As a free roaming latchkey kid, the Life360 stuff is so bizarre to me. I have some family that tracked their kids in high school, then college, then it has continued into their late 20s now. The way they talk about their normal mom-kid dynamics are so strange. Mom constantly checking in, on a drive and stop to use the restroom, mom assumes it’s a flat tire or whatever and has to check in. Stuff like that. I still regularly just go all damn day without picking up my phone, leave the house without it, and all that and just can’t imagine having to answer to anyone. There’s just such a lack of independence that comes with it all that I think I would find defeating. But, it’s these kids norm and they just shrug it off because everyone they know seems to be doing something similar.
> I still regularly just go all damn day without picking up my phone, leave the house without it, and all that and just can’t imagine having to answer to anyone.
I assume that you are a man. Do you know any women who do the same? I don't. To be clear, I'm not here to start a gender war, but women are way more attached to their mobile phones for a wide variety of reasons.
I know women who leave the house without their phones. I also know women who only share their location with their friends when they go out for a night of drinking or their first few dates with a new partner, but otherwise don't feel a need to be tethered to a phone and monitored to feel safe.
Then again, I've also got a niece who has expressed that her phone is a constant source of anxiety. She feels like she has to immediately respond to every text and social media post from her friends no matter what or there will be consequences which could range from causing others worry to losing social status and being potentially excluded as punishment. It sounds like a nightmare.
Definitely. But the family I mentioned also are men, just younger. I get women have different things to consider. But also, not always. I think they’d be safe in a populated area during daylight hours. Dating and meeting up with strangers is obviously a bit more complicated.
It’s impossible to say for sure, it I think I’d tell some to get concerned at a certain time if I hadn’t checked in. I still wouldn’t want people reaching out to me for every unscripted move I made.
Take a survey of women and let us know the results. I think you are profoundly underestimating the safety net phones are seen as by women, but would be fascinated to be proven wrong. Could segregate by age and location - but even elderly rural women raised 90% of their life without phones routinely cary them these days for medical assistance.
I'm guessing actual statistics will show that men are much more likely to experience violence, and much less likely to get help/support from others, but I don't think that'll make women feel any better about their own very real risks. It'd be nice if they had a way to feel safer without endangering themselves by surrendering their freedom and personal data to corporations who want to profit from keeping them under surveillance.
This seems like an especially insensitive reply. Have you ever spoken to someone that was a victim of violence? Their brain is rewired to be much more afraid. Most women I know have experienced violence or something very scary that permanently altered their world view of safety.
I remember a conversation in the running subreddit a decade or so ago. Someone posted disdainfully that they didn't like the trend towards running with gear, and they personally ran with nothing but shorts, socks, and shoes.
My immediate thought was "ok so you're a young white male in a safe location running short distances in good weather during daylight hours only". Because any variation from that set means more gear.
Exactly. About my previous comment, even if you are a privileged young women living in a safe area, you still want your phone to talk/chat with your girlfriends. On average, young men spent much less time talking/chatting with friends on their phone.
EDIT
Gender specific question about your post: What is it that appeals so much to young men about minimalism? I have never been able to explain it. Look at their first apartment. It is skin and bones. Look at a young woman's first apartment. There are all of these nice (but cheap) homely touches. Same for fashion.
You're probably seeing utilitarianism in young men more than minimalism, however they do look very similar. The minimalism throughout the home of (many) single men quite often orients around one "high spec item", like a TV, PC, workspace, exercise setup.
I think in contrast (most) young women's homes have more social signalling in them, homely touches, which has its own benefit equal to or most likely greater than minimalism.
I can say myself that I've always been minimalistic. My flat was bare bones because I treat the place mostly as a place to eat and sleep between spending most of my time outdoors or away from home. As soon as my girlfriend moved in a few years back, the flat went from everything white and "minimalistic" to being colourful and filled with little decorative things.
I'm glad there is more colour to the place and that somebody with an eye for it has taken charge of it, but I know if I went back to being single again tomorrow I'd go back to not having much around the place.
I think we’re “lazy” and have no urge to nest and generally have a utilitarian sensibility.
Lazy in the sense that we only think of bare essentials for most things, especially something like jogging. We don’t want to create more work for ourselves by dirtying more clothes than necessary, accessorizing, etc. We also generally just care a lot less about fashion and how people perceive us. Probably because we hardly even get noticed compared to women. It’s not like people are gawking if we wear the wrong bra. Women are more self conscious and care more in general about how they’re perceived.
The apartment comes with bare walls. Inertia is bare walls.
My wife likes putting everything on display. Like if there’s any surface, her urge is to cover it with what I call knickknacks, trinkets, and probably a dozen pictures. For me, it’s all clutter. Collects dust, creating a chore. If there’s an open wall she wants to hang stuff on it. She likes a wall of 100 small pictures, I’d prefer 1 large framed art. To me her way makes me feel things are chaotic. My way makes her feel it’s clinical and uninviting. We’ve found a balance that works for both of us. I like to have things decorated it’s just I really value white space as a design element. But I think if I were to psychoanalyze it, it’s rooted in the same thing that makes women’s brains always running/worrying and not understanding what men mean when they say “nothing” when asked “what are you thinking about?”
> What is it that appeals so much to young men about minimalism?
It's hard to generalize, and I myself am probably atypical here, but I suspect that most young men have their own 'little homely touches'. They might be less likely to run out and buy curtains or hang up pictures but I've seen things like random sports stuff (team merch or equipment that hasn't seen use in ages), old bear cans, action figures, books, guns, watches, guitars, and the occasional dead animal being displayed (or at least constantly left out and in view). It can look more organic than put together, but I've moved a guy's stuff only to find it put back in what was apparently its spot more than once.
At least for me, housing wasn't exactly stable in my early 20s. Flaky methhead roommates. Lease terminations. Getting laid off from an hourly wage job while living paycheck to paycheck. I've got a life of great privilege now but it wasn't always like that. I had to move frequently and even straight live out of my car a few times. I intentionally owned nothing more than I could pack inside of an hour and fit in the backseat of a '94 Civic because I actually had to pack up my life and fit it in the backseat of a '94 Civic more than once.
