There are many times when a parent should be giving their attention to their child, but they aren't because their attention is on their phone. The specific activity they're doing on their phone doesn't matter.

Before, you could still do these activities instead of focusing on your child, but the way that manifested itself was completely different.

A parent going to the bar after work is different than a parent being at home but ignoring their child because they would rather look at their phone. In the first case, there is a clear line between when the parent is at home and when the parent is at the bar. And, it is fairly obvious if the parent is spending too much time at the bar and not enough time at home.

In the smartphone situation, the parent can now be on their phone literally 100% of the time they're at home. The child has no idea if their parent is ready to focus on them, or is going to be distracted by the phone. And, it's not obvious at all if the parent is spending too much time on the phone.

Therefore, from the perspective of the child, replacing the old activities with a smartphone activity is much much worse.

My point is: bad parenting is bad parenting. As far as I know, smartphones haven't created bad parenting, or other social ills. They've just made it less legible, because now both the healthy activities and the unhealthy ones just look like "using your phone" to external observers.

If the point is to figure out whether someone is a good parent, measuring "time spent on smartphone" will give completely useless answers, and so judging a parent for spending a lot of time on their smartphone at home is simply wrongheaded. You have to ignore the phone (the medium), and look at what they're actually doing (the activity.)

Fun fact: some parents do much of their communication with their children through their phone. Non-deaf parents of deaf children will often text more than they sign.

Being at a play group is mutually exclusive with actively doing work as a workaholic. With smart phones you can be a bad parent while being in proximity with your child. Its a new issue. I think in the old days bad parents were forced to be good parents sometimes because they had to look after their children. Now bad parents can be bad parents 24x7 and children are picking up on it.

Having observed quite a number and variety of parents in proximity with their children over the years, I can quite confidently state that being a bad (in the sense of neglectful) parent in proximity to a child does not require a smartphone and is not a new issue.

And obviously being an even worse (abusive) parent in close proximity to a child really doesn't require a smartphone, and is equally not a new issue.

> I think in the old days bad parents were forced to be good parents sometimes because they had to look after their children.

No. You never had to look after your children except out of a desire not to be a maximally neglectful parent, either out of sense of duty or desire to avoid adverse social consequences. That hasn't changed.

> Now bad parents can be bad parents 24x7

They always could, and those “best” at being bad parents often were.

This is my main point. It has changed. If you leave your young child at home and go to work, you are criminally neglectful. If you stay at home and read your phone but otherwise ignore them, you are not criminally neglectful.

But, it hasn't.

> If you leave your young child at home and go to work, you are criminally neglectful.

True.

> If you stay at home and read your phone but otherwise ignore them, you are not criminally neglectful.

False. It may be harder for authorities to get the first lead which triggers an investigation which identifies criminal neglect in that case, but it is still criminal neglect. With or without the phone, which is immaterial; you can stay home and drink liquor all day while neglecting your child. Or stay home running an in-house brothel. Or stay home reading a book with the kid shut up in another room. Or, well, lots of things that don't need a smartphone, many of which are depressingly well attested in the records of actual child neglect cases.

There have been high profile cases of people who stayed home with their children and severely neglected them being identified, investigated, prosecuted, and punished...since before smartphones were a thing. And, even in the ones after smartphones, I've never seen smartphone use identified as a significant factor.

And it's perfectly possible to be near your child with your nose buried in a book or a magazine.

Yes, it was. The parent could be chatting to other parents and ignoring their child, the parent could be reading a book or magazine and ignoring their child.

The phone has just made it less explicitly signalled. If you want to read a book at a place you have to bring it to that place, you have to consciously select out a book and carry it with you; whereas your phone is light and you carry it everywhere, so it is easier to slip into that behaviour.

I think they have severely facilitated bad parenting. They've made it easy.

In the past, if a borderline bad parent was faced with hanging out at home with their child vs going out to the bar, they might very well have stayed home whereas the same parent would opt for the dating app. It's gotten much easier to make the bad choice.

I do not agree with this. Just because you're doing some important work on your phone doesn't mean it's not bad parenting, if you should be interacting with your child instead.

Maybe this is a different way to look at it: have you seen parents at the bus stop, say, playing on their phones and not paying attention to their kids? (I say "their" but this is almost every parent, some time or other.) That's new behavior that didn't exist before smartphones, because it couldn't. Maybe those people were just as bad at parenting 25 years ago, but their bad parenting wasn't enabled and encouraged nearly as much -- the technology just wasn't there.

I agree that "time spent on smartphone" is a very blunt metric -- any single easily-measurable number would be. But I also think it's a relatively good one. At least in the same ballpark as "time spent watching TV". Sure, what you watch on TV is relevant, but if you watch TV for 8 hours a day, that's very likely to be unhealthy.

