgiving, which is a real rarity since we live all over the United States. We were all out to dinner and he just could not get off the phone, when I finally said, "Do you think its socially unacceptable to constantly be on your phone when we're all here together??"
He got extremely defensive, and very nasty. We haven't spoken since.
I can't tell you how great it is for me to see younger people realize how important it is to be in-the-moment with the people around you.
Maybe the phone is an escape? Getting home at 6:30 pm plus homework means that school-related things are a 12+ hour day. That's a pretty rough schedule for anyone.
Imagine if you had a 12 hour work schedule every day. Now imagine what you would feel, if you didn't have a choice to be there. You had to be there whether you liked it or not. That's what school is like for a lot of kids. Making it extra long probably doesn't help. Many adults would probably turn to worse vices to cope with a schedule like that - alcohol, drugs etc. Extended phone use seems much more minor in comparison.
I devolve into the same exact patterns as this pubescent teen does when I'm overworked. Phone apps hit the same reward centers in our brain as drugs do.
It's possible that the phone displaced her craft activities because it's a lower effort dopamine hit, but I think she'd probably spend all of her time sleeping without the phone.
Just keying in on the school portion draining you of energy, I think of just my high school English classed alone. Read a Novel a month and have weekly tests. Between that write a 5 page paper about the literary elements of each chapter. Fall behind a bit and good luck catching up with all the other work thrown at you. Try to bring this up to a teacher and you get told "What another teacher assigns isn't my responsibility." Bring it up to administration and be told "We trust our teachers to do what is best".
Those who had internet turned to sparks notes, got good grades, good grades meant scholarships and an easier time in college. Those without went further in the hole as they were most likely working after school and trying to bring in extra money to help the family.
Between all of this, it is easy to find yourself mentally exhausted where all you want to do is endlessly scroll things. I can even find myself being drawn to social media when I have had a particularly stressful day at work. Come home exhausted, sit down, scroll, scroll, scroll. Think about the stuff you want/need to do, realize scrolling just requires thumb movement and no thought. Put the phone down after an hour or two and wonder where your evening went.
Ultimately teaching youth responsible habits, whether they be a phone, computer, or anything, is on the parents, but, outside forces really don't make things easier.
it's definitely toxic, but at the same time I do feel that the unrealistic expectations of my teachers prepared me well for the Real World. by the time I got to high school I realized that no one really did all the work. I didn't have to be perfect, I just had to stand out from the pack a little bit to get mostly B's and A's. people set high expectations on the off chance that someone might actually meet them, not because the sky will fall if they don't.
> School is exhausting. Between rising unnaturally early (which leaves kids tired), rushing and bustling kids on their daily commute, most of the daylight hours blocked for school then homework when you get home
I will point out though that, if one is inclined to argue that school should prepare children for adult life, it sounds like this system is a pretty good mimic of the working life any given child is likely to have after they eventually leave school. Just replace homework with non-work obligations (or a second job).
"Life sucks and you may as well learn it early." Setting aside the fact that tweens & teens in particular need more sleep (you can do with less when you're older), even if one has to get up at 6:30 and do a 90 minute commute every day, why make kids do this?
They can learn to get up early and commute when they have to do so. I don't think making kids spend 10 years waking up early is necessary to prepare them for getting up early as an adult.
Analogy: they may have to go without food at some point their life, that doesn't mean we have to starve them now so they're prepared. They can learn to do it when they need to do it.
Yes, but the difference is that as an adult you choose to be there. You can make arrangements that fit what you want. Kids don't have that option. They often don't even realize that they themselves might've put too much on their own plate and might not know how to handle it. They just don't burn out the same way adults do.
As an aside, if school was preparation for adult life then it really should teach you to drive, cook, and an understanding of the law. There are few things that school teaches that end up being more important than those for adults.
You still have way more flexibility and choice. You can decide to work more, work less, find a new job etc. What you get out of it is different and perhaps you don't want to give up your lifestyle, but you can decide to do that. You have no such choices as a kid.
If only. There are pretty much two settings available to most Americans: full time or more, and poverty. Relatively few people have the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time looking for better employment (again this is on top of all the working they are doing) or working less. I, for one, would gladly work a lot less for equivalently less pay, it just isn't an option available to me.
if school was preparation for adult life then it really should teach you to drive, cook, and an understanding of the law.
I don't know about now, but when I was in school (in the US), we were taught all those things and more (a bit of carpentry, metal work, engine repair, simple accounting, etc) YMMV.
At least back at the district I was in back in the day (and worked at, briefly), students could either take shop/business or advanced core classes. For some reason, those paths tended to have scheduling conflicts.
I went to one of the best rated public high schools in my state and also the country. While the academics were top notch compared to basically any other public high school around, it definitely did not prepare you adequately for (formal) engineering school. That includes the advanced courses that you had to take. I suspect that there are very few public schools that prepare you for those actual demands. Additionally, it was extremely competitive with respect to academics (in terms of grades/rank) and developing extracurriculars. It was no way representative of real life.
While I was not a good student in high school, and basically saw it as “doing time”, I was forced to get my act together academically when I became severely chronically ill my freshman year at university. My work ethic changed completely because not being a full time student meant no insurance. Also, if I did not have a job in the future with good benefits, it literally meant death (I require a blood product to survive). So, engineering school it was. But now I don’t live in the USA so this is less of a problem. It is nice not to have to worry constantly about healthcare and having to work a job just for the benefits—-as in to actually be free.
Is it, though? How many jobs will there be 10-20 years down the road where the main requirement is to be able to sit still for 8 hrs, ask before you go pee, and do as you're told? How many of these jobs will be automated instead? Or, differently, is that the kind of job you would want your kids to have?
What sort of job do you have that has homework? Mine certainly doesn't.
More generally, i don't think we should make kids lives suck to prepare them for the fact that the rest of their life is also going to suck. That's not the way to make happy people who appropriately prioritize work/life balance.
I have to study for certifications and generally expand my technical knowledge outside of work. It's not constant, but my quarterly objectives aren't achievable without "homework."
Everyone is different though. Some people have lower stress jobs where they work for a single company and have plenty of time to learn new stuff on the job (or never really need to acquire new skills). But I work in consulting, so acquiring new skills while maximizing my billable hours is part of the game.
I don't think its fair to call non-billable hours "homework". Having non-billable hours is part of running your own business. If you own your own business, you can do your nonbillable hours at any time in the day, including not in normal working hours, but you can also do your billable hours at any time of the day.
It's studying or writing (not billable work) that I must do to achieve a good "grade" (i.e., performance review) and it occurs between 9 and 11 pm -- long after I've left work for the day. That's the textbook definition of homework.
I'm also not the owner or anything of the sort; I'm a mid-level IC with no direct reports.
Homework took more time than housework - and I can decide not to do housework on any given day. I keep a cluttered house because I'm OK with that. Not to mention that housework takes very little mental effort - in fact, it is a grand time to daydream and get ideas (like showering). These are not the same beasts at all.
The second job is closer to homework, so long as you are doing it most nights and it takes some mental effort. And gee, it seems that having two jobs will pretty much kill creativity also and cause folks to burn out. At least with a second job, you are probably older. Teens and pre-teens simply aren't there mentally.
No it doesn't. The only way to prepare for adult life is to experience adult life early on. Experiencing more school life is the exact opposite of that.
I have done home schooling and regular public schooling. If you can afford to have a parent be at home full time with your kids, you are amongst the wealthiest in the world. You are fortunate.
Or the poorest. Especially if you cannot find a job that pays more than daytime child care costs. Then it’s cheaper to have a parent stay at home, despite the poverty level, because any daycare available costs more than any available job brings in.
That's true for young kids, but not preteens. By that age they're old enough to stay home alone for a couple of hours after school. Hence the term 'latchkey kid'.
It isn't always a choice: Most child care places simply do not take pre-teens - they stop after elementary school, as do many after-school programs.
I'll also add that it isn't just a couple hours after school: It is holidays that parents don't get off work. It is summers without school. It is 6-8 hours after school while parents work second shift. It, in general, doesn't matter if your child is mature enough to stay home during the summer or late into the evening, the child care isn't for them.
Any gap in employment or long-term unemployment is difficult to get over, but staying home with children seems to have its own stigma. My mother had quite a problem with this: She stayed home as she could while we were growing up, occasionally working when we really needed money. She started working more when my brother finally didn't need as much care (my brother is 11 years younger, so there was quite a stretch).
She got told no because she didn't have recent work experience. Childcare simply doesn't count unless you are getting paid to watch other people's children.
That's true if you were just managing the home. I know that "homework" and caring for kids alone may sometimes be exhausting, but regularly allocating time for studying is usually worth it for everyone. I personally know two mothers who successfully changed their careers for better during their stay-at-home years.
Your assertion that only families among "the wealthiest in the world" have non-school childcare arrangements is incorrect.
I agree that everyone should have access to better child-rearing opportunities than are offered by school, especially public school in North America. I'd love to see homework eliminated, more time in school devoted to play, more tracking & opportunities for everyone to develop their strengths (be they calculus or auto mechanics), and the elimination of compulsory secondary schooling (let the kids come who want to come & make it rewarding enough that they do, rather than threatening to jail their parents to bring them to heel).
I am ignoring the aspects of your comment directed towards me personally.
I think some of the replies that add "poorest" may have taken your comment too literally. Truly there is no greater treasure in the world than be able to spend that amount of time with your child. We have some neighbors who are not too well off that homeschool their kids, and they are the most engaged and loving family I know on our block. It makes me smile any time I see them interact.
> We have some neighbors who are not too well off that homeschool their kids
This is exactly the type of situation ttul seems unaware of. The "only rich white people homeschool" trope is a myth from people who are unfamiliar with the much more complex reality of the situation.
As someone who grew up in a fire trap of a falling apart trailer that was 25 years older than me deep in the Appalachian mountains, generally what most would consider poor as hell for an American, I was homeschooled. You can try and convince me we were rich I guess, but it wouldn't work.
It's ridiculous that you were downvoted because this is exactly right. Assuming one works federal minimum wage for 40hrs/week and 52 weeks a year with no days off and no taxes, they make roughly $15k by my math. How could a three-person family, with two parents making $30k total, possibly afford to homeschool the child?
It's right, but it's kind of a non-sequitur. It seems to be a response to "you should be homeschooling your kid", which sequoia didn't actually say. They suggested the problem is "school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention", and obviously homeschooling is how they are addressing it themselves, but you can imagine other solutions. Off-hand:
* For starters, school doesn't last until 6:30pm unless you let it. Extracurriculars are extra. If you need afternoon child care (and most of us do), there may be less directed, more creative options available.
* Schools can make changes, and you can encourage your teacher / school / district to do so. Less homework (an idea which has some science behind it iiuc) at least. Maybe a later start time (although this runs into tension with parents' schedules).
Every time there is discussion about kids on HN, someone wants me to leave the work and stay at home. Usually someone who would not do it himself. I did not downvoted, but I see how it is getting old.
Also, middle school that is from morning till 18:30 is definitely not the norm here. There is also this part where every single flaw of every educational system is assumed to be unchangeable and universal.
So it is not even like the argument would made sense.
My son was a curious kid, a geography nerd, and watched a lot of educational videos on YouTube. Got his phone and now is addicted. Is even going bad in school. Sure there is a pandemic, but we have a lot of fights here.
Parents always worry like this. Mine used to worry I was "addicted" to programming on the home PC. I'd say, no mum. I don't go outside and frolic in the fields like a Victorian-era child because we live in the middle of a giant housing estate in the North West of England where it's always cold and pissing with rain. My friends live a car drive away and we aren't into football, which is the only thing available to do outside around here, plus I read most of the interesting books in the house already, I've grown out of cartoons, the computer is more interesting than children's TV and definitely more interesting than homework, most of which is of obviously marginal utility when I become an adult.
Or at least that's what I would have said, if I'd been articulate enough to know how.
The child in this article doesn't sound "addicted" to her phone. It sounds like the wealth of social, creative and interesting activities available through it are just far more interesting than playing dolls with her mum. Maybe it's tough for her mum to accept that her daughter is growing up, but she had to grow out of that at some point - it was inevitable that something would replace it. Would she prefer if it had been TV, like it was for prior generations?
I've thought about schooling quite a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that a kid maybe needs 5 years of full time schooling to become proficient in reading, mathematics, civics and their government structure, and a high school level understanding of sciences. The rest of it is just government funded daycare. And that's what school is supposed to be for, right? To make a literate population capable of measuring and counting and abstractly understanding the world around them. So why does it take 13 years?
Kids are curious. Kids learn. They want to learn. You don't have to force them to do it.
I agree. But my model is slightly different. I feel it’s better to have children of multiple ages together in three schooling stages for multiple years.
Example: grade 1-5 can have children of that age range in that section for five years. Ditto for grade 6-9 etc. this way, children can learn at their own pace and time. And from their peers. Gives them more flexibility.
Schools should be for social education too and learning how to become adults. Parents should be more involved in forming peer groups rather than schools.
School buildings should be the only tax payers funded capital expense. And a skeleton crew of teachers with something like khan academy. Schools are where they can congregate for group studies or games or swimming pools or sports or music rooms or robotics meetups or shop work or fill in the blank etc.
Parents should raise children and make decisions. Not school unions. Also..why should those without kids in school pay taxes for everyone and sundry forever? There should be a base minimum towards public contribution for public education(the capital cost of neighborhood school buildings etc), but cost of raising and educating children should be shared amongst those whose children are studying. This will also help people make financially responsibly decisions as well location preferences when they want to grow and raise a family.
I am appalled that the govt..at least in the USA..has the responsibility of child care, child rearing and the other education. What are the parents doing? Parenting doesn’t end with just birthing your progeny.
Would you want to elaborate about the calculations/estimates and share any top readings you've found?
In many cases, the purpose of education depends on socioeconomic class or what you, your parents, and/or your social groups decide to take for yourselves.
Nearly everybody promotes widespread basic literacy for social cohesion and basic employment functionality, but higher skills are more of a battle ground. Many people do not want others to progress past the basics for a variety of reasons. One is a fear of "overproduction of elites", another is fear of competition from fully developed people with nice critical thinking skills (cue up George Carlin and his comments on critical thinking).
I'm interested in all time estimates for educational programs, know about Finland's general time frames for youth education, don't know about other national norms, and am happy to hear any suggested readings or other ideas.
The purpose of education as sold in the early days of national education was to create a literate and competent citizenry. The criteria I outlined above accomplishes that.
As far as socioeconomic class, overproduction of elites and critical thinking skills, I think it is plainly obvious that education systems do not help. I did not learn critical thinking in school, I learned it in life. In fact, what I'm doing right now is critically thinking about the role and effectiveness of rigorous education. They don't do that in rigorous education.
Overproduction of elites cannot happen through rigorous and standard education, it underproduces capable people. I should note that I do not think you can overproduce elites, I want everyone to be one.
I'm not saying that a person doesn't need an education. What I'm saying is that a child doesn't need 13 years of full time schooling and I'm saying that a classroom is not an effective place to learn most things we need to learn.
This is low effort and a cheap attack on rich people.
Why do we need the money of someone else to educate our children? Why do we go to work to pay the taxes that keep our kids in what amounts to a prison? Maybe part of how you get that 23rd century society is by stopping with this long and drawn out compulsory education charade. Teach people what they have to know to function in an advanced society, let them find their own interests and learn the things they need to learn to do the things they want. What about our current society precludes that from working? Tim Cook's existence?
Our obsession with packing children’s lives with empty calorie activities to “prepare the for the real world” is destructive - to their potential, their mental health, and our ability to level up as a species.
We’re doing it with a Montessori school in a state with low cost of living. It’s a significant cost, but the generational impact massively outweighs the impact to our retirement.
> When my kids home school they will spend a lot of time playing roblox or whatever, but then they'll spend hours playing outdoors, decide to do a cooking project that takes all morning–currently one of mine is getting into "bushcraft" and he'll watch hours of videos about making fires, carving etc. before putting the tips it into practice (safely) during times outdoors, where he spends hours and hours. Then he'll come back, play roblox for an hour, then help clean up and put the younger kids to bed.
> school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention that is preventing her from pursuing creative interests?