I'm really curious why these traits specifically. I suppose I get why women feel threatened just existing outside of locked doors and walls, but you rattled off a very long list of otherwise not true things. I'm not young, not white, run through poor neighborhoods with high crime, usually extremely early hours before the sun is up, sometimes in the rain. I still almost always only have shorts, socks, and shoes. A shirt half the year. What is the perceived benefit to more gear?
It's not like I've never suffered for it, for whatever that's worth. I turned an ankle at about the worst imaginable place a few years back and had to limp home nearly ten miles, which took half the day. Definitely having a phone with me would have made that more convenient, but I lived, it's still only half a day, and I've now got an amusing story to tell alongside all the times I've had to shit on the sidewalk in front of a building in downtown Dallas because the world refuses to have usable toilets anywhere outside of daytime business hours. I've broken my hand once on a run, but you don't need a hand to keep running.
I've also had a phone and it didn't help. I faceplanted hill bombing on a longboard a few years back and it turns out no rideshare driver will let you into their car when you're covered in blood, so I had to take my swollen shut eye, hanging limp separated arm, and go back home on the board and drive myself to the ER in my own car.
I feel like this kind of goes back to the entire point of the article. Like the guy who started this thread, I was a child of the 80s with a teen mom who put basically no restrictions on me and let me do anything, so I was walking around the neighborhood at 1 AM in 1st grade, riding my bike every weekend to the LA County public library 15 miles away when I was 8, going to skid row to hand out cash to homeless people when I got a car at 16. I capsized a canoe in the middle of Lake Arrowhead my freshman year of high school and had to swim back to shore dragging a boat behind me, which took over an hour. I got assaulted by a crazy dude living under a table on a pedestrian bridge skateboarding past him early in the morning, and I won the fight but he burned the hell out of my eye throwing hot sauce at me of all things. I've had my house flood. I've had my car smashed by a city dump truck while it was parked. I've had 9 orthopedic surgeries since turning 35 and my lumbar spine is now one solid bone held in place by screws and rods. I've been divorced twice. I've survived combat. I'm not afraid of bad things happening to me because they already happened and I ended up fine. This also gets at the other point already raised that, though women certainly seem to feel more threatened by the world, men are more likely to experience violence, injury, and early death because men take more risks.
I will, of course, meet a fate I can't overcome at some point. I'm going to die and there will likely be at least one thing I could have done differently that might have put that off by anywhere from a few minutes to a few decades. Maybe at the minute of death I'll even regret that. But I doubt it. I've been extremely close a few times and I was at peace with the idea. It has to happen eventually. I've still enjoyed most of the time I've had and intend to continue doing that. I've seen the lives of the extremely scared and it doesn't seem like they're doing any better than me.
> I'm really curious why these traits specifically. I suppose I get why women feel threatened just existing outside of locked doors and walls, but you rattled off a very long list of otherwise not true things. I'm not young, not white, run through poor neighborhoods with high crime, usually extremely early hours before the sun is up, sometimes in the rain. I still almost always only have shorts, socks, and shoes. A shirt half the year.
Jeez, tell me you are a man without telling me that you are a man. Switch genders: Would you ever write this post? I doubt it.
Wait until you get rich. Then people will buy endless amounts of running gear to show-off their social status. And do really expect me to believe that local women go running in Nairobi without a mobile phone (at least for their safety)?
Let people tell you things. Telling them they don't yet qualify for a real opinion is demeaning. If they are wrong, then they are wrong, but they are still entitled to their perspective and experience.
The risks may be much higher for women, but in most places the base rate is still very low. "Assaulted by a stranger on the street" is actually fairly low in the risks for almost anyone: the vast majority of assaults, especially sexual assaults, are perpetrated by someone the victim knows.
(This also doesn't necessarily mean that such concerns are irrational, just that the risks are not so high that you should expect every woman going out for a run in the dark is eventually going to be assaulted)
reminds me of the people I've encountered who are afraid to step foot in the OSRS wilderness (PVP zone which is also full of valuable loot) for any reason - even though all the valuable loot still works out pretty valuable once you subtract how much you lose because other players killed you, even if you're not particularly good at preventing it.
> is actually fairly low in the risks for almost anyone: the vast majority of assaults, especially sexual assaults, are perpetrated by someone the victim knows.
I need to troll here: You mispelled actually. It should be "ackchyually". Please read "moar" about the meme here[1]. I'm not here to start gender wars, but your response is incredibly tone deaf to the world that women experience in rich, middle class, and developing countries. I keep seeing this bullshit on HN where a comfortable dude has something to say about how women's fear is "irrational". No, that is not has the human brain works regarding safety. It is irrationally afraid. That is how we survive -- both men and women.
...except I get the sense that this creates a shelter such that the pair or members of the shelter never become independent enough to trust that what happens unseen/unwitnessed is trustworthy. certainly that depends upon the dynamics, but it seems that the sooner you begin developing independence and trust with that freedom of some personal secrecy the sooner a real adult relationship formation will abide.
I am not like you, from a long lost generation before the twisted pair gave way. summers from age 8 and beyond were days of unfettered freedom. I feel very fortunate
EDIT:
Why is this thing not letting me post?
I feel like ideation around safety and its feeling depend on context, but there are some who never feel safe and some who (blissfully) can around walk freely without feeling endangered.
Even while they can point to no personal experience of violence or danger, some (men) insist they must be allowed concealed carry to assure safety.
This is not a gender issue. People have amygdala and it develops differently in each of us, shaped early and continuously by experience and by random chance
Kids now teens. We never had a tv. Only let them watch dvd on laptop. Never allowed them on tiktok. Never gave them surveillance watches (kiddyzoom). I also did not have whatsapp, or even carried my phone half of the time.
They hated us for it. Other parents called us crazy. “They should learn how to handle social media!” And now their kids are unmanageable and ours thank us for shielding them.
I did not go so far, but things were not as bad when mine were younger (the younger one is 18 now). We did not have a TV, and for a long time they had desktops, and they got phones are teenagers.
