‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood
‘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.
"No one is bored, everything is boring"
Love that.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent's garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today's youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can't imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
Right? Before that it was tv. Before that it was rock and roll. I was actually told to go outside more because I was READING TOO MUCH. Idk why everyone feels like their way of entertainment is better than everyone else’s. It’s so weird that we can’t let people enjoy themselves unless they do it our way.
DOSBOX & SNESEMU 4 life.
Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
That's still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
Not just pressure to get a fancy phone but that most of the socializing happens on social media now. Even if they sit in the same class, it's a snapchat message.
If they don't have access to it, they're social outcasts by default.
It's fucking crazy..
I think if the kids want to bully, they'd just find a lonely and defenseless target and invent an excuse. If you are a potential target, having an expensive phone wouldn't save you anyway.
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I'd said, he'll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
Nope. You can't expect me to raise my own child How dare you!
Just like the UK bill wanting an ID for porn sites. And, in the EU, Youtube is wanting my ID for age verification to follow EU law. Isn't a much less authoritarian solution just to use blocklists, or even mandate sites send an unencrypted flag with content that is "adult" and browsers or routers can choose to deal with that or not.
Something, something, something, and then BREXIT comes to mind. That worked out well.
Like... join a protest demanding a smartphone-free childhood for everybody?
In Sweden, it was mandatory for kindergartens to have "digital learning tools" up until a year ago. I wonder who came up with that brilliant idea.
What I mean is that it might not be so simple as not giving them access to it if other institutions persist in forcing it on them.
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.
My neighborhood has the same problem. There's absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They're on the playground, they're biking on the sidewalks, they're playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they're f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
You forgot about angry mothers. They are scarier. That's why youtube isn't banned in russia yet.
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
We do have new playgrounds, but the problem is that they're very sanitized and only really suitable for preschoolers. Tweens usually just wander around without any exact place to go.
Even back when I was 9 and playground near my home was replaced with plastic shit for toddlers I knew it was plastic shit for toddlers. On the other side there was stuff for training though. Still nothing for 10-30 or not physically fit.
but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
You just hang out and do fun and stupid shit, it's nice to have special place for it but a construction site and under the bridge is good enough. Problem is modern parents are extremely anxious.
I was with you until the "construction site and under the bridge" bit. It definitely takes a bit of imagination, but I'm not sure not wanting your kids to play on a site which requires the use of hard hats classifies as being "anxious"
Under the bridge is where the junkies hang out and you're a shit patent if you want your kids messing around construction sites lmao
what fun and stupid shit?
That sounds like an American problem. We in many countries in Europe don't have that problem, but our kids still waste their time on smartphones.
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.
Nobody can multi task. I wish this stupid myth would die.
"I'm good at multitasking" is just another way of saying you can't focus on one thing at a 🐿️ SQUIRREL!
Multi-tasking should rightly be called “context switching”. Your brain is alternating its focus between two things in extremely quick succession.
Can't upvote this enough, I have had ppl literally bragging to me about their ability to "multi-task" 🙄
I have ADHD and have the opposite problem most of the time - I can't keep myself on one thing.
What about the left brain right brain simultaneous use, like people drawing two pieces of art at once or like how I can walk and be on my phone while being completely aware of my surroundings.
Sometimes my brain is thinking in one space and my body is doing another. Like I hit auto pilot and stepped away from the cabin, yet the plane is still flying.
Its pretty funny how people will take a single low-population college paper over the evidence of their own experience.
I multitask daily, I have to it's part of my job.
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
That would be TV
Where I live older people don't know how turn on phone. They watch tv instead. Those who have some sanity left also go outside, sit on benches, talk with each other and keep your bike from being stolen.
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.
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it's scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don't see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When's the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
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.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it's a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be "cool" online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
Honestly I think this is the way to go. You can only avoid it for so long. Rather than trying to stop them it's probably more effective teaching them control and how to navigate this flood of potentially dangerous influences.
And what was the result? Did that work?
Lol, I would've been bullied in school if I didn't have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
I didn't have a phone until I was 16 despite most of my peers getting one around 12/13. I didn't get bullied for not having a phone, in fact no one really made any comments on it other than an occasional "wow, I couldn't live without my phone!"
Granted, this was over ten years ago, and was probably the first generation of teenagers where cell phones were near-ubiquitous. I don't know if kids nowadays would get bullied just for not having a phone, but it would severely limit their social interactions. Riding your bike and knocking at your friends' doors randomly, or going to the mall and expecting you'll find some people you know there, these are from a bygone era.
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.
"Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires."
—Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren't an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren't adults it's a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
*when I use the term young adult I mean ~16. Apparently young adult can also mean 18-25 but I've never seen it used in that context before.
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.
a dumb phone and some other machine "to fill the void"
So a dumb phone and a stationary computer or laptop for internet access...exactly what most millennials grew up with.
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 ?
Who says you need a contract. You can just get and activate a prepaid SIM.
Who says you even need cellular service? It's just a different type of radio signal, VoIP has existed for years. If you even need a phone number. Every app under the sun has a calling feature now, but most people don't use phone for calling anymore. Wifi is everywhere so cell signal is not as critical these days.
why would a kid havy £500
School lunches
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.
The prophecy wasn't on terminator, it was on metal gear solid 2, the truth will be unrecognizable from the fakes.
