“No screens in the bedroom, ever.”
My kid is 3 but this has been a big issue on my mind lately. I’ve read The Anxious Generation, The Screentime Solution, and The Art of Screentime over the past 9 months (with some other tech-adjacent books). My husband has also recently had a turn-around on tech for kids. I think our big thing is no personal devices for the little one for a long time. Family computer in a common area. Family cellphone that can be used when she’s not with us. Family tv in the living room. Family iPad that is used for specific tasks.
I recommend reading this article if you’re worried about this https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/kids-smartphones-play-freedom/683742/
I definitely plan to allow as much freedom as developmentally appropriate as she gets older. As it is now I try to make sure she has time to play independently and with friends and I try to not intervene too much when she has minor issues. She has even asked for privacy or that she wants to be by herself and I always respect that within reasonable limits.
Great article, thx
The anxious generation sucks. The author’s even admitted that the screens aren’t at fault, it’s adults banning kids playing outside. Then then get anxious and depressed and they use their phones as a substitution for what we banned
I did not enjoy the anxious generation book. There were a few small parts that I liked, but it’s why I started reading other books instead. My school district was all about the anxious generation and wanted us to read it. I did, but wanted a broader perspective.
I think this is where my family is landing.
Another rule: Don’t let your kid share his face. Ever. For any reason.
If YouTube wants his face, just buy VPN so your kid can browse safely
Try reading this article, VPNs don’t make you more private they just shift the trust model away from your ISP https://www.matyaskoszegi.com/post/vpns-your-privacy-savior-or-just-another-creepy-middleman
You’re missing the point. If your location is outside of UK YouTube and others don’t ask for age verification. Noo need to send your child pics to some creepy middle man
What about onlinebanks? Also a hard no?
Have an adult handle the account. Simple as. They set it up and manage the account to ensure their kids privacy to as much of a degree as they can.
Why will a kid need to open an online bank account?
I mean there are plenty of legitimate reasons. If you want to give your child financial autonomy so that it can learn to budget, I think an online bank account may be a good idea.
But I don’t get the OPs point though, many banks offer adult-managed accounts until majority that only need an ID, not a face scan.
I feel like you don’t understand the meaning of the word “ever.”
Don’t know how this works in UK - In Poland there are other ways of signing into/registering in banking.
VPNs as soon as they can tap a screen. Raise them with online pseudonyms they change annually. They don’t learn their actual PII until they’re at least 10. Can’t give it out to strangers if you don’t know it yourself!
I like and understand where you’re going, but I can offer some actual experience. I learned my legal first name at 8.
It didn’t go down well (I cried because the teacher didn’t call my name and sent me to the school office to get it sorted) and I had a weird complex about the real name into high school. There’s no rhyme or reason to the two names, so it is actually sort of surprising to pair the two. To this day I still go by the nickname I thought was my real name. My nieces and nephews still enjoy discovering my real name and calling me by it thinking it’s a big secret they’ve discovered. I still have to explain it a hundred times a year to new coworkers and acquaintances.
… Were you not in school before 8 years old?
I might be slightly facetious in my comment.
If I were to be slightly more earnest, I would say that the authoritarian concepts they learn from enforcement of arbitrary restrictions like “no screens in the bedroom” are far more harmful to their well-being than the information they could put on those screens.
The best “tech rule” I could give instill in them is an understanding of the concept of “click bait”. The sooner I can immunize them to paywalls and microtransactions, the better.
Have you had any sucess with explaining the concept of clickbaiting and the whole predatory environment of the internet? I’ve tried, so many times, in different ways, with different examples and analogies. It just doesn’t really stick, they are simply too inexperienced to fully understand the consequences and will fall prey to it the next day or two.
I still fall for it from time to time. I used to show them the headlines that caught me; they showed me the ones that caught them.
I think showing them how to use PiHole or some other content filtering would be useful. Empower them to shape their own world.
Pi-Hole? Damn kid gonna be a hacker one day, pi-holing from infancy. Back in my days, we played Club Penguin and Flash games as kids on a computer
Your initial comment did not make this clear. I thought you where serious.
Big agree on the have them understand before draconian rules. Though some stuff is just gonna be walled off on my home network.
I mean, I was somewhat serious. Maybe not the “you don’t get to know your home address until you’re 10 years old” part.
The arbitrary nature of the rules is the problem. I don’t want my kids limiting themselves just because they think they are supposed to. If they know and understand the reason for the rule, the rule itself doesn’t need to exist.
Yet people would call me an insecure creepy troll if I said I have dozens of different nicknames on the same general spaces.
