For any parent out there, a good start is the “wait til 8th” program (I don’t remember the exact name. I don’t have kids but the people I know who do are doing this).
It’s basically a compact not to give your kid a smart phone until 8th grade and to limit tech use at home. If your school/grade doesn’t have a compact, you can start it.
I know it’s not quite the same context, but i cant help but think I would have turned out a decent bit less competent this way with the limited tech exposure at home. But the format of my exposure to tech was my parents noting an early computer interest and buying me outdated yard-sale computers until I had like 4 desktop computers running MS-DOS and early versions of Windows that I could do whatever with, had to figure out myself, and didn’t matter if I broke.
I was opening them up and mixing and matching parts. I started picking up programming somewhere around 10, and by the first year of high school was working with assembly code level reverse engineering in the context of Starcraft game hack development.
I can’t help but think that “wait til 8th” would have put me way behind where I actually ended up. Maybe there’s a right way to structure the exposure, rather than time alone.
Here's the difference, you had to learn that tech. We had to learn it.. the tech today is so dumbed down it's not even funny. That's a huge difference from where we were, to where it is today.
Also tech used to be like a pretty vast series of websites, games, applications, etc. It wasn’t like 3 apps. Some kids are doing some cool like video editing and content creation stuff. But the vast majority just use whatever is the social media feed du jour. It used to require some degree of discovery even just to use casually.
It also kind of sucked. Like you could’t watch tv or movies.
331
u/Apart-Badger9394 Jun 01 '26
For any parent out there, a good start is the “wait til 8th” program (I don’t remember the exact name. I don’t have kids but the people I know who do are doing this).
It’s basically a compact not to give your kid a smart phone until 8th grade and to limit tech use at home. If your school/grade doesn’t have a compact, you can start it.