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?

  • RedWizard [he/him]
    M
    ·
    2 months ago

    Straight-up though: I think you're making a huge mistake if you give your kid a smartphone and let them raw dog the internet when they're in single digits.

    Yeah, this is specifically what I'm talking about. I have friends whose kids are just a few years older than mine, and they have access to YouTube kids. One told me he had to take it off the iPad because a creator can flag anything as "for kids" and it just gets added to the app, so he was playing cat and mouse with brain rot all the time. Another friend of mine had to collect the Nintendo Switch at night because their kid figured out they could watch YouTube from the built-in browser on the device.

    I see comments here in this thread about how "You gotta also talk to your kids", which, I feel, is implied, but maybe I'm wrong. However, over a decade of working in K12-IT has taught me that kids are a relentless force of nature. If you've implemented a block on something like "YouTube", they will collaboratively work towards finding a way around that block (and they will find a way, they always do). They will even create black markets to distribute videos from YouTube!

    Most of that doesn't really bother me, though, I was doing that kind of shit in high school. One thing that stuck with me is someone from the same group of friends told me recently that his oldest (high school age) told him about a year ago, "Thanks for keeping me off the iPad\Computer, and pushing me to do my work, instead of letting me become an iPad kid." He's also in a parallel parenting situation. He told me that his kid and his friends "Can tell which kids are iPad kids." Whatever that might mean. It's not isolated, though, because I hear the same thing from Teachers I work with, and even daycare workers at our daycare.

    I should say, it's not a scientific classification, and I recognize how anecdotal it is, but it's enough to give me pause.