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?
These parents are lazy
Or bring back flip phones. Calling and texting but does basically nothing else.
I’m considering a Linux phone, like the Pinephone. I use Linux at home, so I’m comfortable locking it down to only have what I trust them to use. It looks like a regular smartphone, has terrible battery life (so limited late night time wasting), and most Android apps don’t work anyway, but it makes calls and texts just fine. I may even just not get a data plan at all.
Hopefully they’ll think it’s cool since it’ll be able to run a Minecraft server and whatnot.
Pinephone owner here. The pinephone is not meant to be, not is it suitable for being, a phone you actually use. It’s a developer device.
As you say, the battery life is dreadful. If I actually do anything on it, it lasts maybe an hour and a half with the screen on, maybe up to six with it off.
It is slow. And I don’t mean omg it can’t multitask or play mobile games slow, I mean sometimes you type and it takes a while to appear on the screen slow.
Call quality is abysmal if you even manage to get calls to come through.
I love the pinephone as a project, and the software has improved a huge amount. But it’s not really suitable day to day.
Yeah, that’s why I’ve never pulled the trigger. I’m interested in the PPP, but reports say that battery life sucks and the camera doesn’t work. I’m honestly okay with the camera not working, but I need it to last most of the day.
I’m a developer, and I’d love to hack on it, but I need the phone to be usable as a daily driver first. For me that means: reliable MMS, good call quality, decent speakers, and all day battery life. I only need a couple Android apps, and even those may be negotiable (could carry a second phone to work if necessary). I can contribute to the rest of the nice to haves.
But the OG PP may be good enough for an emergency phone. Maybe. And it’s cheap enough to take a chance on it.
Laughs in Android flip phone
because parents are not regulating this. Its why we have minimum driving ages because parents cant just make their kid do the right thing.
Cars don’t have a feature called “parental control”. Smartphones do.
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.
man? thats really well put. kudos.
would you mind if I screenshot’d your post to share with people or possibly post on bluesky
Sure
youre gonna be FUCKING famous dude
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.
If they don’t create a new law then how will these parents impose their parenting on other families?
Honestly I would appreciate if they banned phone manufacturers from forcing Facebook, X, and other bullshit onto your phone. Making people go out and get it is one of the many intended barriers.
Also OEMs should not be succumbed by Google. Punkt has already introduced MC02 with option to install Google services.
Ya I would also enjoy a phone free from bloat.
The question then would be if it might cause other problems. A lot of places are moving to e-learning, for example, and might expect the students to have internet access of some form or other.
Whether that be in the form of smartphone apps/websites, or through a laptop that the school provides, at which point, it’s basically the same thing, especially if peer pressure puts them on social media or some such.
As I said in another comment if the parents are the ones to buy it then they can put heavy parental controls on the phones or tablets.
I use a work provided cellphone while I’m on my job site and they have that fucker so locked down I can’t even change the auto lock timing so I know you can lock tons of things with passwords on phones and tablets.
Idk anything about school laptops because I’m apparently old as fuck now and that wasn’t a thing when I was younger. But I would assume that they also use software to lock those down.
My family doesn’t get smartphones until age 12. That seems to work well
I’m probably going to make it a rule that my kids don’t get them until 15. I’m 28 and have definitely been ruined by smartphones. My attention span is shit and motivation is hard to maintain when the internet is just right there.
I wish there was a device that only did the bare minimum of email, phone, texting, navigation, and music.
Minimalist productivity-first Android launchers might be what you’re looking for.
Those exist, there are a few products intended to provide that minimalist experience.
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
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.
Many children are being radicalised by online content, like the criminal Andrew Tate becoming popular among teenagers.
Most people aren’t fact checking anything online. They are far more likely to start believing conspiracy theories or outright false narratives.
There’s no cure all solution. I consider homeschooled children taught to live their lives by regressive religious texts to be just as broken as the cult of Tate.
If any intervention will still yield roughly equivalent mixed results, I always err on the side of more access to information. A child can gravitate to Andrew Tate’s toxicity, or they can look up facts about the confederacy their parents told them fought for “states rights and freedumb!”
In a perfect world, loving parents should be available to provide opinions and context, but I’d rather that child have the opportunity to seek out a rational, benevolent path if the parents attempt to indoctrinate them to their worldview with no other options.
The parents most interested in dominating all information their child receives tend to be the same ones that get mad at the schools for teaching children that genitals exist, the universe is billions of years old, and their country wasn’t always perfect, stuff they need to know for life whether their parents like it or not.
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
i agree that parents should not have a monopoly over the information that their children get, but i think that well-educated school teachers are a better solution to this than the internet. (although this would require the US to put some kind of emphasis on improving its education system, so it’s probably unlikely)
you seem to be assuming that children have the same logical reasoning faculties that adults do. this is not the case.
Critical thinking and reasoning must be taught, and in the US largely doesn’t until the college level unfortunately. Many adults, many parents have no logical reasoning faculties and never will. Some are very proud of this, declaring the whims and opinions that pop into their heads “common sense.” I refer you to my fellow Americans who see salvation in a slumlord game show host nepo baby. There’s a reason humanity spent 180+ thousand years wandering in the dirt before stumbling upon a less brutal way to live 10-20 thousand years ago.
Again, some like myself may seek out such information if they are starved of it at home, if they have access. If anything, getting multiple conflicting opinions tends to make a new mind seek out ways to parse the true from the false, and that chance is better than no chance at all.
There’s some of that too.
My policy is to always answer every question my kids have, ideally with some reputable online source. It’s not “because I said so,” but more “let’s find out together.”
But I’m also not going to be giving my kids a smartphone or allowing them to use social media until they prove to me that they’re responsible. I want them to learn how to fact check misinformation, call out bullying, and demonstrate empathy over a text medium (so they don’t become bullies). If they’re mature enough to show that, I’ll slowly introduce things to them.
That said, I’m convinced social media can have a huge negative impact on mental health. Lack of access has an impact too, so it’s important to help them establish boundaries. I’m not going to be monitoring what they do (that’s a privacy violation), but I will be slowly loosening what services I allow them to access on family devices.
Thats how parenting works. Kids dont fact check, they dont know how to. Everyone has a biased narritive and will pass it off to their kids, thats not an issue.
This will definitely work.
Buy em a rzr flip like the olden days, better yet just get them a rape whistle
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.
Can you imagine caring about children’s well development? Gross
Typical knife kill people - knife bad - ban knife nonsense
Truly some of the legislation of all time
The NHS is on fire and brits are wasting time on this shit?
Truly we are a divided and conquered species.
See, you’re exactly who we’re worried about kids meeting.
