Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can’t imagine how it’s like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood
Submitted 8 months ago by fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Melt@lemm.ee 8 months ago
metaStatic@kbin.social 8 months ago
"No one is bored, everything is boring"
Fake4000@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Love that.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
son_named_bort@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent’s garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today’s youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can’t imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
DeadlineX@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Right? Before that it was tv. Before that it was rock and roll. I was actually told to go outside more because I was READING TOO MUCH. Idk why everyone feels like their way of entertainment is better than everyone else’s. It’s so weird that we can’t let people enjoy themselves unless they do it our way.
lurch@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Some play those exact same games ported or on emulators. it’s the circle of life 😆
pdxfed@lemmy.world 8 months ago
DOSBOX & SNESEMU 4 life.
echodot@feddit.uk 8 months ago
So one of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can’t do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to “vandalism” i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn’t given us any money since 2014.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 8 months ago
My neighborhood has the same problem. There’s absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They’re on the playground, they’re biking on the sidewalks, they’re playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they’re f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
But what about angry mothers? They are scarier.
spez_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
ikidd@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
Spaghetti_Hitchens@kbin.social 8 months ago
I think hoops and sticks were big for a while
31337@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I think many worked. On the farm, in mines, in factories. Farmers would intentionally have many children just for extra labor. School hours and breaks are, in part, the way they are to let children work on the farm.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 8 months ago
We do have new playgrounds, but the problem is that they’re very sanitized and only really suitable for preschoolers. Tweens usually just wander around without any exact place to go.
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Even back when I was 9 and playground near my home was replaced with plastic shit for toddlers I knew it was plastic shit for toddlers. On the other side there was stuff for training though. Still nothing for 10-30.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 8 months ago
but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
You just hang out and do fun and stupid shit, it’s nice to have special place for it but a construction site and under the bridge is good enough. Problem is modern parents are extremely anxious.
bignate31@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I was with you until the “construction site and under the bridge” bit. It definitely takes a bit of imagination, but I’m not sure not wanting your kids to play on a site which requires the use of hard hats classifies as being “anxious”
Misconduct@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Under the bridge is where the junkies hang out and you’re a shit patent if you want your kids messing around construction sites lmao
mellowheat@suppo.fi 8 months ago
That sounds like an American problem. We in many countries in Europe don’t have that problem, but our kids still waste their time on smartphones.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 8 months ago
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
crapwittyname@lemm.ee 8 months ago
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I’d said, he’ll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
Dra@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Kids can be real shitheads sometimes
Steak@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Nope. You can’t expect me to raise my own child How dare you!
aidan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Just like the UK bill wanting an ID for porn sites. And, in the EU, Youtube is wanting my ID for age verification to follow EU law. Isn’t a much less authoritarian solution just to use blocklists, or even mandate sites send an unencrypted flag with content that is “adult” and browsers or routers can choose to deal with that or not.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 8 months ago
Like if you don’t want you child to use a smartphone - just don’t buy one for them.
mint_tamas@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Youtube never asked for my ID (I’m in the EU). Which country is this?
kelargo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Something, something, something, and then BREXIT comes to mind. That worked out well.
mellowheat@suppo.fi 8 months ago
Like… join a protest demanding a smartphone-free childhood for everybody?
phillaholic@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Maybe a hot take, but this goes for everyone. I see older people that can’t stay off their phones, and have little to no ability to multitask while doing it.
Wanderer@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Nobody can multi task. I wish this stupid myth would die.
MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“I’m good at multitasking” is just another way of saying you can’t focus on one thing at a 🐿️ SQUIRREL!
BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Multi-tasking should rightly be called “context switching”. Your brain is alternating its focus between two things in extremely quick succession.
Sho@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Can’t upvote this enough, I have had ppl literally bragging to me about their ability to “multi-task” 🙄
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I have ADHD and have the opposite problem most of the time - I can’t keep myself on one thing.
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Its pretty funny how people will take a single low-population college paper over the evidence of their own experience.
I multitask daily, I have to it’s part of my job.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What about the left brain right brain simultaneous use, like people drawing two pieces of art at once or like how I can walk and be on my phone while being completely aware of my surroundings.
Sometimes my brain is thinking in one space and my body is doing another. Like I hit auto pilot and stepped away from the cabin, yet the plane is still flying.
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That should be no surprise. They have been designed to be purposefully addictive.
Routhinator@startrek.website 8 months ago
What should have been a tool was designed to be a trap, because greed.
