I hate to do a bit of snooping, but you list your birth year on your socials. We're of a pretty similar age; I also only got a smart phone in high school.
I really do think the expectations from your friends when you're in your early teens in the current year, is that you have a smart phone. It's probably a major part of social life now, which would leave a kid pretty excluded. Not even touching the things in life that REQUIRE a smart phone now. (Restaurant menus, transit, maps, etc)
Our childhood is pretty much gone from existence, despite how modern it feels. I feel for the GP author, best you can do is make things as protected as you can.
I'm a parent of extremely well adjusted kids who have no smartphones, and it's only isolating if the parents aren't involved. By that I mean we can coordinate with friends and friends parents for our children, which is just a good practice anyway.
Call me a helicopter parent if you'd like, but we've found that our kids have strong friend support groups, and all the parents are now friends as well (or at least friendly), thus creating a healthy sort of community.
I list my birth year on my socials? Time to take that off, that’s unintentional. :P
But yes, I feel your sentiment is right. Although there has to be some moderation—I wouldn’t expose my children to the excess of social media. Internet addiction has messed enough with my life, the last thing I’d like to do is pass that on.
I don’t know how long ago that was so it’s hard to say “things are different now”, but my 11 year old can’t take the school bus without having a mobile app for her ticket.
How is that even legal? School buses are provided in part as a service to low-income families. Who decided it was okay to require parents of middle schoolers to shell out for a smart phone for their kids?
As far as I can tell, someone has “digitised” the local buses by adding tracking and cashless payments to go along with the mobile app.
They’ve also fragmented the services even more in the process since each bus company has their own version of the app (it’s just a skinning of the base app). It means I need to check back and forth between two apps to see which buses are on time. Naturally you can only buy a pass that only works on one bus route. The ux is pretty garbage.
Dealing with public transport in rural England definitely made me appreciate the seamlessness of transport in London.
Oh, I was assuming a US-style school bus system where a separate yellow bus goes around and picks up the kids. It sounds like your kid rides a regular public transit bus to get to school? It's still unfair to have that system be inaccessible without a smartphone, but it's not as completely incomprehensible.
It sounds like they definitely need better UX, and the buses around here very much accept cash still (or special tokens if you buy ahead).
The one that she takes in particular is a school bus, in a weird kind of way. Seems that it’s run by a private company but it only services kids travelling to and from a couple of schools.
But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.
Complain to the school board. In person, at a meeting. Post about it on social media - you'll find you're far from alone in objecting to that ridiculous requirement.
Are you sure? I don't have a smartphone and I also live in England. There are lots of services where the happy path expects a smartphone but I'm yet to find a service that actually requires it.
My kid got a smart phone at age 7 when they started school.
It's still mostly in their backpack and they regularly miss calls and messages from friends because it's always on mute and still in the school bag even though it's already evening =)
You need to normalise these things and teach how to manage it from an early age.
Like screen time is a completely normal thing in our family, it has been activated since the second they got the phone. Every app category has a specific daily screen time - the only ones with no limits are communication tools and educational apps.
The problem is that modern smartphones and app are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers and rewards. The younger a kid is exposed, the most likely he will be affected all of his life by the addiction.
"Normalizing" it akin to normalizing cigarettes - some kids could indeed manage to smoke only one a week, but most won't.
The point is to teach them these things from a young age. If you don't let the addiction build, it's less likely to happen later.
And don't let your 7yo use "apps are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers", that's a given. Get them using apps that don't have that so that the move to "tuned addiction apps" is jarring even to them.
There's a corollary with alcohol. In countries where even kids get (diluted) wine at a young age with food - because it's part of the meal - they don't get the need to get f'd up with the strong stuff.
They get a mental association that alcohol is something you drink for the flavour and in moderation - it's not a tool for self-medicating mental issues.
Same with ads, we've been a DVD/BD/streaming-only household for ages so now ads on TV are a curiosity to the kids. We actually have a competition who mutes the TV fastest when the ads starts in the few occasions we watch something that has any.
My kids are 6 and 2. Right now the wife and I are trying to hold off getting them phones until they are driving. I'm sure that could change when they're in middle school and high school, and whining because all their friends have phones. But, I'm going to try my best to hold the line.
You start teaching them at an early age how society may see it as no big deal, but society is wrong and it's a very big deal. Show them through your actions that life is better lived without such distractions.
And be prepared for everyone to call you a conspiracy nut. But you eventually let that roll off your back when you see how happy your kids are just being kids.
What brutal modern life problems require smart phone with unlimited access?
Most problems we face in our lives haven't changed a zilch - its simply interacting with people for whatever reasons. You don't need phone for that, in fact you should first work on handling face-to-face interactions and only then move to remote ones.
Kids can grok how phone and app works in few weeks through and through and much faster than you or me currently, so that they are not missing anything if they start later. There is very little to 'learn' by further usage of it, just feeding addictions.
I'd love that option, but highschool mandates a smartphone, go figure: let's give attention deficit teenagers an always on distraction device and then complain about how hard it is to keep them focused.
Granted I’m still very early in my parenting years but if my child’s high school requires a smartphone I feel like I’m going to be viewed as a kook because I’ll turn up to meetings shouting at them about how they’ve failed the kids from a social development standpoint.
Not only that, many of them will be themselves glued to the phones while you execute your elaborate speech about child development, missing your point entirely and consider you some medieval crook during those 2 seconds they will be focusing on you.
Lets not act like parents are stellar in this, because more often than not they aren't and most issues with kids come from this direction (as a parent of small kids I really can't blame anybody else if we mess up something, not at this age)
Not only that, he's using my Google account, so it's managed as one of my devices :) With full access to unrestricted YouTube premium, Google Play, etc.
He's only got limits with respect to the time he spends on the phone or PC. So far hasn't discovered or been interested in "naughty" content.
I was forced to live in the "middle ages", communist Romania with no TV, no electricity, go to bed at candle's light, half an hour of cartoons on TV per week when that wasn't canceled to show the achievements of The Great Leader instead. I won't deny my kid access to entertainment and technology in the name of some dreamed up "Amish lifestyle / return to innocence" because there's no such thing.
You don't have to pick between leaving your kid completely unsheltered from exploitation by capitalist forces and being Amish.
You yourself have seen that your kid isn't ready to fend off the exploitation by himself. Setting up parental controls on the phone is in exactly the same category as providing him with food and clothing and shelter—you're supposed to do for him what he can't yet do for himself.
You can work on teaching him how to resist exploitation over time, but it's irresponsible to expose him to the worst excesses of capitalism while he's clearly so unprepared.
That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.