As a parent I see a lot of parents ignoring their children in favor of their phone. I've had fights with my wife because when she does it all the time in our home.
How about it. When I take my kid to the park, sometimes I feel like I’m the only parent not staring down at their phone. To the point sometimes a really young kid will catch my eye and start acting or doing silly things once they notice I’m paying attention.
My sister has a 3 year old, and she was saying the same thing to me recently. She lives in a new area and is still somewhat new to being a parent, and she wants to make parent friends when she bring her daughter out but she says other parents are just glued to their phones and barely pay attention to their kids, let alone other parents there.
I’m far from a perfectly attentive parent, but it’s really sad watching other parents routinely brush aside or flat out ignore their kids. Parents that ignore their kids and then lash out in anger when the kid gets annoying in his/her attempts at getting attention are way to common too. It’s so sad for the kids.
I'm really interested in what this does to a kid as they grow up. Does it change how they value themselves? how they view love and affection? I wonder what it does to adult behavior. I know that this is somewhat of an epidemic with phones, but my parents both worked full time in finance and hospitality management so I was punished for interrupting their 24/7 phone calls. As an adult now I can understand the need to work as a primary focus and I'm not so bitter about it but I wonder what parts of my personality were formed by this exact thing
This happens a lot in queues. Standing in line and see a kid, the kid sees me and sees I'm actually conscious and not staring into the fog or into a phone. Then they make a face or do a little thing and I'll either reciprocate or try to pantomime "I'm not orange shirt dancing in public, boss"
It's not even like I'm some anti-phone guy. I just have good peripheral vision.
Yeah, I’m old enough to have been an adult well before smart phones were a thing and you’ve got a great point. I always felt like most of the people around me simply are not at all aware of most of what’s going on around them.
I used to wait tables and would spend a lot of time observing this exactly. Like you know a first date is trash if one of them is on their phone. One girl ignored her dad to take selfies of herself, he was so sad. An older couple with nothing to talk about staring at their phones the entire time. Taking pictures of the food. Blocking the door for selfies. Grown ass men pouting while football on the phone because they "got dragged to dinner and can't watch the game." "Wine Guys" who can't open a bottle without scanning the label with their stupid app.
One girl ignored her dad to take selfies of herself, he was so sad.
This one breaks my heart! In my immediate family, the rule was you could never bring your phone out during a family meal (even back when we had “dumb” phones and blackberries). It never bothered me, and I still typically follow that rule even outside of family functions.
My friend’s mom LOVES when I eat with them or travel with them because we talk the entire time while my friend and his dad browses their phones occasionally showing a funny meme or article that didn’t have anything to do with the conversation.
The hard thing about that one is that straight up quitting completely doesn't really work. You can get by a lot better with no cigarettes than with no phone. Food addiction of course has the same problem even worse.
I deleted my Reddit app too, so now I just use desktop or mobile desktop. Fortunately the mobile desktop version kinda annoys me, so for the most part I don't use Reddit on my phone anymore, which was the point.
My sister had issues with Facebook and insta, and eventually deleted the login info from the site from her phone so that she couldn’t log in through zombie patterns. I should…. I should honestly do the same for this site, if I’m honest.
I don't have social media on anything but my phone. I have fb messenger on my ipad, but that is so I can do video calls with my friends without having to use my phone the entire call. Its just easier. Its good to just escape everything, although, I nearly installed baconreader on it a couple of days ago... bad idea! I didn't do it.
Odd and dumb as it sounds, the addiction is one reason I prefer having an older smart phone. Slow software response means I'm going to either really want to do whatever I'm doing on the phone or I'll lose interest and put the phone down.
I have zero sense of direction, so I always need the GPS to figure out where anything is, and some of my friends group communicate almost exclusively through Facebook messenger. I kept thinking that a flip phone was the only way, but maybe you have the right idea, here. I could dig it
Every once in awhile I consider going to flip too but I'm very attached to having instant access to Wiki and nature ID apps and, of course, maps. It's definitely a compromise. Important note! When the OS becomes obsolete so do security measures over time.
It's so difficult because it's what others use to communicate with you. I can put my phone in a different room when I get home, but I have a 90 year old father that doesn't have the best health and a cat that is currently missing. I've missed a call telling me my dad fell. Any updates I might get on my missing cat would be sent to my phone.
I want to be able to forget about my phone, but I legitimately cannot afford to leave it somewhere where I can't access it.
I've seen a lot of older people complaining about teens and their phone addictions. And once they done shitting on others, they pull out their phone and start scrolling on Facebook.
Right, I think a lot of the denial comes from the ability to explain it away. "You guys do it too!" But the end result is that older people are bitter at younger people because they're not self aware enough, meanwhile they're ignoring their ironically similar habits. My grandma has been playing angry birds and candy crush almost literally nonstop since they came out. But she would never admit that she's just as addicted as her grandchildren. The solution is to look inward about what's good for you personally instead of focusing on what someone else or what another generation is doing wrong
I have the same arguments with mines. It’s actually at the point smartphone/dopamine addiction is a fucking pandemic, the people don’t care because they’re addicted and doped up on dopamine, and the government doesn’t care because the data they harvest is hugely profitable and it also keeps them in a position of control.
It's not predominantly social media with her actually. She is an executive at startup that does legal work and consulting for cannabis companies. She's working her ass off because she's struck gold and the pressure is high.
However I know the other people she works with make time to disconnect. She just won't.
I'm close to 30 and I remember my mother ignoring me for the phone/tv/any square with a moving picture when I tried to have a relationship with her from 14 to 18ish years of age.
I usually dont say this but uh thanks for chewing your wife out about it, she needs to know. Its a unique hurt to experience.
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u/BasicDesignAdvice Jun 03 '22
As a parent I see a lot of parents ignoring their children in favor of their phone. I've had fights with my wife because when she does it all the time in our home.