this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Ok, but you also need a data plan to go along w/ it (or regular visits to top up; is that still a thing?), plus hide it from parents, or you're going to have a bad time.
Drugs are a different story. You can often get drugs from friends (free to start), can buy them a little at a time, and you don't need to stash any at home. For a phone to be useful, it needs to be readily accessible, which means you'll have it with you everywhere.
It's possible, but it's going to take a fair amount of work to hide a phone from a parent who's paying even a little bit of attention.
The real problem here is parents. Parents need to step up and do a better job. Source: am a parent.
Prohibition never works; people will always find other bad — maybe even worse — things to do. The human pressure to have social interactions may lead to creating terrible IRL friendships, ones that can be much more dangerous.
Instead, I would strongly advise for honest, mature conversations about the risks that social media comes along with. This can lead to a highly positive impact, especially if you teach how to observe interactions between people through social media, even if not interacting, yourself.
Look, maybe it's true that parents should be doing a better job here. The thing is, that's an individual solution. This is a systemic problem. How kids (and adults) interact socially and consume media is fundamentally changed over the last thirty years and we're going to have to find ways to adapt to that as a society.
Yeah, in any particular individual case you can probably come up with a list of things the parent could have done differently. The reality is that this is a problem for tens (hundreds?) of millions of parents.
You can hand wave away any problem that affects children with "parents should do a better job". It didn't work for obesity, it didn't work for child traffic deaths, it didn't work for fentanyl overdoses, it didn't work for school shootings, it didn't work for measles, and it's not going to work for this either.
I'm just going to copy/paste what I wrote in a previous comment in a similar thread: