> So far he hasn't turned into a domestic terrorist, and neither is he selling heroin for crypto on the dark web. Also, he has specific times when he can use his devices аnd limits on how much time.

I think this sort of hyperbole is unhelpful. What people are worried about is more mundane: whether the hyperconnectedness will make their kids less happy in the short or long run. There is some evidence that the age of first smartphone negatively correlates with these outcomes. [1] For my daughters, I worry about social media use, body image issues, and the like.

> Just delaying their first contact to the age of 13/14 won't magically guarantee they will be able to navigate it responsibly. This is just magical thinking born out of laziness.

I don't think most parents think this would be a magic bullet. They just think that it is one (important) tool in the toolkit. We understand that parents (noun) are supposed to parent (verb). It's not lazy to say that we think our children would be better served if their brains were a bit more developed before they are confronted with the world of addictive apps and always-on social media.

I'm glad to hear that things have worked out well for your kid. There are of course a variety of outcomes for different kinds of kids. No one knows whether their kid would have been happier (or would have grown into a happier adult) had they done something differently. We are all just trying to figure out how to do our best, and for some people that means slowing down the rate of change from one generation to the next.

1: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...

That's cool you, a tech-savvy HN poster, has managed to wield technology to find a high-reward/low-risk way to parent using devices, but perhaps your 'correct' solution may not work in all contexts for all people.

Perhaps you just have a kid who has the right temperament to handle devices when young.

Perhaps you work few enough hours or have the resources necessary to parent in a way to make this work.

Perhaps the kids around your kid are generally a good influence.

If there's any truism to parenting (and education) its that there's no one size fits all solution. We're in a moment in time where devices are not exactly great for children given the tools and understanding available. Socializing less device use in a society saturated with addictive devices and experiences doesn't seem that bad an idea, right?

But the parents are too addicted to screens to parent.

Jokes aside, it doesn't help that many parents are not great with technology (not everyone out there posts on HN) so that even relatively straightforward settings changes like placing usage constraints on your OS may not be clear to parents. I bet many parents don't even know the extent to which they can do that, let alone how.

The general point is, our overall management of consumer technology in society is a complete mess thanks to the fact that its solely driven by profit seeking.

You can give your child access to technology, allow them to play with their friends, watch space launches etc. without handing them over to corporations who are only interested in exploiting and manipulating them.

It's great that your kid isn't a terrorist. It's a shame, that at age 6 there's already a collection of dossiers being stuffed with data about your child which will follow them for their entire life. It's a shame that they've been being manipulated by lies at an age when they literally can't always tell what's real or not. It's amazing how we failed to learn our lessons there when it was just TV, but advertising now is so much worse than anything we were exposed to on television.

Kids should have computers and they should have access to the internet, but that doesn't mean they need a cell phone and their interactions should be carefully monitored and supervised.

Pretending technology and social media doesn't exist isn't any worse than pretending that children have the capacity to handle social media and the companies who are only looking to take advantage of them. Denying your kids 24/7 access to a cell phone and a facebook account seems a lot more grounded in reality.

> If your kid is addicted to screens, it is on you. Just delaying their first contact to the age of 13/14 won't magically guarantee they will be able to navigate it responsibly.

I completely agree with the latter, but to achieve the former, it will have to be delayed to at least 18. 12-14 is the age at which they start getting interested in social media, fitting in a group, sexual attraction, etc., which is what makes social media nefast. Prior to that age, many will simply only be interested in cartoons and dinosaurs. It isn't magic, it's just how development works for many (in our environment, at this moment). Hopefully, by delaying it to 18, they will be conditioned less by the instantaneous attention call of whatsapp, tiktok, etc., although many (younger) adults seem quite addicted as well.

> We are supposed to parent. Part of the parenting stuff means supervising and guiding in all environments your kid has contact with, including screens.

That's your interpretation of the parenting role. It might be agreeable for a lot of people on this forum, but that's mostly because we're all a self selected group.

Historically speaking, children were free to learn unguided and parents only interfered if the kids didn't do their jobs, which was literal work on a farm or similar.

I'm not advocating for child labor, but your opinion that it's your job to literally supervise your child learning is also a quiet extreme position from my point of view.

I dont recognise that it is so easy to apply these limits, even though I work in tech. When trying to block through Windows, I get lost in a dark patterns maze of microsoft online family accounts, where I ended up with corrupt windows user accounts - I could no longer log into my own admin account with my written down paasword, and had to reinstall windows. When I try google/android instead, I end up with account/app limits that my child can easily circumvent just by watching videos through the browser instead. What I currently have resorted to doing, is dns blacklisting youtube through the router, and then using alternate DNS where youtube should work.

and this is not even to block my kid from youtube, it is just to keep her usage under/at 1 hour per day. meanwhile I have to fight with her misguided mother, who considers giving her a smartphone (she is 8, sigh). I am strongly against giving them to kids, given that not even adults can handle them responsibly.

