iPad kids are more anxious, less resilient, and slower decision makers

Off Topic
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Simply raise awareness about the risks of using digital devices and the technologies or programs available to protect your children. Contexts and individuals are different, so these measures must be adapted to each case. It is a simple and limited proposal since it does not attack the root of the problem, and that is fine. Every proposal has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the approach being taken. It is only mitigating damage, and that is what parents can do since they have no control over and are not responsible for society’s problems. Failing to understand the limitations of proposals that do not address the root cause of the problem leads us to regulatory measures that, by not understanding the causes of the problem, end up increasing its complexity.

This whole problem is caused by many factors that I have mentioned that carry more weight than blaming the media or parents. For example, if many children spend their time playing games like Roblox, it is not so much because of their “addictive mechanics,” but because not doing so distances them from their group of friends at school who have normalized interacting through this platform. If you don’t have Discord because your parents won’t let you, they are more likely to avoid inviting you to go out somewhere because you are not part of their group. Because of this social pressure, it is normal for them to try to resist this rule set by their parents in one way or another. If they resort so much to digital platforms to communicate, it is simply because it is the easiest thing to do after coming home exhausted from school, homework, and extra courses that parents sign their children up for so that they have something to do even if they don’t like it, such as music or sports.

Proposals that attack the root of the problem would be to give young people greater autonomy by changing city designs to favor people rather than cars. Within this design, outdoor games could be encouraged; school pressures could be reduced; and the educational model could be changed to a freer one that benefits social interaction, such as the Sudbury Valley school, which eliminates things like school grades, etc.

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Thanks. Your answers are very clear and I agree with the vast majority of what you’ve written, but I’d like to go a bit further regarding your last paragraph.

The issues of urbanism and education are fundamental and touch upon some of the roots of the problem. In my opinion, however, there are even deeper roots: political, philosophical, and economic.

Education is controlled by politics since it’s based on laws and regulations, with minimum curricula… teaching is regulated. The public system as it was born from the French revolutionary Condorcet should serve to train both workers and citizens. The revolution failed (the Jacobins) and the rest of us in the West inherited a system designed to create workers more than citizens. As we can observe in the world (and in different surveys), trust in modern science (especially the natural sciences) is at maximum levels, while trust in democracy and laws continues to decline.

What I mean by this is that, although there are alternative ideas and proposals for how things could be changed within the system as we find it today, many of those ideas and proposals are nothing more than voluntarist ideas that don’t really try to change things and, at most, are more about reform than anything else.

The city model as we know it is completely hostile to rural areas, green spaces, public transportation, pedestrian mobility, avoiding the center-periphery division, etc. Ideas about better city models already exist and are well known. They’re not applied because the political class is completely dominated by economic interests (hello David Harvey). People must consume. Public policies and urban design aim to improve people’s lives only insofar as it doesn’t reduce the profits of the automotive industry, fossil fuels, etc.

As for education, more of the same. There are quite original ideas (although I’m completely against the existence of private schools), but they’re not applied because there’s no interest in educating for critical thinking, ethics, and freedom. Decisions come from above, they don’t come from pedagogues, sociologists, or any kind of social scientists. Some politicians listen to these people, but they don’t finance their electoral campaigns.

Although my previous comment was somewhat joking, I really think that the only possibility of changing things is a radical change of the current liberal system. Time will tell. Geopolitics in recent years has been quite crazy with Trump, China, Putin, and the EU.

And with this I’m not calling for immobilism or mere waiting. Activists, educators, writers, intellectuals, journalists, etc., are fundamental and, based on their ideas, people will be able to confront those who will defend totalitarian ideas in the future (hopefully peacefully) and/or, with those ideas, will build the world that comes after fascism (s***, here we go again)

edit: Yes, all this whole thing in a thread about kids using iPads :upside_down_face:

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43
Offtopic

I’m curious about this. Did you mean like as a policy with your kids or with an actual device? If a device, could you share what you use?

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Lots of great info in this thread.

Often I do look at my children and think “maybe we should be like the Amish…then maybe we’ll have privacy and better sleep”.

But more seriously, kids will do what you do. I’m trying to make my life more low-tech in front of them. Even writing notes by hand, which feels very novel (lol) when using apps for as long as I can remember.

I do think a large factor of digital privacy is about personal control.

Control to disconnect from the internet. To modify how your information is handled, and when it can leave your house.

How many of us willingly sit in a room with nothing connected to the internet?

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45

Very well said. Anyone any age can be an ipad kid with how easy it is to doomscroll. Short form content in a vaccum has been such a net negative. It’s important to be mindful with how we consume media

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I mean there is no WiFi in the back of the house where the bedrooms are. I never bought those WiFi extender things. Of course in more compact apartments or houses with more than one floor, it’s not possible to create WiFi free zones like that.

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I recently came across about the concept of kosher phones and tablets when a friend shared with me. Maybe we should switch to them.

What is also striking is the fact that most tech companies have a lot of c-level Jewish executives. Of course this is not exclusive to their community. I remember seeing Telegram’s founder does not keep his phone and etc. Reddit - The heart of the internet

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religious jews are pretty old school, their reasons for opting for dumb phones aren’t for privacy afaik more for anti porn, but i respect the idea of it. i wanna get a dumb phone myself but where i live everything is a qr code, nfc payment, an app option for literally any basic function. huge culture shock but huge step in doing well in this damn attention economy we live in

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I don’t see the harm if total usage is limited and internet access is blocked entirely. Age appropriate movies and downloaded YouTube videos can be streamed from a local Jellyfin server. There are FOSS games for children. Minecraft runs offline without social features if you know how. Older Nintendo titles can be emulated. GOG sells DRM-free games for kids. If I had multiple children they could play together over LAN. This arrangement wouldn’t look much different to what I had growing up. Of course we only had one TV and learned to share. I’d install a killswitch (forced hibernation) for bedtime.

WTF I just realised this isn’t about iPad kids but infants. Who allows their infant to handle a smart device? All they need is food, water, good hygeine, and attention. Bonkers.

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so many parents lol. sit down in a restaurant one day where you see multiple families and pay attention to how many infants-toddlers have ipads or phones they’re glued to. their developing brains are “cooked” as they say

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