Comment by asoneth
4 days ago
> everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have
You can start the conversation with other parents at kindergarten pickup.
Each grade at our school has a pledge that kids & parents can sign to wait until eighth grade to let them have a smartphone. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated site like https://www.waituntil8th.org
My kids are still young but from what I've heard from families with older kids is that holding the line gets increasingly hard as they approach 8th grade. You have to be prepared to socially exclude families that let their underage children use smartphones or social media, the same way you wouldn't invite a family that lets their middle-schooler drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes to your kid's birthday party.
While you can never get everyone to agree to anything, as long as your kids have a critical mass of friends who don't have smartphones then not having one won't make them an outcast.
All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones. No exceptions. If I excluded those families my kid wouldn’t be allowed to have friends. Best I can do is take the other kids phones away after a certain number of screen hours at my house.
Limiting screen time is an exceptionally challenging task because of the many loopholes and bugs in parental controls, and my lack of direct control over the chromebooks the schools issue.
Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
> All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones
My condolences. I agree that it's too late once you hit a tipping point and a critical mass of their friends have smartphones. At that point you have to fall back to weaker backup defenses like parental controls and limiting screen time. The point of Wait Until 8th is to provide a little more time to let them form their own self-image and build up their ability to manage their attention and information diet.
> Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?
Instead of trying to predict the "correct" set you can just lobby everyone. Our public school has about a hundred kids per grade from K through 8th. Parents bring it up not just at school pickup but on playdates, the local listserv, the PTO newsletter, when new families move to the neighborhood, etc.
Apparently several older grades have managed to hold the line such that most kids in that grade didn't have smartphones until high school, and many didn't even have smartwatches or dumbphones.
I moved from the east coast to the Midwest during the pandemic. Any lobbying I would have done during early elementary years would have gone to waste.
And even if I hadn’t moved I would have had to lobby at not just my elementary school but the other two schools that feed into the same middle school.