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.
My last bit in this meandering thread that is much less worthwhile than Dean’s original one: you basically can’t teach someone to do something responsibly through banning it. That’s not what bans are for! You can only do that through teaching and modelling.
I asked my niece why her Instagram only had two very recent photos on her page. She explained that she didn’t want her photos available in the future so her and her friends archive them. Meanwhile, my freshers week mess is still floating around Facebook.
The yoot are so worried about their cyber footprint coming back to haunt them, I get a question about it every school visit. Which we have, to be fair, taught them through modelling!
This is why I find it quite difficult to get mad at Small Human for playing video games too much - because if I had the free time she has, I absolutely would play more games.
Absolutely. Really disheartening though that the prevailing culture across pretty much everything is to try to ban a problem first, ask questions second... if at all.
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.