It has got crazy. I recently read an article by a journalist whose son had just started university who was watching his tracking app and worrying when he did not get out of bed on time. Not as old as the 29 year old in the article, but she said she could not concentrate on her work because she was worried he would missing things. There are Whatsapp groups for parents at some universities - apparently discussing your now adult child with a group of strangers is normal.
I asked my daughter (also at her first term at university right now) what she though of the idea of having a tracking app on her phone, and (as I expected) there was no way to tolerate this. I think children who have been tracked normalise this. IMO is stalking once they are adults.
I think the perception that kids (or adults!) need constant entertainment is also harmful.
When my kids went away to college it was something of a relief. They were on their own. I would not know where they were, who they were with, how late they were staying out, or any of the stuff I was much more aware of when they were living at home.
I never GPS tracked them even when they were younger. They got inexpensive Android smartphones in 8th grade, with a talk about what to watch out for. I didn't read their email or text messages, I didn't lurk on their school website checking grades every day. If a teacher or administrator emailed me, I'd deal with that, but otherwise I tried to let them learn to run their lives. They made some mistakes. That's how you grow.
My boys are 16 and 14, we tried to limit screen time when they were younger but weren’t militant about it. Both are doing fine, good students, and humans. They have had phones since 6th grade and social media but their day-to-day use is more in group iMessage chats and meeting up with friends to play games.
It's probably just not so black and white. Every kid is different and I think you just have to observe how they handle different mediums. If I had a kid that really struggles with peer pressure, why would I put them in a situation where it's likely to be heavily amplified (i.e. social media)? But maybe other kids handle it just fine.
FWIW, I let my boys spend a good chunk of hours on video games because I would be a hypocrite otherwise. But there comes a point when their behavior takes a turn for the worse (I mean after so much video game time) that I end up taking it away for awhile. All things in moderation and such.
> They have had phones since 6th grade and social media but their day-to-day use is more in group iMessage chats and meeting up with friends to play games.
I am curious about the outcome if you had daughters.
> They hated us for it. Other parents called us crazy.
When did this start? And what ages did they start to appreciate the shielding?
Mine are 7 and 10 now and we don't have any complaints... at least not yet. But I feel like parents around us are pretty aware of the dangers here. I'm not seeing their peers getting phones yet; maybe some smart watches. Definitely not social media. We had a principal mention "wait until 8th" at a back-to school meeting and receive enthusiastic applause.
I'm wondering if the culture is catching up, or if they're just a little too young and the pressure is still incoming.
When they were about 13 and 14 they started to appreciate what they had. Both girls shun Insta and TikTok. They get angry when people take pictures without their permission.
The hardest period was when they were 10-13 I think. Because around that time all other kids got their own phones without any screentime limitations, or app store limitations. We'd hear about their friends being on tiktok and snap until 03:00am on schoolnights. Our kids were really jealous about that. But to us, it was like other parents had forgotten that they could actually... you know... parent.
HN always says something about "parents not parenting" in these discussions, but is there actually an objective definition of "parenting" that excludes this behaviour?
We had a TV. but it was a 12 inch diagonal B&W.
EVENTUALLY the kids showed great composure and maturity and we relented to a Color 26inch (still Cath raytube then). Even bought them a NES console one Christmas. because they were good kids.
'shielding' is a responsibility, but it is also a responsible act of parenting to require them - demand of them - to develop their own autonomous safety systems and awareness, independent of our controls or consultations 24/7.
I'm curious what gadgets did you grow up with, and what age did your children get the NES? Are you raising them to have a "lower tech" childhood than yours?
> They hated us for it. Other parents called us crazy. “They should learn how to handle social media!” And now their kids are unmanageable and ours thank us for shielding them.
Life's about boundaries, if you don't set them for your kids they won't grow properly and other people will have to explain them the rules (or they'll be parasites their whole life)
if you set the boundaries on their behalf, they just learn dependence and not how to establish boundaries for themselves. let them get in trouble while they're kids. as soon as they move out or go off to college, they'll be wise not to get caught and to be responsible for themselves if they've had practice doing it already. otherwise, like several people I grew up with, they'll go off the rails and flunk out because they don't have any self discipline and the freedom they were denied their whole childhood was intoxicating
Maybe you did other things right too. Like listening to them. Spending time with them. Passing your genes. Who knows what else. Maybe you’re "just" great parents.
We are. I think. :) We have a great many faults and suck at a great many things. But parenting is not one of those.
We decided early on to treat them as inexperienced tiny teammembers. So many little tricks and nuances. Learned a lot from the book "How 2 Talk 2 Kids".
Like: don't refer to yourself as "Mommy" or "Daddy". Instead use "I": "I'm going to cook dinner now", not "Daddy's going to cook dinner now".
Or: don't tell them what to do, but point out the problem: "Oh, look, those shoes are now blocking my way to the kitchen. Could you help me out?"
(Use that last one at work too. ;-))
But yeah - tiny teammembers because we are a team. We are not against them. Therefor they don't need to fight us. Instead we fight alongside them. And they seem to realize that.
But I'll post back in this thread in 15 years and we'll see how it all turned out by then. ;-)
I don't know if I follow your exact philosophy but one thing I've never done: baby talk. Kid talk? Whatever you want to call it.
I talk to my kids like I talk to other people. "Go to the bathroom" is the notable example. By no means a pro and many flaws in my process.
Frankly, I think the best thing you teach them is not how to do or not do anything but instead the implications of thoughts and actions and what it means to handle and feel comfortable with their choices.
Mine are 8.5 and 4.5. They watch TV like plenty of kids. Rarely used iPads, and my older kid uses a laptop here and there. I will not let them use my phone casually.
But I don't think that them not using it is teaching them much about the phone. Instead it's about opportunity. Do something else! READ, draw, write, sketch, paint, run, craft, build, talk. I'm working on teaching my oldest how to be, well, bored.
Did you have landlines? I want my kid to just walk over to his friend's place whenever he wants, but while most parents are coming around to having kids without cellphones they all live in extremely un-walkable neighborhoods.
