Grandparents are glued to their phones, families are worried [video]

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0n61dg3/grandparents-are-glued-to-their-phones-families-are-worried

110•tartoran•2h ago

Comments

Simulacra•1h ago

Maybe a solution is to spend more time with grandparents, so that they have something more than just technology to keep them company.

p2detar•1h ago

Yes, but no. From personal experience, even around grandchildren, TikTok/FB have precedence. It’s getting sickening and we need to educate our parents about the harm that "the algorithm" causes. I just ask myself whether we are even in the position to do so.

edit: typo

joe_mamba•1h ago

I'd love to. The issue is grandparents are in a town with no jobs ruled by a corrupt government that only steals and embezzles money and provides no benefits to local taxpayers.

There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.

analog8374•1h ago

I know a lot of old bored retired people.

They need something physical and social. Like softball or something. But compatible with their decripitude.

I hook them up with each other. There are parties.

Still working on the softball part.

Ideas are welcome

rationalist•1h ago

> I hook them up with each other. There are parties.

OnlyGrandparents.com?

(I looked it up, the domain name was registered six days ago!)

rrr_oh_man•1h ago

OnlyGrans.com is available for only $50k

Wistar•1h ago

That’s worth about $5

alwa•25m ago

If anybody wants to do something with instagran.org, I know somebody who would be willing to part with it for a good cause…

toomuchtodo•1h ago

If someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ.

Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

serial_dev•1h ago

It’s all fine, but in that case also do not worry about this hypothetical old person spending time the way they like to.

toomuchtodo•1h ago

Certainly, how they spend their time is their choice, concepts of free will and all that.

foobarchu•1h ago

Doesn't always help. My mother (of grandparent age but coincidentally had 5 kids who didn't want to procreate) stares at her phone 95% of the time when I visit. I'll be telling a story and she's on Facebook, doesn't even look up. She's even been called out in it by my sibling who lives with them, to no avail.

Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.

AngryData•1h ago

As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

eYrKEC2•1h ago

In our household, the worst offenders of phones at the dinner tables are the grandparents.

It's as gross as 2 knuckles deep in your nose.

gedy•1h ago

Sure, but I've seen since the 70s old folks just staring at TV all day, so it's not just a mobile phenomenon either.

HerbManic•54m ago

Very true, phone addiction is that taken to a new level but the same underlaying issues remain.

susam•1h ago

Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.

My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...

So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png

Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.

nicbou•1h ago

Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.

I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.

nomel•1h ago

Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.

politelemon•55m ago

This is the simplest and most effective solution, Cheers

l72•6m ago

Just add channels you like to your rss feed. It works great with freshrss.

Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.

serial_dev•1h ago

Screenshot not found.

asib•28m ago

If you press t key you will get a full width video player.

pcblues•22m ago

Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.

Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.

Doesn't take much to find the science.

Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.

If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.

It's your "choice" (tm)

Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)

Peace to you all.

50208•1h ago

Seniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.

rrr_oh_man•1h ago

> the most likely to vote

Well... who's fault is that.

HNisCIS•1h ago

It's because election day is a weekday and the rest of us have to keep up with the grind. It's entirely because they don't have jobs

ViktorRay•1h ago

Early voting exists in many states. Even in these states you’ll find that younger folks hardly vote.

SoftTalker•40m ago

It's been this way for 100+ years (probably much longer) and people found a way to vote. It's easier than ever in most places today, with early voting, mail-in voting, whatever other options are available.

k2enemy•1h ago

And also the most likely to fall victims to scams. An elderly family friend lost millions to a pig butchering scam.

allendoerfer•1h ago

Here in Germany they also ignored the demographics, so our social insurance systems (retirement but also health) are heading towards a catastrophe, because there is no capital backing them. They are fundamentally relying on the next generation being bigger or at least equal. This has turned them essentially into Ponzi schemes. The taxpayer has to jump in, making the state less and less able to do anything at all. Of course they now collectively avoid responsibility and slowly milk the young - their own children - dry.

It is truly the most egoistic generation ever.

heraldgeezer•19m ago

You are describing every pension system in the world.

wortelefant•1h ago

Taking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!

gammalost•53m ago

More: If you want to spend time with your grandkid please do not just sit besides him, phone in hand. If you do not want to then that's fine

retrac98•1h ago

My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.

blakblakarak•1h ago

My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).

gzread•1h ago

Mine got Israeli propaganda and kept texting me so often about Hamas and Muslims that I had to block him.

talon8635•41m ago

Mine got Iranian propaganda and kept texting me so often about IDF and Jews that I had to block him.

