Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
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.
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.
Youtube never asked for my ID (I’m in the EU). Which country is this?
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.
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Also you are not getting bullied because you don’t have cigarettes or smartphones, but because you lack self confidence and because you are perceived as social weak (your friends and random bystanders would not come to your help).
No, you are getting bullied because humans beings are morons who will jump to bully whoever is perceived as different. Do not blame the victim, for fuck sake.
Maybe it’s an useful trait that saved us from the other evil hominids? That and the uncanny valley.
Well good fucking job evolution, you managed to screw over autistic people who have empathy while psychopaths who know how to fake it get to abuse everyone
I mean, they wouldn’t even survive if we were still living under the survival of the fittest stuff, which our society doesn’t allow most of the time 🤔
I’m not blaming victims. Obviously it’s on parents of the bully.
You have completely misunderstood this and are trying to overlay some bizarre Andrew Tate-esque psychobabble to explain your misunderstanding.
What? I talk just from my own experience.
You have drawn an incorrect conclusion about the specifics of the social mechanics and cited it as “from your experience” after presenting it as fact.
You could simply have a poor grasp of social mechanics, or be misinformed, misunderstood the original premise but ultimately it doesn’t really matter.
You implied lack of conformity and participation is not a cause of bullying - it absolutely is, its probably the original cause of most bullying.
A lot of words to say that you disagree, without actually explaining why bullies are not targeting kids who are at social disadvantage.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
*Poison for any young person.
No doubt. I’ve only had girls at that age so didn’t want to generalise.
Yeah k, as a CF person who works with a lot of kids (PJD), Instagram, Fuckwitbook (Facebook) and Snapchat is very toxic for kids and even adults.
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
Perhaps we can imagine a society where nobody had thought of banning handguns for children. But you can just not buy your own kid a handgun if it’s so important to you.
Yeah I remember that story about those kids killing an entire school with their smartphone.
That’s definitely not a flash equivalency at all.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
