How to Delay the Age At Which Kids Get Smartphones
The consequences are severe. This represents an abdication of mentorship that parents owe their children and that kids desperately need. We all sign up for this task when we bring children into the world. We must raise them, like it or not. It’s the unquittable job. Sure, some deadbeat parents have always checked out in ways that horrify mainstream... See more
Katherine Johnson Martinko • It's the Adults, Not the Kids!
A 2015 Pew Research study reported that younger users of mobile phones “stand out prominently when it comes to using their phones for two purposes in particular: avoiding boredom, and avoiding people around them.” Aaron Smith, “U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015,” Pew Research Center for Internet, Science, and Technology, April 1, 2015,
Sherry Turkle • Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
But I worry that we have both oversanitized and overpathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world.