<story><title>My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone</title><url>https://medium.com/modern-parent/my-daughter-was-a-creative-genius-then-we-bought-her-an-iphone-bf617c0b6ca0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianb</author><text>Honestly, so much of this sounded familiar to me ... but from my own teenage years. My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).&lt;p&gt;So I&amp;#x27;d say that no, it&amp;#x27;s not that phones are like crack. There seems to be a disconnect on the parent&amp;#x27;s expectations when children discover the possibilities of a technology that&amp;#x27;s unfamiliar to them. In the article they&amp;#x27;re talking about the ease of controlling TV time but that doesn&amp;#x27;t even compare in possibilities of communication, entertainment and education.&lt;p&gt;Heck... I&amp;#x27;m sure if you could go back in time you&amp;#x27;d discover the first generation to grow up with books, and their desperate parents noticing how the kids aren&amp;#x27;t ... working the fields and feeding the cattle, I guess.</text></item><item><author>lqet</author><text>&amp;gt; I realize with horror that she’s spent nine hours on the phone that day. She was only awake at 11.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; My daughter doesn’t make collages or jewelry or sew anymore. A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Getting her to make a card for a family member — something she once did for fun — is like getting her to clean her room&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Yet still, each day is a battle over only one thing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And little by little, our daughter has chipped away at our rules and resolve.&lt;p&gt;Congratulations, your child is now in puberty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ur-whale</author><text>Now is &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; not like back then.&lt;p&gt;I was like you, spending inordinate amounts of time with computers during my teenage years.&lt;p&gt;But back then, I was &lt;i&gt;learning&lt;/i&gt; useful skills from it.&lt;p&gt;The computer I owned had almost no games for it. All you could do was program it in either basic or assembly.&lt;p&gt;Move forward 15 years, my kid who owned a PC from around age 10 was &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; interested in using it as anything but an entertainment platform.&lt;p&gt;There was simply way more interesting things to do with it than understanding how it worked and bending the hardware to your will.&lt;p&gt;And this was pre-social networks.</text></comment>
<story><title>My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone</title><url>https://medium.com/modern-parent/my-daughter-was-a-creative-genius-then-we-bought-her-an-iphone-bf617c0b6ca0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianb</author><text>Honestly, so much of this sounded familiar to me ... but from my own teenage years. My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).&lt;p&gt;So I&amp;#x27;d say that no, it&amp;#x27;s not that phones are like crack. There seems to be a disconnect on the parent&amp;#x27;s expectations when children discover the possibilities of a technology that&amp;#x27;s unfamiliar to them. In the article they&amp;#x27;re talking about the ease of controlling TV time but that doesn&amp;#x27;t even compare in possibilities of communication, entertainment and education.&lt;p&gt;Heck... I&amp;#x27;m sure if you could go back in time you&amp;#x27;d discover the first generation to grow up with books, and their desperate parents noticing how the kids aren&amp;#x27;t ... working the fields and feeding the cattle, I guess.</text></item><item><author>lqet</author><text>&amp;gt; I realize with horror that she’s spent nine hours on the phone that day. She was only awake at 11.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; My daughter doesn’t make collages or jewelry or sew anymore. A child who used to read in the bath won’t pick up a book unless threatened with the loss of her phone.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Getting her to make a card for a family member — something she once did for fun — is like getting her to clean her room&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Yet still, each day is a battle over only one thing.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And little by little, our daughter has chipped away at our rules and resolve.&lt;p&gt;Congratulations, your child is now in puberty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ertian</author><text>Yup. There was a moral panic about fiction specifically in the early-to-mid 1800s. Kids (and women, too) were sitting around staring at these made-up stories instead of going out and doing real things.</text></comment>