This was the problem for me when I was a kid. I had limited time to play my favorite video games. So I spend whole days in school imagining and planning what to do in the game in order to trade school time for the game time in a very inefficient way, and all my life was optimized to make full use of my game time - even though I was not playing. Separating kids from their favorite activities don't usually work as expected.
that's always irked me about one of the common arguments against permanent DST -- "without DST kids would be going to school in the dark" (instead of coming home in the dark). i mean obviously the clock is the problem
I too struggle to understand this kind of thinking. Our society says bullshit like, "Kids are our greatest resource!" but we know that's pure horseshit because if it was true, we'd rearrange our lives and society around them. We don't.
I see this even with adults. You can certainly toughen up and work long hours and maybe even efficiently. Most people will probably do a better job with less than ~ 6 hours per day at least on intellectual work or learning. If you try to do more you will not be able to sustain it long term with your other obligations in life while staying healthy and happy. As with anything, there are exceptions but they tend to confirm the experience.
I have worked more than 12 hours more days in a row on very hard stuff during e.g. infrastructure migrations that didn't exactly follow a plan for unforeseen reasons and I did an exam the next day after the return from this business trip. I had more similar experiences. I am able to script/ program multiple hours without much in terms of break if I am "in the flow". I also like long walks or just sitting down with people drinking tea and having a conversation even about somewhat deep topics. This is a kind of offset of the peak concentration and performance.
The question about energy and motivation is in my opinion also related to tools and methods and not just long hours and early wake up. At OrgPad.com we learn about new approaches to education in conversations with our users and friends all the time since our 2000+ users are mostly students at elementary schools, high schools and universities. We also have a small but very active community of academics using OrgPad to pursue research and personal development. E.g. a teacher created a large OrgPage with many topics related to chocolate. These are roughly: activities, knowledge gathering tasks or experiments and information. Using this approach you can motivate children and their due to COVID-19 involuntary home schooling parents to discover e.g. whether chocolatey burns: https://www.orgpad.com/s/9l8igw
The teacher who made all that shares her experiences (in Czech) on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyM6l4FHtb0&list=PLs5kSDmhaz...
It seems, the children (and their parents hopefully too) like her approach to digital education a lot. I sincerely think OrgPad.com can help many people with organizing their thoughts and other information and related materials while not sucking their mental energy as other tools and methods do. If you want a short (< 3 minute, in English) taste of what is possible with OrgPad, please have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtqFWSJT9yw
I see some light in this new situation though. My kid has had to remote into his classroom during the March lockdown, and again recently. It seems to work just fine. The teacher can still check on his progress, but when he's at home there's no commute and he can spend his free time as he likes. Meals can also be taken in front of the screen. Slow at eating lunch? Keep eating.
At the same time, he has an actual school that he can go back to next week, and he can catch up with friends again.
This sort of flexible schooling could be the thing for the future.
Except my child is doing the school from home, and it seems that just translates to even more homework. Sure she frequently procrastinates, but having a teacher send "don't panic, here are 4 hours of homework due tomorrow" has literally put her in the situation of sitting on her computer from 8PM till 2AM a number of times now. Plus she is burning ~8 hours on the weekend with homework too.
So, I guess that is the price of being in a top tier highschool taking AP classes. When I was in a similar situation I probably only spent on average an hour a day on homework.
> Edit: I must admit I commented after reading only half the article (shame on me). It does in fact seem like her daughter has a phone-use problem. What I say above remains true, however.
Yes, one of the defining symptoms of addiction (to anything) is that it interferes with your normal relationships with others. Addicts see these relationships as hurdles to getting their fix and tend to withdraw from them as they get more and more addicted.
I very much doubt her kid is "in school" until 6:30. More likely she is in a after-school program, and most after-school programs are part homework help, part play. My kid misses her after-school program terribly as it was more of an extended playdate with her best friends.
It is hard when they come home and their evenings are packed, but I wouldn't make it out as all bad or all exhausting.
> I realize with horror that she’s spent nine hours on the phone that day. She was only awake at 11.
> My daughter doesn’t make collages or jewelry or sew anymore. A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.
> Getting her to make a card for a family member — something she once did for fun — is like getting her to clean her room
> Yet still, each day is a battle over only one thing.
> And little by little, our daughter has chipped away at our rules and resolve.
Honestly, so much of this sounded familiar to me ... but from my own teenage years. My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).
So I'd say that no, it's not that phones are like crack. There seems to be a disconnect on the parent's expectations when children discover the possibilities of a technology that's unfamiliar to them. In the article they're talking about the ease of controlling TV time but that doesn't even compare in possibilities of communication, entertainment and education.
Heck... I'm sure if you could go back in time you'd discover the first generation to grow up with books, and their desperate parents noticing how the kids aren't ... working the fields and feeding the cattle, I guess.
This resonates with me because when I was a kid I really enjoyed video games and I would program them into my cheap, rudimentary computer. I even sold some games I made on cassette tapes. My parents were really distressed that I was wasting my time. But-- surprise-- I had/ have a long and successful career making video games.
Now I am a parent and I tend to let my kids play a lot of game on their computer. But it is different. In the old days computers weren't really that entertaining except if you programmed them. Now they have a lot of passive entertainment value. It's a lot more like watching television or talking on the phone then the engaging hobby I had as a child. I tell them it is important to create media as well as consume media.
My kids (boys) are not on tiktok. I think social media is a waste of time and I actually would worry if either of them used it. They do go on Discord a lot, and that also has some problems.
I agree the vast majority of computer users do not get those benefits, since their main computer is their phone. Phones do not lend themselves to learning about computers, they provide sterile environments that try to get you to forget its a computer in the first place and scroll facebook instead.
Seems like your kid just isn’t interested in the same things you are. If the flashy entertainment were stripped away, they probably would’ve never cared about it.
The poster said their kid wasn't interested in fiddling with workings of computers before social media was a thing, so I don't think that's the problem in their specific case.
There's always been low hanging fruit. There were video games from the dawn of computing. I played games and did programming, sometimes more gaming, sometimes more coding. My mother worried generically about 'computer time'.
Many of my friends had games consoles, or computers but they only used BASIC to load games from cassettes. They turned out fine. None of them ever expressed the slightest interest in creating anything but they went on to do other useful things, like teaching or social care.
We are way, way too quick to assign complicated sciencey sounding explanations to stuff earlier generations would have described as common sense. Games are fun. Reading is fun. Talking is fun. Parents used to despair at the hours their daughters would spend on the expensive telephone instead of doing more child-y or creative things, and so what? They all worked out fine. The world is not short on creative people.
I spent from age 7 to 12, treating computers as entertainment device and then started programming.
My dad never really pushed for me to do it, it was out of necessity. My mom actively fought it.
Somehow it stuck with me and I realised the potential to automate my entire life and, later, that I could use it to make money, even if I was underage.
For my own kids, I'm planning to put them in a situation where they will need to learn how to create and be independent, without pushing them in that direction, or helping them out.
Yup. There was a moral panic about fiction specifically in the early-to-mid 1800s. Kids (and women, too) were sitting around staring at these made-up stories instead of going out and doing real things.
"We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while at the same time it affords no benefit whatsoever to the body" - Scientific American, circa 1859
> not only playing games but also learning programming
I think the basic question is: Are you consumer or producer? When you program or using excel or writing a blog posts, you grow as a person. Apps can be both, so It's more about the ratio. You can try to make nice & creative photos for your Instagram profile or just browse and see what others are up to.
The problem is that kids will tell you that they will produce and learn, but then spend most of the time consuming, which will slowly kills their creativity.
I spent thousands of hours in front of my Vic20, C64, etc. Back then the platforms really encouraged creativity. Now I feel every single platform just encourages consumerism.
There is a substantive difference between a computer and a phone; only one is carried with you every single second of the day. Until you account for the drastic difference in how they can be used, it's pretty hard to equate your experience with a computer to a kid's experience today with a smart phone.
> My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).
Whatever, social networks are a different thing. I wouldn't mind my kids spend as much time using their gadgets as they want except for social networks. Consuming information, hacking and even some chatting are okay, Instagram addiction is not.
Did no one besides you read the article? FTA: "My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14..."
People are arguing about everything from extended school hours, excessive homework to climate change in this thread.
Could it be that the daughter was raised in a highly sheltered environment and once she hit puberty, she had other interests besides collages, jewelry and sewing?
I wrote this in another comment...
"It's a tale as old as time. Every child is a genius, angel, perfect until they hit puberty. Then we find "rock 'n roll", "rap music", "radio", "MTV", "television" or other culprits for corrupting our youth. Today it is social media. Tomorrow it will be VR. God knows what comes after that."
The entire article is about an overprotective and controlling mother complaining that her daughter is now a teenager. Instead of blaming rap music, she's blaming the iPhone.
That might be true, if electronic gadgets were the same as previous obsessions. But they're different. They change from second to second, providing a level of stimulation unprecedented in human experience.
It's possible we're not going to adapt well to this e-world. There's no reason to think an evolved ape has the wiring to make the transition without trauma.
Imagine if the iPhone were heroin. Would we be so casual in dismissing it?
"Imagine if X were Y" isn't really an argument to support "We should act as if X were Y, or at least similar". What needs to be presented is a reason to believe that X is, in fact, like Y.
How is it so obviously not heroin? I, a fully-formed and functioning adult, feel the pull in my brain. I was addicted to cigarettes in my 20s and I've had unhealthy relationships with numerous other drugs and video games that I've (mostly) managed to pull myself away from, after years. The feeling of "checking your notifications" and "scrolling through twitter" on your phone are remarkably similar to the compulsion for drugs. This is my personal subjective experience and I believe objective research confirms it as well.
If you want to make an argument that it should be treated like heroin because it is in some relevant sense more like heroin or other things that it is broadly accepted should be treated like heroin than it is like other things that it is broadly accepted should not be treated like heroin then...some evidence besides simply stating your belief for the relevant similarity would be a good thing to present.
The point you're making may be that it is akin to "drugs" but not all drugs are like heroin and what you are describing is nothing like heroin cravings and withdrawal.
Why not go with something that invokes less emotions in the reader like "caffeine" or "nicotine"?
Because the itch to check on a notification or scroll through the news feed is surely closer to the itch for a cigarette or your vaporizer than... heroin. That's a big jump there just to describe "compulsive desire".
From my personal experiences and according to the subjective experiences of my friends I've had chatted on this topic with... certainly a closer feeling to the reward seeking behavior (itch) that can be conditioned with simultaneous application of nicotine + a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
Sufficient evidence was presented for the metaphor, it seems apt and you seem to be overly obtuse. You seem unwilling to look beyond the obvious "its quite obviously literally not heroin". My god you sound insufferable.
It is really not sufficient evidence for the metaphor, though.
The point may be that it is akin to "drugs" but not all drugs are like heroin and what he is describing is nothing like heroin cravings and withdrawal.
Why not go with something that invokes less emotions in the reader like "caffeine" or "nicotine"?
Because the itch to check on a notification or scroll through the news feed is surely closer to the itch for a cigarette or your vaporizer than... heroin. That's a big jump there just to describe "compulsive desire".
When I was a kid the compulsion to put plastic zoo animals in little enclosures, and build all 151 pokemon out of lego was remarkably similar to the compulsion for drugs. I don't think there's anything inherently bad about this.
Each particular video game gets old and boring really quick. You need a constant supply of new games to stay "addicted" your entire life, which is exactly the opposite of how an addiction for a physical substance works. You never stop taking drugs unless you somehow can taper off the dosage. This is one of the reasons why switching from smoking to vaping and quitting vaping is easier than quitting smoking. You have control over your dosage and a lot of unclean crap is taken out.
Edit:
Not getting access to clean drugs is one of the biggest reasons why addicts suffer from health problems and have trouble reducing their dosage. Small portions of harder drugs and random substances that are optically identical are mixed into drugs and strengthen the addiction beyond what the primary ingredient can do.
Almost everything in history is "unprecedented in human experience". That's pretty much the defining feature of being a human, that our world is constantly changing (because we're changing it). A smartphone is just another distraction in a long line of man-made distractions that we've invented, worried about, and then adapted to. Oh man the headlines that exist from the past worrying about people reading newspapers on trains and how it will be the end of civilization. Heck if you go back to the 1800s, we were worried that novels would make people unable to tell facts from fiction [1].
>It's possible we're not going to adapt well to this e-world
There are very few things humans have ever created that humans are unable to adapt to (and pretty much all of those things are weapons). That's the other side of the unique thing that makes us human: things are constantly changing, and we are constantly adapting to the changes.
For as long as humans have lived, we've tried to distract ourselves from the banality of life. Some part of the population goes down a rabbit hole and stays lost and unproductive: that's not new. The majority of people are mildly productive and then turn to distractions when work is over. And another small group shuns distractions in order to stay as productive as possible for as long as possible. This bell curve has existed through all of human history.
The people who get addicted to apps and social media and phones are the same people who were addicted to novels in the 1800s and comics in the 1930s and TV in the 1950s and video games in the 1990s. Even infinite scrolling isn't new... libraries have existed for a long time, TV just keeps playing forever and ever, and there are more video games than you can play in a lifetime.
When cars and trains were new, people were questioning if evolved apes could survive speeds faster than 30mph. We are not just evolved apes; our specific evolutionary advantage is the ability to adapt, overcome, and get bored even when presented with unlimited stimulation.
But lets be honest - they weren't anywhere near the level of an instantly-available portable object you can keep in your pocket and pings you for attention all day and all night.
There's may be a threshold beyond what we can manage. A Polly-Anna attitude of "we've survived so far!" is not comforting nor convincing.
And the approach of "lets give ever-more-addictive devices to our children unrestricted until some provable damage occurs" is perhaps a negligent policy.
I think the step from books->TV was much more dramatic that TV->SocialMedia. the delta of stimulation is much greater in the former, imho.
In any case, 1hr of iPhone/day is way too strict for a teenager nowadays. I was lucky to be the 3rd child, and my parents didn’t really paid attention to how I was spending my time. I overdosed on a bunch of things as a kid: TV, videogames, my computer, the internet when I got it (I’m in my late 30s), but then I got over them, except computers, which became my profession.
On the other hand, people my age that were only allowed one hour of Nintendo per day as kids, are still craving the next PlayStation like grown up junkies. Last time I played a videogame I was maybe.. 22.
>On the other hand, people my age that were only allowed one hour of Nintendo per day as kids, are still craving the next PlayStation like grown up junkies. Last time I played a videogame I was maybe.. 22.
This is awfully close to gatekeeping. All hobbies are fine in moderation. One is not inherently 'better' than any other.
Yes, I’ll give you that.
I think the point I was trying to make was that being denied some activities ( or have them severely restricted) as a young kid, may have repercussions later in life that ends up being the opposite of what the parents wished for.
Kind of like how TV pictures change from second to second, or city life changes from second to second, or...well, heroin doesn't change from second to second, but it provides a dopamine hit that's even more powerful than things that do. We pretty casually dismiss the Opium Wars now.
Its portable. You can choose your drug with a phone - games, texting, facebook. And it pings and pings and won't let you get any respite. Its different in intensity from all those things that came before.
I just think it deserves some analysis - what's the maximum distracting addictive information rush we can support without becoming disfunctional or chronically obsessed? Isn't it worth finding out, before we give children unrestricted access?
Ah yes. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. I remember when the tv ( aka idiot box ) was attacked for being addictive.
> Would we be so casual in dismissing it?
Who is casually dismissing it? There is an entire propaganda campaign against social media. From congress to news to netflix and on, ironically enough, social media itself. Every day we hear about how bad social media is.
But what I was responding to was the article itself. The complaints in the article would exist with or without iphones, apps, social media. Staying up all night talking to friends, waking up at 11 AM, losing interest in childhood stuff, pushing back against the parents, etc are all teenage behavior, not iphone behavior.
I'm not a fan of smartphones as they are and I despise social media. But that's not what the article was really about. I was just trying to stay on topic.
It was what the article was about. This 'drug' is portable, instantly accessible and actually pings you constantly for attention. It's like nothing that came before. And whitewashing it as 'more of the same' is disingenuous.
iPhones are just a medium for information. In my opinion it shouldn't matter how you access information, the type of information being accessed is what's most important. "Spending too much time" on a phone shouldn't be the top priority, what they're doing with their phones is what should be looked after.
30 years ago, kids had hobbies, there's wasn't much to compete. Legos, collecting stamps/baseball cards, catching bugs, building models, photography, racing home build cars, sports, even things like just reading the encyclopedia, etc. Even libraries weren't that well stocked, I think I read every sci-fi book at my local library.
Now there's literally billions being spent on "free" games, "free video", "free" social sites, etc and trying every video, audio, vibration, trick in the book to make them more addicting. It's a trap, it encourages vanity, consumerism, poor body image, etc. I think the best thing you can do for kids these days is make sure they have a healthy amount of time offline.
