I’m disappointed that most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
This is a horrible truth. Treating kids as though their opinion matters is considered insanity.
Do people even use the term young adult anymore?
Infantising of adults I think is a huge issue we have in society.
It was the case that 16 was defacto adulthood in years gone by. Now I hear people saying you aren’t an adult till 25 or 30! If there are 25 year old wandering around that aren’t adults it’s a failing of the parents and society.
In school when we hit ~16 we got treated entirely differently, the teachers talked to us instead of parents, we was in control of our time. They joked with us. It really made me grow up because I got treated like a grown up.
Same thing with scouts and rugby when I was younger, being pushed to be responsible made me grow. As eduction improves overtime we should be making more capable 18 year old not less.
It’s more of an American thing I think. A 20-year-old child, I’ve literally seen that phrase used. Mental.
with modern science, we have learned that the prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully developed until around age 25. does that mean you’re a child at 24? no. but you are adolescent, and we should have some cognizance about that
I have ADHD, I don’t think mine will ever fully develop.
If you cannot behave like an adult by the age of 24 there’s something more wrong with you than your prefrontal cortex.
This is not about behaviour, it’s about brain functions. Humans brains under the age of 25 function in a different way, because they are not fully developed, no matter what behaviour people learnt to show.
I was 24 years old. I was the same person I am now that I’m over 50.
You literally are not.
“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along - the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires.”
—Orson Scott Card, Ender’s GameIt’s important to note that a big part of that book is repeated evidence that Ender is not a “normal” child. He is heavily implied to have murdered one of his bullies before he was ever pulled out of society and into training (where he explicitly kills another bully).
Nah that quote’s from the foreword, he’s talking about himself
They don’t want the right to privacy and freedom for adults either though. Sure they might say they do if you ask them but as soon as they’re mildly inconvenienced by a protest or someone mentions children are in danger they’re all in favour of spying and censorship laws
Just give your kid a decade old budget
Yea, which wouldn’t be a smartphone then probably.
Depends on what you call “budget phone”. If the criteria is the same as today (sub 300-200 USD) then there are loads of smartphone options.
Here are a bunch of decade old phones that were around 150 USD. https://newatlas.com/best-budget-smartphones-2014/33367/
If you want a cheap non smartphone phone then you could just buy a dirt cheap new one if you wanted.
Sure. Then again, if the goal of getting your kid a phone is so that they won’t be ostracized, I’m not sure if a dumbphone will help with that.
Kids in some parts of USA were shunned at some point because the messages they send get the wrong colored bubble. I.e. those losers are using Android phones instead of Apples.
Things like this make me think that the solution has to be forced on all children. Or their parents, more like.
I don’t really see phones as a problem, it’s the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it’s too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.
Prob a good way to get your kids bullied lolz
They can get bullied for not having phones, they can get bullied through phones and social media. They can get bullied for not having stupid ass Fortnite skins. Anything is an excuse for shitty kids who want to bully,
I don’t give a shit, don’t get them anything. Make them wear raggedy clothes and not use deodorant, I’m sure they will be fine
Pretty sure that clothes are more important than fortnite skins
I’m pretty sure I never said they weren’t.
Every phone offers simple to use parental controlls.
Single player games with retro graphic were enough to keep me entertained for hours when I was young. I can’t imagine how it’s like for the kids nowadays to have access to all the entertainment the internet provides.
“No one is bored, everything is boring”
Love that.
Not to mention access to social media at such a young and formative point in life
Some play those exact same games ported or on emulators. it’s the circle of life 😆
DOSBOX & SNESEMU 4 life.
And the adults back then bitched and moaned about how we were rotting our brains doing this instead of playing outside or reading or other activities they approved of.
Right? Before that it was tv. Before that it was rock and roll. I was actually told to go outside more because I was READING TOO MUCH. Idk why everyone feels like their way of entertainment is better than everyone else’s. It’s so weird that we can’t let people enjoy themselves unless they do it our way.
Nah, I grew up in the 90s and while we had video games and PC games, we also did a LOT of non video game activities.
