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?
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.