‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood

Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can't imagine how it's like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.

Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?

Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.

So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there's literally nothing for them to do.

When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can't do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to "vandalism" i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn't given us any money since 2014.

Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.

The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There's no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven't got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It's one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don't have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.

I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children's technology access, but I fear such groups' 'useful idiot' value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.

I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we fought valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.

It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.

The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.

I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones naturally create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void" and "to not feel left out" is the correct solution at least for me.

I'm disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.

But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?

After the SORA AI reveal today I'm starting to see that luddites have a point. I don't think we'll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I've seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I've seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.

But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don't even know how to use a phone. I don't see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.

I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha

I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.

But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don't want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren't is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.

Uncool boomers be like: "It's the damn phones", when they've created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They've created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.

But ofc uncle Kevin, "It's dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I'm talking to you?"

Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.

I don't really see phones as a problem, it's the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it's too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones, as concerns grow about online safety and the impact of social media on mental health.

Daisy’s got kids of a similar age and we were both feeling really horrified and worried and just didn’t want them to have smartphones at 11, which seems to be the norm now.”

Fernyhough and Greenwell hoped the movement would embolden parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 14, with no social media access until 16.

Smartphones expose children to a “world that they are not ready for” because they can access pornography and content on self-harm and suicide, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health, Fernyhough said.

Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, called earlier this week for a complete ban on social media access for under-16s, and said more people will have mental health issues unless tech companies take action to restrict access to harmful content.

“They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them.”

The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Just give your kid a decade old budget

This is a magnificent idea, and will make the quality of children's lives absolutely better.

Humanity never changes, adults still think we know better what's good for young people than they themselves do. When I was a child and teenager, I hoped that this attitude would die out over the generations, seems that that isn't happening.

Prob a good way to get your kids bullied lolz