Riding our bikes, sports, making shit in our parent’s garage, playing in a band, RISK board game nights, cinema, arcades, hanging out at the mall, rc cars.
I mean, there was almost no time to spend playing video games.
Today’s youth are missing a lot, and they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of mental health issues and the inability to be resilient through a lack of experiences.
My kids, fortunately, had at least part of their youth without a phone. I can’t imagine what disaster awaits kids who only know phones.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones, as concerns grow about online safety and the impact of social media on mental health.
Daisy’s got kids of a similar age and we were both feeling really horrified and worried and just didn’t want them to have smartphones at 11, which seems to be the norm now.”
Fernyhough and Greenwell hoped the movement would embolden parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 14, with no social media access until 16.
Smartphones expose children to a “world that they are not ready for” because they can access pornography and content on self-harm and suicide, which can have a detrimental impact on their mental health, Fernyhough said.
Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, called earlier this week for a complete ban on social media access for under-16s, and said more people will have mental health issues unless tech companies take action to restrict access to harmful content.
“They can live their childhood as they should do, focus on their learning and enjoy the real world without having to spend their life scrolling, which we all know is not good for them.”
The original article contains 610 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I never got a smartphone until 9th grade and it never really affected me that much. Then again, I was the oddball kid who pretty much never used social media outside of yt.
But nowadays social media is so garbage and same goes for maybe 97% of yt, so I can see why parents don’t want their kids having a smartphone. Having pretty much instant access to services designed to keep you on their platform while also making you depressed over the life you could be living but aren’t is never a good idea, especially for impressionable teens trying to find their place in the world.
So then parents should just not get their kid a smartphone and stop trying to police everyone else’s kids. It really is that simple
Fair.
Perhaps we can imagine a society where nobody had thought of banning handguns for children. But you can just not buy your own kid a handgun if it’s so important to you.
Yeah I remember that story about those kids killing an entire school with their smartphone.
That’s definitely not a flash equivalency at all.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
Remember when video games were making kids kill each other? Because when I was a kid, that’s what people were trying to ban instead of smartphones.
I think the difference here is in scope of the problem. Video games do make the extremely rare case of murderous psychopathy worse, but it affects very few children. Smartphones affect almost everyone and the problems they are causing can be seen in quality of learning data.
My point stands that smart phones and guns comparisons are a false equivalency and should never be made.
I’m curious what you mean by the quality of learning data. People are getting smarter* on average than ever before. Young folk are more inclusive that ever before. As far as mental health goes, the general acceptance of mental health has caused an increase, and I’m not convinced social media has as much of an impact as that.
Access to mental healthcare has been hugely improved in the last two decades, and we no longer assume people are inherently bad or problematic when they have treatable mental conditions.
Either way, there’s just not enough data and understanding to make sweeping statements, and it reminds me of when rock and roll was evil, dungeons and dragons was turning kids into devil worshippers, tv made kids stupid, and video games made kids violent.
*smarter isn’t a great term here. Information and data is becoming widely available, increases knowledge and capability for every generation. IQ score are continuously going up and needing to be readjusted to keep 100 at average, but IQ is hardly a realistic measurement of… pretty much anything more than problem solving skills.
The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.
I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.
True point.
My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)
For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.
Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.
Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.
How old is she?
Wow, this sounds really dystopian. You monitor the porn that your daughters are watching? Then you’re an absolute nut job and maybe you should be the one who should have their technology access regulated.
She is under 12! Start thinking before you shout.
And btw it’s not monitor porn but porn filter
Yup, I’m disappointed, but most people seem to treat kids as subhuman, not needing the basic right privacy and freedom that they want for adults so much.
Ahh yes, we should let our 4 and 7 year old kids have unfettered 24-hour access to porn, gore, and combat footage or we are treating them as literal subhuman animals.
Never change Lemmy.
dystopia is when you limit your child’s exposure to pornography. wtf
But also apps intended for kids have been complete failures. The only thing they succeeded in was making platforms where advertisers target children easily. Youtube kids feels like a nightmare of elsagate and shovelware, and it’s scary parents are letting their kids use them without realizing just how bad they are.
