Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable broader access than they would otherwise choose.

When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at night but it is possible for them to pull them from the charging cabinet.

Cue blog posts about section 230 and how it’s impossible to do hard things and parents should be held accountable not companies, meager fines, captured bureaucrats, libertarians, and on and on…

I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our own computers before age 16.

> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").

16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)

This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?

Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.

I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.