What would compel you to announce the multitude of screen names you’ve used over the years? Never practice necromancy. A dead name stays dead; it is never to be referred to by the living.
I dunno, maybe because some of them are still used in other places, or for other purposes =\
It’s unfortunately not quite dead - the Internet is scraped and not anonymous, but pseudonymous, and a bearer of a pseudonym can usually be discovered. If someone really wants it, of course.
But that’s a good thought, maybe it’s time for a few new names.
Beats whatever cumbersome recipe governments worldwide are trying to do to "keep kids safe"TM
“Phone goes in the locker before bed, Johnny.”
“Johnny goes into the locker before bed, Phone.”
If I wanted to raise superhumans, I’d simply not give them smartphones until they turned 18.
Sadly this doesn’t work unless the entire community in your area also does the same. Because your kid will be the only one in their entire school without a phone and they will be constantly bullied, and socially ostricized.
Boomers haven’t had them for quite a bit longer. Wouldn’t say it helped much.
Boomers got lead instead.
IDK, they seemed pretty focused until fox news came along.
If you wanted to socially stunt them maybe. Please never do this.
I know kids who’s parents kept them away from computers growing up, where as I was allowed to play with computers and broke several by the age of 10.
Now I’m good with computers and have made a good career out of it, those kids who weren’t allowed around computers aren’t very computer literate, their parents definitely did them a big disservice.
Teach your kids a healthy ballance with new technology, but don’t withhold it especially when their peers are all using it.
As an old fart who witnessed social gatherings for decades, it looks like social stunting comes from smartphones rather than their absence.
This is correct from your perspective only.
Young people are still social but they do it differently, if you are no not online you wouldn’t know their is a social gathering nor would you be invited. Not from malace but because all information about any event only exists online.
The person you consider your best friend needs someone to talk to. All their friends are available but not you. You become hard to bond with because your not where everyone else is in digital space.
Many events even require smartphone, even boring restaurants sometimes do with a QR code to see the menu/order.
I hate that kind of stuff but since a few years it has become clear that not having a smartphone is basically a social disability.
I understand that it is harder to bond to someone who isn’t immediately digitally available. I understand that "kids these days! " do their social stuff online, but at the same time, they seem to have largely lost all skill at interacting with real humans of slight or no aquaintence.
It is easy to make sarcastic comments on your phone about how stupid this or that is. The sterotypical basement dweller can snark all day. What takes social skill is actively engaging with people you don’t care about and finding common ground.
Yes, digital people track some of this on facebook and such, but in real life: in which community groups do they participate? Do they know what their neighbors do and what they like beyond snapshots of events? That is: yeah, they saw that pic of that cookout, but did they know that he volunteer teaches English as a second language Tuesday and Thursday at the library? When was the last time they went into a neighbor’s home (or had one visit theirs) to share a cup of coffee and complain about that road that needs fixing and who to push about it?
Edited to replace ‘you’ with ‘they’ so there’d be no confusion that I mean multiple ‘you’ readers rather than a single person.
I don’t think you understand. Would it be nice if society was less dependant on phones for everything social? Sure. It is your kid’s responsibility to evangelize to their peers that they have to? Absolutely not.
This isn’t a societal question. This is about affording a kid a social life at all. If a kid doesn’t have a phone when all their peers have one, there’s no “oh well simply only go to events that are shared on something else than phones”, because there are no such events. There’s no “oh well only socialize with people who will make the effort to only have conversations in person”, because there will be at best one kid in the entire school that also doesn’t have a phone (hint: they’ll be the “weird” kid).
This is equivalent to your parents saying “you may only talk to people at school, you aren’t allowed to talk to anyone once you leave school.” Surely you understand that this is a surefire way to completely ostracize and socially stunt your kid, and for what benefit? The only thing you gain is that you get to not parent your kid about safe internet use, a thing you really should be doing anyway because they’re going to get internet access at some point.
This is equivalent to your parents saying "you may only talk to people at school
You’ve got my point backwards. I’m saying kids would be better prepared for life if they talked to people, and particularly if they talked to people they don’t particularly care about rather than only swapping phone memes with kids they already know. Also, no one is saying there should be a complete ban on phones. The article simply suggests keeping the bedroom screen-free (better for sleep, studying, etc.). I went further to point out that as we’ve become more ‘social’ on phones we’re less social in society.
Do you realize how hostile the outside is to non-adults? Like genuinely I’ve seen people call the cops because there was a kid riding a bike unsuprivized in a suburban neighborhood. Malls are dying and there’s nothing to replace them as a meeting spot.
