[steve_adams_86]

I know there’s a point to be made that they’re adults and not kids, but hear me out.

I’m 37 and discovered around age 32 that I used my phone too much. It had crept into my waking life over around 8 years and became a real problem. Today I use a lot of strategies to prevent this, and it’s still challenging to ensure I don’t use it too much.

Kids are surrounded by adults like me or even worse than I am. They use their phones so much, rarely to any useful effect, and they train kids to do the same thing. Adults reject advice or instruction to use their phone less, always certain that they don’t do it for any bad reasons and that they’re in control.

Yet they aren’t. It’s a widespread, chronic, and tragically influential problem. Kids are using their phones way too much, but they’re only mimicking what so many adults around them are doing.

Phones also help fill agency gaps in their lives by allowing them to entertain themselves and socialize without relying on an adult to make things happen. Taking that away is hard and genuinely removes something positive from their lives — especially from their perspective.

I know some adults are not hypocrites. These days I’d like to think I’m not, but I certainly was. I think we need to have a handle on that problem before we can ban phones for kids without reasonable pushback from them.

[soperj]

> I think we need to have a handle on that problem before we can ban phones for kids without reasonable pushback from them.

Do you feel the same way about cigarettes?

[steve_adams_86]

Yeah, I think I do. No one should be smoking. It makes no sense. Adults should be discouraged and it shouldn’t be condoned in common areas. Teens get this treatment, adults should too.

Edit: if people want to smoke privately or without sharing second hand smoke, I don’t think they should be stopped. I’m not trying to say it should be outlawed or something. I just don’t like being around it or having it normalized to kids (or even adults — we shouldn’t accept it as something people do so casually, especially in close proximity to non-smokers).

[dcsommer]

Correct parental examples are key to successfully training healthy habits, but phones are plenty addictive in their own right. It's not just a problem of bad parental examples. Why do you think the parents are addicted in the first place? Are children somehow immune? Hypocrisy is not the main thing here.

[steve_adams_86]

I don’t think children are somehow immune. I think the fact that the phones are evidently addictive warrants adults working harder to set a better example.

Expecting kids to abstain from using them in an area should mean adults don’t use them either, though I can imagine cases where it is warranted and makes sense. But, here I think the adult should be expected to only use the phone when warranted.

Perhaps this isn’t typical, but the teachers in my kid’s schools use their phones way too much. It sets such a terrible example. I can try all I want to make screen time intentional in my home, but they go to school and see people (including adults they’re supposed to trust) using their phones without much restraint. I went on a field trip with my youngest and was blown away by how much the teachers were disappearing into screens on a regular basis.

To me, that’s a complete failure to model good behaviour. If kids are growing up with that, who are we to arbitrarily tell them they have to do better?