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Nearly Half of Parents Worry Their Child Is Addicted To Mobile Devices, Study Finds (usatoday.com)
According to a new survey from Common Sense Media and SurveyMonkey, 47% of parents worry their child is addicted to their mobile device. By comparison, only 32% of parents say they're addicted themselves. USA Today reports: Half of parents also say they are at least somewhat concerned about how mobile devices will affect their kids' mental health. Nearly one in five say they're "extremely" or "very" concerned. According to the survey, 89% of parents believe it's up to them to curb their children's smartphone usage. The survey conducted between Jan. 25 and Jan. 29 included a sample of 4,201 adults, including 1,024 parents with children under age 18. Data was weighted to reflect the demographic composition of the U.S. for adults over 18, based on Census data. Many devices and services feature parental controls, but some parents may not be aware they exist. The Common Sense-SurveyMonkey survey found 22% of parents did not know YouTube -- which has faced scrutiny over how easy it is for kids to find inappropriate videos -- offered parental controls. Also, 37% have not used the controls before. Among parents surveyed who say their kids watch YouTube videos, 62% said their kids have seen inappropriate videos on the site. Most, or 81%, said it's the parents' job to prevent kids from seeing these videos.
That the survey was online via SurveyMoney. Perhaps not the best sampling.
I don't know, but it works for me.
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm sure someone will provide me with evidence if I'm wrong, but to date I am unaware of any actual peer reviewed reports documenting that "cell phone addition" is harmful or even exists. The worst I can find are a few reports that suggest that kids that watch ads for junk food on the internet tend to eat more junk food.
It's not possible to worry about more than one thing....and surely that survey had every possible thing one can worry about it listed as an option
It's really that simple.
I make YouTube videos using my iPhone 6s as the camera and my iPad 5 as a remote monitor and teleprompter. My old iPad2 has an alarm clock app that plays an air-raid siren at 4:30AM. I got couple of Kindles next to the bed. I'm very addicted to my mobile devices.
Nearly half of parents are addicted to mobile devices and aren't worried about it.
These people do realize that it's their job as a parents to tell their kids what they can and can't do, right? Or are they too busy trying to be their kids' chill friend and obsessing over their own selfish shit instead of, you know, BEING THE FUCKING PARENT?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I never realized that there exists one person whose parents comprise half of all parents!
Parents worry about all sorts of things. Everything is a threat. Which is technically accurate if assessed from the position of "zero risk". But just because a parent is worried about a thing doesn't make it an actual threat, though intuition suggests limiting screen time is a wise choice in general. Also, the inappropriate content issue is partially subjective as well. Define the term and try again, knowing that parents differ on what this means. So define the term and try again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
And while Common Sense Media isn't precisely pro-censorship, they strike me as panicky and reactionary. Also, they have a vested interest in promoting concerns from parents and potential donors. I'm not saying they're in anyway being deceitful, but what I have seen of them suggests a cognitive bias toward provoking fearful response.
Nearly half of children worry their parents are addicted to mobile devices.
#DeleteChrome
"Stop reading and go out and play, you'll ruin your eyes".
My mother fell for it, my dad was harder to fool.
davecb@spamcop.net
... and in my childhood days, all parents worried that their sons hair was too long, their kids were doing drugs, their sons were getting all the neighborhood girls pregnant, that their girls were about to get pregnant...
It's the job of parents to worry. Apparently, we have evolved to worry about the most inane things, and pay little attention to that which is actually vital and important.
We learn from those around us ...
I'm afraid my children are addicted to pornhub.
Half of parents worry that their kid is addicted to mobile devices? That number seems low. I'm betting that way more than half of their kids actually are addicted to their smartphones.
That their parents were afraid they were addicted to TV?!
Their parents' parents were afraid they were addicted to radio.
Apparently this is a thing with every generation that advances somewhat from the old.
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners. Contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” “[Technology] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing” - Socrates
Some more examples: http://mentalfloss.com/article...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
prior to smartphones it was TV
prior to TV it was telephones.
prior to telephones it was playing hooky and going to the theatre
and prior to that it was that damned jazz.
It seems some parents --not all mind you-- are out for an excuse to root out anything and everything their child could become addicted to and convict it of the moral decay of all society. The survey singles out Youtube as the degenerate du-jour, whereas my parents complained about the rap music and championed Tipper's parental advisories. After Columbine it was Doom and Mortal Kombat and "those damned video games" that were ushering in a new dark age of "super predators" hellbent on murdering their friends and families...so we got parental ratings for video games.
