DO NOT give your kid a smartphone this Christmas

[Firey40]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDd86TftyNT/?igsh=MTZueGVicm1udDllNw==

The evidence is overwhelming.

Their brains are only young once.

We might not have known before….. but we know now.

STOP GIVING KIDS SMARTPHONES

An air tag and a non smart phone do the same thing without
the damage

I second this. My eldest are 15 and 13 and it’s too late for me but I agree with the OP. So many parents don’t like to be told that their decisions might not have been right. I’m happy to acknowledge I may have fucked up.

Oh Instagram, the place everyone goes to for genuine, scientific, evidence-based info....

The amount of people in denial on here is terrifying

I mean it’s all over the news, I know people think they are really clever pointing out op’s link but she’s not wrong.

Barleysugar86

Why just focus on smartphones... there are many types of electronics. Are your family tech free?

The fact they’re light enough that they can hold them closer to their face is something that always gets to me. Smartphones and the Xbox are the ruin of our family, I can trace all the battles back to them moments we got each. To anyone who manages screens well and doesn’t have addicted children I’m so jealous, every day is a battle here

Absolutely bizarre approach - your child isn’t your property. You can give them a dumb phone to keep in touch.

So what is my child - who has a 90 minute commute each way and 3 different extra curricular classes a week in different bits of London - supposed to do when all the various timetables are on her phone?

Bus apps, tfl journey planner, trainline, tickets, bank app...

Plus she uses WhatsApp to communicate with the different teachers.

Tracking app means I can check that she's got to Teacher A's house okay without having to ring round.

Laugh it up. It’s still damaging children regardless.

“Hi Mum I have arrived at my destination.” Tracking your child is strange behaviour.

How is that weird? I have a tracker on my daughter's phone so I can see where she is after school. Last year she and a friend were chased by a dodgy bloke. Luckily than ran to the nearest shop, who kept them safe while waiting to be collected. But having a method of contact allows them to phone if they need help, and for us to see where they are if they done make contact/get home when they should.
It's a scary world and not everyone can pick up and drop off their kids every day.

Works for us.
DH and I have one on each others phones as well.
Nothing to hide and very handy... want to know if he's on his way to station or still in meetings to time meal... just check the tracker, no need to disturb.

Or parent your children and help them learn to manage a phone, navigate group chats and online communication, offer them other ways to socialise, learn how to regulate their use - like any gadget, TV, iPad, gaming so that it is enjoyable but doesn't take over.

Virtually every child in the uk will have a smart phone, a lot of schools insist on iPads. It is inevitable and children are more than capable of learning how to use technology sensibly.

The real issue is learnt behaviour, growing up with parents addicted to their phones and social media. Ironically watching about how to reduce their children's screen time.

If you're going to lock it down so much it's essentially a dumbphone you could just...get a dumbphone and not have several £100s of redundant tech?

Not all schools use apps for homework. I'm a governor at a phone-free secondary and we don't. I think we'll see more schools doing this; as multiple pps have mentioned the sheer amount of time dealing with phone-related issues is epic. We've not lost one on the bus home yet for want of a tracking device.

You are tracking your daughter's phone, not your daughter.

There's an important difference here.

You know how much a smart phone costs these days right? You don't need a branded one.

You don't get apps on dumb phones. Some apps are useful for various purposes. These apps are not social media.

This sounds like an unusual situation, but as a thought experiment, what would you have done 15 years ago? She probably would have just have to figure it out, no?

Kids have been travelling across London for school for a looooong time, including getting themselves to swimming/music/whatever. That is not a new thing at all.

They're worth enough that the phone thieves know which schools to hang around outside to nick them, that's for sure.

Yep of course some apps are useful but I'd question whether most 11 yos desperately need access to any apps really at all times and it can't wait until they get home. They're not managing their ISA contributions on the bus to school, are they? If schools are appifying everything then they shouldn't, and I think a lot are starting to stop. In a neighbouring borough to us every school has banned smartphones.

We've also got a little mp3 type player for DD which has spotify on but no other internet access via apps or browsers and no sim card which solves that one.

Thieves are there for the stupid kids with Samsungs and iPhones.

They really aren't interested in a £35 none branded phone with limited data.

An awful lot of kids have those phones though. Pop on over to the xmas board and look at the number of iPhone pros being bought. And they don't know what you've got til they've mugged you for it anyway, and are often keen on seeing if they can use your Gpay regardless.

