I doubt that parenting can do much here.

I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.

How so? Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority. Like how else is a preschooler gonna get a smartphone without adult money and support? Last time I checked preschoolers can't open a checking account and a credit card.

This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.

> Parents and schools can collectively decide to take away the smartphones of preschoolers if keeping them safe and focused was the main priority

Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!

If only there were some kind of collective larger than a family or a school that could decide to take away social media from impressionable children...

Yes, and how would the government ban social media apps from preschoolers without forcing everyone to doxx themselves to prove age?

Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.

They've already done it, mate. You can go read about the Australian law. They are putting the burden of proof on the tech companies: "You have heaps of data on your users, you know who are young teens because you target them for marketing. Ban underage kids or we fine you."

Do children buy devices and pay for internet service?

Good luck denying your 12 year olds a smartphone when every single of their friends has one and they are cut off from everything.

My parents gave me really shitty smartphones that were barely powerful enough to do important things but was an awful experience for Instagram/games/etc until I bought a better one with my own money (similar specs to Pinephone Pro)

No luck necessary. Not like you need permission from your child to deny them things.

You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.

Pocket money is a thing, PAYG is a thing, gift cards are a thing.

Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s.

What the heck is ‘dinner money’?

Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?

Parents can still confiscate their children's belongings even if the child bought them. Imagine a child buys large speakers and puts them on blast with windows open in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter if the child bought them on their own, the parent should still be able to confiscate them.

Sure. But a phone is easy to hide… well, until it gets addictive and overused.

Cellphone service providers will most likely be unwilling to start a contract with a child, so the child can't get a SIM on their own. Also if the parent wants to make sure that the SIM card they get can't be used with another phone than the one they provided, they can get an eSIM.

The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.

School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.

The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.

If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.

Contract, yes. I said PAYG, as in Pay As You Go, as in not a contract.

Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for PAYG as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.

Does the USA not have PAYG options?

Is "no contract" to be taken super-literally? Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least? or ask for ID at least to ensure you're a resident of the jurisdiction? I always thought "no contract" was just a term of the trade to mean "no post-payment contract". I'm skeptical they're willing to have anonymous users.

> Do they not ask to sign a terms-and-conditions document at least?

Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.

It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.

Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.

Let's suppose the cause really is as simple as "parents can't be bothered to parent". By default, this will continue to be the case. And realistically we're not going to fix it by telling bad parents to please start being good parents. So what do you actually want to do? I'm not saying it's this or nothing, but if you don't have an alternative policy that might actually help, I don't take much comfort in the idea that the kids who are damaged will have _parents_ who totally deserved it.

There are some alternative policies, for example, banning smartphones in schools. This doesn't completely solve the problem, of course, but at least it limits social media use while the children are under direct supervision of the government.

A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.