Yes, it's like they are despair to find a simple explanation for their child disinterest in things they want her to be interested in when it's just their child growing up.
Maybe. My teenage years were spent reading and being creative. I spent more time creating artwork during those years than in all the subsequent decades put together. But if I had had a smartphone back then? I doubt I would have read a single book or created any artwork. Would that made me a better or worse person than I am now? Well, that's impossible to say. I don't regret how I spent my teenage years. Will those who are growing up fully engrossed in their phones every feel regret? We probably won't know for about 30 more years when they have enough life experience to look back and reflect. It will be interesting to see what people have to say around 2050. Then again, what do they have to compare it with? They can't compare a life lived constantly on a phone with a life not lived constantly on one. So... maybe it is impossible for any person to say which way is better. Maybe it is just the aggregate of all of society over many decades that we can determine whether this experiment has a positive or negative (or neutral) outcome.
I don't think that's true. Most people I know on these apps are creating content just as much as they're consuming it. And the daughter in the linked article is clearly described as doing so.
A lot of the comments here seem to be saying that (1) kids getting addicted to phones is no different than getting addicted to TV, books, etc, and that this is just the latest iteration of a complaint parents have had for generations and (2) this person is a bad parent.
I used to agree with (1), but lately I'm inclined to think that this time, it really is different. Very different. And the primary reason is that unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more, on a scale we've never seen before. Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer. TV isn't a bi-directional communication platform that has thrown teenagers into an arena where they're communicating with thousands of people at a time when they're still figuring out how to communicate in small groups.
Regarding (2), I think people are being far too critical. The author acknowledges many of their own missteps, and they're also going through a time where, iPhone or not, their daughter is growing apart from them, and I imagine that's very difficult emotionally. I also feel like they really humanized how budging a little bit on rules here and there can spiral out of control, and how that feels. I really appreciated that perspective.
"Bad parent" can be applied to anything that goes wrong, and is an empty assertion. And it seems to be asymmetrically applied to mothers, not fathers.
Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat."
This bias in the literature makes it look like there are some brilliant parents out there, who have found the secret for success that the rest of us can "just" follow. There are of course parallels in the business literature.
The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents.
I overheard a discussion between two friends about the effects of TV on behavior. One friend's argument: "Of course commercial TV affects behavior. That's its purpose." This stuff is designed to manipulate us. Maybe that's possible with books too, but books have just not risen to that level of sophistication.
> Also, one of the first rules of parenting is, never show any sign of weakness in public, or you will be attacked ruthlessly. It's a variant on the old saying, "Never let them see you sweat."
I agree with everything you say except for this. We have friends (2 kids now) where mom is like that. On first glance all is perfect, she is perfect mom that manages to do so many things, all is great etc. Apart from actual reality once you know them better and you know where to look. At the end they are no better than rest of us, in some aspects far from it (this kind of behavior stems from some deeper issue(s), which tend to manifest in various ways). And all this charade starts to look pathetic pretty quickly.
Be honest, open, laugh at your fails, we all went through it, its normal. It will get you further with almost everybody including yourself. Definitely with me.
/ If I misunderstood what you meant then sorry for the preaching.
Ah, but do you have kids? Because whooboy, lemme tell ya... Speaking as a parent, I can honestly say there is nobody more judgemental than other parents. I can't tell you how many times I've heard parents criticize other people's parenting.
Parenting is a thankless job is fraught with insecurity and doubt, and every parent thinks they are not doing good enough, and constantly comparing themselves to other parents. Seeing a parent who shows weakness, who is not doing a good job, is a vindication for parents. "Hey, look, I'm not as bad as HIM/HER". You don't want other parents to think that about you, so you make sure you never EVER allow parents to see you make a mistake because you know the first thing that will happen is they will go home and talk about it with their parent/parent/friend/whoever.
Parenting is just like any other job. You can be an employee, but if people think you're a screw up don't expect to be invited to any social functions. Except in this case it's not just you who is getting excluded... It's your child and the rest of your family.
It's kind of comforting that the ad industry has thrown billions of dollars into trying to mind-control people, and conversion rates are still super low. Maybe we got lucky; maybe on another planet somewhere, intelligent life is 1000x more susceptible to ads.
> The best formula I have observed is that obedient, self disciplined children tend to have obedient, self disciplined parents.
I agree and hope people don't take this in a defeatist way. I've found that the biggest impact you can have on anyone's behavior (adult or child) is to set the example. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away, and besides, they only know how to act the way the see. Work on yourself, and your kids will follow.
> I've found that the biggest impact you can have on anyone's behavior (adult or child) is to set the example.
I agree in principle, but I find that that doesn't map very well to the digital world.
This past Saturday, I spent about six hours staring at a screen. My kids did too. I was making music, an act I find creative, meaningful, and intellectually stimulating. They were mostly watching YouTube videos of people playing Minecraft.
At the primitive monkey brain level where "setting an example" kicks in, all my kids saw was that I was staring at a screen so they did too.
Ok, so why did you not make music together with your children if you don't want them to watch Minecraft videos? It feels like you wasted an opportunity there. Blaming your kids for not knowing how to make music is pretty weird.
Learning to play Minecraft seems like a meaningful activity. It's essentially digital Legos, not to different perhaps from the way you compose music on your digital canvas.
Is there something else you would rather your kids be doing?
Go outside. Explore the neighborhood. Ride your bike. Read a book. Practice your cello. Tinker in the basement.
I may be old fashioned, but Minecraft strikes me as faux-creative. It's not something you get "better" at. That's just my reaction, having watched it done. It puts you in a state of flow without actually flowing anywhere.
My question was intended as a direct question to parent poster. If that's what you want your kids to be doing, then that's what you should be doing. Your kid wants to be just like you. They watch everything you do, and they will find their own way to do what they think you are doing.
So, want your kids to go outside? Go outside. Want them to read? Read. Want them to practice cello? Practice cello.
Want them to learn how to build digital creative? Let them see you building your own digital creations.
From my experience and observation of other parents and kids, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they want to be like you, sometimes the opposite.
There's certainly many factors involved (age is a huge one), and it's important to remember that you cannot control or change other people. You can only influence them to change. I believe that is just as true of children as any other human.
By doing the activity yourself, you expose the child to it, and they may decide to take part. Over time, they will almost certainly take interest. That doesn't mean you read a book one day and get frustrated because they are playing video games. You read a book every weekend because you want to, and over time, it influences how your child perceives best use of free time, demonstrates discipline, and showcases a non video game activity.
Yeah. Every time I hear someone blamed for bad parenting, I think about how Abraham Lincoln's father used to beat him for reading. Let's all try to raise little Lincolns, then?
I was 100% convinced my kids won't get these devices until their very late teens, when I saw how my less than 1 year old reacted to the phones my wife and I use. Because his reaction is pure instinct, the dopamine response just to the colors and brightness was shocking.
We now have to work HARD to keep these devices away from him. Part of it, of course, is he observes how much attention we pay them but his eyes definitely light up differently when they are turned on. And that's without the manipulative, 1000-engineers-optimizing-for-your-addiction software built into them.
I honestly find it harder and harder to believe these things do anything positive for us. I 100% believe they can I just think we've turned them into something ugly, right now.
I've babysat for friends with a 3 and 5 yr old, and it is phenomenal how you could grab their attention (and distract from any ailment they had a second earlier) by showing them youtube videos of fire engines with sirens.
I agree with you - when a book is down, a TV is off or a console is off, it doesn't ping you and light up to gain your attention. Sure, as kids we watched a lot of TV, but when it was time to turn it off we didn't get a sound to tell us someone "Liked" your photo. As you said, these aren't bi-directional.
I think the hardest thing for this parent was balancing what was right for their child (and they seemed to be confident in their opinion) and what would hold them back socially at school. It's hard to say no to a child that says "Everyone else has an iPhone" because we all remember being that kid left out from something when we were young.
IDK. I mean you're right, of course, but I remember getting engrossed in books to the point where I lost sleep, or delayed doing other important things because I either could not put it down or I was drawn back to it. This happened as a teen and as a young adult, not so much lately but I really don't read books nearly as much as I used to.
I was also an avid reader growing up and spent many nights under the covers with a flashlight.
I think the big difference is the adaptivity of the phone. Books don't figure out what personally engrosses you and tweak the rest of the book so you can't put it down. That feels too powerful IMO.
Also, at some point you finish the story. There's a natural stopping point and conclusion that makes it easier to out the book down and spend time doing something else before picking up the next one.
Contrast that with so many apps whose main feed uses some sort of infinite scroll.
>unlike TV and books, this is an interactive device explicitly designed to manipulate our psychology into using it more
I think the TV, film, and print media attempted to do the same, they were/are just much less effective at it. For example, watch a "slow burn" movie like Alien. Most modern movies, by comparison, seem to be edited to keep our short attention span tuned in. Same with the old adage "sex sells"...we've always been trying to hijack human attention we're just so good about it now it's essentially been weaponized.
> Books never had thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer
Books and other forms of media have been optimised to be addictive to read/watch for decades. It might not happen at the same scale, but the increase in scale also means that the mediums get less personal. I think that balances things out in some ways.
> thousands of engineers observing realtime metrics to make small tweaks to make you use something just a little bit longer.
As one of the thousands of engineers dedicated to making you use your consumer electronics a little bit more: it's really easy to defeat my work. You make a conscious decision not to use the product, you catch yourself using it, you stop. Do it for about a month and you've broken the habit. That's why we look at metrics like MAUs and L28s. There is basically nothing I can do about a user who actively doesn't want to use the product; we basically throw up our hands and say "Not our target market."
The reason my job exists is because hundreds of millions of people don't think like that, and don't have any conscious opinion one way or another about my product. It's those users we're trying to influence, the ones who are basically ambivalent, allocate their time based on emotion, and don't have any strong beliefs one way or another about what they should be spending their time on or how they want their life to look. There are enough of them that this market is worth billions, but everything I do - all the engagement work and instant gratification and positioning subtle hints in the UI - is about influencing the people who don't care one way or another. If that is not you - if you have actively made a conscious choice what you want to spend your time on, and it's not watching TV more - you won't even see my product. (It was actually pretty awkward when I took my job, because I work on TVs but watch basically none and didn't even own a TV beforehand.)
> You make a conscious decision not to use the product
I feel like I've heard this before, re: alcoholism, obesity, etc... It's true that if you just decide to stop the behavior you don't like, you're cured. But it is so far from easy that it's a lifelong journey for many people.
Your job is not just to compete for a limited number of zombies, but to keep as many people that actually do care from climbing out of the hole. People are not binary between zombie/not zombie, they're on a spectrum, and I think it's naive to think that anyone with the slightest desire to not use your product can just close it & quit.
Here is a little exercise: imagine yourself being a drug dealer, and read your own comment out loud. It rings perfectly, and it is no coincidence, proportions aside.
You cannot absolve yourself from responsibility just because your target audience 'had a choice'.
FWIW I think drugs should be legal too (though I won't go near them myself), and the rest of the country is gradually coming around to that realization.
My dad smashed my computer around the laundry (where the computer lived) with my cricket bat because I was "playing games" instead of studying.
"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation.
But just like my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots, who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society.
>"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with. Even if they did escape the attention algorithm long enough to get bored and explore there is nothing to discover it's a locked black box.
Blanket statements are easy but reality is much more complex.
iSH, code learning apps, Codecademy via the iPad browser, iBooks, Library Genesis for getting any book in existence for free, Duolingo, cloud coding. I could go on...
There's many, many ways of learning through these devices.
Is anything you listed even remotely on the same level as "assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game", what does Duolingo have to do with being able to understand and prod the workings of the machine in your hand.
Still a locked down black box designed around attention algorithms and I'm getting tired of pretending it's not.
I agree, unless you're typing raw hex codes into the instruction pipeline, you're not really programming. And truthfully, I'd prefer manipulating gates by hand. Otherwise, how do you know you're really talking to the machine.
I hate high-level amateurs like you, diluting this serious and noble craft with your hex codes. If you're not etching the silicon yourself, it's ephemeral fluff. Get serious.
Many HN readers earn a living from programming skills they developed by exploring computers aimlessly as kids in the 1990s and 2000s. I’m a Duolingo addict who has used the app daily for more than three years, so I do think it’s a fun way to build basic language skills. But no matter how much time I spend in the app, I won’t learn how it works or get the ability to change, modify or develop it. The learning experience is stage-managed by a company and funded by ads displayed between the lessons. It is very different to my experience of learning to write HTML and PHP when I was in high school.
> But no matter how much time I spend in the app, I won’t learn how it works or get the ability to change, modify or develop it.
Who cares? Just because you and many others on HN learned some stuff from fiddling with some computers doesn't mean that learning a language is lesser.
"Ah, you aren't doing things that I did as a kid that lead to my high income! You're trash, kid! Git gud!"
My point isn’t about coding versus learning languages, it’s about open-ended creative activities versus ad-sponsored iOS games. Don’t get me wrong, I like playing the games too!
as someone who finds the kind of programming possible on iOS extremely primitive, I still find your comment disingenuous. Kids even creating and uploading tiktoks, or messing around with their friends creations in roblox or even trying Swift Playgrounds is miles more useful than... learning pascal and assembly to make the most boring game ever.
kids have access to magic these days, while algorithmic abuse is rampant, thats not an iPad's core proposition.
Has anyone ever learned those languages on an iPad though? Even if you know a few languages already, learning a new one by writing software on a device with a small screen, no keyboard, no filesystem, no native app IDE, no browser debugger, and severely limited multitasking, seems almost impossible to me. If I had an iPad rather than a computer running Windows 95 when I was growing up, I don’t think I’d know how to code today.
> None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with.
It has a generally standards-compliant browser, so while you may not be able to use assembly language and pascal, you can probably connect to something that lets you write and run programs through the browser (whether they actually run in the browser or remotely).
The UI isn't ideal for it, but neither was the membrane keyboard on my Timex/Sinclair 1000.
I think there's a big gulf between Minecraft, Roblox, Facetime and even Youtube when compared to TikTok/Snapchat/Facebook.
Not all screen time is created equal, and there are any number of ways for a child to be creative and learn and socialise in the digital world as suppose to the physical one.
The social networks are a bit different. What value is a child getting from them that they wouldn't get from a WhatsApp group? As other commenters have pointed out, these big platforms are engineered to the last detail to 'increase engagement'. To put it another way - they are purposefully addictive and I don't see the value that might make that worthwhile.
Have you read the book "Running on Empty" by Jonice Webb? It describes a pattern she identifies as "childhood emotional neglect" (a possibly misleading label). The pattern she describes usually includes a combination of lack of attention, lack of an emotional connection between parent and child, and lack of appropriate responses to problems the child faces.
Your comment made me think of that book, and I certainly found it very useful in overcoming some of the lingering consequences of my odd upbringing. My mother was not abusive, but was alternately neglectful and controlling, and I only recently found out that she was continuing patterns from her own childhood. I highly recommend the book if your situation is at all similar.
I started my kids on an app called Simply Piano, and am trying it out myself. I loved music my whole life but never wanted to take piano lessons; now I do, so I'm trying it out.
Turning that into a career seems like a moonshot, making it comparable to other "achieve celebrity" plans young adults may have (become a movie star, become a famous youtuber, become a famous rockstar, etc)
I think in general these aspirations shouldn't be shat on, but young adults with these aspirations should probably be gently guided in more realistic directions.
You dont have too, the time investment is minimal,many girls were already taking erotic pics anyway. If you are attractive you can ride that wave for several years and keep living your life normally.
I've noticed that many of these girls are college students and the money from their admirers is useful to buy clothes, gadgets and to take their boyfriends to fancy vacations.
So as long as you are aware this is a bubble you will be doing fine.
I don't know what you mean by 'you don't have to.' The claim above is that there is a difference between learning how to program and having an onlyfans account. Your response was to say the difference is that the latter makes money. My response to that is the former is more likely to turn it into a career. I don't see where compulsions come into it.
You dont need to invest time in onlyfans. It's free money basically. For all the other 'careers' , Youtubers, modelling, acting, singing, there is a huge opportunity cost because you have to invest a lot of time just to have a slim chance. If you are 20 yo attractive girl, you take some pics every other day, the less clothes the better and you may be raking money in the thousands by month. It's your choice what to do with the rest of your time.
Turning it into a career is difficult, not because it's hard to get into. Rather it's hard to stay there because your attractiveness is a finite resource that is running out eventually.