I’m seeing more retro-style tech spring up for kids. We just got one of these for the kiddo: https://tincan.kids/ and have found out several other parents have them so there’s a small but growing network of kid landlines forming.
Even without purpose-built things like TinCan, most "landlines" these days... aren't. My parents' house is wired for telephony, but the backhaul is 5G. A box in the house serves as the uplink between the 5G network and the "landline" phones throughout the house.
They should learn how to handle reality before being inundated with an endless overwhelming deluge of unreality, outright bullshit, and lies. Kudos to you for giving them that chance.
In a world where heroin is normalized, it might be a good idea
A similar question as the European vs American approach to handling alcohol. In Europe (vast oversimplification incoming, big continent with lots of cultures and jurisdictions) it's normal to drink beer the first time by 14, in the presence of your parents, and are typically able to buy it freely at around 16. In the US (oversimplification incoming) you typically have your first experience with alcohol in secret, or binge-drinking once you are 21 and free from your parents. The European version typically results in more alcohol being consumed, but in healthier habits
One crux is that this only works if the parents are actually using alcohol/social media in a healthy way. A heroin addict can't teach their children how to responsibly use heroin
> In Europe (vast oversimplification incoming, big continent with lots of cultures and jurisdictions) it's normal to drink beer the first time by 14, in the presence of your parents, and are typically able to buy it freely at around 16.
You did disclaim about this, but my understanding is that most European countries no longer allow you to buy alcohol before you’re 18 (but with some major exceptions like Germany and Belgium). Culturally, you are however quite spot on.
Well, it’s like epsilon-delta proofs in maths, isn’t it? For any acceptable amount of harm (epsilon), you can find some upper limit on consumption (delta) that causes harm below that threshold based on our current experimental data. Presumably, most people won’t care if epsilon is small enough, for example smaller than the risk of getting cancer from a walk in the park without sunscreen on.
A lot of the information is from back in the time where opium was legal but most people are not very receptive to opioids. They feel sick and tripping balls and would
not repeat the experience if offered.
It is a very particular kind of person who gets addicted right away.
Of course, in a social context where consumption is expected, many more may reach the point where they keep consuming in order to stave off withdrawal.
I’d like to hear more, if you don’t mind, about your kids’ experience:
1. At what age did they start recognizing your rules benefited them (and start tanking you)
2. Was it a daily nonstop fight to keep telling them “no” to these things?
3. Did your kids feel sincerely ostracized and, if so, for how long?
When was the crossover point, when they stopped hating you for it and started thanking you? And what was the specific thank you about? Not wasting their time with tiktok junk, or helping protect their developing brains from addictive slop?
The earliest time they expressed gratitude instead of annoyance at the boundaries was (I think) when they were 13 and 14. Their friends and classmates would be on snap at 04:00am on schoolnights, endlessly argueing and namecalling and drama. The youngest was really gratefull that she could be on snapchat, but only for a short period of time, and never after 19:00.
And this week they both said how thankfull they had so few advertisements in their lives. Because we block with pi-hole and ublock origin, and showed them how online ads work and how to avoid them.
(Sidenote: If you have kids: talk to your teachers and schools and ask to setup firefox+ublock origin on their classroom computer. Or just install 'brave'. All teachers use youtube during classes. With ads. You will be lifted to instant hero status for blocking those.)
I don't think GP described the "bare minimum". Sounds like he went above and beyond to keep bad stuff at bay, and probably took some heat from his kids about it. I hope to be as thoughtful, thorough, and successful with my parenting.
Minimizing screens has been shown to have a massive effect on children, positively.
At the same time children are exposed to things and if they don't know how to navigate it, it's critical.
I take small people through what the screens and computers are trying to do their brains and then ask them to watch their brain watching the thing that catches their interest.
It could be someone's smart watch, someone's phone, or a tv.
One time a small humanoid self reported to me that sugar makes them want to have more sugar, and some screens seem to do the same thing, but other screens don't make them feel bad.
I agree - it wasn't that we'd block them from tech without explaining. We take our little people seriously. We always saw them as inexperienced, not dumb. And turns out that if you take people seriously, they return in kind.
So we'd sit them down and discuss what Meta et al were doing to them. And why we thought that was a bad idea. They still hated us for haha but a little less I guess. Rephrase: they still thought it was unfair because their friends got to be on tiktok 24/7 and they couldn't even get a phone.
We told them 'life is not fair', and other parents were ignorant of the dangers but that didn't make the dangers any less.
I don't know - maybe we just got lucky with our kids.
Oh, I want to be very clear. Children absolutely need to be protected, period. The algorithms are completely self-serving and predatory to get and keep people watching, and they do not care.
The simple proof is how impossible it is to even create a single playlist for children on YouTube. The brands actively create more and more official channels to offset parents who are saying to not show a channel in their feed anymore.
You have a great point about what other children do you or don't do. The Every Family is Different Angle is one that I like and also that people who know how to talk to each other will be more able to lead themselves and others compared to anyone who just listens and watches all the time.
There are so many dangers out there and really especially with AI now able to ramp up everything, those dangers are going to increase and there's going to be something needed because otherwise the entire world directly or indirectly is coming into the little screens and little brains unfiltered and unmanaged.
Back about 15 or so years ago, I heard from colleagues and even my sister about how they banned kids from the stupid that was readily available on television. Their kids would be forbidden, for instance, from watching Hannah Montana, or even the entire Disney Channel and/or Nickelodeon. When my nephew was little, Caillou was forbidden to him. I was impressed with these parents' gutsiness and willingness to take action to protect their kids from harmful slop.
Banning kids from social media seems to be the present-day equivalent of that and I commend you.
Here's another one for ya: we also forbade them from watching Barbie. They are, to this day, pissed about that hahaha.
And recently they confessed that they sneakily watched once in a while. :-D
So they got the boundary. Found it to be unjust. Tested it. Crossed it. Got away with it. Grew from that. All without having to steal lipstick, smoke joints, or drink themselves into a coma.
