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What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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Technology
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I watched the first generation that got personal unrestricted mobile phones for themselves. Somehow I thought it was a good idea at the time. It fucked them up mentally, and then Covid-19 came and doubled the effect.
Now I think that a parent who gets their under 12 year old kid a smart phone should be treated roughly in the same way as if the parent gave the kid cocaine.
We got an iPhone for my niece who is 8. It’s locked down so all she can do is text, call, and take pictures/video and she can’t contact anyone not in her contacts list. She has some games but can’t use them for more than an hour per day and they won’t open during school hours.
A big issue is parents not bothering to learn how to use and set up parental controls.
Controls like these don't work if the kid is smart, determined or the parents are too tired or uninvolved. There's more to the cellphone issue than the actual cellphone.
It depends on how heavy handed the approach is. A kid could learn about using a vpn or proxy service to bypass dns or dpi based content filtering but if you properly configure the parental controls on iOS or android there is pretty much nothing they are going to be able to do. If they are that determined, I think you need to have a conversation about making good choices themselves and trusting them not to consume harmful content.
I was able to bypass the content filters on the PCs when I was in high school because it was a shitty content filter that could be bypassed by killing the process in an unelevated task manager. My kids are going to have to be more resourceful than that
It doesn't matter if the kid is smart and determined, parental controls can't be circumvented.
Unless the parent is stupid enough to leave their phones unlocked or lax enough to unblock the phone every time the kid asks for it.
I lent my 8yo my old phone, heavily restricted and with Family Link installed; She's only allowed 2 hours a day and isn't allowed on stuff like YouTube. There are ways to do it responsibly.
There are a few things to consider.
She's just 8, so you have an easier time controlling what she does (I say this with the experience of rising 2 children to adulthood)
She might not be susceptible to these things
You just might be a better parent for any arbitrary reason
So as an anecdote your situation is valuable, but as a guideline to how the whole society should handle this problem possibly not so much.
12? Those kids get phones at 8-9 around here as far as I saw.