Yup Kojima 1000 years ahead of his time.
quite concerning that misinformation is not taken seriously enough and is allowed to poison minds like a plague with no opposition
I think it may get to the point where tracking who owns what is a lost cause and societies with larger commons are going to pull ahead while our "individualism" centered societies will fall into an endless wave of scams and grifting.
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
Gen Z has terrible digital literacy already. Knowing how to scroll tiktok or whatever doesn't teach you what a file system even is.
Is it that important? All technology gets better to the point of it just working, and when it rarely doesn’t, you contact someone who does. My grandfather could build cars from parts alone. My father could do most maintenance repairs and knew enough to understand what the mechanic was telling him. I know what video games and entertainment have told me about cars, but have no clue about it in real life. It hasn’t mattered. Cars are so reliable, I can just have AAA if I get in a bind.
The goal is to change the norm, Fernyhough said, so that when children come to the end of primary school, the class “bands together and says, ‘Let’s all delay until at least 14.’
Yeah right that's going to happen: p
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
Older people forget that the norm of childhood has changed. And assume that children should do the same things they did instead of learning how to moderate what they do
Sounds sort of like those virginity contracts.
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.
So then parents should just not get their kid a smartphone and stop trying to police everyone else's kids. It really is that simple
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?"
It seriously is part 'those damn phones'.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Eh, I have to agree begrudgingly. I remember having this discussion with someone I know about mental health post smartphones. We came across a few studies tracking mental health of adolescents for the past few decades. To compensate for lack of data (due to lack of mental health awareness, yadayadayada), they tried to inductively predict this missing data using various factors. The interesting part however was the increase in mental health issues in the early 2010s. Now of course, while their data might be quite error prone, I think it makes sense logically.
So yeah, I do agree with you. The situation is not black and white. Unfortunately, the uncool boomers (sorry for the lame term,-I use it to not generalize all boomers) do not see it that way. Banning smartphones in schools is one of the stupidest things to do. Uncool boomers purely blame smartphones, and almost always engage dialog in bad faith. It's mudslinging basically.
Now, if I present a nuanced opinion here, it won't be considered at all. Essentially similar to the "leftist long paragraph" meme. Therefore, to combat this, mudslinging back is most effective. At least it drives home some idea (in this case, the idea of walkable city design). Is this bad faith? Yea, unfortunately. But does it make sense to try to have a good faith dialog with someone who doesn't want to have one?
This is the wrong take but it's a part of it for sure.
Is it the boomers this time? I remember millennials thinking that about zoomers and now they've grown up, zoomers have been saying it about Gen Alpha calling them iPad babys
Lol it has nothing to do with cars. I grew up in the 90s without a phone and my city wasn't much different then than now. I was constantly outside playing and so were all the other kids
I grew up in the 90s and my entire childhood neighborhood is concrete now. The overgrown wash where we built forts is gone. The desert surrounding the area? Gone. It's just roads, shitty apartment buildings, and cement for miles. Maybe it didn't change for you but my kids could never grow up the same way that I did there. Most of the more wild areas are gone. Banished to the outskirts of town now. Hell, we don't even really have sidewalks and hardly anything is walkable due to traffic. It has everything to do with cars in plenty of places. There is literally nowhere for kids to be kids within walking distance of me now either.
Few years ago when I played with kids outside in minecraft on phones.
Children in countryside are behaving pretty much exactly the same when it comes to whining about smartphones.
Not all doomers did it. But those who didn't were communists.
Loll post this meme as a post!!!
You do realize that everything around you is mostly built by previous generations when you are not a "boomer", cause your generation doesn't do much yet other than differentiate between "cool" and "uncool"? And that's true for every generation.
Criticizing the ruling class is extremely important to a functioning society. Baby Boomers are largely the ones in power around the world. The largest voting bases of all conservative movements are baby boomers. I wouldn't mind if the generations that follow criticize us for stuff. That's just how stuff works.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
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!
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.
Just give your kid a decade old budget
Yea, which wouldn't be a smartphone then probably.
Depends on what you call "budget phone". If the criteria is the same as today (sub 300-200 USD) then there are loads of smartphone options.
Here are a bunch of decade old phones that were around 150 USD. https://newatlas.com/best-budget-smartphones-2014/33367/
If you want a cheap non smartphone phone then you could just buy a dirt cheap new one if you wanted.
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.
I think part of the issue is that there's a lot more predatory shit on the internet nowadays. I say this as a person who has had unfettered access to the internet since my tweens. Social media and The Algorithms have changed the internet, and not necessarily for the better.
Just as a for-instance, if you go to YouTube on a freshly installed browser without logging in, the front page is kind of wild. Then the algorithm will pull you down a rabbit hole and kids who haven't been taught that they're being manipulated are going to start taking everything as fact from people like Tate.
We didn't have things trying to get in our heads to this extent; while I do wish the kids had their freedom, I also recognise that the internet has become hell. I can understand why parents would try to shield their kids from that.
Generally they do. Of course they are responsible for all the dumb shit in the world, but also most of the good and interesting.
Young people don’t get dumber as they age. They get smarter, wiser, better able to cope with adversity. Setting sore back and knees aside adults are doing alright when it comes to raising the young.
Prob a good way to get your kids bullied lolz
They can get bullied for not having phones, they can get bullied through phones and social media. They can get bullied for not having stupid ass Fortnite skins. Anything is an excuse for shitty kids who want to bully,