To the parents I say this: your child carries with them more knowledge, power, and responsibility in their pocket than you've likely known in the past fifty years. Any question they have can be quickly and comfortably answered by this device, which is nothing short of a god send for kids in cities ruled by moral majorities that refuse to teach sex education, outlaw abortion, and think Gays control the weather. Do yourselves a favour and teach them how to use these devices instead of enacting parental control after parental control, which you neither understand how to operate nor how to troubleshoot when your kid makes their way around it. Mentor your children, dont stifle them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Take it away and see IF they act like a junkie.
Nervous?
Sweating?
Inability to form thoughts or opinions?
Sunlight painful?
Can't sleep?
Lack of personal hygiene?
Irritable?
Defensive?
You might be an addict.
As somebody who lives in a college town, I would guess that the number is closer to 75%-85% of kids are seriously addicted. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with all of these kids walking around staring at their devices constantly. Heck, kids even walk less (and ride bikes almost never), because, I assume, they can spend more time on their gadgets sitting on buses than they can walking or biking..
I don't respond to AC's.
Have gnu, will travel.
Half of parents are of below average intelligence too.
I worry my friends who are adults are addicted.
I will try to get people to go hiking. Or for a run. Or explore the local state park. "Nah man..." and they spend the next 4 hours sitting on the couch scrolling through a Facebook feed like a zombie.
"Hey I read this book. It's pretty good and I can lend it to you if you want". "Nah man..." got a Facebook feed to scroll through.
You can try to tell people that isn't a good way to live but message enters deaf ears.
The other half of the parents were too addicted to their own mobile devices to notice their kids were also addicted.
Seriously, what parent isn't concerned that their kid is addicted to mobile devices? Cars, trucks, sure they seem innocent enough, but then they start demanding you change zoning codes to subsidize the device storage "Mom, I want my trucks in the living room AND the kitchen!", they require minimum parking standards "I don't want to go to grandma's house, there's no place to play with my car race set!", and they monopolize the streets demanding more than one-third of the land "I have to set up my race track in the hallway!".
Obviously, we as a society need to change this.
And get them to stop playing with their cell phones while doing so. Have you ever been run into by a metal truck as your kid careens down the sidewalk?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If parents were serious they'd take the mobile devices away.
If your preteen was "addicted" to heroin, you'd hope most parents would do more than wring their hands over it. At the very least not tolerate it under their roof.
Well, yes, it is logic. Perhaps if they spend less time tied to that mobile device sharing empty communications, they will pay attention to everything else.
Solution is easy, a minors only internet, with secured log in provided by schools and only licensed adults allowed access to monitor and supervise interactions. All content on the minors only internet must pass a review board but some companies with legal ramifications for failure can upload direct and be reviewed after, get it wrong pay a major fine.
That they use it too much, not so much of a problem but they access content damaging to a immature mind and I am talking the corruptive advertisements produced by psychopaths with effective doctorates in psychology the sick fucks.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
phone? pfft, my son is a gamer and his video card weighs more than my PC tower. he can't carry that around 24x7
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
Distracted driving accounts for 300,000 injuries and 3,000 deaths every year in the US. And those statistics are doing nothing but rising. School shooting deaths don't even come close to that threat in society. This isn't just an addiction problem. This is a deadly problem that affects all of us.
And since we're not going to win the war against tobacco (440,000 deaths, 30,000 deaths from secondhand smoke) or alcohol (80,000 deaths), might as well try and tackle this ever-increasing issue in society.
And counting wars? You might as well give up on that. Warmongering is what we do, and it fuels our economy more than most care to admit. You would stand a better chance with making alcohol and tobacco illegal.
These people do realize that it's their job as a parents to tell their kids what they can and can't do, right? Or are they too busy trying to be their kids' chill friend and obsessing over their own selfish shit instead of, you know, BEING THE FUCKING PARENT?
What's worse only 47% of parents (surveyed) are even worried about their kids being assimilated into the Borg collective ... probably because they already are.
Seriously though trying to limit your teenage kids online time is like playing that kids toy where you knock down one worm for another to pop up somewhere else. You give them a online time-budget ... LOL, that's gonna work. You kick them off their phone, turn your back and five minutes later they'll be on the pad, kick them off that, on the desktop, one of the laptops ... and then your wife is on about you that you've brought too many devices into the damn home and that you should maybe be a roll model by getting off your device and do some home renovation ... It's a constant battle, it really is.
The thing with parenting is that's it's almost as if these damn kids have a mind of their own!
...that many are worried.
In other news, more than half of parents are idiots
I wish I was wrong.
I guess the other half doesn't notice because they rarely look up from their own devices. Kind of a weird stat there. I know parents who think that an hour a day is addiction. and those that think that there is no such thing as being addicted. Safe to say, this is an empty survey
I often wonder now as more than 50% of the population walk and hold their dog turd, just how good can this experience be.
