I'm trying to cut back because I think it's hurt my attention span and short term memory. I was looking at minimalist phones, but I need apps.
For reasons we just confiscated our 8th grader's iPhone and replaced it with a flip phone. Letting her have unfettered access as early as we did was one of the worst parenting decisions we made. She is grumpy about the switch but accepts it and has been bedazzling the flip phone with rhinestone beads.
That way she'll learn how to text the old fashioned way.
Already has. She's eerily quick at it.
Yeah, our rule was flip phones for middle school. They somewhat just substituted computers, but not entirely.
I'm really trying to use my phone less, I think it's bad for my mental health, but it's really hard for me to cut back. I'm currently trying putting a big widget on the main page showing how much time I've spent, but I rather quickly have just started ignoring it.
Separately, I have no idea what I'm going to do in two years when I have to replace my iPhone 12 mini. Every phone on the market is just insanely huge and I don't want any of them.
I am happy with my flip phone and have no plans to switch over. I'll fight against getting Steady a smartphone for as long as I possibly can.
I can't not have a smartphone I think. I need it for work (email, authentication) and navigation while hiking.
And, I don't use Lyft much, but when I need them I don't know how I would get them without a smartphone.
I admit that I freeride on my kid's dad's phone.
But you could decline to do work on your phone and your own time and you could use a hiking book to navigate.
It is less convenient (can't see my kid's swim times during the meet) but it is entirely do-able.
10- we recently took a tour of an orthodox neighborhood of Brooklyn and since they don't use smart phones (only "kosher phones"), there are ads there for services you can call who will intermediate to get you a ride share.
To work on my computer, I need my phone to authenticate who I am. I could decline to have work email on my phone, but then I wouldn't be able to get away from my desk during working hours.
12: What if I need a ride on the Sabbath?
I do always hike with a paper map. But the paper map doesn't know where I am.
No way. Can't catch Pokemon with a flip phone. What would I do while I was driving?
I quit Pokémon Go for Lent and haven't started back yet.
xleA has had an iPhone since he was 10, as that was the age he was walking to and from school on his own. There were periods when the various school Whatsapp groups, and the attendant social exclusion, low level bullying, etc were really bothering him, but he's almost entirely over the novelty of that since he started high school (he's 12, and nearing then end of his first year of high school). There's a group that coordinates their walking to school activities--they have a Thursday morning cake and hot chocolate thing, like old people--and some for other things, but he almost never uses them.
His only two regular uses for his phone are music, and, when he is stuck in the car for long periods, playing crappy games. He would definitely spend a lot of time watching Youtube or TikTok, though, if I let him. But I don't.
xleA has had an iPhone since he was 10, as that was the age he was walking to and from school on his own. There were periods when the various school Whatsapp groups, and the attendant social exclusion, low level bullying, etc were really bothering him, but he's almost entirely over the novelty of that since he started high school (he's 12, and nearing then end of his first year of high school). There's a group that coordinates their walking to school activities--they have a Thursday morning cake and hot chocolate thing, like old people--and some for other things, but he almost never uses them.
His only two regular uses for his phone are music, and, when he is stuck in the car for long periods, playing crappy games. He would definitely spend a lot of time watching Youtube or TikTok, though, if I let him. But I don't.
14 ask your Shabbos got to book you an Uber
What a coincidence, this is an active discussion on the WhatsApp group for my kid's school. Inspired by some NYT article, maybe?
My kid has a Gizmo watch. She can send her parents (and up to 18 more contacts, subject to our approval) text messages, audio messages, and pictures, and receive the same plus actual calls. It comes with a few games, but she doesn't like them. It also has a tracking device, which seems Orwellian but has been comforting in crowds or with complicated schedules, a step counter, and a "school mode," which when enabled turns the watch into just a watch plus the ability to make emergency calls to the parents.
She's had it for right around a year, since shortly before her ninth birthday. If that seems early for something like this, we justify it by the fact that she spends most of the summer out of state with her grandparents. For at least six months she's been asking for an actual phone, even though probably fewer than half her friends have devices like this, let alone phones. Kids are crazy.
The Calabat is 12 and we're attempting to get him a Garmin Bounce so I can feel better about him biking to summer camp. So far we've received one dud.
My position is that they need a smartphone like they need a hole in the head. I'm fine with tech -- the kids have had laptops since they were six --- but Internet that can be used only in one place seem to have all the advantages right now over Internet in your pocket. The Calabat is a natural self-regulator, so he'd be fine, but with Pebbles it would be an unmitigated disaster.