That could only do so because someone learned how to program in assembly even if not being payed for it.
A good example of how making money not always equate to making value.
There would be no Mark Zuckerberg without Rasmus Lerdorf. And if both were in the same room with me, it would be with Rasmus that i would like to talk to, because it doesnt matter that his net worth is peanuts compared to Zuckerberg, because from my perspective at least he created more value to society doing harder things than Zuckerberg.
With Tiktok, Youtube and the like, the comparison gets even worse when you compare the abyss of money making vs. value produced..
I'd argue that "doing tiktok" is not creating but consuming an app. Similar as writing a reply in a chat app is not "creating literature" (generally) but merely consuming the features of that app.
Writing replies in a chat app is learning to type. Typing is a job skill, people used to pay for typing classes.
If, in the chat app, you create literature, you're creating literature. Some people are, most people aren't. If, on tiktok, you create interesting short films, you're creating interesting short films. Some people are, most people aren't.
To sum up, I agree with you that "doing tiktok" is like using a chat app, and agree with you that it's not necessarily educational. I disagree that it's necessarily not educational.
The head of technical support at the company for which I work recently quit her job to support her husband's streaming career. He makes in three months more than I do in a year.
This idea that things like iPhones, or video games, or any other piece of technology cannot possibly be productive or profitable in the future, it's got to die.
When I was young, my passion for computers meant I wouldn't become the lawyer people suggested I should be, but now I make more than most of my lawyer friends. Things change, and "using an iPhone" may end up being the key to future happiness, career opportunities, or who knows what?
> The head of technical support at the company for which I work recently quit her job to support her husband's streaming career. He makes in three months more than I do in a year.
For every one of those, there are hundreds of streamers who quit their jobs to focus on streaming but ended up broke, and thousands of streamers who spend every free moment outside of their day job trying to build a following but never get there.
The old dream of rock stardom, well, you get a guitar and figure out that it's actually hard and maybe you shelve that. Streaming... anybody can play Minecraft, so you can keep the dream alive a lot longer.
Sure, but I'm not saying "everybody should try streaming for a living." I'm saying it's not true that kids using iPhones is always a dead-end timesuck.
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I'm sorry, I fail to see how providing a counter-example to someone pooh-poohing phone use by children is now analogous to advocating for productive cocaine use.
It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.
I explicitly added the disclaimer to preempt your attempt to ignore my question, which you did anyway. Fantastic.
You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.
Okay, I'll try this one last time. Please try to read the whole comment, rather than getting hung up on one element of it. You know, like you incorrectly suggest I did.
This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.
This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.
That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!
Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."
That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.
So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."
Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.
It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.
So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.
Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!
Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.
TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.
That's all. Don't be so quick to assume that smartphones--or any other technology--are 100% bad. That's it. That's the only thing I was saying.
P.S. Personally, I don't think the kid's problem is the phone, but the social media. TikTok and Instagram are a poison to humanity.
Don’t most streamers use complex setups involving professional-grade AV equipment, custom-built gaming computers, and complicated software like OBS to glue it all together? I don’t think you can learn how to do all that stuff by spending lots of time on your iPhone as a teenager.
It's worth learning anyway, even just to help one's family videos not be so damned boring and amateurish.
Not everything has to be directly related to employment. It's nice to know how to cook a meal, even if you have absolutely no ambition to work in a restaurant.
> my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots
Why are you so convinced this sentence isn't going to describe you in 20 years?
I missed so many experiences sitting in front of the computer all day, it didn’t really get me any further than if I had taken a more modest interest.
YouTube and Minecraft and these digital realities are fake realities. Whatever happiness they provide is temporary and short lived. It took me until my 30s to realize this and now I’m starting all over again.
Digital stuff is fine in moderation, but I will not let my children build a life around it like my parents allowed me to.
I have an almost 17 year old who doesn't want a smartphone.
He plays Minecraft/KSP about 90 minutes each night.
But he'd always, always accept an offer to do something else with me or someone else in the family.
So I make sure, as his father, to make that offer sometimes. And I also feel fine if I'm feeling like a book or a movie or something else.
Not all kids become [insert teenager cliches] upon the onset of teenage-dom, for all the different reasons this can be true... but when I was his age, I definitely defaulted to getting on the computer instead of doing other things.
I do think it's interesting how little discussion there is in culling digital behaviors moreso during pandemic times. I personally don't have a lot of interest in any of the new iPhones because my iPhone mostly lives on my desk at home. It hardly ever gets out.
Why do you think he somehow "managed" this? How your children act and what they want to do is, in many ways, beyond your control. Do you think of yourself like that? Like "I acted like X because my parents raised me like Y?"
I spent a year of my starting teenage years tinkering with my android phone. Custom ROM and stuff.
Then I got a better PC and spent time trying to make website to earn money because everyone was doing it.
I failed. AdSense didn't pay me anything. I realized it was more profitable to make a blog on how to make money online than go try if yourself.
I built my first gaming rig. Played few games and got bored after a few months.
I ended up watching death note on YouTube through recommendations.
Finished 500+ anime within a year. It was the best past time after school.
Got bored of that. This time, I though of making money using software. Worked with WordPress, earned some cash fixing people's site and optimizing them by removing useless plugins, adding yoast SEO, improving cache and moving people from shared hosting on GoDaddy.
I started to tinker with PHP code and themes like Divi, adata. Then I wanted to build a CMS. Looked up stuff and it felt complicated so after trying for a few weeks, dropped the idea.
Now I got into novels and manga because I was running out of anime. Probably 700+ or so titles. Enjoyed that for a bit. Finished Chinese, russian, Japanese, etc light novels using Google translate. It was fun. I was addicted.
Now something clicked again and I purchased courses on udemy for 90% discount (yeah it is always discounted). Finally, I knew enough programming after few weeks to create a CMS. I did that but it turned pretty poor compared to WordPress.
Joined an online non-profit therapy group. Listened to people and gave advice...in retrospect, k shouldn't have done that.
Joined discord, spent time there and well learnt more about weird internet cultures and spheres.
Started to get worried about future. Spent time researching health insurance, FIRE, investment and saving strategies. Opened broker account on few online sites using my dad's identity. Landed on r/wsb. Spent few weeks researching and stalking people there. Concluded it was nothing more than gambling. I started buying equity. Built a decent portfolio. Then diversified with Forex and SIP index fund.
Roughly more or less how I spent my teenage years. There are lot of other small and things I did but will be too personal.
All happiness is temporary and short lived. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I believe that any action that gave us truly permanent happiness would turn us into lotus eaters...
I started reading this article really really wanting to agree, but ended up thinking that a large part of the problem here is that the parent is not making enough effort to understand her child.
The parent says "my daughter was a creative genius, and then..." as if to imply that she isn't any more. But it sure sounds like she has creative pursuits to me:
* "She wants Roblox. All the kids have it, and it seems harmless enough. She’s building her dream house" This sounds like a creative pursuit to me.
* "She wants to talk with her friends. I don’t see any harm in FaceTime." She's talking with her friends.
* "She says she wants to do a TikTok while we’re in the “aesthetic” woods" She's creating TikToks! How cool is that, and how creative! Again we see she's not a passive consumer, she's still a creator - it's just that the medium has changed.
The real problem here is that the daughter used to pursue creative activities that the parent approved of (sewing, drawing). Now she does creative activities that the parent does not approve of or understand.
The parent should bridge the gap by trying to understand the things their daughter spends time on. Instead they lambast them from a distance! It's such a shame to me that the article ends with a note about how the parent will try to convince themselves that creating tiktok videos is creative. What?!? Creating videos isn't creative?? Of course it is! You should be encouraging and reveling in this sort of behavior!
I guess it particularly rankles because my parents did the exact same thing when I was young - they constantly tried to get me to stop using the computer. They never took the time to understand that I was using it creatively - I was coding games, writing books and poetry, learning python, modding warcraft 3. But of course they never saw the creativity in modding warcraft. "Oh, he's playing video games again..."
P.S. and as I suggested, I do agree with the premise - phones definitely can destroy creativity, they definitely are addictive, they definitely shouldn't be given to kids... These are critical problems, well worth addressing and being worried about. But if I had to choose a single thing that was even more important, it would be fostering understanding relationships between parent and child.
> It's such a shame to me that the article ends with a note about how the parent will try to convince themselves that creating tiktok videos is creative. What?!? Creating videos isn't creative?? Of course it is! You should be encouraging and reveling in this sort of behavior!
My seven year old runs around with my old iPhone 5. We've locked it down to essentially be nothing more than a camera, but she'll still make videos for her whole screen time allotment for the day. I used to wonder if this was a "good" use of her time.
Then she discovered iMovie and now edits videos, adds transitions and music, makes her little sister an actor in movies... and I remembered when my parents worried about me spending hours in QBasic making little sine-wave art with music playing in the background.
No, definitely not “of course”. Creativity is not defined by the technology or even the result, but is a... well, property of a process. I - personally - can snap a video without being creative at all, and the video may happen to be good. Like how a talking parrot can drop a joke at an appropriate moment, without understanding it at all ;)
It all really depends on what goes in one’s head as they do something.
That is - to recognize if the kid (or whoever, age does not matter here) is creative just talk to them and learn what the heck are they thinking. Like asking to share what’s their passion for that hobby, or teach how they do it - even the most basic replies would quite probably involve some descriptions of the logical processes running in one’s head.
(I do not mean to argue if your kid having a passion for recording videos is creative or not. Just saying that it’s not universally applicable “of course”.)
"Of course" in the sense that it is literally creative - an act of creation. I'd argue that whether the exact pattern of neurons firing in her head measures up the standards you have is less important than the fact that she's actively using her phone to create content rather than passively ingesting it.
Hi - how did you lock down your kids iPhone? Am more of an android man but will be getting a refurbed iPhone 7 for my daughter (apparently they are "better" than Samsung)
Not OP, but I do this too. You can configure Screen Time on an iPhone. There you can limit the total time the device can be used each day. It's also possible to limit usage to certain apps, or block access to certain categories of apps, and allowing only certain people (e.g. family members) to be contacted or messaged.
If your child has their own Apple ID, Screen Time works across any other Apple devices linked to that Apple ID.
In my case, we've turned off all web access, have certain educational games available for a limited amount of time, and only allow outbound texts to grandma.
It's extremely robust – most of the hacks I've read about (or heard from parents with older children!) involve trying to record the screen while you type in the unlock code to change a restriction. Physical attacks are also popular: shoulder surfing is a given, but one coworker said their kid put a tiny layer of hand lotion over the screen to capture where they touched and then attack the code. Clever.
One of my coworkers did that with his son. He had his carrier's tracking app installed on his son's phone so he could see where he was. The son figured out how to disable it.
So he wrote an android service that'll send him the location whenever he needs it and installed it on the phone. His son doesn't know about it... yet.
He fully understands this is an "arms race" of sorts and I think he feels like if his son is smart enough to outsmart his dad, he's probably smart enough to handle himself with a little less supervision. (I think the kid was in about 8th grade at the time.)
This is incredibly dramatic. Buy her some drawing and art apps. Lean into the TikTok thing and find her a local dance or drama troupe. This is what we did with my younger sister, who is the same age. Instead of painting on a canvas, she paints digitally. Instead of bemoaning her TikToks, we've taken her to singing and dancing competitions, which she's won.
Or, perhaps, accept that during a pandemic, when your child's entire social sphere has collapsed, the internet, Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok, et. al. are the closest they can get to interacting with and making friends.
>When friends visit, she occasionally asks them to watch her latest TikTok videos. Some are even funny and creative. Or so I tell myself. It helps with the guilt.
I can't be the only person who finds this comment to be really sad.
This isn't the iPhone's fault. This is someone failing to support their child's hobbies because they're not the perfect idyllic vision they had. End of story.
It's bigger than supporting her hobby. She's addicted to the phone, it's very clear, it drives her every action during the day. If her addiction was painting, and she had meltdowns from not finding her brush, or fighting with mom because she can't stay up late, her mom might have the same reaction.
The author obviously wanted to allow for a balance but it quickly grew out of control to the point where the only thing that mattered was her phone. That's not healthy, and that's not failing to support her hobby.
This thread exercising various mental gymnastics to find other causes for her behavior honestly reminds me of a bunch of climate change deniers arguing why human activity has nothing to do with atmospheric heating.
Being cautious with assuming causations is usually a good idea - but it falls flat when we know the causal chains that are at work.
In the case of climate change, we know for a fact that humanity is releasing ever-growing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and we also know the physical chain reactions this CO2 will trigger. Predicting climate change in broad strokes is not statistical guesswork, it's just applying physics.
Likewise, we know apps are addictive because they are actively being designed that way. Maximizing user retention and engagement is what app developers do. It's how they make money and it's one of the core metrics that investors use to estimate the value of an app.
So you have someone showing signs of addiction after using a device that was specifically designed to be addictive. Occam's razor really doesn't give a lot of room for alternative hypotheses here.
This comment exercising various mental gymnastics to find nefarious causes for a teenager's changing personality...
Every generation of parents thinks their kid is the smartest and then they become teenagers and suddenly they're moody and want to do things that their parents don't approve of. That's the basic fact underlying this. Any argument you make about kids changing when they become teenagers needs to have this realization at its core. Once you realize that, then you can start to make judgements about whether or not their behavior is cause for alarm or not.
Yes apps are addictive, because they're designed that way. But I can tell you what else is designed to be addictive: literally everything. Do you think Doritos taste the way they do by accident? They don't fall off the Dorito tree tasting like that. Or what about the chip companies that has the slogan "betcha can't eat just one" or "once you pop, the fun don't stop"? Likewise, why do TV shows and movies never line up with reality, even if they're based on a true story? Because they were designed to be more interesting than reality. Why do episodes always end on a cliff-hanger, or people leaving a theater say "man they really set that up for a sequel"? Because it was designed to be addictive. Why do most songs last about three minutes and have two verses and two repetitions of the chorus? Because the producer knows that's the most addictive way to write a song.
I mean literally everything: Why is bread and milk at the back of a grocery store? Because they know you're going to buy that anyway, and if it's at the back, you'll need to walk past a whole bunch of other things that are all designed to be addictive, with colorful marketing signs designed to maximize engagement. Why do automakers make cars with smooth gear changes and plush leather seats and feature-filled entertainment consoles and a jillion speakers? Because that keeps people happier in their car and more likely to buy another one of those cars in the future. Why do people love dogs? Because humans purposefully designed wolves into the perfect human companion, and everything about a dog was designed to increase user retention and engagement. Why does cola have caffeine added to it? Because caffeine is addictive. There is literally no other reason.
"It's designed to be addictive" isn't an excuse, because everything is designed to be addictive. So start with "my child is turning into a teenager and teenagers like different things than children" and then subtract "everything is designed to be addictive" from your reasons. How do you talk to your children when they want more Pringles or a(nother) dog or to stay up late watching TV, or when they're upset that their first car doesn't have Bluetooth audio? I'll bet this author wouldn't write an article shaming their kids for that.
Are fruits and vegetables designed to be addictive? Are hobbies like playing the piano or running designed to be addictive? I think you're too expansive in your use of "everything".
Funny enough yes, fruits and vegetables were designed to be addictive. The fruits we have today are the result of genetic modifications that make them sweeter, so sweet in fact that zoos have had to stop feeding modern fruits to their animals because it was causing the animals to gain too much weight [1]. Vegetables can be the same way. Look at corn before humans ate it versus what it looks like today [2]. Humans specifically designed fruits and vegetables to have more sugar so they were tastier to eat. And this was thousands of years ago, so it's not even a new creation.
I don't think running counts as something humans designed but the hobby of running absolutely is designed to be addictive and maximize user engagement. Is there any reason for running shoes to be bright red or lime green or neon orange? Most normal shoes aren't, so why are running shoes? Because brightly colored running shoes sell better than more neutral colors [3]. Likewise, Strava is a very popular running app. Why is it more popular than many competitors? Because it compares your results to someone else's results and challenges you to do that run again, but faster so you can beat this other person's time. That's pretty addictive and of course it was specifically designed that way. There are even people who consider themselves Strava addicts [4].
You're right that everything is too expansive, but everything humans have designed, we've designed to be as addictive as possible (or at least to increase user engagement and retention). Yes, even the piano... the instrument was originally a pipe organ operated by buttons and levers. That's difficult to play and difficult to use in your home so we designed a smaller version called the clavichord but it was too difficult to hear in stage performances (and performing in front of a live audience is... addictive and people want to keep doing it) so along came the harpsichord which was later refined into the piano because the piano is easier to play than a lever-operated pipe organ and if no one cared about user engagement and retention, why bother making a piano that's easier to play?