That might have been partially the intent, but you also don’t see many platforms for kids or teens these days either. When’s the last time that something like Club Penguin was around, rather than everyone having to share the same network/platform?
Uncool boomers be like: “It’s the damn phones”, when they’ve created cities where 2+ tons of metal can freely roam around wherever they like. They’ve created cities where kids cannot go anywhere on their own without being run over by these said metal beasts.
But ofc uncle Kevin, “It’s dem damn phones. Can you at least look at me instead of scrolling through Facebook when I’m talking to you?”
Not all doomers did it. But those who didn’t were communists.
Is it the boomers this time? I remember millennials thinking that about zoomers and now they’ve grown up, zoomers have been saying it about Gen Alpha calling them iPad babys
People say many things. It doesn’t change the fact that the ruling class is largely boomers. Hence, addressing the most influential voting class doesn’t seem so absurd to me.
25% of population gets 100% of representation
Lol it has nothing to do with cars. I grew up in the 90s without a phone and my city wasn’t much different then than now. I was constantly outside playing and so were all the other kids
I grew up in the 90s and my entire childhood neighborhood is concrete now. The overgrown wash where we built forts is gone. The desert surrounding the area? Gone. It’s just roads, shitty apartment buildings, and cement for miles. Maybe it didn’t change for you but my kids could never grow up the same way that I did there. Most of the more wild areas are gone. Banished to the outskirts of town now. Hell, we don’t even really have sidewalks and hardly anything is walkable due to traffic. It has everything to do with cars in plenty of places. There is literally nowhere for kids to be kids within walking distance of me now either.
You do realize that everything around you is mostly built by previous generations when you are not a “boomer”, cause your generation doesn’t do much yet other than differentiate between “cool” and “uncool”? And that’s true for every generation.
Criticizing the ruling class is extremely important to a functioning society. Baby Boomers are largely the ones in power around the world. The largest voting bases of all conservative movements are baby boomers. I wouldn’t mind if the generations that follow criticize us for stuff. That’s just how stuff works.
Not really, criticizing was commonplace and accepted in medieval societies, changes were made by disobedience and rebellions. (I have that fixation on Dutch 80-years war the last few days, hope to get rid of it.)
EDIT: Point is - it doesn’t matter what you say when that doesn’t serve to exchange ideas without interruption and control, and all the talk in the Web in that spirit is controllable and interruptible. Also this can’t be true, there simply were no baby boom in many parts of the world in those years.
This is the wrong take but it’s a part of it for sure.
It seriously is part ‘those damn phones’.
I was a kid long before smart devices, cities were the same urban hellscapes.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Instant gratification from unknown sources under the direction of a 9 year old is a serious problem and people like you who pretend its not are probably part of the generation damaged most by it.
Eh, I have to agree begrudgingly. I remember having this discussion with someone I know about mental health post smartphones. We came across a few studies tracking mental health of adolescents for the past few decades. To compensate for lack of data (due to lack of mental health awareness, yadayadayada), they tried to inductively predict this missing data using various factors. The interesting part however was the increase in mental health issues in the early 2010s. Now of course, while their data might be quite error prone, I think it makes sense logically.
- More exposure to fked up world events (like Gaza, Ukraine, lack of climate action and so on) leads to one being depressed of course.
- In my experience, faceless trolls are much worse than in person bullies.
So yeah, I do agree with you. The situation is not black and white. Unfortunately, the uncool boomers (sorry for the lame term,-I use it to not generalize all boomers) do not see it that way. Banning smartphones in schools is one of the stupidest things to do. Uncool boomers purely blame smartphones, and almost always engage dialog in bad faith. It’s mudslinging basically.
Now, if I present a nuanced opinion here, it won’t be considered at all. Essentially similar to the “leftist long paragraph” meme. Therefore, to combat this, mudslinging back is most effective. At least it drives home some idea (in this case, the idea of walkable city design). Is this bad faith? Yea, unfortunately. But does it make sense to try to have a good faith dialog with someone who doesn’t want to have one?
