Agreed. This is more reactionary nonsense I remember hearing in the 1990s when nintendo would ruin everything. Before that cable and MTV was going to ruin society. Before that dancing and horror movies would destroy future generations.

I distinctly recall my parents kicking me off the landline phone in the early 90s every single night from talking to my friends, because they could hear me in my room so instead of staring at a flickering box with mundane sitcoms my other alternative was to jump on IRC or dial STS chatboards to talk to hackers in NYC that gave me (what was at the time) priceless information. How did that hurt my communications skills or development. By the time mobile phones became affordable I was already chatting with all of my IRL friends using online messenger instead of calling them since as kids, you are always kicked off the phone or parents/siblings pick up landlines and would listen in.

One thing I definitely know kids do is lookup safe sex and other awkward questions on sexuality and gender on their phones. Why you would deny your kid access to medical information and peer counselling so they can make correct choices or seek depression outlets I have no idea. They aren't going to ask you anything, and schools have sex ed too late. I used to listen to a call in radio show late at night when I was 13 that was all about sex ed. These shows don't exist anymore, there's nothing on cable, and parents are even more reactionary conservative now just look at the Tea Party nutbar parents attempting to extinguish sex ed from schools at every opportunity. Kids are unlikely to do it on a home computer too because there might be history their parents can find.

How do I know kids are doing this? Because the local schools here told everybody that the majority of searches done on school open wifi was sex ed and gay support groups (not porn, medical sites). They cited this as a reason to start sex ed in Grade 6 instead of the usual Grade 9. They are also looking up drug safety specifically MDMA correct doses and how to identify fake drugs, or how to order testing kits.

Just make sure you tell your kid not to use social media under a real identity ever, and to be careful where they send pictures to avoid future facial recognition software databases, blackmail and stalkers.

Nothing your kids do now is any different than what you did as a kid just you can't remember how shitty it was staring at the wall all night because you were forbidden to go out on a school night, TV was complete shit, the radio played nothing but bland shit and you had nothing interesting to read since your parents denied you any literature they didn't want you to see. My parents discovered a philosophy book that doubted the existence of God and they shredded it in front of me, so I went online and read it. I had to sneak out of my house in the middle of the night just so I could see my Grade 8 girlfriend to talk for a few hours in a dangerous pitch black park. Now you can just text each other or jump on chat instead of wandering the streets at one in the morning.

EDIT: I bet his kids already have smart phones and just hide them. Every school has a small trading economy just trade an older Android in exchange for homework being done or sell something. A kid in my school sold candy in grade 5 all the other kids bought daily. He was super rich by kid standards. I traded a bunch of hacker tfilez and private invites to warez boards in exchange for a pager in 1991. Another kid would rent his father's porn mags and videos out, and in Grade 8 a kid in my school would sell cheat codes and finishing moves to video games in the arcades. You could also pay the kid who worked in the office to give you a late slip instead of getting the standard detention and lecture.