Before smartphones, a working father might head after work to the bar, to avoid his own family until he's calmed down from how frustrated his boss makes him. After smartphones, the same father might instead head into his study with a bottle of whiskey and talk to his friends (who are also getting drunk in their own homes) on a group-chat, or over a game of Fortnite.

Before smartphones, a stay-at-home mother might have to run errands for a few hours: going to the bank, going to the grocery, going to attend a continuing-education class; and she would perhaps leave her child at home, or ask someone to babysit them, depending on the age. Now, instead, she's setting up some bill-payments and transfers in a banking app, then picking through a grocery-delivery app, and then watching an online lecture and participating in a forum as part of an online continuing-education program.

In both cases, the parents are now spending more time at home than they were before—but no more (or less) time paying attention to their kids than they were before.

If you measure the delta (time where you're near the kids but ignoring them), it looks like it's going up. But this is as misleading a statistic as the one that says seat-belts increase injuries: no, they don't, they just turn fatalities into injuries, and nobody was counting the injuries sustained during fatalities. Nobody was counting time spent outside the home as time spent ignoring your kids.

Of course people were counting that!

I recall a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where Calvin phones up his dad at work and asks him what he's doing. "Don't you think a game of Calvinball would be more fun?" (It would be, of course, so Calvin's dad heads home to play.) Or just think about the cliche of a politician retiring "to spend more time with his/her family."

Your examples sound great and noble but not really very realistic. Realistic is parents checking Facebook and Instagram at otherwise idle moments -- "idle" when they could be paying attention to their kids.

You are probably right that historically, many fathers were absent a lot of the time. That has definitely changed a lot but I don't think smartphones are the cause.

Even if everything you said is correct, there could still be a significant difference between "my dad isn't here a lot of the time" and "my dad ignores me a lot of the time" (smartphones greatly enabling the latter). Neither is great, but the latter in particular risks setting a dangerous example to kids when it comes to them learning how to socialize with others.

I saw plenty of people at bus stops or similar places with kids ignoring them long before smartphones. Sure, the use of a smartphone while doing so is new, but it doesn't fundamentally transform anything.

My parents were experts at being in the same room as me while abrogating my existence. My mother lived on the phone (you know, the kind you put to your face and go “oh I know... oh I know.... oh he didn’t!”), and my father had a newspaper for a face.

I inevitably one day had enough, and shredded the newspaper at the breakfast table, threw the phone into the garden. Oh, the hiding I got for that - but at least it was attention.

They sent me to boarding school shortly thereafter, which was a relief, for the reasons you describe.

But that is just my anecdotal evidence just like the article is just anecdotal. Give me some real research showing parents are giving children less attention and to a degree that it is negatively impacting them and I'll care.

all those have significant higher friction and time/effort required than smartphone based equivalent. Instant gratification is extremely important factor in the enforcement of addiction. It is like gambling addiction by playing weekly state lottery vs. playing slot machine or roulette in casino.

PS I don't believe any of the people quoted saying "Wow really opens your eyes huh, a lesson for us all" are going to change one iota!

And so, if you're a little bit bored while talking to someone? Oops, you've just pulled out your phone.

I do that. I catch myself doing it, though, and sheepishly put it away, pretending I was just checking the time. It requires a bit of self-awareness, though, and that decreases when people are tired and under stress. I would expect that people who would previously just be "zoning out" are now "phoning out."

(On the other hand, you know what seems to be a novel piece of social etiquette that I entirely approve of? People whipping out their phones while eating. Not while waiting for their food—while actually putting the food in their mouths. There's seemingly no longer a social norm about "not talking with your mouth full", so people try to carry on a conversation while also getting food stuffed into their food-holes, and neither one goes as well. Presenting yourself as slightly distracted [by, say, an "interesting" article on your phone] decreases the social pressure on everyone else to talk. It's a social-engineering "hack", that seems to be rapidly approaching an established convention.)

We can only deal with that responsibility if we think deeply about the human instincts, urges and needs that our technology interacts with. We need to reflect on the strengths and vulnerabilities of the mammalian brain. We cannot be glib or facile, we cannot just say "put your phone down", we cannot just blame the users or a handful of huge multinationals. We need to ask ourselves honestly whether we are making salad or junk food, whether we are making medicine or cigarettes. We need to ask that question often - when we are planning an MVP, when we are adding a feature, when we are gamifying a metric. Is this function call exploitative? Does this for loop enrich the world?

Many apps are designed to be addictive, which doesn't help.

You can do a study that proves that someone is "addicted to their phone" just like you can do a study that proves that someone is "addicted to using their car." That doesn't say much about why, so it's kind of a useless "fact."

Theoretically, you can be addicted to the process of using your phone, just like you can be addicted to driving, but I kind of doubt that that's what's driving the majority of what people refer to as "smartphone addiction."

More likely, they're addicted to specific activities that happen to exist on phones. Remove the phone, and they'd still be addicted to those activities; they'd just be doing them somehow else. Escapists gonna escape; socializers gonna socialize; etc.