> honestly reminds me of a bunch of climate change deniers
What does this have to do with climate change? Ever consider getting help for your climate change addiction? "My daugher was a creative genuis, and then we introduced her to climate change." Apparently for some people, climate change isn't a science, it's a religion.
> So you have someone showing signs of addiction after using a device that was specifically designed to be addictive. Occam's razor really doesn't give a lot of room for alternative hypotheses here.
Could be that. Or maybe it's something else..."My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14..."
It could be that the mother controlled her daughter's life and once she's hit puberty, she got a little bit rebellious. She wasn't so interesting in sewing as when she was 8 and needed her mother's approval. But now her priorities is friends, boys, etc?
It's a tale as old as time. Every child is a genius, angel, perfect until they hit puberty. Then we find "rock 'n roll", "rap music", "radio", "MTV", "television" or other culprits for corrupting our youth. Today it is social media. Tomorrow it will be VR. God knows what comes after that.
Maybe it's climate change. That's what causing these teenagers to become moody and rebellious.
It’s not clear to me how they’ve decided their child is no longer “a creative genius”. It sounds like she’s just creating things via the phone now, and so the content isn’t literally sitting on the floor in the living room.
Whether it’s desirable for their child to be making digital content and publishing it is another question entirely, but the title premise never seems to be addressed directly. The article is a long-winded way to say ~“we keep making up arbitrary rules for the phone, and then we realize they’re arbitrary so we change them, but we never actually sit down and pick some sane and long-lived rules”.
I believe this is a huge problem in our society. And I recommmend everyone who downplays it to watch "The social dilemma".
There are a few aspects which are worrying:
- Social pressure to be connected constantly increases for children below 14 years.
- Sites like TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, etc. are designed to be addictive. Children at such a young age do not have the same level of self control like you.
- The longer kids spend time on these platforms, the smaller their bubble gets where they live in.
I understand that as a good parent you can try to explain such things and guide them. But many won't.
Recently I was invited to a school meeting about screen time. I was shocked at some recommendations, for example, age = hours of screen time per week. Also many parents trust tablets and phones way more than desktops. This also worries me, because arguably there are more ways to be creative on desktops.
I also spent endless hours playing video games when I was young and chatting about them on forums and irc. But social media is on a whole other level and I think most people do not even realize it.
> Social pressure to be connected constantly increases for children below 14 years.
This is absolutely a problem, but I don't think it's a problem that can be solved at an individual level, and denying this privilege to your child would IMO do more harm than good as they'd miss out on social events or provide a reason for bullying, etc.
Withdrawing from social media and the bullshit rat race of the "attention economy" is absolutely the right thing to do, but it has to be a voluntary decision.
I don't have a link to it but I remember reading an article which was saying something alone the lines of everyone having a limited amount of "weirdness points" and that we must spend them wisely. In today's society, being isolated from social media is a "weirdness point" (whether we like it or not) and it's up to each individual to determine whether it is worth for them to take the hit.
I have withdrawn from social media as an adult because I am at a stage in life where I don't have to prove anything to anyone, don't have to be "cool" kid and have other ways to play the "status game". However for a typical teenager social media popularity and the "cool" factor is probably their biggest assets when it comes to status and I don't think it's fair to be putting them at a disadvantage by denying them access to it.
Eh.. I actually not that concerned. I would say the social networking is more of an issue but Roblox and Minecraft are probably less so. Minecraft is basically virtual lego. Roblox is basically puzzles outside of adopt me.. I would ban adopt me if I could.. Yes there can be issues of bullying and what not. YouTube may be the worse of the bunch b/c it is so close to TV itself and that's where you see celebritification. We know its a seismic force from unboxing videos all the way up. I've seen it in person. But there are some YouTube shows that are not just consumerism and have wholesome content.
I will add that remote school adds in a live video component and my kids Facetime with their friends while playing games. I find that encouraging since it's the opposite of social isolation.
Clearly these things can be addictive. We know from Asian internet cafes that they are.
As an anecdote... I was raised on TV basically after school for a couple hours, basically latch key. I was also raised on a computer. The computer basically became my primary focus. My current job is software engineering and I was way ahead of the game even before college. Today, I don't watch TV at all.
So I think there is a big distinction between active and passive screen time.
That being said, when I go camping or off to a remote cabin with no Internet, I find it nice to disconnect. You could argue that's a more natural state for us so I think it's important to take that time with your kids for a week or two where all there is is nature.
The Social Dilemma struck me as a pretty manipulative movie. It depicted recommendation algorithms as three evil scheming clones, interspersed with a skit showing a family with the worst case of social media addiction the writers could imagine. This provides huge latitude to exaggerate and mislead. I don't think many people would explicitly endorse the claim that social media addiction is so bad, preteens can't last half an hour before smashing open locked boxes to get a hit - but that's what the movie showed!
> It depicted recommendation algorithms as three evil scheming clones
I thought it was a good non-technical presentation of what the recommendations / notifications work like. These were basically the pillars of engagement, ad revenue and... can't remember the third. We know it's a metaphor - what would you show otherwise - the code for rearranging timeline and best ad selection?
> showing a family with the worst case of social media addiction the writers could imagine
It's Requiem for the dream, the tech edition. Sure it's an extreme, but also it's not an unrealistic extreme. They picked elements we see - replacing in-person interacting with gamified social networks, rise/normalisation of extremist communities, literal addiction to continuing use.
> preteens can't last half an hour before smashing open locked boxes to get a hit
My first lockpick exercise was the keyboard lock on a PC to work around parent's time control, so... sure.
One big recommendation for all to watch "The social dilemma" on netflix also.
The social media apps on the phones are specifically agonized over, tested, and refined continuously to increase interaction, aka make users into addicts.
My theory is that like everything this requires a balance and gradual introduction. Start early, let kids make mistakes, punish them for said mistakes, let them learn lessons.
Enforcing super strict rules has never helped anyone I think. 1h a day is quite strict in my opinion especially if consumed in multiple sessions. If I had just started doing something and it took me 15min to get fully absorbed and in 15min I had to call it quits I'd be pretty angry myself to be honest.
I can make an analogy with access to sweets here. Our boy aged 6 now has had unrestricted access to a cupboard full of variety of sweets since he was 3. And believe me he loves sweets! Technically he can go and take as many sweets as many times as he wants to and no one would probably understand. But we've said it is 2 sweets a day, reasonable quantities. This was strictly enforced early on and now we can 100% trust him to pick whatever he wants when he wants. Because he knows when is a good time and what is a good amount. He'll even come home from school some days and say he'll only eat one sweet today as they've had chocolate cake for pudding at school.
So cut your kids some slack and let them learn themselves rather than locking everything behind locks - physical or digital.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. That could be attributed to the poor title, though.
The way I see it, pre-phone their daughter was probably much more engaged with her parents and was doing more manual creative stuff. After the phone appeared, she distanced herself and got absorbed by it.
I don't get why so many people here are trying to defend smartphones/social media?
Isn't it pretty obvious they are addictive? And to a young kid, that doesn't know any better, it can get really bad.
Agreed that these can be bad (my kids have some socials but I keep an eye on them and have lots of talks about pitfalls to avoid), but for the sake of argument I can't help pointing out that what you're describing is a normal process of individuation that teens all go through.
Social attention focused inward toward family --> Social attention turning outward towards others + establishing an identity apart from that of the family. This is totally normal.
Some apps are addictive, not all of them. The biggest problem IMO is that "no phone" isn't an option. Kids need a phone to participate in society. That's just the way it is. The problem I see is that phones have super addictive apps like TikTok that target young kids, so giving them the "good half" of a phone means you also end up giving them the "bad half" and kids aren't good at understanding why the bad half is bad for them.
It's like serving a kid a plate of food with vegetables and meth side-by-side and the meth dealer is making every effort they can to push the meth into the vegetables.
Is being addicted to creating tiktkok/instagram content to get likes such a bad thing?
The fight to stand out on those social networks forces you to be creative.
As a technologist and parent myself, I find the biggest problem to be the lack of fine grained parental controls. Yes, technology in of itself is not the issue, it is the highly addictive nature of certain software, but on different devices, limiting what they can/can't do is very difficult.
When school started online, my 8 year old was initially really engaged, but then started getting a bit bored once she got into it, and would watch Youtube videos. I was fine with an hour after she finished her school work, but the time she spent watching slowly increased until she wasn't even doing her homework. She'd erase the history on her browser so I couldn't tell how long she was watching for (but fortunately I know the tricks, and was able to figure it out). This led me to blocking Youtube (and all other video sites) on the router. I looked into Youtube kids, but I can't limit it in the ways I want (certain times of day, certain videos), and so I just outright ban it. I also found Youtube too addictive with its short videos, and so now only allow Netflix Kids at certain times.
The best solution IMO would be that I could say something like "these apps/sites need my permission", and then every time she tried watching a video or opening that app, etc, I'd get a notification on my phone asking if I should allow it. That would really put the control in the parent's hands. Could apply to tik tok too - I may be OK with it if my kid has to get permission to post a video, and get permission after every 20 mins of use/watching 20 videos.
Until such controls are available, I just saying a blanket 'no' to some of these apps/sites. She can use them how she sees fit once she's emancipated.
Learning to jailbreak and flash routers to get around these parental controls is what got me into programming.
I had managed to get myself unrestricted internet access from pretty much age 10 onwards using a "broken" laptop I had secretly fixed, and the "restricted" iPod Touch that I had unlocked by editing the Springboard.plist.
At age 14 they had a talk with me where they said they finally were going to give me some restricted internet access and I almost burst out laughing because I had been online hours per day for the last 4 years, but managed to keep it together.
Ten years later and it's a fun story we all laugh about. I wonder what I would be doing today if it wasn't for those parental controls motivating me to break systems.
I share this opinion. The parental controls are so bad it almost seems intentional. Look at the mishmash of trash you need to deal with between a Microsoft account and an XBox account (which are sort of the same thing). That's with a company that IMO is trying to make it work, but the experience still sucks.
Then add in the need for a parent account (or two) plus a child account (or two or three) for every service / app kids want to use and all of a sudden you're asking people to manage dozens of accounts. Throw in multiple platforms and you could literally be trying to manage two or three dozen sets of parental controls and it's not static. The apps / services are constantly churning.
It's easy to criticize the OP of this article, but I know the feeling. The intent to be a good moderator is there, but the tooling isn't and after a while you just give up, turn a 10 year old into an 18 year old, and moderate over their shoulder instead.
The distinction between apps is huge too. Things like Minecraft, Roblox, educational games, etc. are pretty harmless and somewhat creative. Apps like TikTok and Facebook are worthless and should be banned (by parents) IMO.
I also wonder what filters might have outsized effects on curtailing addictive behavior - for instance if you blanket silence all notifications what effect does that have? Though I’m not a parent so I don’t really know
This resonates with me as the father of young children. The older one is two and already is a pro at using my phone. She knows where all the apps are and easily switches between youtube, netflix, spotify, various games.
Initially I was amazed at the exploration and learning. So I let it happen. Of course, its easier to just have no phone time with a 2 year old. So I sympathize with parents of older kids where the dynamic becomes one of peer pressure.
Not really condoning phone use with teenagers and I'll play the devil's advocate here: If "everyone is doing it" - is that OK? Why have your kid be the outlier in these situations?
I actually had to look up James Charles, referenced in the article. James is 21. The iPhone came out in 2007 - so presumably James has had access or been around a smartphone well before his teenage years. Yet, the videos are creative and immensely popular. The point is, creativity is less in physical space and more in cyber space now...
1) They are bad parents
2) They are good parents
3) Smartphones are a qualitatively different addiction problem than TV, comic books, or other demonized technology of yore
4) It is correlation not causation
5) Her problems were partly caused by the iPhone
It seems more like he set boundaries, then let his daughter run past them. Setting boundaries is hard, it takes strength, but you can't sacrifice boundaries to "keep the peace". Short team peace is long term hell.
They are bad parents for not sticking to boundaries on occasions. They are good parents for caring enough to try to have boundaries,, thinking about the positive and negative impact the phone and apps may have on her. Sure, nothing can be true and false _in the same respect and same time_ (Law of Non-Contradiction), but I routinely feel I'm both a good and bad parent.
Little girls grow up into tweens obsessed with pop stars and friends and then into teens who rebel to find their own way. No amount of sheltering can stop it.
and the grownups who aren't their parents know this and are ready to make money on that with nothing but cost for the user/product. i don't think it's strange that parents don't want their children to be products.
For parents who want to stay in touch with their kids but don't want to give them a phone, cellular Apple Watches are an excellent option. They can make and receive calls anywhere with a cellular network.
They are cheaper than phones and the plans are well priced too. Around $15/mo for service.
> Somewhere along the way, I realize that apps like TikTok and Instagram are impervious to Apple’s Screen Time limit. They work even when the rest of her phone shuts down. To keep the peace, I let it slide.
The author is completely wrong about this, so I can only assume that their kid is indeed being creative and has manipulated them into believing it.
Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends.
I actually noticed this the other day. I set a 10 minute time limit on Instagram, and while I'll get the "5 minutes left" reminder, it won't kick me out of the app the way it does for other apps. Running iOS 14.2.
Also 14.2, I went and checked this on my own phone. It both gave me the 5 minute warning, and then locked the app when the limit expired.
Could be a bug somewhere that I'm not being hit by, of course.
Also, could be the article writer using parent-controlled screen time limits and having accidentally(?) unchecked the "block at limit" option in the rule, which would let the phone-user hit the "ignore limit" button for it.
Can anyone from Apple or an iOS dev chime in? What is the screen time limit supposed to do? Are apps required to abide by it, and these ones are circumventing that somehow, or is it optional for the app to shut down?
This seems fixable, either on the dev side or with better communication about how the feature actually works. There's no reason to dupe people.
> Overall... this does seem like an "onset of adolescence" thing. 20 years ago this author would have been bemoaning that their teenage daughter spent all day on the land-line with her friends
This time it is so different. On the landline with friends you could talk but not be manipulated by external actors. Landlines are not exactly skinner boxes and also they cannot be thrown into one's pocket and be with them virtually everywhere. This time it is different.
I'm definitely considered a part of this generation of kids that grew up on the Iphone, and though I disagree with this blog on a lot of areas (as listed in the top comments), there definitely are things that this blog really hits home for.
Iphones and social media are a vice on my generation. I used social media a lot a few years ago, but I had to quit it because I learned about nosurf[1] and how horrible for the mind these new technologies can be. However, many people I know are stuck in this addiction - scrolling on Instagram 4+ hours a day, sending streaks[2] to 10 people at once on Snapchat, who screw up their sleep schedule just to get another anime episode in. They obsess over the number of likes they get on each post and send empty platitudes to each other on their birthdays. Of course these things I just listed are not the fault of each and every person, but a product of what happens when you bring together a billion dollar company who wants people to spend as much time on their app as possible, and an impressionable generation whose brains haven't even finished developing yet.
From reading this, you may come to the conclusion that I'm some jaded teenager who hates technology and social media. But I understand the magnitude of technology and the potential it brings. I'd say I'm much more not only intelligent but wiser because of the countless podcasts, debates, lectures, articles, and music I've consumed in my 'internet life'. But that is beside the point - This parent's experience sent a chill down my spine because it is almost exactly how my parents must have felt when I got my first phone. We originally had a contract (not using it after 10, not using it in bed, etc.) but little by little my addictive brain pushed those boundaries, and when I didn't get what I wanted I had tantrums. And though I've curbed on my screen time (at least on my phone), There's always that pull, always that invisible string that attaches me to my phone. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this experience that this parent had with her child almost exactly mirrors my parent's experience with me, and most likely many, many other parents.
She became a horrible person. She lost it for a month. Became the Sweetest happiest person ever. Gave it back. Exact same mood shift.
Repeat for years.
It caused her such horrific depression. Mostly from social media drama.
As an adult she’s finally realizing how her mood shifts because of it.
Younger kids can get iPhones when they move out.
They are quite happy in life, although Dad is very unfair about phones.
> She used to rush to our bed as soon as she woke, demanding cuddles and to “Talk Friends.” We played with puppets and stuffed animals in the morning, getting the “friends” to sing and act out scenes from plays like Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast.
