How are kids dealing with technology?

5 comments

1. Young person here. Not from the US but I lived there a lot growing up, and I attended school there, so I feel qualified to answer this.

   >do y’all just let kids walk around with smartphones?

   Yep! I’ve been walking around with a smartphone everywhere I go for almost ten years now. In junior high school we were required to put our phones in our backpacks, but in high school we could carry them with us in our pockets.

   >Are there parental controls?

   There can be. My parents didn’t do parental controls, but they did monitor my activity by reading my texts and checking my search history.

   >Is it common for American kids to get a cell phone at a young age?

   I would say so, yeah. When I was growing up, smartphones were generally our second phones (our first phone was a slide/flip phone, at least in the area I lived in). Smartphones existed but most parents in my area didn’t want their kids to have a smartphone under age 10. Personally I got my first phone at 9, and my first smartphone at 12 I think.

   >What about computers/internet access?

   Absolutely necessary to do well in school. Midway through high school, my school provided all students with a (poor quality) laptop that we had to bring to class every day.

2. My kids have tablets, but they have to earn time on them, and usually their time can be spent on fairly educational things like Osmo. My oldest has a Switch, but she earned that by hitting some reading metrics and proving to me she can read at a level I felt was acceptable. To note, she earned it in Sept 32, and while she’s just finishing 1st grade, she’s reading at and has the vocab of a 4th grader. So if there is correlation between her improving her reading to earn a Switch, and being grades above in her language, I’m OK with that.

   They don’t have internet access, and video content is curated. My wife watches a lot of crafting YouTube videos with the girls, and that has led my youngest to pretend she’s talking to an audience when she’s doing art, but we’re using that as a learning opportunity: We pretend to be “chat” and ask her prompting questions about making art.

   I’m thinking about building a computer with the girls, so they can learn some more about tech and have their first system, which I’d lock the hell out of.

   We are not “usual” about our tech though. We’re both tech savvy, but we think it’s more important that our girls play in mud, fall out of trees, collect snails, and play with physical toys. We have neighbors who just kinda let their kids get tablets whenever they want, or get to browse and pick what they watch on TV. We want to be more involved in our kids’ media.

3. I’m 21.

   Can say w certainty kids born between 2000-2005ish got it pretty rough with unrestricted internet access. A lot of my friends and I have experiences we thought were normal but now feel pretty uncomfortable in hindsight.

   I’ve worked w kids for a while too and the youngest I’ve seen w a phone was 5. She could only call her dad/mom and had kid settings on all the entertainment apps. Another kid was under 2 and knew how to punch in the TV password for making purchases, so I’m assuming it’s gonna be rough by the time they can start reading lol.

4. Diff families will handle it differently.

   There’s a teen in our family and they have access to their smart phone and Chromebook and desktop but there are parental controls on there.

   More strict parents seem to not give their kids (hand me down) phones until age 12 in my area.

5. My kids don’t have smartphones, but they can use ours with parental controls or supervision. On the computer, they know what’s off-limits (social media, online gaming, unapproved YouTube) and are allowed a limited amount of time unsupervised or supervised. We have a part-time cellphone phone my oldest daughter gets to use when she goes on overnight trips.