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Discussion (10 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004817
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002487
Today's kids are discouraged from walking around unsupervised, discouraged from partying together, discouraged from fighting and pranks.
So we take away their phones and kids what, sit around at home? Homes where the parents are phone users ie homes without libraries, without adequate crafts.
Phone-free lifestyles require a society-wide infrastructure, and we don't have that.
Invite your buddies over - your parents are nervously hovering. Hang out at the park - adults find you strange and might call the cops. Schools close at 3, malls gone, libraries full of homeless people.
What's going to happen is the rich kids will be fine, shuttled around from activity to activity. And the poor kids, the kids who used their phones as escapes from dull, grey homes - they'll suffer.
Sure, that's a nice metaphor, but a picture-perfect version is one with predatory Ads everywhere, weird adults pretending they're kids asking them for intimate photos, bullies coming in and out calling them names and foreign agencies trying to radicalize their political views so they hate that immigrant kid or that somewhat flamboyant boy playing with them. Meanwhile their parents pretend they don't see the problem or actually don't see the problem because they don't care about them at all. And neither does their school – unless it's one of those that began to ban phones.
In France?
The worry that kids have nothing to do at all except social media means things went really bad. They can do all the things kids did before social media. Literally all of them are available and present in their rooms and outside.
>Today's kids are discouraged from walking around unsupervised, discouraged from partying together,
Not true in France.
> discouraged from fighting and pranks.
As they should be.
> Phone-free lifestyles require a society-wide infrastructure, and we don't have that.
We literally have that.
Not that I agree with the premise that there isn't anything to do. Even if were to limit the scope to just your examples, printing presses are still around, and those screens can be used as digital alternatives.
The only missing input from society here is that it actually need to put real effort into raising its young.
1. Ban phones
2. ???
3. Childhood is saved!
I'm trying to figure out what Step 2 is supposed to be.