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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.
They already make their phones more expensive than anything a kid should have. What else can they do apart from this public-spirited action ;-)
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.
Oh think of the children! We should:
- Address profanity in music by censorship (Tipper Gore)
- Address video game addiction (think World of Warcraft)
- Address violence in video games because it's causing crime to increase
- And now... TADA! Phone addiction
These so-called "values groups" do the same thing every now and then. They claim X is going to ruin society and some overarching entity needs to intervene and forcefully make people "behave appropriately".
This claim has been made again and again and again and every prediction of society turning into a bunch of lazy, dangerous degenerates proves to be false because it's not supported by any evidence. Get off your high horse and worry about yourself instead of thinking yourself superior and others being too stupid to think for themselves thus needing you to think for them.
We'll make great pets
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.
There are people who think that kids spending all day on the phone might not be healthy. Some of these people are rich. You did get that part straight.
The part you didn't get straight is when you assumed that someone is telling someone else how to run their life. What's being proposed is for Apple to put software on their phones to facilitate parents who, on their own, make the decision to limit their kids' screen time.