- More exposure to fked up world events (like Gaza, Ukraine, lack of climate action and so on) leads to one being depressed of course.
What should I do if I live somewhere where fucked up event happens now? Or what kid in Belgorod/Odessa should do?
- In my experience, faceless trolls are much worse than in person bullies.
People have different experiences. Mine is opposite. It happens.
Sorry no, there have been several studies about the negative mental health impacts of always on social media life in teens but you just like muddying the waters so you pretend it’s anyone’s game and give a backhand at the end of your drivel.
Pretty sophisticated but still just forum sliding bullshit.
Sorry no, there have been several studies about the negative mental health impacts of always on social media life in teens but you just like muddying the waters so you pretend it’s anyone’s game and give a backhand at the end of your drivel.
I haven’t come across these, but I don’t deny their existence. I just wrote down what I’ve come across myself. I already agreed with you on this point.
Pretty sophisticated but still just forum sliding bullshit.
I’m sorry that you feel that way. But as you demonstrated just now, you are not interested in engaging in good faith. You are still stuck on the “social media bad” train, when I already agreed with you on that. This is exactly what I mean by mudslinging. People just want to repeat certain phrases again and again, progressively louder and louder while vomiting ad hominems left and right.
It isn’t “forum sliding” if the topic is indeed that complex. But as I stated before, you are not ready to move on from “social media bad”. Hence, how can one engage in good faith in such a scenario?
But how will they ever stop these children from just walking into a store and buying a £500 phone and signing their own service contracts ?
A law saying phone companies can’t open a contract for a kid without a parent present?
In most US states kids under 18 can’t be held to a contract so nobody would give one to them anyway.
Even then, they can go to a dollar store and buy a sim card for super cheap.
I think that’s what doublejay1999 is talking about. Look out for the hidden /s.
:-o
Who says you need a contract. You can just get and activate a prepaid SIM.
Who says you even need cellular service? It’s just a different type of radio signal, VoIP has existed for years. If you even need a phone number. Every app under the sun has a calling feature now, but most people don’t use phone for calling anymore. Wifi is everywhere so cell signal is not as critical these days.
True! I used Skype on a PSP to talk to friends before I had a cell phone. They could more easily use a phone only with wifi.
Wow I had no idea Skype was on PSP.
There even was a camera for PSP specifically.
As a child, I was just not given home wi-fi password, and the cell plan effectively had no internet (to be fair, parents were on the same call-and-sms only plans as well). I definitely did not want internet bad enough to wander around in search of public wi-fi.
why would a kid havy £500
After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.
But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.
quite concerning that misinformation is not taken seriously enough and is allowed to poison minds like a plague with no opposition
I think it may get to the point where tracking who owns what is a lost cause and societies with larger commons are going to pull ahead while our “individualism” centered societies will fall into an endless wave of scams and grifting.
The prophecy wasn’t on terminator, it was on metal gear solid 2, the truth will be unrecognizable from the fakes.
Yup Kojima 1000 years ahead of his time.
So what of the kids going to do instead? People like this always demand that children go outside but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
When I was a kid we used to sellotape each other to the swings and other wholesome activities. But we can’t do that anymore because the park activities have been removed apparently due to “vandalism” i.e normal wear and tear that took place over 10 years has occurred, but we cannot afford to fix it because central government hasn’t given us any money since 2014.
but there’s literally nothing for them to do.
You just hang out and do fun and stupid shit, it’s nice to have special place for it but a construction site and under the bridge is good enough. Problem is modern parents are extremely anxious.
what fun and stupid shit?
Like play games (like war or something), roam around, make fires, have “gangs”, play other pretend stuff (basically role playing but without any real rules ) - ask your parents and grandparents what they were up to when they were kids.
make fires?!?
Yes, more a country side thing, you go to a secluded spot and make a fire.
And aerosol cans, don’t forget the aerosol cans
- This is a privilege a lot of city kids don’t have
- No to fires lmao wtf
- They only did that stuff because there was literally nothing else to do. Not because it was more fun.
