My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.

The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.

It's true and it's also true that parent's would be criticized from the sidelines for allowing kids, even from a very young age to sit in front of screens for hours on end when i was a kid.

I have a friend who didn't have a television until the age of 12. If you ask which kids turned out well adjusted and which didn't it wasn't the one's with no screen time anymore than the one's with unlimited screen time. There's some reality to life people here aren't accepting and i can't see an issue with some level of hands off parenting that this enables quite honestly.

I know people are going to attack with some extreme of "you allow your kid to be raised by a tablet" or some such but these views are all so tiresome. The reality is that majority of kids have always been allowed some form of screen time and todays screentime is going to at least be more interactive than yesterdays screentime.