Putting aside that this time estimates can vary widely depending on culture, that there was covid, and that a lot of this time isn't spent doing things with their peers but in a classrome which also might happen to contain their peers I thinks it's still a flawed analysis.

Because if you look at the time they can choose what to do, like in brakes between classes or in brakes in the classe (e.g. PE) a bunch of it is spend talking, like talking about the latest trend, the grate experience they had yesterday etc. All of which the child with too strict parent can't proper join in. Then after school they join again, but today often over internet instead of meeting physically, and again the child with the too strict parents is left out.

I'm not sure if you living in a fundamental different world then I am, but it's really hard for me to understand how this is hard for anyone to understand. (If you live in the US I guess this might very well be true.)

This never was a discussion about fully unchecked phone usage. The best practical solution for something is most times some some in-between solution.

> The best practical solution for something is most times some some in-between solution.

I'm very curious as to what you recommend for an in-between solution. It seems to me that either the child has a phone or they don't. How is it possible to effectively restrict their use of the phone short of not allowing them to have it unless a parent is present?

Parental controls of the phone. I.e. the child physical has the phone but the parent virtually owns/controls it.

Which sadly are currently often sorely lacking especially for younger children and even for the limited functionality often need too much technical understanding (e.g. knowing that "adult-content filters" tend to not work and at least for young children whitelists are preferable while sadly also often cumbersome).

Our main trouble is that there are like 30 Web- or streaming-capable devices in our house, not even counting ones that are packed away, and getting the balance between "usable by adults with little friction; locked down for kids" right on all of them is a real pain. Only the Apple-ecosystem stuff is relatively easy to manage, as far as that goes.

Worse, some of them are school devices that we can't manage. And having to physically manage device access is another annoying, never-ending task.

Except this is the first time in more than a couple of generations that kids were locked out of schools for up to two years.

If your kid is never isolated, how can they possibly develop healthy behaviors around boredom and isolation?

I hope you understand and just decided to pretend not to that _social_ isolation is not about physical isolation or boredom or having free time with nothing to do.

While the "simplest" way to archive social isolation is to be physically isolated you can be social isolated while having people around you 24/7.