Every year this post shows up. It’s based on flimsy evidence, and the pledge itself is nonsensical peer pressure. All children are different in how they interact socially. Some do better with a computer or phone as an intermediary. This has been true since the BBS scene in the 1980s through smartphones today. I have had two teens with very different relationships with their phones, one is a socialite, the other just uses it to read manga and text close friends. Both have used their phones since grade 6, and had access to phones and iPads and PCs since age 3. They’re comfortable with technology and understand the risks of talking to people online because that was my job as a parent: to teach them from a young age to see these devices as an extension of themselves, that they will eventually be the ones in charge of their privacy and how they wish to be treated.
Public policy is based on aggregate behavior patterns of the overall population. If every policy were to account for outliers like your teens, nothing would ever get done.
My teens aren’t outliers, and we’re not talking about public policy. We’re talking about an influence campaign that actually doesn’t have reliable evidence about aggregate behaviour patterns, it just has an agenda.