I keep xelA's phone quite locked down.* Some of his friends have completely unfettered access, and I know they are already watching the various manosphere dickheads, or age inappropriate** content.
* it will be a very very long time before he's ahead of me in any kind of tech arms race.
** although I think mostly of the "stupid pranks" variety, rather than p0rn.
So for those of you like Cyrus and Cala, at what age would you get them a real phone?
I figure that by senior year, they're essentially a roommate that you can still bail out of trouble, but they need to be able to lightly get into trouble while still at home so that they don't go too nuts when they're on their own. So I see it stepping up in autonomy over high school.
I should say that we do have (utterly ineffective) daily time caps on Hawaii's phone, and we are planning on figuring out how to do that better for both this week. The sheer length of time on phones is not good.
24: at Ace's 12th birthday party, the kids with phones all downloaded tinder and started swiping on different guys. I did tell their parents at pickup though to give their kids' phones a scan.
25: Haven't thought about it too much. Atossa is still only in 4th grade, so high school is still comfortingly remote. Hopefully at some point between 9th and 11th grade, depending on her maturity, her friends, how confident we are we can supervise it...
I wouldn't be too confident of that just based on how we've failed to lock down her iPad, unfortunately. It seems like it should be possible to lock certain apps at certain times, but we failed to figure that out, so we wound up unlocking it entirely the last time it came up. This reminds me that her summer travel is approaching and we should probably try again soon.
On the opposite end of the parenting spectrum (the "barely" end, I suppose), I gave my kids smart phones with no controls or supervision (other than verifying any payments) when they were 12 or so. They all kept out of trouble, got good grades, and stayed solidly leftist. I realize this is "I drove drunk for years and never crashed once" territory, but.
I got my then 10-year old a phone when he switched to a new school with a long bus commute. He uses it almost exclusively as a hotspot to play games on his tablet, as a camera, and to text me. But it's locked up during the school day.
They all kept out of trouble, got good grades, and stayed solidly leftist.
I have my thumb on the scale to ensure that last point to whatever extent I can.
25: probably 16. The local moms & I made a pact because we figured that the main reason kids want smartphones is that their friends all have one, so we're trying a little collective action. So far it hasn't been much of a problem socially, but the Calabat is a bit of a weirdo (social butterfly but also oblivious). 13 seems to be the usual age that kids get the phones, so we'll see how long it lasts. But right now, none of the Calabat's friends have phones, or phones that they're allowed to use for more than contacting parents, so it's not inhibiting much other than YouTube access.
It's important to be able to learn how to manage the smartphone prior to 18, and I agree with you there, heebie; I just want their brains to be bigger and more developed before I give them an ADHD-feeding device. And I've had a lot of conversations with undergrads and the recurring theme is that a) most think social media is a poison (not sure it's distinguishable from how being 14 is a poison but lots of data points) b) they eventually figured out that it was brainrotting them and a lot of them still struggle c) they wish they'd had more guardrails (e.g., no phones past 8pm, not getting a phone at ten.)
When we xeriscaped the yard last summer the kids helped with some things (moving bricks), and as it turns out, when you tear out your entire front yard everyone on the street stops by to talk to the insane people, and SO MANY people marveled at our kids being outdoors doing things. What's our secret? How do we keep them from being on video games all day? "We just told them no," shiv says, helpfully.
I remember one time a guy called into the radio complaining about something my dad did that he did not like and part of his complaint was "he's obviously wrong because his yard looks like shit." Words to that effect. Anyway, I had to spent a lot of that summer doing lawn care.
Oh, one guardrail that's worked for us is that they charge their phones overnight in the living room.
I was recently contemplating the amount of time I spent on the (land line) phone in middle and high school. SO MUCH. More in high school, I guess? But definitely a ton in middle school too. Talking, or not talking. Ruining the phone cord, by stretching it out to lie under the dining room table. I was the oldest so all my parents had to massively recalibrate their ideas about how many lines was enough for a family, whether to have call waiting, etc.. What a bunch of archaic ideas those are now.
Do you guys have land lines? Do your kids borrow your phones to call their friends for play dates until they're old enough to have their own phones?
I remember having to wait until after 9:00 to call people on the land line because the rates were cheaper.
