Imagine being 10 years old and telling your parents: “I want a $1,000 gadget, plus $40 every month to keep it. It’ll let me chat with friends and adults I’ve never met all day long. And by the way, I’ll never look up from it again.”
They would have said no.
Or picture this at age 12: “I’d like to take hundreds of pictures of myself and post them where all my classmates and anyone else online can see them and rate how I look.” That’s essentially Instagram. Again, your parents probably would have shut it down immediately.
But today? Most parents are saying yes, often without realizing what they’re agreeing to when they hand over a smartphone. It doesn’t mean they’re bad parents. Many are the same moms and dads who enforce bedtimes, require seatbelts, and expect manners. Yet the pull of technology and social media is so powerful and normalized that even careful parents get swept up in what everyone else is doing.
The stats are sobering: Kids now get their first smartphone around age 11. Nearly 40% of 10- to 12-year-olds are already on social media. The outcomes, according to mounting research, haven’t been good.
