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Great read! I couldn't agree more. We've been asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking "what age is good for a smartphone?", parents need to be asking, "IF a smartphone is good for my teenager." I explored that a bit here, from a Christian point of view: https://open.substack.com/pub/dearchristianparent/p/talking-to-teenagers?r=3huc9s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Thanks for the post. Smartphone are an alarming concern and has been for a while. If one truly thinks about it, who really needs them? It’s one of the great accomplishments of the tech world that they sold all of us on smartphones as indispensable. We all believed their claims of better connected societies but we ended up more fractured and frightened than ever. How sad. I wish for a world without smartphones and rightly regulated computers and internet.

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I urge everyone, particularly parents, to read “The Anxious Generation” Crazy nowadays that parents are paranoid about predators getting to their kids outside. Yet let them have free range on a smartphone and social media.

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This is incredibly important. In my opinion, the smartphone problem is especially insidious because good features ( family communication) are by design inextricably tied to bad ones, such as anonymous communication and social media. The real problem is that they are inherently bad machines. For a list of schools and institutions that avoid them, read this:

https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/invisible-academies

In one of your articles, you mentioned that Canada still uses physical books in elementary schools. Do you think they are behind the times or truly wiser? The next article I will write will discuss building robust smartphone-free communities.

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I'd say much wiser! Case in point: this past weekend, my family went to an off-grid cabin in rural Ontario, and my teenage son was able to bring his math textbook along and do his homework. If any of it had been online, he would not have been able to do any of it. Schoolwork needs to be portable, and it should not rely on or assume there's always access to internet.

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This is very good. My main question was whether you are concerned Canada will copy the US tech-based system in the future, or whether the country bases its educational policies on the recent studies showing more efficient learning with printed pages:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X18300101?via%3Dihub

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Katherine thank you for your great post. Also, regarding safety, the fact that cellphones are tested by taking the temperature of on an inanimate plastic dummy head filed with the equivalent of jell-o, based on the measurements of a male military recruit's head, should render every parent absolutely apoplectic.

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A whole host of new dangers is right - including the wireless radiation that developing brains are exposed to, while changing their rhythms and thought patterns:

https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/techmyth

Congrats on the new book Katherine!

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