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Apple Should Address Youth Phone Addiction, Say Two Large Investors (reuters.com)
Two large Apple shareholders, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, are urging Apple to take steps to address what they say is a growing problem of young people getting addicted to Apple's iPhones, Jana partner Charles Penner said. From a report: Jana, a leading activist shareholder, and CalSTRS, one of the nation's largest public pension plans, delivered a letter to Apple on Saturday asking the company to consider developing software that would allow parents to limit children's phone use, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Sunday. Jana and CalSTRS also asked Apple to study the impact of excessive phone use on mental health, according to the publication. Jana and CalSTRS together control about $2 billion worth of Apple shares, the Journal reports.
And why do parents need help in cutting their own childrens' phone usage?
What happened to the good old "Turn the damned phone off"....or even better..."Give me that phone".
No need for Apple to get involved there.
Because mommy and daddy want to be their kids' friends and don't want to traumatize the kids by actually parenting.
Hell, why would parents buy children (less than teens at least) a phone in the first place?
Because it is a lot easier to let the phone entertain the kids instead of actually parenting.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I think these investors are missing the point. You can be addicted to *anything*. But something that they've long pointed out is many addictions are the result of some other gap or need that is missing in life. I often get the impression that online a lot of folks are quite literally lonely. As much as you can make do with a virtual social life, I suspect having a real social life is a part of being human. So parents throwing their kids a near $1000 phone because they don't have time to deal with them is not really making the situation better. Instead encourage your kids to be with other kids in person and better yet take a more active approach to the community you belong to.
You're right of course, ultimately this is the job of a parent. However, I can think of a lot of features that could be added to mobile OSes to allow the kids to have access to their phones without having access to the time and attention sucking applications on their phones. As an example case, phone gets taken away and then they want to go for a bike ride outside. Well, I want them to have their phone on them if they are doing that! There should be a way to access the phone features while locking down access to apps. Another example, we can't seem to find a standalone alarm clock that is loud enough to wake my kids up. I would love for them to just be able to use an alarm app on their phones but if we give them their phones at night they'll be up late on them.
I've found some third party apps that kind of do things like this but a lot are expensive, some you even have to pay for on a monthly basis. It could be built into the OS.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That just means you're a bad parent.
Maybe. Or perhaps the moral panic that the world is going to hell because teenagers are using technology to SOCIALIZE is just the predictable result of yet another generation reaching cranky geezerhood.
Meanwhile, until I see some objective evidence that mobile phones are really more harmful than TV or landlines (the targets of previous moral panics), I will decline to micromanage my kids social lives, and let them learn responsibility by making their own decisions.