Meet the parents who refuse to give their kids smartphones

The vast majority of teens and tweens today have smartphones. These
parents said no.

For Adriana Stacey, it's very simple.

"I'll never buy a smartphone for any of my children," she says.

It's a personal stance born of professional experiences. Stacey is a
psychiatrist who works primarily with high school and college students
in Fayetteville, Ark., and in her practice she routinely asks new
patients to swipe open their phones and show her how much screen time
they're clocking per day.

"I rarely find one that's under nine hours," she says. "So, these
teenagers are spending more time on their phone than they are
sleeping."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/09/parents-kids-smartphones/

***** Moderator's Note *****

I knew an Amateur Radio Operator who had a teenage daughter, back
around 1995, and he figured out a novel way to obviate the problem.
When his daughter demanded that she get a cellphone, because "All the
cool kids have them," he told her that she could have a special radio
instrument which would top whatever the "cool" kids had, and made her
obtain a Ham Radio license to get one.

My buddy then went and bought her a small 220 MHz Ham transceiver
which had been set up to use a local Amateur Radio repeater, and
whenever his daughter wanted to get a ride or ask permission to visit
a friend's home after school, she would call home on her "special"
phone, using the "autopatch" which connected the repeater to a phone
line, and make a request without needing to pay for a cell phone or
airtime. He told me that when other kids asked where to get one, he
had told her to say that her dad worked at the phone company (which
was true) and had speacial permission to use channels that the
ordinary cellphone users couldn't get, and none of them, according to
him, ever persued their questions any further.

Admitedly, he had advantages others did not: they lived in a rural
community far from the major cities, and he owned the repeater
equipment himself, and 220 MHz has always been a rarely used band, but
it shows what you can do to fight back against megabuck peer pressure,
"influencers," and the other tricks of the marketing juggernauts that
infested the early years of the cellular revolution.

Bill Horne
Moderator

On 5/13/2022 9:06, Monty Solomon wrote:
> Meet the parents who refuse to give their kids smartphones
>
> The vast majority of teens and tweens today have smartphones. These
> parents said no.
>
> For Adriana Stacey, it's very simple.
>
> "I'll never buy a smartphone for any of my children," she says.
>
> It's a personal stance born of professional experiences. Stacey is a
> psychiatrist who works primarily with high school and college students
> in Fayetteville, Ark., and in her practice she routinely asks new
> patients to swipe open their phones and show her how much screen time
> they're clocking per day.
>
> "I rarely find one that's under nine hours," she says. "So, these
> teenagers are spending more time on their phone than they are
> sleeping."
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/09/parents-kids-smartphones/

This is teetering on the edge of "telecom" conversation, but my 7 year
old daughter's doctor is _very_ against smart phones and tablets for
children. She is adamant that all of this screen time is exacerbating
attention deficit issues in children, and causing focus issues in
school. Of course, my daughter doesn't have a phone, but we've reduced
her screen-time (if it were only up to me, she would have never had the
tablet in the first place).