“No smartphone” is a boundary, and U.S. parents are often raised not to set boundaries under threat of mental, emotional, and/or physical abuse. So it makes perfect sense that we have now-parents completely unable to define and discuss boundaries with their children. Far better to capitulate in the face of an uncertain and not life-threatening risk than to allow their child to ever think that boundaries are healthy, etc. For the unfamiliar, here is a good starting point for understanding the generational cognitive dissonance in play: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/contradicto...

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b00ty4breakfast 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even the most Laissez-faire of parenting has boundaries; no reasonable adult is allowing their teenager to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway. The problem is that smartphone access isn't seen in the same category of danger that recreational opiates and unlicensed driving are in.

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binary132 2 days ago | parent [-]

“Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here. Most people unfortunately aren’t very reasonable.

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Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> “Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here.

No it's not. I could imagine sentences where it would be, but not this sentence. Here, watch me replace the word:

"99% of adults are not allowing their teenager to to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway."

Even if most people aren't ""reasonable"", they are whatever adjective that sentence describes.

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altairprime 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

“Over half of U.S. adults surveyed said that it’s very inappropriate, somewhat appropriate, or were uncertain whether it’s appropriate for their child to set boundaries for their interactions” is a reasonable-sounding statement, too; it’s plausible, applies to children of all ages (below or beyond age 25!), and is demonstrably an aspect of culture represented by media and other ephemera.

The position itself is, of course, completely unreasonable — boundaries are never inappropriate to consider (and to contrast with the parent’s boundaries about immediate versus deferred conversations in unsafe circumstances, the child’s age and cognitive ability to assess risk, and so on), no matter how uncomfortable it is to teach a child about boundaries by honoring one they’ve presented one! — but that intolerance is presented in such a reasonable guise, with a tone of majority support to quash any brief qualms, that it causes many to overlook its true nature.

See also “pleasant”, as in “Pleasantville”.

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binary132 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you thought the discussion was actually about 12 year olds doing heroin and driving, I think you might have missed something.

	▲	Dylan16807 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable". Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing. In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries. The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable". TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.

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godelski 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving

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b00ty4breakfast 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure you've got some hard data about the crazy amount of parents knowingly letting little Timmy develop an addiction to street drugs

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j45 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's starting to change in places, including in the US.

The reality is it's not the smartphone, but the slot machine type software running on it.

There's more than enough science that placing this kind of content in front of humans before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed at age 25-26 leads them to leaning on the pre-frontal context of the adults around them, and missing that, whatever they're spending the most time with that's then possibly raising them.

Screens at lower resolutions and quality didn't seem to be as much of an issue compared to the hyper saturated motion with sound effects that are consciously chosen to keep eyeballs.

Like anything, digital can be used for good, or bad, and in lieu of good, the other can to happen and become more of a default.

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godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

I agree but it is much harder to stop people from building slot machines than to stop children from using them. Even easier than telling people to stop using them.

And hey, maybe if we actually take some autonomy and remove that market from actors who don't want to build the things the market is requesting then they'll actually build the things the market is requesting... it's easy to say we want something but no one listens when we still buy the thing we say we hate. Maybe it's addiction but it's still hard to fight against. (Though we could still do better by accommodating those who are trying to break the network effects. You can complain how hard it is to get off Facebook but if you're not going to make the minuscule extra effort to accommodate those who do leave then how can you expect the ground to be laid for you to?)

At the end of the day though, with kids, the OP's argument fails because it either assumes smartphones are an inevitability or that the benefits outweigh the costs. It's a bad argument.

	▲	j45 a day ago \| parent [-]
		The market isn't always requesting thing, viral consumer loops are used to form addictive habits to get a market to request things. That being said, it could be used for more positive things too, beyond attention farming and resale to ads alone.