I'm pretty sure you mean some Barbie show? Apparently that's a thing that exists. Because Barbie is a great movie, although I'm not sure what to recommend about the maturity level required to understand -- it seems that many many fully grown adults have not reached that level. (Ken will be okay. The movie isn't about Ken. It's okay to have a movie not be about Ken. Do not conclude that the movie is saying that all men are vapid losers because the movie portrays vapid men.)
You literally need to give your kids a phone now.
They need to login to school apps to complete their assignments and similar cases.
Yours probably grew up in the interim time before these tools became mandatory.
But: they have phones. Since they were about 12. But with screentime, with us controlling the apps, without tiktok, behind a pi-hole and pivpn. With the initial agreement that we - the grown ups - were _always_ allowed to open their phone and look at any content.
For the past year or so the eldest doesn't have any screentime limitations anymore, but she still does not use insta or tiktok.
What we did was constantly explain our decisions. And showed them how boundaries were there for protection, not holding back. And if they showed us that they could handle lifting of a boundary we would lift a boundary.
Other parents in our neighbourhood just gave phones to their kids at age 11 and never set boundaries. Those kids now take pictures of girls in their classroom, and turn them into nudes. And send them around large groups on snapchat. Police was involved. But I look at the parents. Kids _need_ boundaries.
We pointed out to ours the peers who watch shorts in a doom loop and how they are shaping up to be losers, that pretty much set them straight. But a lot depends on a person too, how competitive they are or how prone to addictive behaviors.
The tracking is normalized, and they're going to grow up to be adults that both tolerate and impose oppressive surveillance that we couldn't even imagine today.
I mean, it's pretty clear it's not going anywhere or getting any less oppressive. At a certain point, attempting to subvert these makes you stick out even more.
I don't have any data to back it up, but my impression it is mostly young people that are aware and opposed to Flock et al.
I think people can understand the nuance and tradeoffs between your parents knowing your locations, Big Tech tracking you to profit off your data, and companies who's raison d'etre is to sell your data to law enforcement.
Surveillance is already normalized and mostly unavoidable, but I believe tolerance for abuse of the data is higher than you think.
I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.
They are opposed to Flock, while at the same time they are constantly reporting their location to each other and monitoring where everyone they know is. Which is logically consistent: they're not ok with tracking being done to them, but they're ok with doing the tracking and opting in to being tracked.
Of course, with pervasive tracking being normalized, and the apps doing this being subject to law enforcement and the government, it kind of ends up as the same thing.
(Whether parents have access to this voluntary tracking, I don't know. My kid uses it with his friends, but I've never wanted to track him. Seems creepy and distrusting. Sure, he lies to me about some things, but I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't a lie. Feel free to disbelieve me.)
I don't think it i s the same thing. I don't like pervasive tracking either, but it is very different from for police to subpoena google to get my data, than it is for flock to directly give law enforcement my location.
I use Find My friends on my iphone, I trust them enough they can know my location and I trust Apple enough to carry that data (I realize this is implying "nothing to hide", but I also consent to giving Apple my location). I get that it seem creepy, but its also a cool new technology if you can get over how creepy it seems. Not trying to sell you one, but give you another perspective.
I'm not a parent, but when I was teen my parents monitored me as much as they could. Personally, I think location tracking is less of an issue than parental surveillance of internet browsing. I do think if parents are going to track their kid's location, they should let their kid track the parents, too.
> I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.
Right it's not even a question of new data-- a mountain of historical privacy leaks were benign because it was a needle in a haystack. In the future everyone will be electronically stalked by a fleet of AI private detectives. To limit the damage we must substantially restrict the collection and retention of personal information.
They wouldn't even need to stalk us. I imagine they are training individualized models based on our individualized data, then use those models to A/B test the potential for advertisements or other propaganda, but they are probably already doing that. I wish my brain was big enough to know what they could be up to.
I think the issue isn't the collection, or retention (although there should still be data retention laws to protect against the liability of holding that data), but the ways the data is shared or used by third-parties. If businesses were no longer able to be shared or sold to 3rd parties, or be used for advertisements, the remainder of issues are largely ideological.
There are things parents will not want teens to do that teens will want to do. They will not want to feel pressure to even explain themselves after the fact.
That sounds orthogonal to device management to me. It will happen either way, and not having GPS tracking won't stop parents from catching their kids doing stuff they don't want them to (at least if it's a recurring thing)
People here seem to completely overlook that parents have been managing the whole life of their kid for more than a decade and teenagers are really bad at hiding things in general. Perhaps it's different if the parents are working three jobs and never talk to their kid, but I don't see that as a general case.
> most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance
That is decidedly not the way I've seen most people handle the convenience/privacy tradeoffs we all face every hour of every day. So I'll put a question mark on that..
Really ? Kids in family plans will have their devices bound to an admin, and that admin has a lot of rights on their devices, purchases etc (that's the whole point)
I can't imagine every family setting up the admin features to be in psychological crisis.
> Once the kids realize their parents are tracking their location with the phone, the answer is easy: ditch the phone.
In the "One Battle After Another" movie there was a (semi)funny subplot about this, except in the other direction, the parent wanted the kid to ditch the phone, and the kid had a secret one.
> You can tell them not to do stupid things all day, but life finds a way, and I want them fully equipped when it happens.
Mine's following her uncle's footsteps: he's BJJ black belt (and instructor) and she's into her 4th year of BJJ. She already dislocated another person's arm (another teenager who wanted to "see if BJJ works").
The goal is not to overpower a 25 y/old muscular man: but to win her just enough time to be able to ring an alarm/pass a distress call, grab her pepper spray in her purse, etc.
I trust her and she can do all the crazy shit teenagers do she wants to do: it's some of the others I don't trust.
Oddly enough when I was 9 I regularly went places without a phone. If I needed to reach my family I’d have to find a pay phone and hope someone was at home to answer.
The general backup plan was to go to the nearest friends’ house.
Yeah the difference is that kids now don't really remember phone numbers (neither do I anymore honestly), and pay phones are basically non-existent
I wish kids could go out like I used to but the world is just different and some of the failsafes I took for granted like payphones don't exist anymore
I taught my kid my phone number when she was 7, and we tell her that if she needs help she can knock on anyone's front door and ask to use their phone.
