I used to compare the drawbacks of no smartphones for kids to growing up in a house with no or limited TV, until my mother emailed to complain with a point that has really stayed with me, which is that at least she was also willing to do without a TV.
Said it before, but to reiterate:
"Ban social media for under 16s"
"internet-free phones for children"
These ideas may have worked 20 years ago, but that horse bolted so long ago, it's galloped around the planet and is now approaching the stable from the opposite direction
/1
I think this is key to why “no social media until you turn 16” is both unachievable and a major misread. There are I think pretty clearly risks to kids from too much smartphone or social media. I think the data is much less clear on whether those risks are worse than they are for say, Elon Musk.
The reason why I didn’t have a TV for much of my childhood and it was limited for the rest of it is simple: my mum didn’t watch much TV so simply did not get one until I started to actively lobby for one.
Ironically, I was on the Internet much sooner than most of my peers for basically the exact reverse reason: she needed it for work and therefore the Internet came to our house much earlier than for most people in my cohort.
I don’t mean this in a kooky wet liberal way, though I am indeed all three of these things: you simply can’t, as a matter of logistics, impose effective limits on the Internet usage of your household that you do not impose on yourself. You can have easily broken rules, that’s it.
As a kooky wet liberal, of course, who do I think is why I will often get home and say “let’s not watch anything: let’s put some music on and have a chat with some wine?” - my mother saying the same to me in my teens, of course.
Agree. It would be very rich of me, a person who has looked at the BBC News Website, App, or Ticker almost every day for over twenty years, to try to implement these rules in my house.
I wasn't allowed to watch Sesame St because my mum didn't like the American accent and "zee" instead of zed! Or, later, Grange Hill - she thought it was a bad influence...
Also, even if you could make one, what's going to stop parents who don't care that much just buying an "overage" phone for their underage kid who wants one? Or just giving them their own old phone when they buy a new one?
Makes sense, but:
i) some parents still won't care enough, and
ii) some kids will find a way around it and, depending on the nature and purpose of the workaround, it might quickly become common knowledge among kids their age
I distinctly remember my school trying persistently to block internet access to gaming websites from school computers. Some kid would always find a site that the filter missed, or a working proxy, and once that had happened every kid in school would know about it within a week or two.
where is Sir Clive when you need him ? although this sounds more like Amstrad territory, am sure Lord Sugar and Miriam Cates would have a meeting of minds
Like the voting age, I think there is a much better case to be made for "No social media after the age of 35" than there is for before 16.
Let 16 year olds vote, and don't let anyone over the age of 60 vote. (Full disclosure, I turn 60 this year).
Of course it's all bollocks because it's much more about class, education, interest, upbringing, income, housing, and health security and much more than age.
The horse has truly bolted, but as a small measure what about we stop them from experiencing the algorithm until 16.
Twitter / FB was originally about seeing the people you followed rather than having your feed populated by an algorithm to keep you scrolling that little bit longer
I think - given that some algorithms are clearly harmful to *adults* - there’s a solution to that which doesn’t involve a basically unworkable age bar.
This is why, in my experience and observation, the orthodox Jewish Sabbath break from phones and screens still does work– for kids and for adults. Because the parents are doing it too. it doesn’t feel like a punishment, or unfair but instead like modelling something healthy.
I hesitate to ask this question, because I think the answer will depress me enormously, but in what year did you turn 17?
There's a world of difference between entering a world of technology later than all your peers and entering it with them.
To your mother’s point; my daughter has limited screen time and, granted she’s at school where phone use is banned, my screen time exceeds hers. Of course I’m doing God’s work on social media but even so…
Using a smartphone ≠ having social media.
Of course the technology is essential now, but the sites designed by tech bros to be as addictive as possible and amplify all feelings of confused identity and insecurities are something we should take away from teens IMO.
the three way split in the playground:
1) not allowed to watch ITV because it was common
2) not allowed to watch BBC because it was posh
3) only allowed to watch S4C
Classwar in our playground was knowing quotes from new episodes shown on Sky vs being 3-4 years behind on BBC 2.
Then The Simpsons declined rapidly and Channel 4 took over the batch of episodes that were good.
Type (1) for me. Then as an adult I ended up working for TTTV, Yorkshire TV and Granada before Granada ate them all to turn into ITV. Still not sure my mum was wrong TBH.
See had you grown up in lympstone you’d have had the 2 tiers above 1): a) don’t own a TV so have to go to neighbours to watch Monkey and b) only allowed to watch Sunday night Dickens adaptations on the small black and white set in the library.
missed out "not allowed to watch telly ever until after 4:30pm because of {nobody-ever-told-us} and btw, Dad will put the news on at 5:40pm every single day and that's your time up, deal with it.
So I didn't have even the simplest of mobiles until quite late, in a way that put me a bit out of step with my peers in a few ways, and I didn't have MSN til around the same age and I think my parents would say these days that this maybe wasn't the best set of calls to make for my social life
When I was 16-18 (2005) and had started to finally make friends they did quite consciously revise the policy and I got sole ownership of the emergency phone I shared with my mum.
And I do think being the one kid in my year in a posh school who had neither MSN or a phone (and just had to call landlines) probably contributed to how vile some of the bits of bullying were, in a way my folks didn't entirely appreciate
(They were, rightly, quite worried about me being cyber bullied or groomed. But given how outstandingly good they were at Providing Adult Supervision, I think that may have been less of a risk than they feared)