I'm sure this sucks to experience, and I'll experience it in my due time, but - your kid has friends now, and is no longer wholly dependent on you. It's life. Before cellphones, this person would be lamenting that her kid was spending all her time at the mall with her friends, or off in the woods running around with the neighborhood children.
> But some days I get so angry, I rage against the phone. I say the iPhone is evil. It’s stealing her childhood.
> ...
> The worst part is that our child has changed. She used to rush to our bed as soon as she woke, demanding cuddles and to “Talk Friends.” We played with puppets and stuffed animals in the morning, getting the “friends” to sing and act out scenes from plays like Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast. We all got involved. Those days are gone. I understand she’s probably too big for “Talk Friends,” but it’s heartbreaking watching her race into our room each morning to grab her phone.
The problem is not the phone. The problem is making the child choose between attachment and authenticity. She doesn't run to you anymore because you're constantly fixated & raging about the phone. Not because she prefers her phone to her parents. You've told her it's not safe to be herself around you.
In our family I use the Gryphon router/app combo and Apple Screentime to monitor and enforce limits and Rooster Money to create incentives for kids to do chores and make good choices. Twenty years from now, this could make a big difference as to whether my kids are disciplined, independent, employable adults, or screen junkies. As a society, I believe screen addiction is creating a reversion to the mean scenario where mean focus and productivity is decreasing over time as companies continue to optimize how they manipulate people for profit. This is another case of socialize the costs, privatize the profits.
Labeling the phone one object causing the problem is inaccurate. It is a world of possibilities and the unlimited aspect of it is what make it’s so addictive. It would be like if I said walking was addictive because we always do it. Social media is the actual culprit. Think about how much attention it takes just to baby sit a toddler. Now online they can get 100x more attention than any parent could ever give, not only attention but appreciation. Everything is liked or hearted online a hundred times over. They need to understand love from family is worth more than a million likes from most online friends and strangers.
The article doesn't focus on what's going on outside of the phone. 14 is a pivotal age, because it's about that time that high school starts. A lot of what the author describes sounds like a girl beginning the process of detaching herself from her parents. But there could be other factors at work.
I am in my late 30s. Our generation had very little access to computers growing up but we used what we had to tinker and experiment with them. I mean sure many people just played games but there was enough to do for those of us who were interested.
The current generation is basically digitally connected from the day they are born and yet the 'general purpose computing devices' they have access to are walled gardens like phones and tablets. And with the way Apple is going about it, even Macbooks will soon join the ranks.
Quote: "If she’s eating dinner early and by herself, I’ll let her keep watching James Charles on YouTube"
Well, that right there is your mistake. Instead of James Charles introduce her to VSauce or Primitive Technology or any number of youtube channels that are truly related to creativity /mind inquiry.
I used to watch a lot of Discovery Channels on TV when I grew up in the 90's. Some stuff I've learned back then it became gateway drug to tinker with electronics, which led to my current profession as programmer.
1) How much of this behavior is just a young child growing up and clashing with their parents? The author seems to blame the iPhone for their personality change, but it just seems to me that it coincides with a common period of rapid emotional and physical growth.
2) As others have pointed out - why not try and find a better medium between technology and creativity? Seems to me this is just the classic battle between tradition and technology.
Father of five kids (2 adults, 2 teens, 1 almost teen) here. The iphone isn't the problem. It's the scapegoat. The real problem is what other people have said: too much time on school and she's a teenager. How much time is she really getting to do things she WANTS to do. With my kids, they seem to turn to the phone when they are lonely, sad, anxious or angry. It's a painkiller, not the pain.
If my mother called me a “creative genius” in a highly public forum when I was a teen, I would have given her the Mother of All Teenage Rebellions.
So where is the data that quantifies the intellectual value of each single concept taught to children, on a concept by concept basis? And where is the data that the techniques used to teach any individual concept is worth the loss of that amount of childhood?
Seems like a lot of effort for any given lesson topic, but when you multiply any waste of time by the number of children and value of their childhood, it’s not so big.
Maybe give a teacher a child time budget...the amount of off-campus time you can take from a child’s life. Exceed that...and you can “buy” more time, but your contracted time would be extended without compensation as well. A slow kid may need more time, and additional support from another resource would be made available at no budget expense to the teacher.
Phones are addictive. But we can't just call that the beginning and end of it.
I read books on my phone. I've probably read hundreds of thousands of pages, I've got a library that is a very respectable size on my phone. Is reading them a sign of addiction to my phone? Or is it the same as reading paper? Am I just using my phone as a tool?
I don't take pictures except to document things. I don't have any of those social media accounts people use to share photos or videos of themselves or whatever. I see women (and men) on the beach (or elsewhere) who's goal is to get a cute photo. I feel like they're wasting such a wonderful experience on a narcissistic persuit.
But I spend hours on sites like this one talking to other people. Talking to people I don't know, people I do know, people I only know online. Sometimes about stupid stuff, sometimes about interesting stuff. It's not something I use for passive entertainment really very often. If I'm pondering life, making bonds, questioning my own beliefs, is that as simple as a social media addiction? Is it constructive?
I know I am addicted to my phone and the internet in general. And it has detrimental effects on my life. But it has been very intellectually constructive for me. I have expanded my vocabulary quite a lot, I have learned to articulate my thoughts very well. I have learned to write code and about quantum particles and I've read research papers. I've talked to some very interesting people, even some very important people. So is it all bad?
I think the trick is to not make it your life. Go outside, dig your hands in the soil, grow something. Immerse yourself in the moment where what is going into your senses is not curated by you or someone else. I do a decent job of not touching my phone when I'm out there. But I'd say I haven't struck that balance quite yet, because I don't go out there enough. I used to go out there every day and get dirty. I need to do that again.
This lady needs to set rules for use, and then be firm with them. If you don't want your child to use a device for more than an hour a day, don't let them use it for nine.
All this child is doing is learning that their parent is a push over. You gotta be firm and push back.
My 12-year-old daughter is also obsessed with her devices!
She spends at least 3 hours a day writing on her laptop (she's on her 7th 150-page+ fantasy book), drawing and making comics on her ipad (taking full advantage of layers and other techniques), and animating on her phone ("Gacha" characters).
I wonder how much parental behavior can improve outcomes, either in the short run or long run. Do kids pick up on parents' habits and mimic them? If a family had strict rules that even parents followed, would kids be more likely to feel that the rules are fair and/or appropriate.
Even if this doesn't work in the short run, it's possible that after kids grow up, they would adopt healthier habits based on what they saw their parents doing when they were kids. I have seen similar things happen with eating habits, where kids initially rejected parental rules but as adults they adopted healthy habits that their parents modeled for them when they were growing up.
The problem is not the technology, the problem is as she mentions in passing bad parenting. If it wasn't an iPhone it would be "talking through the landline" (remember ALF's starting scene? it was an issue for us kids in the 80s/90s) Cable TV, or marijuana or any other addictive passtime.
This also happened with teens in the last couple of generations. Exhausting school/activity schedules and availability of passive or semi-passive outlets (TV, meet-ups with friends, playing with the computer/console, etc). Some worse than others.
You can't expect too much from kids creatively when they're subjected to such lifestyle. Some kids will either manage to be on top of things enough to have some extra energy in them, but not all.
I'm not dismissing the fact that smartphones and social media are extremely addictive, of course. That's a major problem. But the symptoms you are describing go beyond that.
- have open discussions about behavioural patterns in your kids to make them understand better what is good for them
To find the right balance between convenience, social pressures and the things that are actually good for oneself even if inconvenient is an everlasting struggle. This is best to be addressed early in life with good guidance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You can communicate via a method your parents can't because you used it extensively in your prime while they didn't. Your grandparents probably had the same issue with fax machines and your grandchildren will probably have the same problem with neural-messaging. Every generation thinks "but this time it's different" and every generation is wrong.
I will still say that lacking the ability to communicate via a particular medium is not the same as lacking social skills. My inability to send messages via Morse code over telegraph lines doesn't mean that I lack social skills.
So if a skilled telegraph operator handed you a message including the word "naloopen" you would know what that means? There was not just one but several forms of telegraphese developed. A conversation held entirely in brief dots and dashes has a substantially different flow to it than say typing out a message on an internet forum, which in turn is nothing like how one would communicate with a 5 second fleeting video recording. A telegraph is a very simple machine to operate, I'm sure you could learn quickly, but you would certainly still lack the social skills necessary to keep up with a professional telegraph operator from a century ago.
Likewise, your parents certainly don't have any problem conceptually understanding keyboards, letters, or addresses - they were perfectly comfortable with typewriters, letterheads, and postal codes. Dealing with nigerian princes and chain mail might involve the use of technology, but these are very much social skills.
As someone who only uses social media platforms that are mildly reskinned versions of 80s/90s message forums, I don't really know what the "BCC vs CC" of tiktok is, nor do I care. I have an excellent understanding of how tiktok works technologically, but I lack the particular social skills tiktok requires. Since my peers do not get it either, this has never been a problem for me, but I'm sure in a few years when my kids expect me to just know how to snapple into the televoid with them that I'll look like an idiot as I search for a reply button somehwere.
Once again... not knowing how to communicate via a particular medium does not equate to a lack of social skills.
To your point, if a telegraph operator handed me a message I didn't understand, I could just say, "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" because that is social skills.
And if someone at the bar buys you a drink and you're not totally sure why, you can go over to them and say "Hey, I don't understand this message. Can you explain it to me?" You posses the social skill to ask for clarification, you lack the social skill of flirting.
That I can have someone translate to and from Urdu for me does not mean I have the social skill required to communicate via Urdu. Likewise, that your parents can ask you whether something is spam or not doesn't mean they have the social skill required to communicate via email.
Wikipedia defines social skills as:
"A social skill is any competence facilitating interaction and communication with others where social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways."
If the ability to effectively communicate via a medium doesn't satisfy that definition, what does? You are welcome to use a different definition, but that's what I am referring to by social skills.
Flirting and speaking a foreign language are a false equivalence to not knowing how to e-mail or use social media.
Whether using your definition or another, my point still stands that social media does not lead to GREATER social skills than previous generations possessed.
Not being skilled in ALL aspects of socialization isn't the same thing as lacking social skills in general.
I really see no difference between trying to determine if someone is in to you based on how long they emphasize the y in hey versus trying to determine if someone is into you based on the number of times they repeat the letter y in heyyy.
I never claimed that social media leads to objectively greater social skills, there's no reason why being able to write a great email is inherently superior to being able to write a great telegraph message. However, one skill is undeniably more useful in this day and age. It does not matter if you call it a social skill or a technological skill, the fact remains that there are people who know how to communicate effectively via social media, and those who don't, and just because you are comfortable in the latter category does not mean your daughter will be too.
How many people sent a fax to a tow truck when they got in an accident? How many people met their future spouse faxing?
Conversely, how many people have been scammed out of their life savings by nigerian princes? How many people developed a poor work life balance as they could now do work from home any time?
I'm not going to argue that smart phones have no issues, but everything that came before had issues too, and all were abandoned when something better came along.
Yes. I don't know how old the GP's daughter is, but restricting communication apps—especially during a pandemic—seems counterproductive. TikTok, sure, whatever; it's a time suck and doesn't really help with social skills. But socializing online really matters now, especially for adolescents.
Edit: If she's eight years old, then this seems like a more reasonable restriction. Disregard what I said previously. Eleven or twelve might be a better time to get Snapchat, especially since that's about the time that most kids get their first smartphones today anyway.
Yes, she is 8. But even if she were 10 or 11, we'd probably keep similar restrictions. She does have access to FaceTime and our time restriction will probably grow as she ages.
A minor should not have access to Snapchat. It’s all fun and games until she sends a nude picture to a boy out of naïveté, falsely lured into a sense of security by Snapchat.
> 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.
So, how about when your schoolwork requires you to 'ingest the drugs', you visit YouTube to watch the video your teacher picked out (they did a bad job IMO, but hey) ... then you're supposed to leave [cold turkey!] and get on with your work, except the website is highly animate and designed carefully to entice you to stay. All of a sudden you're spending the afternoon watching dross on YT because kids lack self-control and companies know how to exploit that.
Of course there's some blame goes to the teacher, but hey.
I think your response is disingenuous.
Aside, I don't know what tech you're using but mines all been blinken-lights and conditioned-response dings (by default) for years.
There is certainly a conflict, OP might have been slowly melodramatic in their choice of words but just as casinos foster their whales, so too tech companies use the psychology of addiction against consumers.
In your YouTube example there are are few people that have responsibilities:
- teacher
- video maker
- YouTube Devs
- companies
- "kids"
- individual
- school
- etc
YouTube (the drug) is just a series of instructions that make a slab of glass light up in a certain pattern and a speaker to oscillate in a particular fashion (depending on hardware).
It's an inanimate f----- object. It doesn't have "responsibilities".
That's the point I'm getting at. Why don't we, collectively, stop blaming the drugs/tech and start finding solutions to the actual problem?
It's easy to point the blame finger, it's harder to solve a problem.
A key difference is that YouTube/companies in part work to increase 'engagement' (which in turn encourages overuse, and encompasses the courting of addictive behaviors) even when it reduces utility.
Do you not think drug dealers aim to "maximise engagement" too? It's not the drug's fault for the dealers actions. So how about we stop blaming an inanimate f----- object and work to find a solution to the problem.
In your schoolwork example I can come up with four potential solutions off the top of my head:
- Speak to the teacher about concerns and ask about other ways of doing what is required
- Speak to parents and ask them to help with the homework
- Buddy up with a friend and watch the required video with a friend to avoid falling down a rabbit hole
- Use software like youtube-dl to download the video locally, to avoid temptation of watching another video
Then we come back full circle to the parent comment. It's not the drug's fault. It's not the phone's fault. It's not some software instruction's fault.
Blaming and ascribing fault is only helpful in identifying the problem. After that, the question becomes what can I do about it that will helpful for me today? What is my solution for how this affects me?
You know, technology doesn't just materialize spontaneously, it is made with a human purpose and that purpose (with all the subjectivity of everyone that participates in creating and fostering the technology) is imbued in those inanimate objects. When you use technology it guides you in its intended use according to its purpose, when you open a door by its handle, when you put your headphones on.
Phones and youtube specifically are made to make money by gaining and keeping one's attention. They achieve it with tactics that trigger addiction. Some people become addicts, some not so much, but if you have a human brain you will feel the pull to abuse them.
In the case of phones and youtube the "mythical they" are the ones who profit from them and don't care about the effects of their tactics on the users. Maybe it is not warfare but it sure is asymmetric.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a conservative and grew up listening to the music others where considering bad and were on the other side of the fence, they were an outdated generation in my eyes then.
Now as I got older I realize a lot of it was just crap stuffed into our faces keeping us from discovering the real good artists out there. Those folks did have a point here and there. A lot of that music was pumped by the music industry purely to make money and similarly this addictive software is doing the same thing with amplified effects and more shamelessness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The key is NOT the phone itself, but the APPS and the Use of the phone.
Author seems to be struggling with the connected-kid culture around apps like Instagram and TikTok - which are transforming the school-based culture to something where to be popular, you have to be connected and posting. This is what needs to be controlled IMHO.
As many mention, there are MANY positive uses where the phone is a 100% better medium to teach or learn than old school books or otherwise.
With my kids, I focus on installing and limiting the games and videos to ones that I find productive and educational.
for what it counts, at age 10 i had no internet... i read physics books, dabbled in analog electronics, carpentry, drawing and other things.. But one day i got internet, then I spent next 10 years playing video games, and watching youtube. So there is certainly an opportunity that was lost somewhere. It helped me learn programming for sure. But could I have watched 5000 hours fewer of youtube videos and spent 9000 hours less on multiplayers games and instead focused on something else? who knows, but i can't rule it out.
Our precocious angels have been transforming into sullen monsters at the onset of adolescence since the beginning of time. Do we really think they would have stayed precocious angels forever, if only they had never discovered comic books or rock'n'roll or TV or video games or whatever the current teenage vice happens to be?
Sure, there is good evidence that smartphones are more addictive than a lot of other pastimes and devices, but the fact that your daughter turned into a teenager isn't that.
It feels like a bit of both. The phone is probably a focal point for other issues. But, I don't think we should downplay the fact that the finely tuned, variable reward scheduled, Skinner boxs that are many modern apps are anywhere near comic books, rock'n'roll, or videogames of old. I'm pretty conscious of intrusive notifications and apps that aggressively vie for my attention. Even with those limits in place, I'm acutely aware of the effect of having reddit available from my pocket in < 2 seconds. Maybe I'm weak, but I feel that it affects most of us in a fundamental way to some degree.