These are choices we make, we dont need to give in to what "everyone" does.
The individual might be back to the 90s, but the rest of society and the environment is not. E.g. kids in the 90s just had to carry a few quarters and they could use a payphone if they really needed to call home. Today payphones have virtually disappeared.
No it just normalizes being tracked as the price of admission to using these tools.
So they'll keep the phones and accept being tracked and just hold onto a certain amount of anxiety and resentment. Woo
The thing is the parents normalizing this kind of intrusion of privacy think they are in the right while creating a very dangerous world. Even things like going through your kids rooms (yes even when they live at home) is a huge privacy violation.
No wonder the "but think of the kids" argument is so effective, we all grew up being propagandized by or own parents and environment.
Privacy feels like such an innate desire. Your mention of parents going through your room brought back a few negative emotions tied to a few memories, where my mom either came to me with something she found in my room, or walked into my room and went directly to where something was hidden and pulled it out (indicating that she had already been snooping in my room and found it). Thinking about it, I realized that's one of the reasons I started hiding things where my parents couldn't easily get to them, like in the rafters in the garage, or in various forts and hideouts I created in the neighborhood.
> like in the rafters in the garage, or in various forts and hideouts
Now imagine your parents tracking you going into the garage every time or to specific hideouts.
Privacy is in my opinion one of the most important human rights that exist and the most frequently diminished or ignored, especially around parent/kid relations. Hence why it is a part of the UDHR (universal declaration of human rights).
With regards to kid/parent relation we are often too lenient as a society. One good measurement that you can keep in the back of your head to judge a kids invasion of privacy is the following question "If this kid was suffering from abusive parents, would this allow the parent to intervene the kid reaching out?".
While I agree with your overall sentiment, surely you do accept that parenting necessitates a certain degree of privacy intrusion from the parent to the child? (Or a stronger claim, that parenting involves a degree of surveillance, and active, parent-initiated guidance and control.) An infant or a toddler requires a high degree of control and privacy intrusion, and that degree should decrease as the person matures. I think that is nearly evident, and the only aspect that people (and various schools of thought regarding childcare, education and in fact social systems) argue about is the shape of that curve; how fast should the level of surveillance and control decrease and how low should it drop?
Yes I agree it is required to a certain extend however at the same time I think the socially acceptable level is usually too much to the parents control of the child. The falloff could be quite strong in my opinion. It is a difficult balance but usually parents or adjacent persons don't even realize privacy violations are happening. It is a real problem for kids (and people trying to help them) in difficult and abusive situations.
I have seen famous influencer (parents) commonly say things like "If you live in my house I can go through your room any time I please.". I understand the sentiment and some kids and situations require that, however I think openly incentivizing others to do so or normalizing that is not right. Especially knowing that it can make reaching out of abused kids much more difficult.
Both of my parents grew up in very small houses with a lot of children, and my wife shared a room with her sister. I'd guess that the vast majority of humanity now, and certainly in the past, had very little individual privacy because there was no room!
It seems like a modern luxury in western suburban living. Nice if if you can get it, I suppose.
I think that in a lot of cases you will find that especially if physical privacy is not able to be maintained (small room that needs to be shared). There will be additional space (respect) that will be created for mental privacy.
In the past or in communities today where physical privacy is not always possible you will find there are a lot more accepted ways for people to separate themselves. Third spaces where you can be uninfluenced by the other party will be more common, going out for dinner alone or to the park alone are examples of activities that will be more normalized in those communities.
Your parents could probably be out the whole day without being tracked or recorded fully. However the modern day surveillance (including tracking of kids) means you will be tracked everywhere. You don't have the luxury anymore of going somewhere anonymous.
Ask your parents what they did when their sibling annoyed them.
I think there’s a difference between privacy being a challenge (your example) versus a situation where privacy is actively undermined and disrespected (OP’s example).
It’s like accidentally ending up in the background of someone’s photo at a public park versus someone actively following and taking photos of you. Or sharing a room with a sibling versus that same sibling digging through a personal journal.
The eradication of critical childhood environments has severely degraded the experience for kids and parents alike.
My parents parented a few hours a week; most of my childhood hours were spent in adult-free development - with peers or on my own. I ranged everywhere.
My kids ranged not at all. Instead they grew up under 24/7 adulting. They had little of the opportunity I had to grow ambition, problem solving skills and basic independence.
Adults traded their growth for car culture, trespassing culture and extreme beliefs about stranger risk that never reflected reality.
I spent 20x the time parenting that my parents did. We parents spent hours trying to manually recreate (via camps, events) the slivers of the childhood that we experienced organically. As good as these events were, they didn't come close to replacing what adults have taken away (daily adult-free, free ranging).
The end result, I have 5 adult sons and will probably never have grandchildren. Besides being economically impossible for a couple to support themselves on typical wages, parenting is immeasurably more complex and time consuming than what my parents experienced.
In short, parents give way more and kids get way less.
What worries me are the impacts of constant surveillance that we can't see. What does it mean when every child gets assigned into various buckets like "smart/stupid", "constantly late", "impulsive", "has few fiends", etc by companies who are constantly tracking their grades and test scores in every subject as they age, along with their location and social networks and online habits. What happens when that data ends up with data brokers and sold to everyone from potential employers, to governments, to insurance companies, to criminals and scammers, and to AI companies for use as training data.
We're already seeing things like predictive policing, surveillance pricing, judges using AI to write rulings and parole-boards using AI to decide the fate of prisoners, extensive (and often illegal) background checks used by landlords and employers, careers being ended by people's ancient social media posts, and literal bombs being dropped based on AI's flawed assumptions.
AI is making it ever easier to trawl through the massive piles of data being collected and output results, which will randomly contain errors people will probably never be told about even when they're being used to make decisions that have major impacts on their lives.
It's become so normalized, even by their own parents, that kids growing up in this environment don't even question it. I wonder if we're raising generations of stunted adults who've been denied the opportunity to develop confidence and independence as children, training them to submit to constantly being monitored and recorded, and then throwing them to the wolves who are eager to use all that data to maximize their ability to take people's money, manipulate them more effectively, or pass judgement on them.
