Comment by japhyr
1 day ago
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.
I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18.
I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences.
Cracking up wifi and such saved me up a little, but not much. I missed TONS of stuff and experiences. When I could finally got all the media and proper skills, it was really damn late.
Don't do this to your kids, then. Time doesn't roll back. Ever. Don't be a shitty narcisist parent and let your kids develop their OWN tastes.
I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.
With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.
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How old are you? The internets were way more nice when we were kids. Not in the no 4chan edgelord way but the not toxic algorithmic way.
There is no way feeding YT etc. to kids is at any way good for them, their parents, humanity and so on.
edit: And yes, I agree with you.
Or: if you do this, go live in a community where this is the norm. No, it's not possible for everyone. But then again we can't all have nice things.
I purchased Mudita Kompakt phones for my kids when they started secondary school. There has been some pushback but overall it’s been a success.
The fact that they occasionally forget to take it with them or they leave it downstairs when they go to bed, makes me comfortable that it doesn’t have addicting properties.
And, because it’s android any apps demanded by school can easily be side loaded.
That costs more than the last seven phones I've bought. Not total, but each. I was expecting maybe $100, but $400? Is this a joke? A $400 dumbphone that isn't gold plated?
It hasn't been a problem for us. Our child has a cellular enabled Apple Watch (it has its own phone number). At home, the iPad satisfies all the other needs, and is restricted with Screen Time and Downtime. YMMV (kids are different)
I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.
There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
I like lineageOS but it feels cruel to give a kid who is dying for a smartphone a nexus5 with lineageOS on it.
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My gut reaction was "well, you can give them a phone, just lock down tiktok and other crap" but then I was thinking "well, in the end that doesn't matter in practice, they can buy a used device from a friend for pocket money and hiding it from me will be trivial", so... it all comes down to my relationship with the kid. Nothing else will work.
If .. many parents would do this (like you imply), then there would be many kids without a phone who can be friends with each other?
Also I doubt the "not being able to have friend without a phone" in general. But surely harder in most areas.
This is a symptom of not encouraging children into extracurricular activities. If all you have to bond over is social media, your friendship is empty. That's how you create terminally-online, mentally ill people. Everyone needs third spaces like sports, scouts, music, church, clubs, and the like. They get you out of your house and head and surround you with people who share similar interests.
my kid's extracurricular activity groups like to chat outside of club-time, too. being the only one of the group not able to do so would be ostracizing.
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My extracurricular activities were full of nerds (martial arts) with Play Stations and internet at home. So, as an owner of no inet or a console at home was pretty much hell from 2001 to 2005. Oh, and no cell phone until ~18.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
Pick-ups and drop-offs? You walked yourself home, used your bike, or took the bus. This getting driven around is most ridiculous.
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
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> How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
With a lot more difficulty.
"I'll be done with marching band practice at 6:30"
"Ok, I'll come get you then"
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
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Pre-arranged times. Be there or else.
Payphones.
Time still exists. Payphones not so much.
And: payphones were ubiquitous. Car parks, bus stops, restaurants, bars, other businesses, random street corners, airports, bus depots, train stations. Probably several at a given high school at different locations. So long as you had loose change they were a reliable option. These started to disappear in the late 1990s, though support continued generally through the late aughts, and in certain locales (e.g., NYC) through the late 2010s.
There's some interesting technological anthropology in The Paper Chase, a film set at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s (released 1973), there is a payphone on the dorm floor, and it is the only phone available. That and a number of other elements date the film in ways that other set-dressing (costumes, architecture, cars) don't convey as emphatically.
We used to use payphones and call collect, then say a quick message when the collect service asked for your name.
"Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
We used landlines of course, and it was an utter pain in the behind.
There was no way of letting anyone know that you were running late once they were already underway to pick you up.
I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school.
In Australia this is normal. The distribution of phones increases slowly during high school, not before. Kids don't really use phones anyway, they use some combination of online games and messaging apps so they can do it from a computer or tablet without a phone.
> Kids don't really use phones anyway
My kids used the home phone for many years before they got their own cell phones. They would call their friends and grandparents. (The grandparents loved it)