The modern internet is weird. It’s a space where you can link up a Skinner machine feeding you pure hate and vitriol directly to your brain, but it’s also a space where you can teach yourself literally anything.

I feel like the trick is using it more for the latter and less for the former. Even using Beehaw too much, it quickly becomes obvious that I need to shift my focus. Endless streams of news and opinion aren’t, like, great.

I think there are ways to impose child safety locks, as it were, on a phone’s access to the internet? Like a curfew or “max hours in a day” limit. I feel like that would make more sense than not giving a kid a phone.

And there are also tricks one can apply to circunvent some of that attention-grabby design, like putting the phone in grayscale mode.

Also, unlike cigarettes, smartphones serve many purposes, and 99.999% of people (in countries where they are ubiquitous) will need to own one at some point. I think it may be better to actively teach a child how to handle the information-overload, attention grabbing tricks, misinformation, and so on of the internet, rather than leaving them to just figure it out for themselves later on.

My concerns with denying children a smartphone altogether include:

• Phones are an essential safety device, and smartphones are better at this than dumb phones because of things like GPS and maps navigation (especially for kids who get lost easily), clear emergency alerts (e.g. “expect a tsubami in 3 minutes”, or “there is an active shooter currently around the grocery store at x and y street”), the ability to store easily accessible information for first responders in the phone (which can sometimes also be auto-shared when you make a 911 call), and the ability to easily and silently text 911 if they find themselves in a situation where calling is dangerous.

• Phones and social media are now an integral part of most kids’ social lives. If a kid doesn’t have a smartphone and can’t join in on real time group chats, with the ability to see the things their peers share in that chat, or if they don’t have video chat access, they’ll be cut off from a lot of other kids and their social life will suffer for it.

And access to social media is especially important for kids who need to find support they can’t find easily irl, like for queer or neurodivergent kids who benefit from talking to others like them on the internet - even if they’re lucky and their parents are supportive, it’s not the same as finding a peer support group. For similar reasons, access to digital library collections can be a big deal. Granted, some of this would be covered if they have access to the internet on a laptop or desktop, but at that point they’d have internet access anyway so they might as well have the phone too.

• Phones are more and more often required for basic utilitarian access, too. Sometimes taking the city bus requires a phone because you can’t pay cash anymore. Sometimes the laundry machine doesn’t take coins, only app or internet payment. Sometimes the menu at a restaurant is just a QR code that tells you to look at their website. It sucks but it’s only getting more this way.

I’m not advocating for giving smartphones to literal toddlers, but beyond a certain (fairly low) age I think at this point the risks of giving a kid a smartphone are outweighed by the risks of them not having one.