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
That would be TV
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Where I live older people don’t know how turn on phone. They watch tv instead. Those who have some sanity left also go outside, sit on benches, talk with each other and keep your bike from being stolen.
fosstulate@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 months ago
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
simple@lemm.ee 8 months ago
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it’s scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
T156@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don’t see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When’s the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
DrunkenPirate@feddit.de 8 months ago
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability.
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they found how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
ricdeh@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Wow, this sounds really dystopian. You monitor the porn that your daughters are watching? Then you’re an absolute nut job and maybe you should be the one who should have their technology access regulated.
angrystego@lemmy.world 8 months ago
How old is she?
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 8 months ago
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we caught valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
suzune@ani.social 8 months ago
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it’s a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be “cool” online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 8 months ago
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Lol, I would’ve been bullied in school if I didn’t have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Zealousideal_Fox900@lemmy.world 8 months ago
*Poison for any young person.
UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Uncool boomers be like: “It’s the damn phones”, when they’ve created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They’ve created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, “It’s dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I’m talking to you?”
mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It seriously is part ‘those damn phones’.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
rab@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Lol it has nothing to do with cars. I grew up in the 90s without a phone and my city wasn’t much different then than now. I was constantly outside playing and so were all the other kids
iegod@lemm.ee 8 months ago
This is the wrong take but it’s a part of it for sure.
Ilflish@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Is it the boomers this time? I remember millennials thinking that about zoomers and now they’ve grown up, zoomers have been saying it about Gen Alpha calling them iPad babys
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Not all doomers did it. But those who didn’t were communists.
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I’m disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
HelloHotel@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The problem is we want/are forced to let kids to have access to the big internet pipe but we also dont, we want to moderate what gets through.
I feel like most adults struggle with maintaining boundries on usage let alone kids. I do not like the antagonistic arelationship between child and parent that smartphones create. I think a dumb phone and some other machine “to fill the void” and “to not feel left out” is the correct solution at least for me.
alternative_factor@kbin.social 8 months ago
After the SORA AI reveal today I'm starting to see that luddites have a point. I don't think we'll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I've seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I've seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don't even know how to use a phone.
doublejay1999@lemmy.world 8 months ago
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id 8 months ago
I fear for the digital literacy of Gen Alpha
AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don’t want their kids having a smartphone. Having access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren’t is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
aluminium@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Humanity never changes, adults still think we know better what’s good for young people than they themselves do. When I was a child and teenager, I hoped that this attitude would die out over the generations, seems that that isn’t happening.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 8 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones, as concerns grow about online safety and the impact of social media on mental health.
Daisy’s got kids of a similar age and we were both feeling really horrified and worried and just didn’t want them to have smartphones at 11, which seems to be the norm now.”
Fernyhough and Greenwell hoped the movement would embolden parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 14, with no social media access until 16.
Smartphones expose children to a “world that they are not ready for” because they can access pornography and content on self-harm and suicide, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health, Fernyhough said.
Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, called earlier this week for a complete ban on social media access for under-16s, and said more people will have mental health issues unless tech companies take action to restrict access to harmful content.
“They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them.”
The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
boatsnhos931@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Prob a good way to get your kids bullied lolz
Grofit@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t really see phones as a problem, it’s the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it’s too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.
AzureRT@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Just give your kid a decade old budget
mellowheat@suppo.fi 8 months ago
This is a magnificent idea, and will make the quality of children’s lives absolutely better.
lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 8 months ago
Who is buying the phones? The parents. So the parents buy their children a phone and then surprised Pikachu?
Fudoshin@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Peer pressure. Kids at school get the new greatest phone and tell their parents. Parents feel compelled to get it for their kids.
IndiBrony@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s still on the parents. My little lad is 15 and never had his own phone until his tweens. Amusingly, he was older than me when I got my first phone back in the 90s.
He never got bullied for not having a phone.
PutangInaMo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not just pressure to get a fancy phone but that most of the socializing happens on social media now. Even if they sit in the same class, it’s a snapchat message.
If they don’t have access to it, they’re social outcasts by default.
It’s fucking crazy…
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 8 months ago
I think if the kids want to bully, they’d just find a lonely and defenseless target and invent an excuse. If you are a potential target, having an expensive phone wouldn’t save you anyway.
feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Or you could say “and then act surprised”.
my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 8 months ago
Or you could say “and were shocked at the results”! It’s nice of you to highlight how people communicate differently even with a shared language, the world would be so boring if everyone was the same.