I was with you until the “construction site and under the bridge” bit. It definitely takes a bit of imagination, but I’m not sure not wanting your kids to play on a site which requires the use of hard hats classifies as being “anxious”
Kids stood around and stared at their feet before swings were invented, I imagine.
I think hoops and sticks were big for a while
“we’re children! we’re children! we’re children!”
“Pay no attention to Wimp Lo, we purposely trained him wrong… as a joke.”
I think many worked. On the farm, in mines, in factories. Farmers would intentionally have many children just for extra labor. School hours and breaks are, in part, the way they are to let children work on the farm.
Kids go outside and get run over by monster trucks
That sounds like an American problem. We in many countries in Europe don’t have that problem, but our kids still waste their time on smartphones.
My neighborhood has the same problem. There’s absolutely nothing for the teens to do. But all they do is complain in the forums about how the teens are wandering around causing trouble. They’re on the playground, they’re biking on the sidewalks, they’re playing chicken with the cars. Yeah, they’re f****** bored. The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
The last thing you want in your neighborhood is a bunch of bored teenagers.
You forgot about angry mothers. They are scarier. That’s why youtube isn’t banned in russia yet.
We do have new playgrounds, but the problem is that they’re very sanitized and only really suitable for preschoolers. Tweens usually just wander around without any exact place to go.
Even back when I was 9 and playground near my home was replaced with plastic shit for toddlers I knew it was plastic shit for toddlers. On the other side there was stuff for training though. Still nothing for 10-30 or not physically fit.
Dang if parents only could do anything about their children smartphone use.
Like… join a protest demanding a smartphone-free childhood for everybody?
Something, something, something, and then BREXIT comes to mind. That worked out well.
My kid was the last one in their school year to get a smartphone. He was bullied for not having a smartphone. He used to ask me for one several times a day and I stuck to what I’d said, he’ll get one on his birthday. I still feel it was far too early. He was 10 when he got it.
Kids can be real shitheads sometimes
You did the right thing. If it was the 1900s and everyone else was to give their child cigarettes, they might get bullied for having no cigarettes, but you know what is best and you stuck with it
Also you are not getting bullied because you don’t have cigarettes or smartphones, but because you lack self confidence and because you are perceived as social weak (your friends and random bystanders would not come to your help).
You have completely misunderstood this and are trying to overlay some bizarre Andrew Tate-esque psychobabble to explain your misunderstanding.
What? I talk just from my own experience.
You have drawn an incorrect conclusion about the specifics of the social mechanics and cited it as “from your experience” after presenting it as fact.
You could simply have a poor grasp of social mechanics, or be misinformed, misunderstood the original premise but ultimately it doesn’t really matter.
You implied lack of conformity and participation is not a cause of bullying - it absolutely is, its probably the original cause of most bullying.
A lot of words to say that you disagree, without actually explaining why bullies are not targeting kids who are at social disadvantage.
No, you are getting bullied because humans beings are morons who will jump to bully whoever is perceived as different. Do not blame the victim, for fuck sake.
I’m not blaming victims. Obviously it’s on parents of the bully.
Maybe it’s an useful trait that saved us from the other evil hominids? That and the uncanny valley.
Well good fucking job evolution, you managed to screw over autistic people who have empathy while psychopaths who know how to fake it get to abuse everyone
I mean, they wouldn’t even survive if we were still living under the survival of the fittest stuff, which our society doesn’t allow most of the time 🤔
In Sweden, it was mandatory for kindergartens to have “digital learning tools” up until a year ago. I wonder who came up with that brilliant idea.
Nope. You can’t expect me to raise my own child How dare you!
Just like the UK bill wanting an ID for porn sites. And, in the EU, Youtube is wanting my ID for age verification to follow EU law. Isn’t a much less authoritarian solution just to use blocklists, or even mandate sites send an unencrypted flag with content that is “adult” and browsers or routers can choose to deal with that or not.
Youtube never asked for my ID (I’m in the EU). Which country is this?
Like if you don’t want you child to use a smartphone - just don’t buy one for them.