34: Actual voice conversations have had a weird trajectory. As a kid I saw my parents talking on the phone all the time, which among other things meant that I picked up basic phone etiquette by observation/osmosis. Middle school age I was often calling up my friends, not usually having long conversations but negotiating/coordinating play dates. In high school that kind of fell away; by geography my school friends were too far away to hang out with (until I had a car and then was just in person at school when we coordinated things) and phone calls to them were expensive long distance calls. I dunno if I would have been on the phone with them otherwise, but that sealed the deal and I lost the habit of talking on the phone.
These days, between being kind of voice-call-averse habitually and adults conducting communication by text or email, my kid has had a lot less opportunity to observe telecommunication in any detail - texting another adult is indistinguishable from any other fiddling with a smartphone - and has had less ability to call his friends or their houses and arrange things himself. He asks us to text other kids' parents and arrange things, which is a task I had kind hoped to be done with by now (Not being able to call someone's house, and instead messaging one or both parents no matter where they are in the world, is a weird change and not one I like very much). So now, just about 13, he has a smartwatch and uses a laptop with Discord on it but doesn't have terribly good habits with communicating with people on either mode.
The smartwatch is a pretty decent middle ground device. Good for location, OK enough for communication for logistics, annoying to actually use for chatting, and much less attractive/distracting than a smartphone.
But still attractive/distracting enough that I have to ban them from my classes.
We have a landline but usually the kids when they want to get together ask the parents to text. On their computers they can message school friends. As near as I can tell the kids with phone still have to ask their parents if they can come over, so right now at least it cuts out the middle man.
The Calabat is getting big enough to bike the trails on his own which is another reason for some kind of device for contacting us.
My son's phone habits are so shitty. It's not that he can't remember what I've told him, but that he just doesn't use the voice phone enough to internalize it. He was looking for a summer job and giving out his phone number on applications, but he would not answer the phone with "hello, this is ....". He just says nothing until the other party speaks because he's used to answering calls from spambots.
I don't remember when, exactly, but at some point in adolescence I started answering the phone by saying "What!"
I thought it was quirky and charming. My grandmother thought it was sort of rude but mostly funny. No one else told me their opinions.
Obviously, you're supposed to be formal in answering the phone at work, so you can't just say "What?" and need to go with "What fresh hell is this?".
I think all of my son's peers had smartphones by age 11. There may be a few hand-woven-granola outliers, but I doubt it. That said, as I've mentioned before, most of his friends are also very sporty and spend a lot of time training, doing competitive sport, or outdoors, generally. So the phones don't seem to have turned them into indoor shut-ins, but they are definitely a vector for poor social choices.
A friend is a head of year at a local high school, and he has total horror stories about phones. Things that seem like the plots of lurid fiction, rather than reality.
20 autocorrect is antisemitic as well as stupid
Yes. Lee is going to refuck relations with Japan, and I think is a lot more likely to curb exports to Ukraine. But, more important to bury coupmakers (the more so in that some of them took on Maga tactics). Yay.
So, for decades, the US has exported bits of paper it pulls out of its ass, and the rest of the world has taken those bits of paper and given you actual stuff in exchange. Great deal, right? Best fucking deal ever. Are you ready for more winning?
Section 899 of the bill that the House of Representatives passed last week would allow the US to impose additional taxes on companies and investors from countries that it deems to have punitive tax policies.
[...]
For foreign investors, Section 899 would increase taxes on dividends and interest on US stocks and some corporate bonds by 5 percentage points every year for four years. It would also impose taxes on the American portfolio holdings of sovereign wealth funds, which are at present exempt.
[...]
"Our foreign clients are calling us panicked about this," said a managing director at a large US bond fund. "It's not totally clear whether Treasury holdings will be taxed, but our foreign investors are currently assuming they will be."
Yeah, they are winning. They want to destroy the ability of the government to aid people and ruining our ability to borrow does that.
28: I am Apo. Total unsupervised neglect of Sally and Newt's internet/screens/smartphone use, and they turned out great. But I wouldn't recommend this as anything other than luck.
28 & 53: me too, three kids. Last one graduating high school this year is the most digital native. The oldest seems to be breaking herself of most social media & toys with getting a dumb phone. I agree there is a lot of luck in how it turns out, but I think there is a certrain "they have to go through it to come out the other side" element to digital life. It's my (our?) generation that is doomed. They'll mostly figure it out.
BTW, this post is so slate-pitch you should paste it together with your comments here and send it as an article proposal.