(I mean I was mugged at knifepoint for my Nokia brick but that was in 2003 so).

How did the tracker help in this situation? Were you following the chase in real-time and able to intervene?

@Startinganew32
I teach 18-21 year olds. An increasing number of them are too anxious to attend classes face to face and cannot cope with direct questions even if they do come to class. Assessments like presentations are out of the question because of the anxiety it causes such a huge number of them (we’re talking a third of the cohort). Time keeping is very poor as is taking initiative. Study skills are shocking for a high ranking institution. So I would say that we already have a generation who will at least struggle in employment

Do you not think that for this generation,
a lot of the problems have been caused by time spent in isolation during the pandemic with schools closed and not being able to spend time socialising with their peers in person? Hence a much increased amount of time spent on computers/phones/the internet.

Young people slightly older probably had smart phones in their teens but had other things going on and so didn't spend such a great amount of time being reliant on them. Certainly that was the case for my DS.

@ShinyAppleDreamingOfTheSea

It was like this before the pandemic. All the pandemic did was super charge the amount of time they spent locked onto their niche online communities. It is not all the uncommon now for children to only have online friends. This makes the school experience so much more stressful for them. This tread has been building for the last ten years at least.

Phones rob them of real social interaction and therefore make it much harder for them to cope with face to face, real life situations. There are about a thousand symptoms of this but the trend in School refusal is the worst. Why would they want to come to school when they only feel safe with online interaction? So many of them
just cannot cope anymore

Japan experiences this well before we did because they had earlier access to the technology. Their falling birth rate is fuelled by two things: the high cost of living and growing numbers in two generations of people opting out of society to live in an online world.

@Bontonbonbon
"Japan experiences this well before we did because they had earlier access to the technology. Their falling birth rate is fuelled by two things: the high cost of living and growing numbers in two generations of people opting out of society to live in an online world."

It is true that high costing of living is one of the reasons birth rate is falling, but you're wrong about the technology side, if anything what you said about technology is inverted.

One thing with Japanese culture is that even now it's extremely sexist with massive focus on gender norm and social expectations, plus shame culture, you need to marry and have a family even if it's an arraged marriage without any love.

On the side of men many effectively live to work themselves to death, especially if they're salary man, they pretty much don't participate in their children life, sometimes not even wife life, because they work so much, and if any of you don't believe me google "Japan black company".

On the women side they're expected to have children and become housewives, they don't have any support to put their children in daycare and such, they have to become housewives and their lives will be 100% about taking care of the house and the children.

Women expectations are so bad that many effectively don't get promoted at their jobs because everyone expects them to marry and stop working altogether, never getting back at it, and just to make a point, any of you search "Japan medical school scandal", multiple universities literally rigged the exams so women would fail, because they believed most would eventually stop working to have children, with some even saying they only entered med school to find husbands.

Japanese people started to get into online world because that's literally all they could do since they had no life besides work or take care of the house, it's one reason for example Japan has a massive amount of mobile games, gacha in particular, because you can play it anywhere at any time if you have 5 minutes free, because they simply don't have time to something else in their lives a lot of time.

Another reason young generation don't want to marry isn't just the high cost of living, but because many simply don't want to live like that, Men don't want to work themselves to death but have no choice, so they stay single because at least in their free time they can use their own money for themselves, women don't want to marry because they don't want to become a housewive and have no future besides taking care of the children.

Also, unlike in the west women are expected to completely be a housewive for the rest of their lives and have no career, at best most get a part time job because it's all they can do, it's not like in the west where women have a lot more freedom.

Japan has a lot of social problems that justify the declining birth rate, technology and smartphone ain't even close to be one of them, a lot of people throw themselves at online world exactly to escape the crushing expectations of society + many times it's all they can do with the little free time they have.

@Tsama

You make some valid points about social expectations which I agree with. But I hear from my Japanese friends that there is a big technological aspect fuelling this as well. No one wants to grow up to be a salary man anymore. Even salary men don’t want to be salary men. Sexism is very much rife too.

However, even when I lived there in the mid-2000s there was already a growing escapist trend for the younger generation (who were becoming known as freeters then) to opt out to spend their lives online where there was less pressure. Which is very much what is happening here: high cost of living + unrealistic career expectations + immersive online world= social collapse.

It was already a conversation amongst friends in Tokyo as early as 2005.