I linked to this thread, only because it's what got me thinking about this topic again. Me and my SO talk about phones occasionally, regarding our kids. Neither of them are anywhere close to an age where they might have one. However, as time goes on, we find ourselves so repelled by the idea of the kids having a fully fledged smartphone.
Given the reality that all social media apps are effectively skinner boxes, training you to use them more, the idea of allowing kids on them feels like offering a 10-year-old a cigarette. I have to remind myself that the internet I grew up on is dead and gone. I may have been exposed to some weird ass shit in AOL chat rooms, but there wasn't any kind of algorithmic content feed keeping me itching and scratching.
So far, the only time the oldest uses an iPad is when they use mine, and the only apps they use are Procreate for drawing, and an app that helps kids learn to write letters and words. Watching TV is probably the worst thing we get into at home when it comes to just pure content consumption, but we keep the list of watchable stuff pretty small, and regularly axe shows we feel don't meet our standards when we venture off that list.
I guess this has evolved into a larger discussion about media consumption as I have typed this out, but at the end of the day, that's what's happening on these phones, right?
These are my guiding principles on the subject:
They sometimes conflict with each other and they can be hard standards to meet, but the more ambiguous parts are things we can feel out as we go since that’s de facto what everyone is doing on the subject anyway.
I’m skeptical of the narrative that tech companies push where they’ve created mind control rays which force people to engage with their content. Super convenient if your entire business model revolves around content engagement. If your kid is at risk of addiction (mental health, family history, etc) then yeah don’t let them download the slop machine apps. I authorize intense parental controls for my kids stuff. I also have Pihole set up to block ads on our entire network. I also tell my kids that it’s not healthy to enjoy something so much that it makes other things boring. And then I model taking breaks.
How often would you say your kids attempt to bypass the parental controls? I operate what amount to "parental controls" for over 1000 kids every day, and I regularly encounter the new, interesting, and funny ways kids find to get around those controls. No one shares paper notes anymore, they share Google Docs and use the Chat feature built into the doc interface.
Either they ask permission when necessary or they just tell me that they bypassed something because they’re proud of figuring it out. It’s definitely a different dynamic than doing tech for a school, for example. Might just be a thing with my kids idk. I don’t get mad when they bypass stuff. There’s just a lot of reinforcement about why the rules are in place and validation of their emotions around that.