I’ve put through kids through secondary and have two more to go. I universally regret giving them a smartphone at year 7. For the first one we caught valiantly - we said no; she and one other girl in her whole year didn’t have a smart phone. Within 6 months it became clear that she was missing out on a lot of events by not having a phone. We caved in and bought one of those neutered android phones meant for younger people - it sucked and basically didn’t work. After 9 months we got her a used iPhone.
It was also the wrong thing to do. Social media immediately starts shaping them and we still have restrictions on which networks they can go on. She can pry Instagram out of my cold dead hands; that site is liquid poison for a young girl.
I decided to go in the other direction. My two boys got their phones at 7 and 8. I put parental controls on it and never allowed them install apps. Most annoying is the extensive use of Youtube so far, but on the other hand both of them are speaking English and have good grades. The usage is limited to 2 hours a day. And at 9pm the phone locks itself.
However, I talked to them about social media and blocked Whatsapp, Instagram etc. I still need to talk more to them of course, because it’s a risk for adults, too. They are individuals and I respect that they need to have fun after school. And I want them not to be “cool” online, but generally be happy with their lifes.
Our experience was that iPhone parental controls are broken beyond belief. They basically don’t work. Searching online I’m not the only one with that problem. Maybe it’s better on Android.
It’s not that they basically don’t work, they pretty much don’t work full stop. Most of my experience with them was in ios 12 but even in 16 they’re still crap
And Apple know, of course they do. But there isn’t any profit in letting anyone use your phone less.
On Android, I’m using Google Family Link. Pretty much locks down and takes control of the entire phone and let’s you manage it all remotely, it’s akin to attaching a Windows computer to a centrally managed Active Directory domain.
Screen Time on iOS is proper road kill. It’s not clear, it’s slow to update and it does not obey screen time restrictions.
And what was the result? Did that work?
Depends what you mean by “it worked”. Of course the kids play too much games and watch too much YouTube. But at least I have kids that are happy and I really have fun with.
It’s also easier to tell them what I want when I really need them to do something. What I want to avoid is to have kids that don’t have respect towards their parents.
I guess it’s also my attitude. I really like to come back from work and have fun with my kids and see them happy. I know many parents who rather try to get their kids to sleep as soon as possible to have time for themselves.
Honestly I think this is the way to go. You can only avoid it for so long. Rather than trying to stop them it’s probably more effective teaching them control and how to navigate this flood of potentially dangerous influences.
*Poison for any young person.
Bjo doubt. I’ve only had girls at that age so didn’t want to generalise.
Yeah k, as a CF person who works with a lot of kids (PJD), Instagram, Fuckwitbook (Facebook) and Snapchat is very toxic for kids and even adults.
Lol, I would’ve been bullied in school if I didn’t have a phone. At least in later grades when phones became more popular.
Coming from an era when nobody had phones, basically everyone got bullied anyway.
This, tbh. You don’t get bullied for something, you get bullied because bullies want to bully.
In my experience it’s usually the ones that stick out and aren’t seen as “cool”. Not even nerds, just people that are different in one way or another.
So everyone
No? Not everyone got bullied when I went to school, and I’m sure it’s not very different nowadays.
My point is that everyone is “different in one way or another”, so we’re all fair game. That might be getting bullied in front of everyone for being a stereotypical nerd, or it may be another clique talking about you behind your back for dressing preppy and hanging out with the “cool kids”.
I think it depends the most on whether the child has a group of friends or not.
I didn’t have a phone until I was 16 despite most of my peers getting one around 12/13. I didn’t get bullied for not having a phone, in fact no one really made any comments on it other than an occasional “wow, I couldn’t live without my phone!”
Granted, this was over ten years ago, and was probably the first generation of teenagers where cell phones were near-ubiquitous. I don’t know if kids nowadays would get bullied just for not having a phone, but it would severely limit their social interactions. Riding your bike and knocking at your friends’ doors randomly, or going to the mall and expecting you’ll find some people you know there, these are from a bygone era.
I had a phone, but it was an old one, so people made fun of that.
