TLDR:
Making your kids go without smartphones could be difficult because their friends will most likely have phones and will most likely leave your kid out of events and conversations.
Yeah, even if the parents mean well, all this is really doing at the end of the day is putting the kids at a significant disadvantage compared to basically all their peers lol. Smartphones aren't going anywhere, just like the personal computers/cell phones before them, and denying that reality is only going to make it harder as time goes on.
Not saying they can't take any steps to try to curb the more negative effects of social media n stuff, but trying to go full amish about it is just silly.
Perhaps, but I personally think it's more likely the latter and they're just a bunch of fart-sniffing pretentious idiots with more money than sense.
Devil's advocate: when their son runs for X, there will be less video evidence of him using the nword and using gamer moves on women.
I think your comment ties back into one further up the thread, where someone said that this is good as a collective decision, and extremely bad as an individual "choice". If you send your children to a school where this is common, you get to reap the obvious benefits from your kid not having access to these harmful devices. Whereas if you make a "consumer choice" to be a responsible parent, you just set up your kid to be resentful of you, since you excluded them from one of the most basic activities that their friends have access to.
Problem is, those kids will eventually get these devices, and then they have no framework for how to control their own usage. I would imagine they'd also have some catching up to do on social expectations about device usage in groups.
If all the kids friends don't use the phone to communicate, then the problem isn't there.
I think there's more overlap with the "microdosing lsd to be more productive for my boss" crowd than non-bug-eating DSA PMC radlib karens, but my exposure to the Silicon Valley tech scene is blessedly minimal
Giardia is a pleasant walk in the park compared to cholera or dysentery. Oregon trail 2022 baby! We're back
That paragraph about her dance group going on their phones instead of talking to each other is so depressing. It isn't that common where I am because reception is awful and goes off frequently for long periods of time, so you're often left with no choice but to socialize.
And the difference in social skills is kind of staggering. I've seen it between kids in the city raised on smartphones and rural kids who weren't. The city kids are a lot more withdrawn and socially awkward while the rural ones are more outgoing and talkative. The rural kids also have better attention spans. Sometimes there are benefits to living in the mountains lol
really? honestly i've known exactly the opposite - myself and all 5 kids i knew spread out across my rural ass county had literally no way to interact with people our own ages except online (unless you were willing to walk an hour plus to the next village to see each other lol), whereas when i moved out and met city kids, they were people who'd been able to interact with other kids their entire lives and seemed much more social and less anxious
Rural communities here tend to be very tight-knit and there are frequent get togethers for things like house building with other villages or giant dinner parties. A lot of it comes from the indigenous groups putting a lot of emphasis on community events.
Nope. Highlands of Central America. I did live in Upstate New York for a number of years and found it to be the opposite. Most of the rural kids were in heavily religious families and had really creepy cult-like vibes. I think I was the first non-white person most of them had met. The city kids were more socialized and less spiteful overall.
Yeah, sounds about right. America is pretty atomized and alienated right now. Not a lot of strong community in most places.
I'm a grown (and relatively well-adjusted) man and I can't handle having a smartphone myself
Yes, it really is a shame that texting seems to be not the way people communicate now. I mean, why would you communicate with your friends over Instagram or whatever? Doesn't really make much sense to me. I feel like getting your kid a keyboard phone wouldn't be a bad idea instead anyway though.
I think in the future small 'anti-internet' communities will be formed by parents like these. Maybe children raised in these communities will be better socially adjusted lol
Sadly given current trends those communities are much more likely to be of the controlling and indoctrinating type than well-meaning. But maybe more people who aren't nutjobs can realize how harmful the internet is to kids.
Being better socially adjusted just means you're good at adhering to social norms. If these kids are outside of the norm then they wont be considered better socially adjusted. Whatever is considered good social skills is defined by whatever the social norms are.
The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I was very late to the smartphone scene and have therefore not become cripplingly addicted to my smartphone, in fact it's usually dead if I don't need to go anywhere. Instead I'm cripplingly addicted to my pc.
Maybe what we are all cripplingly addicted to is escaping the nightmarish reality we are subjected to in the imperial core.