The problem is not so much any sort of addiction as it's a time sink. Sites like YouTube are designed so that you keep clicking on more videos until hours have passed and no homework were done. If it weren't mobile devices, it'd be TV or something else, but mobile devices is what we have to worry about recently. When they're teens you can't just look over their shoulders, so the best I've come up with is openwrt (LEDE) DNS blocking.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
reading, writing, memes.
Parents unable to discern the difference between these things. News at 11.
Me, myself and I, that's your kind of post alright!
There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!
You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.
Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.
How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????
The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!
You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!
When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!
Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!
Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:
The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!
So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!
Signed:
Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
(1920-1955) You listened to the *public* radio broadcast - alongside your parents or others, publicly. It was approved by the government - to get your parent's approval for the station.
(1955-present) You listened to the *public* TV broadcast - alongside your parents or others, publicly. It was (pretty much) approved by the government - to get your parent's approval for the station.
(2010 to present) private entities can isolate and intentionally target children and *any* adults are not even entitled to know.
Fuck yes - you should know what your kids are doing just like every other time in history. Like if they were being attacked by wild dogs. Privacy is a precious thing, but not at the expense of a parent's one and only job - the safety of their children. (yes, adult/individual privacy is distinct by necessity than a child's right to privacy from their *guardian.*)
Hey creimy-dumpty here is an idea!
Why don't you post 2 days ago to avoid getting modded down?
The problem is, back in my day there were plenty of public phone you could use as a kid. Those are nowadays gone from the landscape. So if you want your kid to have a phone if only for emergency, you can't rely on public phone (gone!) and have to give them a phone. And unless you go out of your way to find a clamshell phone with no social media ability, the kid will have a phone which most parent will have no idea on HOW to lock down, and the kids friends will show them on how to install stuff.
creimer lies again!
Looking at a book is not reading creimer!
You obviously can't read nor write anything properly!
Here is another lie by creimer:
creimer says he is going to post one comic con video every day in April but creimer lied to be a comic con affiliate and maybe win a t-shirt; By May, creimer will already have moved to his next get rich quick scheme!
Proof: He always lies! He also said that he would publish books in January but he has moved to the comic con/youtube get rich quick scheme instead!
Once you meet a kid with a serious device addiction you'll understand this is a serious problem. Some kids spend many, many hours shut away in their bedrooms, without exercise or face-to-face social interaction. This is sometimes the result of personal problems, and the online world offers a way to escape. Perhaps this is ok in small doses, but when kids prefer to do this for entire days, and get distressed if they can't get online, it's a serious social problem. How is this going to affect their health, world view, ability to get a job, ability to communicate in a civil manner and be active members of their community once they are older? This isn't justabout kids who spend too much time on their phones. It's about kids who are gradually ceasing to be part of society.
To clarify, I'm talking about kids that avoid interacting with other people in person - including their family. They will use a device and headphones to actively avoid interaction all hours of the day, no matter where they are - on a car trip with family members, during a meal, any time.
I can't do anything. I am a mentally handicapped person - a parent! I can't possibly just take away the fucking thing from my child, because think of the children! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!!!!!
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
Or maybe half of parents pick something they can control to worry about.
Or maybe most people in the world can focus on more than one problem at a time.
And what about the 19% who think it's up to someone else to make sure their kids don't see inappropriate material? What other parental responsibilities do they think they can shirk? Who do they think should be doing their job for them?
Of all of those mobile device addiction is the one that the parents themselves actually have a chance of doing something about
And the 9/11 deaths were just peanuts compared to all of that. But look were all efforts and money went.
> 89% of parents believe it's up to them to curb their children's smartphone usage
Whose responsibility does the other 11% think it is? Honestly?
People who fall in that group are NOT qualified to be parents in the first place.
Not if you take the damned thing from them!
I feel like if I keep reading these comments, I will get a concussion from banging my head against a wall too hard. First of all, schools just don't have the cash to do something like this. You won't give them money to buy pencils, and you expect them to pay for all the infrastructure this will require? Second, how are you going to pay these "licensed adults"? I'm not going to do extra paperwork for free, and I doubt that there are many others who would want to. Even if we forget about paying these people, there's still the fact that requiring /all/ content to be reviewed by some arbitrarily picked board of moderators is such a bad idea. First of all, how on Earth would this board review everything coming in at a decent speed?
And second, isn't this effectively applying censorship to what kids say? What if the board starts censoring messages of users with political views that they don't like? What if these specially approved companies start paying the board to not approve other companies, or to block their messages?
Doesn't limiting the content on the internet so heavily ruin what makes the internet so beautiful? The ability to say, think, and do whatever you want, whenever you want (within reason obviously) is what makes the internet so beautiful. It's why we have sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc.
Controlling what your kids see is not the job of a bunch of arbitrarily selected bureaucrats and corporations. It's your job, as a parent, to help your kids grow up well, and nobody else can fulfill that position any better.