KoftaBob•5m ago

Iran's a sideshow compared to Tel Aviv's Hasbara spin factory.

Aurornis•49m ago

It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.

It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.

The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.

pndy•3m ago

For about 2-3 years now youtube itself is flooded with countless channels producing generated content. Whoever are the people behind this they know what they're doing and what kind of stuff will give them views and attention from vulnerable audience.

There's fueling political and social rage with "news", casting doubts on family relations with "true life stories" (daughter-in-law threw me out of my house), religious "coaching" (dead since end of 60s Padre Pio gives you life lessons and "secret" prophecies), worthless tips and tricks (don't eat this nut if you're 50yo woman or your hair will fell off), lewd promotion with twist on history (sexual violence in every thumbnail) or tourism (women in country of x are "ready" all the time). So on and so on.

So I'd say it's not that much strange if you look closely what kind of the content older people can walk onto. And this is just youtube.

exo762•1h ago

Amazing opportunity! One more demographic to save via age verification laws, with a side dish of reliable personalized advertisement profiles.

alansaber•1h ago

Reminds me of Chade and The Skill from the Robin Hobb books

ellyagg•1h ago

My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.

colechristensen•1h ago

The concern is what you're doing when you're getting older but still able.

The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.

impure•1h ago

I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.

krackers•1h ago

That makes sense, they haven't "built immunity".

tietjens•1h ago

Can you share some things you were reading?

xnx•1h ago

I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.

Cpoll•1h ago

The recontextualisation of "parental" is very amusing.

tromp•1h ago

As nicely illustrated in this Young Sheldon episode fragment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nd90rFPYVnc

gcanyon•1h ago

Time to sign off HN, I guess :-)

On a serious note YT shorts are on my radar for "things I spend too much time on that deliver minimal value."

hsuduebc2•29m ago

In my opinion it's best from short content feed out there but it's still useless. Too much AI slop in there. Needles to say I did get some interesting creators in there but I believe people I'm searching for are using YouTube as long videos platform and do not properly use the short term format.

kevin061•1h ago

Before smartphones and TikTok it was casino TV at 3AM, TV infomercial shopping, and the like.

nolist_policy•1h ago

Wait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.

everdrive•1h ago

This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd.

Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.

reactordev•50m ago

Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.

WastedCucumber•40m ago

The article in question:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...

SoftTalker•37m ago

Before smartphones they sat at home and watched game shows and TV evangelists, and listened to Rush on the radio. Which is worse?

pcblues•29m ago

"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"

False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.

pndy•28m ago

Over 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down.

Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.

I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.

HackerThemAll•21m ago

Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media. They're often retired, having entire days at their disposal, wasting them on forwarding sh*t back and forth.

hsuduebc2•16m ago

I must admit. My parents we're right the whole time. Staring at the screen for a whole day is truly unhealthy and they should go to play outside instead.

This whole thing is beyond ironic.

CompoundEyes•14m ago

I see it a different way. Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. In fact they might just not be that into you anymore. It’s ok if visits upset their routine and holidays are somewhat irritating. Same for being not overly enthusiastic about taking on care giving roles for grandkids. They’re still individuals and it’s not like old age causes someone to lose their inner world. They’ve seen a lot and not as much is novel likely. They’re facing loss, mortality and decline. If they feel compelled to scroll let em scroll. I’m so glad assistive technologies and a11y will be there when I’m decrepit so I can have something more stimulating than TV. Maybe ask grandma to play some Lethal Enforcers the next time you visit you’d be surprised — mine did.

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Grandparents are glued to their phones, families are worried [video]

Comments

Let your Coding Agent debug the browser session with Chrome DevTools MCP

What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

In Memoriam: John W. Addison, my PhD advisor

C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma

Glassworm Is Back: A New Wave of Invisible Unicode Attacks Hits Repositories

Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human motion data

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)

Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro

Show HN: GDSL – 800 line kernel: Lisp subset in 500, C subset in 1300

LLM Architecture Gallery

Rack-mount hydroponics

Show HN: Signet – Autonomous wildfire tracking from satellite and weather data

Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

Show HN: What if your synthesizer was powered by APL (or a dumb K clone)?

Grandparents are glued to their phones, families are worried [video]

Autoresearch Hub

Kniterate Notes

IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (2019)

How kernel anti-cheats work

$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

Generating All 32-Bit Primes (Part I)

The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

A most elegant TCP hole punching algorithm

Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))

Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all

Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold

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