Calls for smartphone-free childhood grow in Britain

Why does everything have to always be so goddamn black and white always? "Smartphones bad, let's ban them for kids". Why not have smartphones with parental regulation?

Smartphones are great. Apps are user-hostile malware. Online spaces are, in the majority, traps. If every time you drove downtown you ended up in a corporate police state designed to play you and your friends off each other and make you all miserable so you look at more advertisements for shampoo, you would conclude that getting in the car is bad for you.

Trying to legislate this is...fucking stupid.

You don't want your kids to have a smartphone? Fine. Don't buy one. Kids dont need phones, bur if you're worried about them being able to contact you, just get a dumbphone on amazon.

Parents are concerned that providing their children with a smartphone will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.

These same parents will also just shove a smartphone or a tablet in front of their kids faces to shut them up for a while.

I wouldn’t be opposed to a device that blocked all social media, but was filled with educational, and age appropriate, apps for a child. I don’t think playing Math Blaster ruined my childhood. Super Mario Brothers didn’t give me any life skills, other than improving hand-eye coordination. Neither one ruined my life, though.

You dont need a law for this. If you dont want your kid to use or have a smartphone then dont buy them one.

My family doesn't get smartphones until age 12. That seems to work well

No, children deserve to be able to fact check their parent's biased narrative, too.

It's a conservative mindset to demand you get to monopolize the information your child receives until they're 18.

The post in February triggered a tidal wave of reaction from parents similarly gripped by anxiety about providing their children with a device they fear will open them up to predators, online bullying, social pressure and harmful content.

Can you imagine having to teach your kids about these risks, help them to deal with them and prepare them for adulthood?

That would be so much work.

The school I work at is implementing this starting next week.

Except it's a music school so they can use metronome apps. Also, they can use it to send emails to the copy room to print music sheets. Or to use in class when it's required. Or for whatever exception they can think of. And they actually expect us to enforce it with all these exceptions.

Yeah, I'm sure it will work /s

[US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt] links the rise of the “phone-based childhood”, continual supervision by adults and the loss of “free play” to spikes in mental illness in young people.

So phones are one out of three of the cited problems, but the only one they're doing anything about. These poor kids are going to have to deal with helicopter parents and no free time with one less form of escape. Something tells me that'll make it worse.

This will definitely work.

Buy em a rzr flip like the olden days, better yet just get them a rape whistle

Can you imagine caring about children's well development? Gross

iPad kids are gonna grow up to be unable to focus on anything or endure discomfort/boredom.

Sounds like typical flag-shaggers, yearning for "the good old days" when there were four channels, you played in the road because the Tories took the playgrounds, etc - so they want to force it on their kids instead of accepting that the world has changed.

Typical knife kill people - knife bad - ban knife nonsense

When I was a kid I was always moving around, going place. Incredibly unsafe, but nobody in my neighborhood died young at least.

The point I want to make is that I have stronger bone density as a direct result of physical activity while young, and I worry about the younger generation now who won't have that.

Almost all the solutions I read in this thread go from one extreme to the other. Here are my PERSONAL perceptions:
Taking away children's smartphones or limiting them is obviously not the solution, and if we did, in the process we would be violating multiple rights, to privacy, freedom, access to information, etc. There is no guarantee that they can be fulfilled in other ways.

But children are not responsible enough to use ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) without adult supervision!

That is simply false, the responsibility and use they make of ICT is not something that is born by magic, it depends completely on the education they receive, if you say that your children are not responsible enough to use a phone as their parent you are the main responsible. From that, start thinking about how to educate them to be more responsible, not all parents are as good as you at making sure you don't blind them.

Regarding privacy, there is a great discussion about parents and the privacy of children and adolescents, however, I will ask you some important questions.
Did you tell your parents everything? Didn't you divide school life, friends, and family? What would have happened if you had had ultra-religious or extremist parents in some way who limited your way of acting and your access to information that they did not consider part of their values? These three things have been happening for a long time.
I also read in a comment that people don't verify information. Many organizations, governmental, family, religious, etc. They don't want people to verify what they're told, but that doesn't mean we can't make our voice count to make it happen.
Another thing I read is a problem mainly in the United States (I'm not from there) and it's the iPhone, it's not worth wasting your time here, I mean bullying still strongly exists there. They need a big change in their education as the first important step in the discussion, I wish them luck.
Everything has to do with everything, and the general economic situation in the world keeps parents working instead of taking care of their children, but at the same time if we leave them the cell phone we will get worse. Taking measures on our side is not going to help, we have to generate consensus on the use of ICT.

Sorry for my English, I am learning the language and writing this text with the support of a translator, some things could not be expressed as I wanted.
EDIT: With translator, I mean google and LanguageTool.

Isn't that why they got Brexit?

My childhood was before smartphones but when the Internet already existed.

In my preteen and teen years, the Internet was more or less my only escape from my horrible offline life. I envy today's kids that they can access it everywhere.

Everyone who wants to take that possibility away from any children, go have sexual intercourse with yourself.

The NHS is on fire and brits are wasting time on this shit?

Truly we are a divided and conquered species.