There's a parent-driven approach I'm hearing about more and more.
Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required".
This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.
The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.
I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child's social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.
Sounds like a business opportunity. Make a token (Bluetooth low energy token?) that parents can place in the location where devices can be used. Either have it baked into the hardware's software (so Apple would need to support it) or sell a Wifi router that only allows the 'screen' devices to connect to wifi when the token senses the device (which would make it work for any device with wifi and Bluetooth token's ranges).
Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.
>> my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media.
ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.
>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.
Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.
>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.
This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.
Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.
Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required".
This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.
The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.
I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child's social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.