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Yes, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure if there's a solution to it. I just know that age verification won't do anything. To me, it's a coordination problem, because one household deciding to clamp down on technology use isn't going to move the needle for a whole country and everyone else is going to treat them like the Amish, so there's no good incentive for the first few hundred (maybe even few thousand) people to start increasing control over their kids that way. In an ideal society, we wouldn't have a culture of handing kids Internet-connected devices and not monitoring them one bit, but that's exactly what we do.
I still remember the early days of the Internet, when everyone was advised not to share any personal information with strangers online. Now, a lot of people and especially the younger generation do just that, and get into exactly the trouble one would expect from doing so. And now we're being told we need to share even more personal information to save the younger generation from themselves. It's all so tiresome.
If their kids are notably better off, mentally healthy, successful, healthier, and more socially active than their smart-phone counterparts, people will eventually jump.
A huge confounder is that, as many others in the thread have pointed out, a kid who doesn't have a smartphone is going to be socially othered and considered an outcast. Not just metaphorically but also literally since most of their peers are going to be communicating through smartphones. Again, it's a coordination problem.
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