Smartphone <> social media

It's disingenuous to pretend watching some documentary on planets is the same as scrolling on tiktok. These devices have two faces: one is excellent and you can learn a lot from it, the other is pure crystal meth and messed you up.

I think delaying the crystal meth part is fine, but delaying access to education feels rather shortsighted.

> So far he hasn't turned into a domestic terrorist, and neither is he selling heroin for crypto on the dark web.

So you think. I for one have greatly enjoyed subscribing to your kids’ onlyfans where he relentlessly mocks about how clueless they are to his terrorism and heroin business.

Joking aside, it’s hard to know what our kids are doing and reminds me of a friend who swears that their kids don’t need controls because they don’t do anything bad. And the kid literally has a YouTube channel with them vaping, getting arrested, tagging buildings. They literally said something like “I talk with my kids and know them and they would tell me if they were doing this stuff.” And there’s a weird cognitive dissonance when they watched the video where they said that it wasn’t them, but their friends. “They were holding that vape for their friend, they don’t use it.” People love their kids.

I struggle with having useful controls and use a mix of Apple, Microsoft, google and third party tools like bark. None of them work well. Some do a good job blocking, but not unblocking for things like school.

A simple example of Apple’s, that I think is best, you can set a screen time limit like “one hour a day” and then set some apps like those used for school as unlimited. But the unlimited time apps consume the one hour limit and block the “fun apps.” So my kids would wake up early to use their one hour before school and have no time after school. You can approve extended time, buts by clock time, not actual usage. So if you approve an hour at 709, then it’s allowed until 809, even if they only use the app for 30 seconds.

It’s a usability pain in the rear end and I can’t expect anyone actually uses it.

Not to mention how buggy it is. At least a few times a day it takes 60-120 seconds to open the screen time app because it syncs usage before letting you approve requests.

So really, it’s easier to just block devices altogether. If I could do it again, I would wait until 8th grade.

> But the solution is not pretending it is not there and hoping they won't become absolutely fascinated at the magic age of 14.

In fact, 14, sort of the peak of puberty, strikes me as one of the WORST possible ages to first expose one's children to the Internet. Either let them practice earlier at the shallow end of the Internet pool, or lock them up until they are at Rumspringa age.

"14" also sounds suspiciously like something cooked up in an Anthroposophic thought bubble. Rudolf Steiner was a big believer in 7 year developmental cycles, so "14" is self evidently the correct age to make a deal with Ahriman, if one must. The team running the pledge does not mention any connection to Anthroposophy, but Waldorf schools seem to be endorsing the pledge.

> If your kid is addicted to screens, it is on you.

This is wishful thinking. You can be truly the best parent in the world with unlimited time, wisdom and attention span but in the end you are competing with corporations who are dedicating billions of dollars and thousands of people to make very sure their apps as maximizing addiction. You can't compete with that.

Sure you can limit screen time but that doesn't do much. It's like saying the old days that I only let a child smoke from 10am to noon, so it's ok they won't get addicted.

> Just delaying their first contact to the age of 13/14 won't magically guarantee they will be able to navigate it responsibly.

There are no guarantees in life (except death (and taxes?)).

It's about playing the odds/probabilities to achieved the desired outcomes (presumably happiness, or perhaps Aristotle's eudaimonia).

100% agree. Whatever you decide, supervision and guidance is the best you can do to your kids. I guess it's easier to remove the plug and pretend kids are safe when disconnected.

This view seems a bit rosy and willfully ignorant of the actual current state of the internet. I think it will spoil most of the batch but the lucky few will come out better for it.

Those kids that do have a desire for encyclopedic knowledge may be well served by a smart phone.

However, most kids do not have that desire to begin with, and even those that do face problems. Unlike a traditional library, the internet is an ocean full of some information of so-so quality and much of abysmally low quality. A local library will not typically house the latest unedited, unhinged screed of the resident neo-nazi, and if it did, a well-educated librarian could help put it in appropriate context and help reaffirm the community's values. Learning from the internet outside of maybe learning about tech itself (and even the info quality there is in rapid decline imo) is mostly like learning from an encyclopedia authored by conspiracy theorists and village idiots.

> My 5-year old nephew has access to a smart phone along with social media accounts on the major platforms. Is it healthy? Probably not. Neither was my generation binging on TV and video games. But it also gives them access to an absurd wealth of information richer than any library I had growing up.

The things that made TV and video games "unhealthy" for you are not the same or even comparable to the threats that make social media unhealthy for kids today.

Also, children don't need access to social media to have "an absurd wealth of information richer than any library". That can be obtained elsewhere online. I don't think many people are suggesting that children should be cut off from the internet entirely, but rather that they shouldn't be given constant unsupervised access, or access to platforms run by companies who are devoted to exploiting those children.