I'm not saying that you said anything counter to this. I just think that apps which are hyper-tuned to captivate our every moment are a different beast.
I turned off all social media notifications on my devices so that I feel more like they're there to serve me rather than me a slave to it. Having it in my pocket is a lot less enticing when it's not constantly nagging me. I feel a lot more in control of it these days. I'm able to leave it on top of the microwave for hours at a time without feeling the anxiety of missing something.
I'm with you. The only audible notifications that I get are phone, text and a couple of other messaging apps that I barely use (I'm talking one message per month per app). I get visual notifications for my personal email. Contrary to many people apparently, I also view texting as an asynchronous activity; I don't fee any urge to view and reply instantly to texts.
I even turned off the visual notifications on my email, facebook, linkedin, everything else that would normally give people the impression that my device is there for their benefit and not mine. The only audible notifications I get are from my girlfriend on WhatsApp and phone calls... which reminds me, I've put my phone down somewhere and I should probably go find it... after my cup of tea.
I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then.
My kid's first "social" app is Roblox and part of my justification for is that it's easier to talk about some of the issues of social media while they are young and will listen to me.
We talk a lot about addiction and the tricks games play to make you want to come back every day. We talk a lot about safety and what predictors are looking for and what they say to try to sound like a friend. I hope these are good discussions and I hope they stay with my kids as they grow.
If I'd started at 14? They've already learned to tune me out by then.
She'd get a childhood without being a phone junkie. 9 hours a day is extremely worrying for an adult to spend on a phone but for a child it is way worse, they are in their formative years and that would turn into their baseline
> I had the opposite take. I also feel like an addict with my iPhone, and I’m old enough that they didn’t exist when I was a teenager. I’m not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14 would have changed much, she would just end up addicted then.
I have 4 active mobile phones and I cannot understand the allure people who claim to be 'addicted' to phones have with them. I actually dread the time I spend on them, as the UX is so much worse when used to interface with Internet than a PC/Laptop in my opinion.
I also grew up at a time before smartphones but I grew up on the Internet using computers/laptops and admittedly spend a large time of my Life on both, for work and leisure, but I still cannot understand this seemingly prevalent disease that has afflicted so many. And I do have what some may deem an addictive personality, specifically to adrenaline and endorphins.
I think the common variable is the lack of time spent outside cities and their homes and have an almost pathological aversion to Nature. I can assure you that the latest Twitter beef seems incredibly insignificant after a 10 mile hike and watching the sunset in total silence, more should try it. Believe me I was there for its first incarnations and the forum 'flame wars,' of the 90s and early 2000s; they're only fun so many times until you grow out of them (ideally in your teens) and they all predictably start and end the same way. Its really not that interesting.
> Im not sure why the author thinks waiting until her daughter was 14
As for this, I agree with OP; I went to private school most of my life with many helicopter parents who swore their children were supposed prodigies only to seem them 'throw it all away' after they left the 8th grade and got their first taste of freedom they discovered members of the opposite sex, cars, status, drugs and booze and many ended up in continuation schools as they did it all in excess.
I'm personally glad I went to one night school class (as I always skipped morning classes) my freshman year of HS just to see what happens to people like that, it was massive learning experience but also a deterrent to not fall into those traps.
It also got me interested in computer networking as I was in a class sponsored by Cisco and my fascination with tech went beyond just soldering/hacking Playstation and Dreamcast consoles and ripping games to sell at school.
I think the bias and their views tends to lean toward their disappointment, but some people are just too easily susceptible and are often coerced by their parents into a certain path, and once they have any semblance of freedom they just rebel against it all. And I can understand that as I have a few cousins that ended up that way and we could all see it coming from a very young age.
To be honest the people who I found to be most successful in Life, beyond just financial and material wealth, and over all well adjusted were people whose parents just let them become who they wanted after their toddler years and then nurtured and supported their skills and talents that way. They had very healthy relationships with their families, often after turbulent teenage years, and were very open and free thinking about problem solving and World views.
Everyone is prone to peer pressure, especially in your early teens when you have no idea who you are and often are so quick to give into group think to fit in (we're biologically hardwired that way for survival), so I can see why some parents may want to wait until 14 or older. But I finis it hard to accept the consequences these devices are supposedly creating. Social Media 'balling' and the supposed depression that follows for so many seem insignificant when you grew up seeing what job your friend finished for Arab Shieks in Saudi Arabia and Dubai to a bunch Zonda Rs and Helicopters for a lark on a Tuesday morning. It was just funny, and kind of sad to think anyone with much money was that crass and had such poor taste.
I personally think its a mistake, but I understand the reasoning.
As, anecdotally, I mentioned I grew up on the Internet and I'm very grateful to my family that I was allowed the freedom and the opportunity to be subjected to all of those positive and negative influences in the early days of the Internet as it helped narrow down who and what it was that I really wanted in my Life.
Sheltering your children from the harsh realities of the World may seem like the right thing to do, I still recall the aftermath online in the Columbine shooting to this day, but it has many unintended consequences; the World is a very messy place and being a *young adult) and having never developed any coping mechanisms for stress or dealing with difficult situations as you get coaxed into the World is one of the saddest things I have ever encountered. I think this what you are really seeing on many campuses in University in the US and Canada (I started to see the rise of it as I left in 2009) and the toxic rise in cancel-culture online that's bled into the real World.
It's pushed by people who never learned to deal with the often very brutal realities, that the World is marred with conflict and filled with paradoxes and that its a constant battle for sanity and reason to prevail; but equally that it is your responsibility as a Human to navigate that and make the most of it and your Life. Because if you're a student and must have a job to pay for tuition, rent and bills you really aren't going to be getting riled up about the 'Sociological and degrading Epistemological implications' of not having gender-less/trans bathrooms on campus and need to riot and disrupt classes until the entire campus becomes a safe space in order to cope with those ramifications while you waste the next 6 years to write a dissertation on gender studies as a result of it.
If neural lace's primary use is going to be participation in the global network of advertisement-funded Skinner boxes, then honestly, I won't be getting one myself, despite how hyped I am about brain-computer interfaces in general.
This is how these things always go isn't it? We invent this incredible technology that augments what we do, what we can be, what we can learn, and what we can believe...
and then we turn it into an almost-exclusively advertising tool designed to convert a human being into a money making machine.
It's one of the reasons I'm not enthusiastic about technology anymore. I see what we do with it. Every. Single. Time.
I'll third this. I was so excited about the applications for speech/smart interfaces in the home a la Cherry 2000. But we got Alexa. A tool to buy stuff and spy. I won't denigrate the actual useful functions these devices have - I like to ask Alexa to tell me jokes when I'm at a friend's house that has one. However, it's all the things that come with it that turned me off.
I'm currently pursuing open-source tools to run home automation but it's slow-going. It's complex.
Meanwhile, she self-admittedly said she broke all her rules regarding the phone. Also her child grew up into a teenager. Kids don’t stay the same forever.
A take exception to the repeated use of the pejorative term "junkie". Apparently people suffering from addiction is the last group we are allowed to be prejudiced against.
Spoiler alert, the phone didn't break your daughter. You and society did.
The major issue this brings to light is the complete ignorance around addiction. It is not caused by the substance or the activity, but rather other underlying issues (trauma, unmet needs). This mom sounds overbearing. This poor kid has probably been on the Ivy League track since preschool. School until 6:30PM, I can't imagine what is wrong.
Addiction problem? Find the needs that aren't being met. We have such a lack of knowledge about mental health, as a society, that most people don't even know where to start.
The end of the article brings no reprieve. The mom basically throws her hands in the air and we can only assume that she will double-down on her overbearing, unhelpful approach.
You can ban phones and vaping, but it won't do anything to address the underlying issues. Until we learn to proactively address mental health, it will only get worse. This article gives me zero hope.
Although it may not sound like it, I have a ton of compassion for the mom and the daughter. I used to have severe addiction issues, I was a real mess. I had to figure this stuff out by evaluating available information and (dis)proving it to my satisfaction through trial and error. With a lot of support, I managed to unfuck myself. I think I'm just frustrated with society in general. So many issues, so many simple ways to make headway on them, so little action or even understanding of the problem space. I can tell you one thing for sure, this lone autist is not going to save the world.
phones/tech are of course a problem if you don't set limits. But to me the biggest issue is not being able to connect to your kid. I have a 4yo and he loves to play on his tablet, and he even plays some videogames with me. But I try super hard to do other things with him as well, and try hard to enjoy them as much as I can. We play (non-digital) games he wants to play. We build legos. We also started playing some tabletop RPGs that are super simple for kids and he loves them. He asks me at least once a week to play (we actually always play the same scenario and he doesn't care, he still has tons of fun).
The parent in this article is struggling with too many things at the same time: kid becoming a teenager, tech, and lack of connection with your kid. Having kids and growing them to healthy human beings is super hard. I wouldn't blame the daughter's behavior to any single thing, it looks more like a combination of multiple issues. Hopefully they both can find a good path moving forward.
This is the reason we send our children to a Waldorf school. Most of the parents don't buy their kids phones or let them have unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet and devices. This means our kids are not desperate to fit in with the other kids.
Our kids are very creative as a result and are constantly doing things and playing and have good social skills.
I am a high-school dropout myself and am mostly self-taught. I started a locksmith business in the Denver metro area when I was 21 and taught myself how to pick locks, open vehicles and service locks on homes, automobiles and businesses and a ton of other things as well. I did use books and videos to learn. I switched to software engineering when I was 30 and did the same thing.
I don't think learning specific material in school is really that important but more so the learning how to learn combined with "creativity". We have far too many people in this world who are good at following instructions but what we really need in my opinion is people who are creative and can solve tough problems, not follow instructions.
Learning things along the way is easy if there is a solid creative base and persistence.
I suppose there can be some highly specialized areas where you need to be in school the whole way and get certifications etc (e.g. surgeon, law).
But in practicality, I want to have creative children who grow up to be multi-talented and have confidence that they can learn whatever they need to learn to solve problems of the modern world. This is why we send them to a Waldorf school.
I had a friend that went to Waldorf school. All in all, he ended up not knowing anything and got such bad SAT scores he couldn't go to college. He was really upset, blaming his parents for ruining his life by sending him to a school in which you don't end up actually learning anything.
My ex gf went to a Waldorf school. She proceeded to CU Boulder and promptly failed out of pre engineering classes because she didn't know how to use a computer.
I could have written that article about my own daughter. To those of you suggesting that "maybe it's the schedule", you are wrong.
I got my daughter to sit with me and watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix, and she still wouldn't leave her iphone alone. I could not believe it. Her exact behaviour is being acted out in front of us, and she's busy maintaining her streaks. I pause the show and "Really? Are you seriously using your phone right now?"
She's totally addicted to snap. so much so that she will even make little snap poses during a normal face-to-face conversation, which prompted me - the first time I saw it - to say "Did you just pose for a snap photo?" to which she embarrassingly agreed that she had.
Just as the author of the article related, my daughter cannot be without her phone and exhibits many of the same behaviours described in the article. Sounds like we've had the same arguments.
Seriously!! I’m sure we all have something to say about this. But, this isn’t the type of content that we normally discuss here. I hate to point out something is off-topic, and I know even that is against guideline. But, sometimes I feel that HN must add a checkmark to the submit form to confirm what you are posting is relevant as a reminder.
> A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.
I don't think it's the phone itself that was the problem here, I think its allowing your teenager unfettered access to social media. TikTok, Facebook, IG, are not particularly healthy IMO. There is something to look at here with the loss of interest in reading and being creative. iPhones are in fact very good outlets for creativity, its just that children need limits within them just like anything else.
Parents should be engaged with what kids are actually doing on their devices and be able to set boundaries for their digital lives. I'm all for being creative, and I think digital tools can be a real boon to it. Making games, videos, digital art, programming etc. are all awesome, character building experiences. Scrolling through feeds for 9 hours a day watching celebrities do hand-jives and gossip, not as much..
> A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.
SCHOOL! SCHOOL! A thousand times: school!
Of course a child who likes reading for leisure is going to do it less readily when they are told what books to read and forced to read them on someone else's schedule and analyze rather than enjoy them. I have no idea why people are blaming the phone and not school here.
This is a story of every second household. My wife's nieces are stuck on phone practically 24 hours. The day their internet balance gets exhausted is when they peep out of their phone screen and raise all hue and cry forcing their parents to recharge their phone immediately. Their sleep cycle doesn't exist and if their kid brother even if playfully hides their phone then he risks getting killed by them.
Another toddler in my extended family just had his eyesight treated because of addiction to mobile phone.
There is a reason why tech billionaires are sending their kids to schools devoid of screens. The general horde who are making these billionaires even richer by buying their phones and seeing virtue in being able to afford it should introspect the damage they are doing to their kids.
"A real public health issue is widespread apathy, likely as a byproduct of enough easy to access content to basically numb you in a cloud of short-term dopamine hits in exchange for long-term lack of fulfillment and motivation." - @nikillinit
Yes, at some point during the day, I take the electronics away, and enable wifi parental controls (which pretty much blocks everything like YouTube, etc.). This is usually followed by a brief meltdown, then books/paints/whatever come out and the analog world is revisited.
When my parents had a say in my technology usage (amount of time spent in front of a screen, turning off the router at midnight, etc), I would want to find ways around it, such as jumping onto a neighbors hotspot, or saving up and secretly buying myself a second phone so they couldn't take it away. Sometimes I could get away with pulling an all-nighter on my phone.
Before I got into technology, it was books. I read for hours every day, and my parents complained that while reading was good, I was doing it in excess.
Once these limits relaxed, so did my desire to exceed them. Now I've moved out and live on my own, I find myself wanting to spend far less time on the computer.
We have a natural tendency to worry about kids, if the technology really is different this time, and dangerous to be giving kids.
Here's another perspective: are there socially well-adjusted adults who get sucked into it and ruin their lives? We're inclined to care about the kids most, but kids are resilient and continue to grow and adjust and change over the years. What about their parents? Are there adults who get sucked into social media addiction and it ruins their lives? If yes, how common would you say it is?
(I'm not trying to lead an answer here. I thought about it for a couple minutes and I haven't decided for myself.)
I'm not suggesting it's better or worse for an adult to be addicted, I'm suggesting that if social media is dangerously addictive we'd see addicts across the age spectrum, and I'm asking whether people feel like that is happening.
Familiar teacher told me not to give any phone or tablet for school aged kids. I wanted to buy iPad for my son and then buy LEGO EV3. LEGO apparently does not like windows. But I’ll listen to the advice. She is in normal school in normal district, but there are enough cases of smartphone addiction. Kids are getting aggressive and need psychiatrist when the phone is being taken away. And these cases occur more and more often. So as a father I don’t want to open this can of works as long as I can. Schools should bad phones in the first place.
I don't really like the article, but to me there is a problem and it isn't just teenagers but adults as well, everywhere you go people are just mindlessly phone out and scrolling. Games are sucking a bunch of time as well. Quarantining has made it worse.
You'd hope people were more educated or exposed to cool ideas but given the debate on the election and the most popular videos on youtube it doesn't seem to be that way.
Maybe its just a new normal and I'm old. I feel lucky the internet didn't exist when I was young.
The share of iPhone for today's teenagers is much higher than the regular population. Much of it from the natural progression from old iPod Touches, where they built their accounts, apps etc.
It’s not about smartphones, same thing was years ago with “I bought my child a PC, and now he’s stop doing anything...”. It’s bad parenting, addictive social media’s or games that’s responsible for that, not device itself.
It could be a deciding factor - modern smartphones and tablets are already very skewed to content consumption rather than content creation, and iOS devices even more so with their walled garden & app censorship approach.
While its preatty simple to start coding on a Windoss/Linux PC, Android and iOS devices are not self hosting, you need to download an SDK, set device into developer mode, etc. - a barrier in itself. On iOS it's even more complicated if you wanted to write an app for your iPhone and share it with friends - expensive developer subscription & draconian app review!
So my worry is we will loose a generation of developers who would otherwise get to coding and sharing of their creation on PCs if their first and only device is a locked down cosume-only device like an iPhone.
I don't think it's about IPhone or smartphones per see but the technology/software running on them which turns them into skinner boxes and which are not even constrained to certain physicals spaces as they are being carried and used everywhere. And the 9 hours on the phone is an absolutely worrying thing.