I think the problem here is what are you supposed to do with very low probability really bad events. I.e. your kid being kidnapped or similar. The probability of this extremely low, but it is unimaginatively bad. Therefore any small thing you do that will reduce the chance of this happening may seem reasonable.
It is not clear to me how to think about this rationally.
Part of the way to think about it is that you simply can't control such events. We never could and we never will. Trying to do so is a losing game for temporary psychological comfort only. I think the key is that the "small things" that you do are unlikely to actually reduce the probability in practice.
Stranger kidnapping is an extreme black swan, but there’s plenty of more realistic scenarios where tracking could mitigate a bad outcome. Kid gets off the school bus at the wrong stop: found in minutes. Kid is riding bike, falls and knocked out: found easily.
There’s a ton of rare, negative scenarios where risk reduction is so cheap and easy that you’re silly not to do it. Car accident deaths are about 1 in 100 million miles driven, you certainly can’t control other drivers, but not putting on a seatbelt is stupid.
> Kid gets off the school bus at the wrong stop: found in minutes.
if they have a phone they can call for help. before mobile phones they used payphones.
> Kid is riding bike, falls and knocked out:
Unless its somewhere very lonely, someone sees the kid, calls emergency services, who contact the parent. I do not know how this works in the US where you pay for ambulances though.
You think a phone is less of a tracking device than an Airtag? It's more tracking, more potential issues with social media and via helicopter parenting, etc. But sure, give them an airtag or a phone, either is an acceptable mitigation to the risk.
It probably works out fine, but relies on someone noticing. A tracker or phone wouldn't require that helpful stranger as a pre-req.
I don't know that it is possible to think rationally about things like that. It will always be a challenge for parents.
IMHO the key question is: what do you with that fear? If you let it rule you, there is a high risk of becoming such a controlling and overprotective parent that the child never gets the real-world experience that they need in order to survive.
I have seen many real-life cases of parents who were way too overprotective, out of a motivation of love and concern. But it really hurt the children because while they were kept safe, they hadn't developed a lot of street smarts. By the time they then ended up in college, they were a ripe target for predators.
Timeless problem faced by probably every halfway decent parent that ever lived.
Nah. I always felt the kids a couple years younger than me got the best deal (or better than my age.)
My age got on AIM during the transition to college, would have loved it in high school
Then facebook came to colleges right as I was finishing
Tinder came around after my dating days were over
But, I got to roam around town on my BMX and remember only having 3 tv channels as a kid. And I got to be an early adopter of so many things. So I think that’s a better mix. I love being bored and trying new IRL hobbies other than constantly losing time to a screen.
Tinder has an interesting arc. At first, it seemed really awesome and many people liked it. It supplemented the traditional dating process. This is what I wish I could have participated in. I think there was about a decade of that after which it replace and became the dating process. Meaning, talking to strangers, flirting, starting a conversation and asking someone out at a coffee shop or whatever became unusual. Then it became awkward. Then it became cringe. I don’t want to participate in today’s dating scene at all, largely because of this app dominance and how it’s changed the society and norms.
It is sad that the kids have no autonomy around their data, per the decisions of the parent.
Awful practices that have always been done in some form, like lending rates shifting per "intangibles" all are re-enabled by tech like this. Predictive pricing and insurance premiums seem top of mind.
Now, think through: Mom and Dad got you your pulseox sock from Owlet for your 4 month old foot. If something irregular shows up in that data set, are your insurance premiums changing?
Or, think through: savings the kids via counter-encryption can lead to a lot of kids-savings in other ways. If your nanny cam shows anything but a baby on a blank crib, can your nanny cam call CPS on your for you exposing your kid to SIDS risk?
The fact we can't answer this should set off alarm bells on the future for our kids.
Before you tell me this is far off: if you did standard pre-natal testing, in the last 12 months, you didn't mind which vendor was actually processing your standard tests, your kid's genetic data was auto-included in the dataset for an opt-out only Israeli genetics research company (thinking of one company and one kid I know of). I'm sure this was totally benign.
There was a time when I liked having intricate data about things because it was interesting for me to learn about my own world. That rosy-eyed picture was polluted by surveillance capitalism, and it's gotten to the point where I'd often rather write things down on paper or in a markdown or yaml doc rather than use an tracker app, just because I know that my own hand-written data isn't one profile in a global data set used to squeeze value out of me.
Also, after reading the free part of the article, I propose the word "pramopticon".
It could happen given the reverse engineering efforts that are possible with the LLMs.
I think there will be a nice time window before all hardware is released with some sort of DRM, and while losses from people who reject the surveillance (similar to AdBlock) are small enough, where you will be able to hack this hardware to run for yourself only.
Same, early 2000s I remember dreaming about having some wristband or something that would read all the "data" from my body and automatically know what's wrong and so on, even dreaming of being able to have "automatic journals" created from dreams and what not, my imagination was the limits, collect all the data, create miracles!
Then Snowden happened, and Cambridge Analytica, and Event X and everything else. Now I'm the same, all "family data" lives on harddrives that are physically in my home, I prefer paper notes over anything on my computer, for my journal at least, and my perspective is basically that secrets are impossible over the internet. If you want something secret, it cannot go through internet pipes even once.
Technically, the wristband dream isn't totally dead. Like you said, the real poison pill is internet access. As long as tech is physically walled off from bad actors who really really really want to take a look at it, it's not impossible. But as 'the future' comes for us all, the idea of computerized, but not connected devices becomes more of a pipe dream.
Modern marketing just preys on parental guilt. If you don't buy a $300 sensor or track your kid's location every second, they subtly make you feel like an irresponsible parent.
It's actually sad for kids. In childhood being able to stay out a bit longer, solve sudden problems without calling mom, or just sit alone taught you how to cope with the world. But if someone monitors a child all the way to their college dorm door, it's unclear how they're supposed to develop personal autonomy at all
Many decades ago - there was barely a dangerous / dumb thing you could do roaming my neighbourhood that the network of mothers wouldn't relay back by the time you got home.
