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‘It went nuts’: Thousands join UK parents calling for smartphone-free childhood
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Perhaps we can imagine a society where nobody had thought of banning handguns for children. But you can just not buy your own kid a handgun if it's so important to you.
Yeah I remember that story about those kids killing an entire school with their smartphone.
That’s definitely not a flash equivalency at all.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
I think the difference here is in scope of the problem. Video games do make the extremely rare case of murderous psychopathy worse, but it affects very few children. Smartphones affect almost everyone and the problems they are causing can be seen in quality of learning data.
My point stands that smart phones and guns comparisons are a false equivalency and should never be made.
I’m curious what you mean by the quality of learning data. People are getting smarter* on average than ever before. Young folk are more inclusive that ever before. As far as mental health goes, the general acceptance of mental health has caused an increase, and I’m not convinced social media has as much of an impact as that.
Access to mental healthcare has been hugely improved in the last two decades, and we no longer assume people are inherently bad or problematic when they have treatable mental conditions.
Either way, there’s just not enough data and understanding to make sweeping statements, and it reminds me of when rock and roll was evil, dungeons and dragons was turning kids into devil worshippers, tv made kids stupid, and video games made kids violent.
*smarter isn’t a great term here. Information and data is becoming widely available, increases knowledge and capability for every generation. IQ score are continuously going up and needing to be readjusted to keep 100 at average, but IQ is hardly a realistic measurement of… pretty much anything more than problem solving skills.