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EE warns parents against giving children under 11 a smartphone (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 month ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (30 children)

EE is advising parents that children under 11 should be given old-fashioned brick or “dumb” phones that only allow them to call or text instead.

That sounds ridiculous. An 11-year-old is, what, a fifth-grader in the US?

If they have access to a computer or something in addition to their phone, okay, maybe. But for a lot of young people in 2024, their smartphone is their sophisticated electronic device. Maybe they tack on a keyboard or whatnot. But take that away, and they don't have a computer to use. A computer is just too essential of a tool to not let someone learn.

Kids used to veg out in front of the TV, where material is generally not all that fantastic and the device is noninteractive. I think that it's great that smartphones are replacing that.

I was programming when I was in first grade. I was doing computer graphics and word processing somewhere around there. Those are important skillsets to have. I made use of those. You want kids to pick those up. You do not want to push those back. I'd get a computer of whatever form into their hands at the earliest point that they can avoid destroying it.

If your concern is that you want to restrict access to pornography or something, okay, fine, whatever, set up content filtering. I think that they're probably going to get at it anyway. But that does not entail not permitting access to the computing device. That's a restriction on access to the Internet.

In May this year, MPs on the education committee urged the government to consider a total ban on smartphones for the under-16s and a statutory ban on mobile-phone use in schools as part of a crackdown on screen time for children.

That'd be, what, up to high school before you have one? And that's not "I have parents who want that", but outright "the government doesn't let anyone do that".

Wikipedia. Google Maps. The store of knowledge available from search engines. I use those all the time. You want to cut them off from that?

I read and certainly write way more text than I did in the pre-Internet era. Do you want kids reading and writing less?

I mean, I'm just boggled.

[–] tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Agree with your points on having a pocked PC to hack with, the issue here is then with mobile and their OS makers which mindbogglingly have omitted to design a working and hardly hackable "children account mode", since what is damaging here is not what they can fiddle within their devices, nor certainly what they can read from wikipedia, but rather the unfiltered and unaccountable exposure to a profiling oriented social media storm which even adults fatigue to cope with.

I'm sure it isn't unheard of OSes having a hardware locked managed kiosk mode, because that is what smartphones basically need.

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