When I was young, I didn't have the internet, but I was active on a number BBSs. I suppose that could have been considered the "social media" of the day, and I was not supervised while online, it was also an entirely different beast. It was not run by companies who were looking to exploit me, manipulate me, and collect every scrap of my personal data that could be extracted. They were mostly being run by other nerds. It was about community and not profit and exploitation.

Early exposure to the internet, to online communities, and to technology in general is important, but no child needs a device in their pocket which is designed primarily to collect/leak personal information and for media consumption to do those things. A cell phone and a facebook account are probably the worst way to achieve those ends anyway. We can do better for our children than to throw them to the wolves.

My 10-year kid watches the usual amount of silly stuff on youtube. But from time to time I catch him watching some popular science content. One of these days he gave a very good explanation of what a black hole is during dinner.

Then paying attention to him, I found out he is a subscriber to a very entertaining young astronomer's channel and that's where he was learning all that stuff. I sit along with him and engaged with him in the content.

On the other hand that are some content producers that are absolute trash, in those cases, I gently persuade my son this is not the best content for him, well, sometimes not so gently, in the worst cases I just lay down the law that he is not to watch that channel anymore. I do it rarely enough that it still works.

It is not magic, you just need to parent, the same way you have to do in every other situation in your kid's life that doesn't necessarily involve a screen.

It's not a given that the parents are addicted to phones. It's also not clear that access to large amounts of information driven by selection pressure of algorithms is automatically a good thing: some of these informational memes drive children to do harmful things (for example, the tide pod challenge).

The people who built this stuff don't let their own kids touch it. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know?

Does your 5-year old nephew reads?

I was wondering the same, because everything about this organization seems a bit iffy to me.

Part of me wonders is there an ulterior motive to the campaign.

I'm personally for banning phones in school, and schools should have e.g. tablets with internet access when the classes call for it, and for supervised access outside.

I'm not for what this proposal sets out to do which is to completely eliminate phone access.

That is, I'm in agreement with you.

> I plan on doing something similar with my children

You plan to go to a public library to show them a video in which a picture of Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit is appearing line by line?

> Especially because I assume that you weren’t allowed to read comic books during class.

But we were able to bring them to school.

"This time is different"

I do think modern apps, adtech, and addiction engineering are devastatingly effective and different from predecessors. We need to treat these with specific care. Similar to nukes vs. conventional bombs. Adtech and recommendation algos are the WMD of the marketing world.

I was recently interviewed for a job by a guy doing infra at an adtech company. He had a PhD in physics from UCLA. These are the big guns your 7 year old is up against. TV and video games did not have this intellectual firepower behind them. May the odds be in your child's favor.

While I do think extreme doomerism about new technology is misguided, I also feel this hand wavy "they said it about us an we're fine!" dismissal is also misguided.

Just because TV and video games did not lead to total societal collapse does not mean they are free of negative side-effects, nor does it make these technologies necessarily comparable to any other generational-shift technology adoption. TV definitely had and has negative societal side effects. Prolonged and uninhibited video game usage definitely van have negate side effects. Same thing will likely be the case for smartphones.

I also think smartphones are a special breed since they can expose children much more easily to fringe ideology than either video games or mass media ever could thanks to gatekeeping mechanisms.

We'll never get a handle on appropriate, healthy societal relations with media technologies until we stop summarily treating them as purely negative, purely positive, or purely neutral and start doing the work of analyzing each technology and its use and potentialities in their particulars.

There was a study posted here recently showing that the earlier a person is given access to a cell phone, the worse the person's mental health is as an adult: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35948332

But also: our generation saw a dramatic increase in obesity.

Correlation is not causation. But some correlations are just too obvious to ignore.

It also may not have been wrong then. Being outdoors and playing with others is great for kids, watching TV is... mixed. Same w video games. Definitely dosage dependent. And it's pretty clear social media is not good for kids.

Was TV really any better though? You seem to be saying "we survived so they will too" but just because you survived an environment with TV, doesn't mean that TV was harmless.

Waaay before that it was, um, books. Kids who read books instead of playing outside were weird. The age of the 10c pulp magazine, science fiction, westerns, crime stories, they were everywhere.

And parents lamented the time spent reading them instead of doing something outside.

Just wait until our kids grow up, and their kids have a VR headset strapped to their face 24x7. They'll bemoan the time lost that was watching youtube.

As an aside, in my day it was TV, and today my kids aren't interested in TV. Not sure my parents see the irony ;)

Violent video games have always been the boogeyman, but there never was any real evidence of its effect on children. These days there's constant news of widespread mental health issues in teenagers; I think the current iteration of social media has much worse effects than video games ever had.