Facebook or Instagram might be a superstimulus for pulling in a particular kind of competitive narcissists, but I have no doubt that such people would still be trying to show off how great their lives whether the apps were there or not. They just might not feel as much of a reward for doing so—because fewer people would be paying attention—so they might feel a sense of ennui (from this drive of theirs going unfulfilled), rather than a sense of dependence (from it going intermittently fulfilled.)

Not necessarily. A smartphone makes a lot of activities much lower-friction than they would be otherwise, and often much higher-reward. This is enough to drastically change a lot of people's behavior.

By modifying the pursuit of that activity in a number of ways, the activities become more addictive. It is more frictionless to begin them, reward is provided more instantly, and new ways to gamify the activity increase the dopamine response.

To say it is not the phone is true, in the sense that the phone on its own is not terribly addictive solely as a physical object. But the distinction is somewhat pointless when it has a large "addictiveness coefficient" to other activities.

Hate Facebook, if you like. Hate news services with apps. Hate the addictive ecosystems.

But hating the phone means biasing yourself even against phones with no addictive apps installed on them. It means fomenting a movement to get away from "smarts" in phones altogether, resulting in things like https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/1/17066494/li....

"Dumb smartphones" are a cute idea, but also a reactionary one; rather than just curating an apps marketplace to disallow these addictive activities, they entirely preclude this thing in your pocket from being a portable Turing machine, capable of achieving whatever functionalities you might want/need it to.

Consider an alternate world to our own, where we had had an established+successful smartphone-luddist movement for the last 5-10 years, most phones looked like the Light Phone, and you'd be breaking social norms to have a "full-fat" smartphone. Would these exist?

• ride-sharing apps

• WordLens (and its incarnation in Google Translate)

• password managers and TOTP 2FA (and mobile cryptocurrency wallets, if you like)

• podcasts

• maps with buildings and travel-times on them, and solid public-transit routing models

• competent voice-recognition (and thus the leaps-and-bounds-better accessibility for blind users we have today)

• the eBook ecosystem

• DSLR-quality phone cameras

• VoIP apps (and thus, the commoditization of cellular providers)

• streaming video-service mobile apps (and thus, demand for 4G cellular infrastructure)

All of these things are—at least in my opinion—unalloyed goods. None of them are addictive (or are addictive only to the background level of addiction we've already culturally come to terms with in entertainment products); they're just things that allow your smartphone to be the solution to a problem you've already set out to solve.

But, if we spin smartphones themselves as a cultural net-negative, I don't expect we'll see many more of these utility-type innovations.

Sure, many of these things are nice, but phrasing them as "unalloyed goods" I think it extremely one-sided and comes only from a techno-centric perspective. You don't have to be a Luddite to actually consider downsides of the things you mentioned and upsides of their alternatives.

• ride-sharing apps

Call a Taxi, ride a bike, get a ride from a friend, walk. How is a ride sharing app an unalloyed good on a glorious day for a bike ride?

• WordLens (and its incarnation in Google Translate)

Effort put into foreign languages "the hard way"--study, recall, practice--actually strengthens your mental capacity, rather than being spoonfed answers by an AR system automatically that never leaves space for you to grow, never challenges, and instead treats you like a complete know-nothing, which you will remain if you fully rely on it. Learn some language! It's fun!

• password managers and TOTP 2FA (and mobile cryptocurrency wallets, if you like)

I am not sure how a password manager is an unalloyed good? It allows you to have more accounts and more passwords and not remember anything, but it presents a security risk...

• podcasts

Radio. Books. Talking to people.

• maps with buildings and travel-times on them, and solid public-transit routing models

Learning the streets, navigation skills, learning how to read a bus timetable, asking people, talking to people on the subway--asking for directions!!!?

• competent voice-recognition (and thus the leaps-and-bounds-better accessibility for blind users we have today)

People are pretty good voice recognizers. Who do you want to talk to and what for?

• the eBook ecosystem

You got me there. Books are heavy.

• DSLR-quality phone cameras

• VoIP apps (and thus, the commoditization of cellular providers)

I dunno. People pretend like phones didn't exist before mobile phones. There used to be such a thing as payphones on many street corners, if you really really needed to call from somewhere. Hotel lobbies, bars, your friend's house, etc.

• streaming video-service mobile apps (and thus, demand for 4G cellular infrastructure)

For what really? I mean, so you can ignore everything else around you? I don't get it. Why do you just assume this is so much better than the real world? It just isn't!

This is a joke, right?

He explained that when Facebook was being developed the objective was: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” It was this mindset that led to the creation of features such as the “like” button that would give users “a little dopamine hit” to encourage them to upload more content.

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Seems reality and fiction is getting more and more mixed up... especially if you have Ted or Deadpool showing up to talk shows (then again, this isn't a new thing is it, Bugs Bunny showed up on a talk show in the 1990's).