Give them a flip phone, a brick phone, a dumb phone. The key is you want your kids to be able to communicate with their friends, but you don’t want to give them over to for-profit companies [whose] goal is to hook your child.
My emphasis, I’ve no real idea if keeping kids away from smartphones is possible, but I do wonder if alternatives to for-profit companies could be created?
I wonder too if it might be even more important to keep parents of pre schoolers away from their smartphones?
The children In my class, 8 through 11 year olds, are at least 50 years younger than me. My childhood was so very different. Our lives and games were soaked in war. Our parents and grandparents were survivors. Everything seemed simpler, easier to grasp. Our milk came from nearby farms, pasteurised in a local dairy. Our history books shorter with line drawings of cavemen and kings. And so on. Sometimes my pupils seem like a different species or inhabitants of a different planet. Then again, when they are fascinated by a spider or delighted by a bounce time shrinks.