I was very late to the smartphone scene and still got cripplingly addicted to my smartphone, but only if a PC isn't available
Get your child a pinephone. They'll have basic functionality (most of the time) without the tendrils of proprietary surveillance capitalism apps. When things do go wrong, they'll learn the skills to fix them.
Based on my paltry research into the pinecone over the last hour I would say it's actually worth getting the flagship phone and encouraging the use of Ubuntu touch... still looks like it has good potential but isn't quite there yet
I thought you wrote a pineapple and was wondering if you had ever used a phone
I'd sure love it if we could put that genie back in the bottle, but we can't. My kids are teenagers and there is no way in hell I'm going to open up another vector for them to get Othered. They're already neurodivergent and queer and bullied on occasion. So yeah, I got them phones. Fuck the consequences—if I can get my kids bullied less, I give less than zero shits.
(I also taught them where all the soft spots on a man's body are, and we're learning how to shoot. But you can't really do either of those in school.)
Ah fuck I sincere posted by accident.
I actually trained my childerinos to do a heckin revolution at their school and gank all the teachers, and they did it. They are teaching the classes now, and it's all classes on how to TNT a Senator in Minecraft.
Sometimes I like to watch the newest redstone traps on YouTube. If I'm ever purged as a reactionary when I'm old, I hope that's how they catch me. Those Minecraft kids are creative as hell.
This could be solved significantly better with parental controls and parents’ unions (idk what else to call these). Not all social media has negative effects on mental health. But kids could be provided with alternatives so long as their friends were on the same ones and it could be a really positive experience instead of this liberal approach of all or nothing because everything has to be an individual solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the sentiment the mother in the article is getting across. You see the horrifying impacts of smart phones all day and you don’t want your kids to go through that. But by isolating yourself in enforcing this rule, you’re also isolating your kids.
The idea that I’ve been toying with is if you can get a group of maybe half a dozen parents to buy into the idea, you could set up a Friendica instance, a Minecraft server, and some kind of chat server and have those be the primary spaces that those kids interacted with each other. Restrict the corporate social media apps and get them in the habit of actually using social media socially with people they know irl. Kind of like how home schooled kids will enroll their kids in extracurriculars together
If I were a kid I wouldn't want to use software my parents set up to talk to my friends. Maybe I just had shittier than average parents but imo having private space is super important.
You'd need to designate one of the kids as sysadmin, but then you're in an Omelas situation where you've got a bunch of happy ten-year-olds and one who's aged 30 years with a dead-eyed stare and a coffee addiction muttering to themselves about database backups
in fact my paranoia about my parents seeing what i did online is what ended up with me going into the highly lucrative field of work im doing now :thonk:
Oh yeah absolutely same, one day I'm 12 doing dumb javascript snippets for an Internet forum full of other dumb kids, suddenly im thirty-mumble trying to untangle someone else's Gordian knot of a kubernetes cluster
There's probably something to zoomers being less adept with computers than millennials. We grew up with computers that were fairly easy to use but still required some technical knowledge. It's all been abstracted away for ease of use now unless you really go digging or use :tux:
Yeah, that and spending more time with their phones than on devices with keyboards/terminal access/etc like a desktop or laptop
Even in the early 2000s, not having, say, a Nokia 3215 and MSN Messenger was death to your social life.
Well I guess that explains a lot about my high school and college experience.
It's always been like that. One of the markers for middle class status is having the money to access their communication channels. I'm sure there were a lot of people wondering why they never got invited to anything in 1800 because their calling cards were made from the wrong type of paper or something.
The more I learn about social media and smart devices the more of a fundamentalist I become about this shit. Even if you're not going to take it away completely limiting your kids to something like no more than an hour a day is just good parenting, plain and simple, because this shit rots your fucking mind the way people used to think that Radio and TV would.
Dunno if you've checked in on the boomers in your life lately but TV absolutely has worked as advertised. Brains just coming out their ears at this point.
I mean non-stop daily propaganda will do that regardless of the medium, I just think that mass social media is harmful as a medium regardless of content.
I despise smart phones and their effect on social norms. No doubt they are even worse for children than they are for adults. I don't know what parents should do. It doesn't seem like there are any good options.
Just never having a Facebook account already puts you ahead of 1/3 of the US if not more.