This isn’t even getting into the seeming requirement to spend what feels like 100$ to see a movie now or any of the other stereotypical hang outs. Or how many people have parents that simply do not have time to drive them places.
I’m genuinely interested in your response because I genuinely think the world has become actively hostile to kids being kids.
I think we need to unruin outside for the kids. I don’t care about phones
First bit: Why do we as a country (speaking from the U.S.) allow police to assualt the citizenry? Why aren’t we all in our town halls demanding the removal of any cops who handcuff kids, tackle people who don’t speak English, or fire guns at anyone who isn’t at that moment attacking someone? The police should be under our control by our consent. We elect their bosses if not the sheriffs themselves. Why aren’t we showing up in numbers in person to demand better?
Second bit: I know there are still some communities where kids can ride their bikes without fear because the parents still know everyone on the block. They might not like all the neighbors, but they know them and aren’t calling the cops on them. The bad part of that is a distrust of outsiders and unwillingness to accept anything different. Humans fall into us/them thinking too easily. As far as I have heard/read/seen, the best way to mitigate that is first-hand exposure to the ‘other’ because people tend to be better than whatever sterotype someone worries about. Reminiscing here: I remember visiting my grandparents and having them walk me into various houses on the block to chat with neighbors. It never occurred to me as a bored child that this was socially incorporating me into an insular community that might have been sucpsious of a strange kid biking around the same streets over and over if they didn’t know I belonged there.
That said, I don’t understand how the kids like me who grew up running wild wherever we wanted became parents who didn’t allow any roaming, and who’s kids then became adults that will call the cops before asking the neighbors. Maybe we move too often. Maybe we fear litigation. Mostly, I suspect, we work too many hours for not enough money such that adults don’t have the energy to form old-style communities where people banded together (both for good and bad), and instead everyone only bitches online just as I am doing right now.
You still have local second-run theaters where those still exist, plus parks and playgrounds where those haven’t been ruined yet, and depending on where you live, there may even be various art/craft places to hang out at, splatter-painting places included in that, and some of the nicer parts of the country even have interactive museums that are kid-friendly (as in actually interactive, like the patrons can actually interact and play with the exhibits there).
Aside from those, yeah, there isn’t much for kids to do.
sarcasm, but also not really if you're in a *really* low-income part of the country where there really *isn't* anything to do, think of places like Appalachia for a good example of that extremeNot in the suburban shithole I grew up in (late gen z)
You’re still ignoring the core problem in that children can’t do any of those things by themselves anymore and all of them cost some amount of money with the exception of playgrounds and parks. Growing up the closest one to me was about a 30 minute drive so I would never be able to get myself there.
So all you have to do is for everyone to move to a better neighbourhood, problem solved.
Sarcasm aside, in my neighbourhood there where some attempts to get together. Then people started complaining about eachother. Now at most a neighbour may wave back when i wave at them.
You’ll need to use a smartphone for most jobs nowadays, even just random dude in a supermarket.
Maybe not a smartphone, I mean you can still use calls and texts to call out sick answer calls about job interviews.
But yeah you’re not wrong in that smartphone do make life a lot smoother. For example if you want to check your payroll and w2 info, that is gonna require an app on a smartphone, and some of them even requires an app for 2fa because of (supposedly) the increase in fraud, and banking and job applications, while you don’t need a smartphone for those, you’re still gonna need access to a computer, so for someone without a computer, might as well get a smartphone instead of a dumbphone + a computer.
No, many jobs even trivial ones give you company phones so you can look stuff up, do inventory management etc
Are you in EU? Because in America, that’s not the norm.
To clarify, they do provide devices for things you do on the job, like scanning inventory for example, but not for the stuff you do outside of the job, stuff like checking your pay statements, schedule, and to call in sick, that’s expected to be done on your own devices, because that’s technically not needed for the job itself, even though its practically needed as a prerequisite for getting that job in the first place (Because how are you gonna fill out your job application? They don’t even take paper applications anymore, its all done online. You’ll need a phone number and some companies require an email address as well).
If your phone breaks after you got the job, that’s fine, you probably won’t have any problems if you work at a warehouse or fastfood place, but just hope you don’t get sick and need that phone to call them (because “no call, no show” get you fired).
I meant on the job. So people need smartphone skills to get a job. That’s what I meant.
I don’t disagree, but wouldn’t it be better if society rejected that demand from capitalism and forced them to change because people aren’t interested in using an app to shop in a fucking grocery store?
I meant to work at a store but your point still holds I guess
I used to sneak beers as a teen. Your kids will be sneaking Internet.
