I don't think the intention behind "free range kids" is that they get unrestricted access to technology and everything the internet can serve up to them.
> I don't like giving cell phones to kids younger than 12 or 13 because childhood should be free of a lot of the technology we use today.
The future is technology. You're holding them back, socially and technology skills wise, if you wait until they're 13 to give them a cell phone.
I was fixing computers and was generally the house technology expert well before I was 13. To get to that point required unrestricted access to tech and the internet. If I was locked down until 13, I would not be as successful as I am today in tech, if I was in tech at all.
The computer that you used required skills to use and maintain, and stayed at home. It is vastly different than a dumb (yes) internet appliance kept in a pocket all day long subjecting children to dark patterns and dopamine hits for hours a day.
Hard disagree. Children with phones don't socialize face to face with other children. That's pretty much the most important skill taught in elementary school and you're taking it away from them. You can still let your child use computers at home, but they should have to interact face to face in order to socialize. Yes, the future is technology, but not being able to interact with people without anxiety is not a path to happiness, and that's what you get when you give children phones.
Fully agreed. I spent my entire childhood with essentially zero electronics (we lived overseas), and didn't get into computers until we were back stateside, and I was a young teen.
As an adult, I'm proud of my technical accomplishments. But having no social anxiety, because I learned how to communicate face to face throughout my childhood, has been the biggest boon of all. Not joking.
[edit] I feel I should also add that not getting in to tech until already a teen has never felt like a deficit, or that I was starting behind anyone else. On the contrary, the non-virtual skills that came from playing with physical things like lincoln logs, tinkertoys, building models with friends, etc. gave me a intuition of how the world works that has helped me a great deal in getting my head around the nature of more virtual structures.
Interacting with children who have smartphones. Both as a child myself and now. Obviously it's not a universal truth, but I've seen it more than 10 children who suffer from this which is enough to convince me that it's a risk.