I had a habit opening LinkedIn every now and then to glance at the content. Sometimes I would quickly close, sometimes I read a bit and close, sometimes longer.. anyway that's a distraction from whatever I am doing.
I did a small experiment recently on LinkedIn. I unfollowed everyone. My LinkedIn feed is empty. I don't open LinkedIn as much now, think about it.. it faded away.
I really like having no feed.
Then I wondered what Facebook would be like without a Feed.
> My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed.
Uhm... There was a period in my life where I had to work part time and go back to school and even that only took 11 hours per day including a 30 min commute both directions. This girl is doing this in her teenage years...
The rule in our house is no electronics when the sun is up (on weekdays, we're a little more lax on weekends). So in the summer, that means very little TV time, and in the winter, a lot more.
So far that seems to work pretty well. But they are only single digit ages.
Somewhere along the way, I realize that apps like TikTok and Instagram are impervious to Apple’s Screen Time limit. They work even when the rest of her phone shuts down. To keep the peace, I let it slide.
Does she have ways to socialize with peers outside of the phone? It seems like her peers are all on social media and she's interacting with them the only way she can.
I would love it if you clarifies your point or found a name for the economic theorist.
I will admit that a lego kit with instructions is very different to a collection of lego parts and I would encourage every parent to buy buckets of assorted bits rather than kits that might end up staying on a shelf once assembled
Legos? Their innate limitation as simple bricks that can be shaped into many things is what makes them creative in my opinion. Though I suspect what you may be hinting at. If kids have no toys they'd use their imagination more or make their own toys.
Legos constrain creativity to simple objects that get stuck together. The creativity is not applicable in the real world and hurts imagination of the world that exists. Yes, what you said.
And now after saying all that I realize when comparisons are made of US to developing countries the same harbingers to creativity and innovation appear where if a situation in America can be resolved through a particular means, the lack of such means become an obstacle to the similar rise of developing countries.
No offense, but the author / parent sounds pretty passive when it come to parenting. It could've been an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch or whatever or a Macbook. The point being: the parent never enforced the limits nor stood their ground. Of course your kid is gonna plow you over once they know all they need to do is just ask.
You gotta set those limits and stick to what you say. No matter how awkward or unpleasant it may seem. They'll eventually understand, and on some level, respect you more for being a disciplinarian. Sometimes kids act out though they secretly crave rules and boundaries.
iPhone is designed to be as addictive as crack cocaine by the best Computer Science PhDs in the world. It would be hard to resist that. While I am not ready to produce a moral judgement on that, I do think it’s a real problem.
I'm afraid to wade into this given the negativity and judgementality of the comments here, but I could have written nearly every sentence of this article myself.
My kids will consume unbounded screen time if given the chance. They will forget to sleep. They will ignore requests to hang out with friends. I don't know if they have ever willingly got off their tablets of their own volition, except sometimes to eat.
Now that the kids are schooling virtually, they spend their day staring at a laptop. When they get a break or schools over, what do they want? To stare at their tablets.
I try to regulate it. I'll tell them to get off and do something else. Twenty minutes later, they're back on. "Didn't I tell you to get off?" "Mom, said we could." "Did you tell her I told you to get off screen?" "No..." They are like junkies, pitting us against each other.
But it's not like I can just kick them off. Because some fraction of the time, they're playing Minecraft which I think is pretty creative, and they're playing with their friends. Given how little social interaction they can get right now, I'm loathe to minimize that. But as soon as their friends sign off, they switch to YouTube without saying anything. "Weren't you playing Minecraft with Alice?" "Oh, that was hours ago.".
Sure, if my wife and I were better more disciplined parents maybe this would be less of a problem. But it really sucks having to essentially live in a house that has a big bag of candy-coated heroin right next to the breakfast cereal and have to constantly be vigilant about not letting them have it. And then when someone points out "Hey, maybe we businesses shouldn't be able to leave bags of heroin candy in our houses," all you get is comments like the ones here judging people for letting their kids have it.
And, no, this isn't the same as when we played with our computers as kids any more than caffeine is the same as heroin. A difference in degree is still a difference, especially at this magnitude.
Parenting is hard enough as it is without having to fight a personal uphill battle against the trillion-dollar capitalist attention acquisition industry.
I may be misjudging the author, but this awfully reminds me of my childhood and makes me angry for this child.
Everything I did had to be approved. They were always on my back, watching and controlling everything.
If I wanted to do something they did not approve, they were angry or mocked me. They forced me on activities I hated because THEY liked it. Never aknowledging my wishes or needs.
Never had privacy because they always had to check everything I was doing. Even closing my door made them angry. God save me if I dared to actually lock it, hell would loose on me.
When I asked for help, they never really bothered, they even laughed at me and made me feel like I should be ashamed to ask a question.
I lived under ridiculously strict, completely non-logical and arbitrary rules in everything in my life. Even daring to ask an explanation made them angry because I was defying their authority.
Want to get this nice book you like? Too bad, you don't have money. But mom does not think this book is interesting, so we'll get this other one instead. What, you already want to buy something else? We already bough you a book last week, you should be grateful.
They moved in the countryside because they are completely antisocial.
What, you want to visit a friend? I'll have to drive you, you are so annoying. We'll do this another time.
What, you want to go to disneyland? And a shopping center? Do you even know how much it costs and how many people are there?
What, you don't want to spend every sunday with us visiting completely uninteresting places with us? What's wrong with you, why don't you never get out of the house?!
You got punished again at school? [hell looses on me] I was sure your friends were not very frequentable, stop stop meeting them. Seriously, why didn't the teachers see that? Parents and teachers are so incompetent nowadays. Fortunately you have parents giving you a good education.
Computers were the only place where I could escape from this hell. I could have my own virtual world and they could not control it. I could subscribe to a PhpBB forum and talk with actual human beings about things I actually liked. I could choose any video game, movie and music and get it on Emule without asking permission.
This had and still have devastating consequences on my well-being.
You should be listening to what your child wants and teach her how to make her own smart choices. You should give her freedom, love and care, not arbitrary limits without even un explanation.
If I did not have my computer that my parents did not understood, if they had the power and knowledge to control and choose what I am allowed to do with it, I probably would have ended-up killing myself or something.
TL;DR. If you plan on giving a child a phone, make it very clear that it's not "her" phone - just as like with cars when they are learning to drive - and that you are lending it for certain activities, and that you can impound it whenever you feel like, for whatever reason. Also, that they should expect a certain level of privacy invasions.
I have 3 daughters from my first marriage (ranging from 26 y/o to 2). When they were growing up I was a single father, and their phones went from brick-like nokias to Androids in the time it takes you to snap your fingers.
At the time I didn't give it much thought, and when I realized what was going on the harm was done. I really wish I'd knew better; I should had.
My youngest daughter is 7 now, from my 2nd marriage. And phones in particular and technology in general is something I give a lot of thought, and have discussed at length with my partner (Thankfully, we're on the same wavelength here).
She is also really creative; she was learning violin before lockdown, and while in lockdown besides her violin classes, she took singing and piano lessons (Obviously, at the level a 7 y/o can take then over Zoom / Meet).
We only let her watch around 1 hour of TV per day. Being strict here is a constant struggle, but we keep it more around that amount of time.
She also plays with the computer (Or phone, or tablet) "only" 1 hour a day, with the tablet or phone restricted to only weekends, and a particular game - Star Wars Battlefront - only 2 days a week.
Besides that, something that we haven't been able to manage - namely because it can go from 15 minutes a day to several hours - is phone usage for video calls. But I have to admit that I struggle here because I don't have a decided opinion regarding what to do here. She does sometimes hour + video calls with her grandmother on the mother side; they are very close, and due to COVID she haven't seen her since February - she lives 1500 Km away, with travel almost impossible in this country (Argentina) - when usually she would travel frequently, say every two months. Same happens with her friends that she hardly sees nowadays. and I gotta reckon that the video calls are usually on the creative side, for instance with a friend that lives in the same town as my MIL they would play using local toys similar to legos.
Both my wife and I dread the time when we'll eventually have to give her a phone,because just like TV and tablets and computers, it's going to be a constant struggle, made worst by the "but my friends do it / have it" line of reasoning.
As we do want to be prepared for this, what we decided is that, would the moment arrive, we are not going to give her "her phone". We are going to lend her a phone, that is not going to be hers, and she will be allowed to use under certain circumstances. And we would have the right to inspect that phone whenever we fell like it.
The reasoning here is that from our point of view, having a phone is not very different from having a car. If you would not give a 10 y/o a car, why would you give her a phone in an uncontrolled way?
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The problem isn’t the phone, is that she’s being socialized into adulthood by a bad influence: the crowd. Not just her friends at school, but the national and global crowd she can access through the phone.
You can stop it, but you won’t. The messages we give to girls now are awful. They are taught by the crowd to freely wield their sexual and social power instead of being taught to use it thoughtfully. This power is intoxicating and can only be tamed by strong values. They will be indoctrinated against your “outdated” parental authority. Their “heroes” will be criminals and bad women like Cardi B. If you really want to stop that, pull her out of the school she’s going to, find a ‘conservative’ school to send her to, and spend time teaching your values at home. You probably won’t do any of this. It’s not the phone, it’s the values and who is teaching them. And right now, that’s not you.
We all are yet to see what this current youtube-raised generation of iChildren will turn out to be.
And I already don't like what I see, even though they are still only 5-10 years old: zero attention span, inability to be still and contemplative, useless hyperactivity, zero respect to parents yet enormous fear of police and other powers that be, lack of personal responsibility, whole life documented and filed in the cloud, total dependency on internet and electricity, so much that they are at the fringe of going insane or commiting a suicide when there's an outage...
And oh if it were only their parents who'll reap what they sow.
this is dumb. everyone arguing about this is dumb. the parent is also dumb. The reality is that there is an economics of utility algorithm programmed into everyone and we innately seek out whatever makes us fit in with others and whatever entertains us with the least effort. It is a projection for the parent to assume their child has creative potential or a great creative enthusiasm when they, devoid of other ways to gratify their desire for novelty and expression, use the materials at their disposal. Now that her daughter has been given a device that satiates, at least for the moment, her desire to be popular, cool, and in-group, as well as provide her exponentially greater conduits for gratification and effortless creation-interaction, she is just like the rest of us.
If this parent is frustrated at all they should, instead of being conceited about vicarious passions, be mournful their child has fallen prey to consumerist joys and will likely never develop a true adult passion for enriching experiences and pastimes.
If my child asked me for something everyone has i would get her the things everyone DOESNT because when she is older she will appreciate the novelty of her personal childhood more than she will remember being just like everyone else. I would get my child a basic feature phone like a light phone or a flipphone, and i would get them an e-ink tablet and, yes, a customized device for watching television and youtube, possibly an android tablet heavily locked down. I would prohibit the use of apps like tiktok, snapchat, and instagram, all of which any in-touch millennial knows are the key platforms driving this soulless era of contact appreciation and gameified approval from others that really makes generation z teenagers look like a bunch of zombies, far more than we or our parents did at the same age.
It is my store too as a parent of a single child losing creativity to instant pleasures and doom scrolling on an iPhone.
To add salt to injury, the dance team at school she is part of encourages them to post on Facebook and Instagram. They have study groups on Facebook, Discord, Slack and even Instagram.
When I demand they use simple old style text messaging, she has friends with fancy phones but no SIM card and depend on Instagram messaging for everything.
I have given up after going through frustrating, helpless and endless hours of convincing.
Lack of ability to focus will be the serious limiting factor for innovation and creativity. I see it at work where you get engineers cannot persevere to solve hard problems. Agile has become them excuse to do some quick hack and throw it across the wall.
What a load of shit. I’m sorry I have an 11 year old who has an iPod touch the real problem here is lax parenting. My son cannot use his phone alone in his room alone, he doesn’t have TikTok or any social media apps. He cannot take it to school (not that there’s a school to go to at the moment) or take it out of the house unless he asks first and 95% of the time we don’t let him. Kids test—that’s like an iron law of childhood. It’s your job as a parent to set boundaries. Set the rules and set the consequences and then FOLLOW THROUGH on the consequences. This is the equivalent of lazy parents in the 80s blaming “death metal” for their children’s problems, or lazy parents in the 90s blaming video games, or 2000s parents blaming the internet. It’s you—all these problems are your fault.
"What a load of shit", "all these problems are your fault."
Really? This comment just seems like ego-driven parental grandstanding rather than an actual attempt to understand how the first generation born into the era of smartphones and all-the-time internet access might have difficulty negotiating a healthy psyche against a multi-billions dollar oligarchy of companies intentionally seeking to monetize their attention.
Congratulations, your son doesn't seem addicted to their ipod. Cool anecdote; here's actual data about wether or not parental control of phone use has much of an affect on phone addiction (it doesn't):
https://journals.lww.com/jan/fulltext/2018/04000/does_parent...
It’s not ego driven but there was anger on my side. I hate it when we blame technology first, which seems to be the point of this article. Kids can absolutely be addicted to phones that’s true. But it’s the job of the parent to set limits, this person admits in the article that her daughter wore her down and flaunted the limits and there were no consequences. So yeah she may be addicted now, which we can’t really diagnose, but that’s still the parents fault for setting limits and bending to the will of their kid.
I don't think the article made this differentiation specifically, but I don't see this as blaming technology, but ad-driven companies engineering skinner boxes. It is well understood that advertising companies wreak havoc on children's health (tobacco, body image, sugar, etc). We should hold these companies accountable.
While there were definitely lax restrictions here, there are more factors here (societal pressure, both cultural and literal; the article indicated that study groups and other activities were coordinated solely on social media) that affect one's proneness to phone addiction.
In addition, in the article linked above (and others), parenting is not _the_ bellwether preventative in terms of phone addiction - there are psychological factors, environmental factors, etc.
In addition, there are societal variations across gender that are documented as having an affect on proneness to phone addiction.
Don't let your individual experience override the reality of the situation. This is an issue that is going to require extensive research and potentially regulation.
1 I’m sorry about your attempted suicide and I hope you’re ok now. 2 We are not that strict, my kids have limits but they are known and they know what happens if they break the rules. But you are right there is a balance and this parent seems to not be balanced at all and they’re blaming the phone. She said her daughter wore her down and she caved and allowed her TikTok—I’m sorry but as a parent that is on her. Limits do need to grow and change as the kid gets older but unfettered access to everything at 11 is not the phones fault.
Yes, but if you read the article you can see that much of the phone's interruption in their lives is their kid making videos. That kid is creating content. Children under the age of 13 certainly shouldn't be on TikTok but that's not the parent's fault, that's the platform's.
Preventing your children from accessing social media is taking away their support network. If you're as strict as you say - and refusing to let your son take his phone out of the house is strict - he's certainly not going to trust you because _you don't trust him_. Your job as a parent is to let your kids grow, not to put these kids of boundaries on them. Let them look up to you for advice, not look to you every five minutes to see if what they're doing is allowed. If you were parenting well you wouldn't need to put more than a couple rules on your kids because they'd be good people anyway. They won't have those kids of rules on them as adults.
There are two people I know in real life with parents more strict than mine (and my parents aren't as strict as you); one of them has grown to develop anger issues and the other has such little life experience that it's sometimes hard to talk to them ("what's X?", "what's Y?").
> My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed.
Perhaps it is not just the iPhone, but school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention that is preventing her from pursuing creative interests? As a homeschooling parent whose kids have been in school at times, I see this first hand. School is exhausting. Between rising unnaturally early (which leaves kids tired), rushing and bustling kids on their daily commute, most of the daylight hours blocked for school then homework when you get home not to mention whatever homework the teachers decide to assign to parents, and did I mention the kids are exhausted by the end of the day due to early wake-up?
Compulsory daily full-time school for children may be good for some things but it would take a lot to convince me that it increases their creativity. When my kids home school they will spend a lot of time playing roblox or whatever, but then they'll spend hours playing outdoors, decide to do a cooking project that takes all morning–currently one of mine is getting into "bushcraft" and he'll watch hours of videos about making fires, carving etc. before putting the tips it into practice (safely) during times outdoors, where he spends hours and hours. Then he'll come back, play roblox for an hour, then help clean up and put the younger kids to bed.
I am concerned about over-use/addictive nature of computers & phones, but I think it's myopic to see your otherwise creative child tired and craving mental distraction and say "aha the phone is the problem." Step back and look at the whole picture.
Edit: I must admit I commented after reading only half the article (shame on me). It does in fact seem like her daughter has a phone-use problem. What I say above remains true, however.