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Hexbear's thoughts on kids with phones? (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This subject is easily one of the biggest and most frustrating realities of doing parallel parenting that I have to deal with being divorced. Kiddo is 9 and unlike mom I straight up refuse to give him smartphone access at my house until 11, at the earliest. He has access to electronic devices for his hour of screen time a day which are heavily moderated and controlled at both a device level and router level. PG-13 content is totally acceptable to me and I'll even allow R rated depending on the circumstances and provided we can engage with it together. I am not a fan at all of trying to shelter your kids entirely from the outside world and definitely believe in talking to kids about difficult subjects like violence, sex, drugs, et al.

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. There is just so much goddamn awful trash, gross inappropriate memes, and parasocial relationships which are going to give them tons of weird ideas about all kinds of shit you'll eventually have to work with them through. Media literacy is a complicated subject even for a adults. That isn't even getting into all the shit designed to fuck with their dopamine levels.

I do think the comparison of giving a kid a cellphone to giving them a cigarette is probably a bit hyperbolic...but I definitely would liken it to giving them a soft drink or ice cream or something. At a certain age its ok and totally normal to have it...but the internet and smart devices are treats which as the parent makes you responsible for handling moderation until that blasted prefrontal cortex comes in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I understand and share all your concerns. I am dealing with a kid of a similar age, and it is frustrating to know what's out there. That's why "his" phone is his "mom's" phone that he's "borrowing". It's logged on to her stuff. Sure he can (And does) sometimes get around that, but ultimately he is responsible to her for all he does on the phone, which has limited what he does on it quite a lot. And ultimately we can't really do a lot of other stuff that we can enforce when he's at his father's place, or just enforce at all really. Ultimately he has to have a phone and that phone needs the internet, so we can only create an environment of responsibility for what he does with the phone.
But he basically can't exist without a phone. He gets his homework on an app ffs.

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