A friend of mine have an iPhone to his kid on his 9th birthday and, despite the fact that his son is really smart, I thought it was way to early to give a child a smartphone. The parents were going through a divorce, so it was a classical « I’m better than your mom » bad attitude, but still.
I hope when the times come my own kids won’t be to needy on this, because I’m thinking like the author of the post and if I can, they’re going to wait sometimes before getting any.
After all, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs prohibited smartphones and pads for their kids. There’s a reason behind that...
Does anyone have effective strategies for getting the kid to not want to use social media as much?
We also make them charge their phones in a room away from them at 8pm each night. Not a lot of good things can happen on facetime late at night for a middle schooler.
Microsoft's Face API can detect age. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
So, automatically flag accounts with a face that is <18, and force age verification. Facebook already has identity verification mechanisms.
Can any of us? Personally, I have to resort to all sorts of tricks to keep myself from spending far too long browsing social media feeds. They're frighteningly good at what they do.
In my experience, parents like these that need to turn their child into an “other” and can’t see how their own behavior is very similar if not the same as the child 20-30years their junior, are just really bad parents. They’re very oblivious. Maybe that’s why they have to write these articles so they can try and signal to people that they aren’t as awful at parenting as they truly are.
