God help us, we just gave our 11-year-old an iPhone.
I generally think technology is terrible. I’m definitely a “late adapter” and prefer to have my friends explain new apps and things to me that I tell them are stupid before the next year flipping and becoming the biggest fan of Spotify or whatever. Still, we gave the kid an iPhone, and despite being scared as hell about what we’ve unleashed, I’m glad we did it.
Communication is changing so rapidly
The problem with texting and social media is that the technology opened a new hellhole where people feel free to say absolutely horrible, awful things about each other. As someone who does journalism, I do a pretty good job of pretending that I’ve got thick skin and that being called an evil hack paid off by George Soros/the Koch brothers/the Freemasons doesn’t bother me. But it does.
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It’s the last place that I want a child with a still-forming sense of self to stumble into. Some of the worst perpetrators in those places are other kids, because they have a hard time seeing the full person on the receiving end of the vitriol. Or even worse, they might get a thrill out of psychologically crushing someone and don’t yet understand how wrong that is.
Some never do, as evidenced by the emotionally stunted man who’s moved back into the White House.
This doesn’t even count the really whacko things that are out there. I tend to think the worst stuff is really rare. But we all know that these things happen, and that adults exploit and harm children.
To be honest, it’s not that social media and new tech is so terrible. It’s that communication is changing so rapidly that it’s leaving us bewildered and unable to sort out the pros and cons. And we don’t have time to figure out how to lock down the bad stuff.
But communication is good, right?
The case for better communication, though, is pretty good. It’s why we’ve been so successful as a species ‒ from being able to say, “Hey, watch out for that animal about to eat you,” to sending lifesaving medical information instantly around the world.
When I was a preteen, it was communications technology (a 20th century landline) that was a social lifeline after my dad’s job in the Navy moved us part way around the world.
And despite being a luddite, I ended up on most of the platforms (Twitter/X/Muskworld, Instagram, Reddit, even TikTok where I must have bored some Chinese spy to tears). It was my former reporter job that got me there after phone books disappeared and everyone stopped picking up calls from numbers they didn’t know. Social media also turned out to be great for pushing out stories to people who hadn’t looked at a news site in years, let alone read a newspaper.
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Our two boys went through their own trauma with the COVID-19 pandemic that locked us down for a year. And like everyone else younger than 70, we didn’t have a landline. It made the older one’s pleas for “just a flip phone” seem reasonable. He would only be able to call and text, he pointed out.
So, we went to get a flip phone. But during a three-hour session at the store, our provider dangled a deal that lowered our bill and gave us a new device. I got a shiny new iPhone and our son got my old one.
Holding down Pandora’s lid
As I understood it, we could push some parental control buttons and he would magically have access to all the safe things and not the dangerous ones. That proved to be more complicated than I thought. So when he asked for the internet to do a Spanish project, I fumbled. Luckily, my wife is less of a tech idiot than me.
His phone now has internet access but on a limited basis and only if we give permission. There’s also no social media access, and we keep his phone in our room at night.
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The good part is, he seems to understand that this comes from love. The other day he told me he had YouTube on his phone and didn’t know why. While we let the boys use YouTube on the television, I didn’t want him getting intimate with an app whose algorithm has taken people to some dark places.
He told me he tried to delete it but couldn’t. Neither could I, so I went to ‒ where else? ‒ the internet to learn how to get rid of it.
Anyway, we know that Pandora ‒ in this case, the woman in the Greek myth, not the app ‒ has cracked open her box and that his access to the online world and all its usefulness and ugliness is coming. The only thing we can think to do is try to keep our hands on the lid and let it up, ever so slowly.
Joel Burgess is a Voices editor for the USA TODAY Network. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked as a reporter for more than two decades.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: An iPhone for my kid? That’s an awful idea. I did it anyway | Opinion
