Rebecca Onion, a Senior Editor at Slate.com, has come out against phones for kids. Her essay is titled, "I Changed My Mind About Kids and Phones. I Hope Everyone Else Does, Too." Here is an excerpt, outlining her argument:
On the issue of kids, smartphones, and social media, a vibe shift is happening, and it’s happening on the left, right, and in the center. Here’s a survey of recent anti-phone discourse on the topic in politics and culture in recent weeks and months: The TikTok “ban” (don’t call it that) garnered bipartisan support in the House, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill making it illegal for people under 14 to have social media accounts in Florida. “People are so unwilling to blame iPhones as one of the main culprits in a variety of social ills but graphs like [these] are revealing. It’s obviously the phones,” zillennial writer Magdalene Taylor tweeted, semi-virally, attaching that infamous “teens today aren’t hanging out” graph. Hosts of two podcasts enjoyed by Very Online left-ish millennials, TrueAnon and Time to Say Goodbye, devoted episodes to making freewheeling arguments against the use of social media by kids. (Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates who has written for Slate, even suggested on the latter show that smartphones should be made illegal for use by people under 18. Tyler! A take!) A trend piece in the Daily Beast uncovered interviewees from Gen Z who said that when they had kids, they certainly wouldn’t be letting them be “raised by” iPads. “Get offline. It is not alcohol, it is not porn, it is not weed, it is not blah blah, it is being online. Get offline,” wrote a Reddit user on r/GenZ.Things are different in 2024. Yes, we have new data on the shape of the mental-health crisis among teens, and especially teenage girls, and how it’s worsened since phones got front-facing cameras and platforms became dominant. But the biggest shift doesn’t come from looking at new data; it’s from experience. More and more people have a boomer relative who was radicalized on Facebook, a grandma who won’t look up from her phone during family visits, or a Gen X partner adept at the art of phubbing. We, who are supposed to enjoy grown-adult levels of impulse control, have had trouble sleeping due to doomscrolling, spent Zoom meetings looking at Instagram, or gotten into weird fights with strangers on Reddit that derailed us emotionally for far too long. We, ourselves, with our developed brains, have felt like flies on sticky paper when it comes to social media; of course children, still forming their selves and navigating the pitfalls of pre-adulthood, may be affected by it too. “Kids probably shouldn’t have smartphones” has lost its generational sting. It has come to look more and more like common sense (emphasis added).
I have addressed this topic before (for instance, in my postings: "Where Are You?" and "Let Me Explain The Modern World"). I think I would have to be counted, with Onion, as part of the group that believes that "kids probably shouldn't have smartphones."
Let me remind you, though, of that "grandma who won't look up from her phone during family visits." That grandma is mentioned in Onion's article on why "kids" shouldn't have smartphones.
"Kids"? How radical are you willing to be? Looks like maybe the older set should be included, too.
Do we, really, think that providing everyone with a device that invites us all to ignore the reality of where we physically are, at any particular moment, is actually a great invention and advance?
I am suggesting that it's not.
Showing you just how "radical" I really am!
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