[trey-jones]

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

[willio58]

Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.

[blitzar]

Once the data is in bosses will see the massive benefits and ban mobile phones entirely during work hours.

[illiac786]

I am looking for data regarding this, do you have references? I need to convince my school ;)

[colechristensen]

This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

[DocTomoe]

Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.

That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.

[eikenberry]

I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.

[teekert]

I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;)

You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.

[angiolillo]

I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action.

If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.

[colechristensen]

One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age.

If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.

[dyauspitr]

All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.

[lukasm]

I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18.

We basically give cigarettes to children.

[thw_9a83c]

> nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.)

I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.

> We basically give cigarettes to children.

In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.

When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.

[soulofmischief]

It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.

[petre]

Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.

[thw_9a83c]

> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15.

I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks.

The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about.

The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.

[martin82]

"adults use smartphones"

Is this so?

I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium.

"adults smoke opium"

If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it:

"adults eat sugar"

"adults watch TV"

Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do.

In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.

Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption.

You can just swipe a credit card for payments.

A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.

In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.

[raw_anon_1111]

Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.

[hdgvhicv]

So no social life for kids then?

It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.

There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.

Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.

[dr_kretyn]

Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".

[all2]

My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be.

We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.

[pembrook]

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here.

This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.

Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?

[nullify88]

I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content.

I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.

[phatfish]

"Old media" was (and is) quite heavily regulated. Not everywhere turned into an East German surveillance state.

The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.

[Parka3458]

Whenever a politician wants you to think of the children, you should be alert. What we see Danish politicians push for is the same we see in England. I don't think Danish politicians are acting on their own, it is much more likely that this is a push from EU.

We see similar attacks on personal freedom with the new GDPR updates: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles...

[oytis]

I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.

[tuveson]

This website is social media.

[kayodelycaon]

What exactly do you mean by “social media”?

There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.

There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.

There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.

At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?

[SunshineTheCat]

Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."

[ceejayoz]

I, too, was a really great parent before having children.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...

> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.

> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.

[barbazoo]

If you live in isolation, totally! We live in a civilization so we have to coordinate and compromise to get along.

[mikkupikku]

Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.

[josephg]

If all the other kids are on social media all the time, it makes it much harder to keep your kids off it. Would you want to be the one kid in school who’s not online? Would you want that for your kids?

Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

[tjpnz]

Then give parents the tools they need! I can reliably black hole all social media on my home network, and can configure DNS on their phones to do similar. A lot of that knowledge I picked up working in tech, but no tech company is going to offer such robust solutions to parents.

[Barrin92]

For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids. More importantly the constant appeal to the responsibility of parents misses that this is a collective action problem.

The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)

[sfpotter]

So... you don't have kids, I take it?

[mtoner23]

oh yeah, children famously do what their parents are told. especially when it comes to interacting with their friends. and they never are more adept at understanding technology and circumventing parental controls.

[yard2010]

Do you have children? You are correct. But it's easier said than done.

[exssss]

Except it's not so easy, because there's social pressure on the kids to use them to fit in with the group.

[isaacremuant]

How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.

Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.

[trey-jones]

A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.

And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.

[Aeolun]

It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.

[t0lo]

Far worse.

[skapadia]

1000% agree.

[porsager]

If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?

[owisd]

you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.

[EarthMephit]

You could make that exact same argument for alcohol, cigarettes, prescription medication - The reasons are the same.

[arcfour]

As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too.

As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.

(Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)

[beloch]

First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.

Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.

e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.

Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].

Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.

Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.

------------

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.

[dlisboa]

Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.

[mrtesthah]

The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.

[dmje]

Yeh, no.

Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing.

This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.

[thatguy0900]

Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish

[cycomanic]

As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone.

/s

Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.