I'm being seen by everyone else when I walk around the street, but there is friction to the information, it's not being collected, transferred, or cross-referenced unless it meets certain thresholds that involve many people signing off on it as notable or unusual.
There's a big difference between all your neighbors running purely on-premises camera setups versus all of them running individual nodes of a giant panopticon.
> being able to stay out a bit longer, solve sudden problems without calling mom, or just sit alone
none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket
my hesitation is from knowing these _dont_ work: by the time airtag shows where someone actually is that isnt a 500m circle, you can see them with your analog eyes :/
> none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket.
Technically true. However I think there is a very small percentage of parents that can keep themselves from interrupting in such a situation. Actually I think it leads to a slippery slope situation (the article calls it a downward spiral) where the interruptions will be easier to make the more you do it as a parent. The only question remaining is how high up the slope do you start and how fast do you slip?
> none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket
When I was about 8 years old I was allowed to go with the bus by myself between my mom and my dad.
I can remember two times I fell asleep on the bus, and ended up some other place, and had to figure out how to get home from there, by myself.
I'm sure of the technology was available at the time, my mom would have placed an airtag on me, and without a doubt, would have seen me miss my bus-stop and jumped into her car to pick me up wherever I ended up. Bless her heart, but I'd miss the opportunity of figuring it out by myself.
Of course, just one silly example, but I could see if this was constantly happening, a child might get accustomed to this "saving" being automatic, and not even trying to solve things yourself because you know your parent will come save the day. Until they don't, of course.
> I can remember two times I fell asleep on the bus, and ended up some other place, and had to figure out how to get home from there, by myself.
if it involved asking a business (car service in my case) to let you use their phone, or already having a quarter and using a payphone to call mom... thats an airtag :)
> a child might get accustomed to this "saving" being automatic
i dont fear a perfectly functioning society; im an adult and am also used to 911/999/etc being available. some people watch Demolition Man and get the wrong idea...
It is not an airtag. The payphone doesn't use a network of snitches to say where you are at all times. It is really bad to instill the idea that you are never private, it makes our surveillance situation worse and more accepted. Which i am sure hackernews and the EFF have plenty of articles to show why normal people need privacy.
How so? Mom has no way to know where you are until you initiate the call. Isn’t a big part of the developmental point to have kids recognize they’re lost on their own and then ask for help from a friendly stranger? What’s the ‘no airtag’ scenario you imagine?
> having a quarter and using a payphone to call mom
I had enough coins for 2 phone calls in a sealed envelope in my school bag for emergencies - probably still in the bottom of my bag wherever it may be.
> if it involved asking a business (car service in my case) to let you use their phone, or already having a quarter and using a payphone to call mom... thats an airtag :)
No. An airtag works for your mom no matter if you want it or not, some payphone on the street places the agency about calling help into your hands.
> none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket
It instills a Panopticum-like philosophy in said kids since their very early ages, meaning they become aware that they're being watched at every moment of their lives. In my opinion that does affect said kids' future look on life (once they will have become adults, that is).
> It instills a Panopticum-like philosophy in said kids since their very early ages
Santa Claus has been around since before airtags; you dont need technology to make kids fearful of invisible retribution, just a clever song ("he sees you when youre sleeping, he knows when youre awake")
We’ve strip-mined every cultural superstition and monster for the entertainment industry, but those superstitions and monsters often existed - even in the minds of adults - to warn against certain behaviors, actions or locations.
If that was so people who were more religious would be more accepting of surveillance and I do not think that is the case.
God is also perfectly good, outside time, unlikely to question your actions, and completely forgiving. Rather different from being watched by human beings.
I do not think belief divine omniscience by itself had much impact on people's behaviour.
Why would a religious person, holding a sincere belief their actions cannot be hidden, want more surveillance? It would be redundant, no? Maybe they can chime in and resolve it. Best to hear from a source directly.
There is no religious reason for more surveillance - which its with the point I made.
The reasons for wanting more surveillance are entirely secular: things such as catching criminals, protecting children etc. They are about giving power to the authorities, and how desirable more surveillance is depends on how much you fear what it is supposed to stop, and on how much you trust to authorities to use the powers you give them ethically and effectively.
It's true that the idea of 'someone is watching you' is very old and a well-tested method of social control. The religious angle may be why so many people are receptive to mass surveillance today. But not everyone is religious, and those that are rarely live with a true, 24/7 feeling of dread and fear that someone is actually watching. The fear of consequences is very distant, and there is often forgiveness for small infractions. That fear becomes very different when you can put a face and a name to the people watching you, and you know they can affect your life in very real and immediate ways. This is the preconditioning that starts with childhood surveillance.
I've spoken to many of the deconverted who where genuinely afraid of committing real and mental sins as a direct condition of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Have you not met someone like this?
I'm saying, in response to "The fear of consequences is very distant, and there is often forgiveness for small infractions," that people do have a fear of misbehaving and a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent god is a critical component of a 'feeling that someone is always watching' resulting in that fear and subsequent avoidance.
certainly proponents of surveillance capitalism would argue that the brain must percieve a social slight in the same way it percieves a slight against god. i can imagine some of these types whispering morpheus quotes to themselves in bed. "the need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by god ..."
Yeah, but then there's religion with an all-viewing God or gods. And years of these ideas repeated never really goes away. After all, what if there really IS a God, or Vishnu, or Allah, and a Hell, etc.! The very idea is enough to drive a kid to Pascal's wager.
There’s many people who don’t believe in either Santa or god. Only about half of younger people believe in hell in the US.
Unfortunately, even those who escape such beliefs now have to face the reality of surveillance not by gods, but by men, many of whom don’t have your best interest in mind.
> none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket
Do you want to install an app on your phone that will track you and your online activities for the government? They won't interfere, they just want to know what you're up to and help. Children are people and want some privacy too. I know I did.
Presumably, when this generation comes of age they will largely answer this question with "sure, I don't see the problem", which many will consider a big win.
Most marketing for most things preys on guilt, fear, and avarice - negative emotions are uncomfortable, and you first create the negative emotion in the target's mind, and then sell them the solution, to alleive their discomfort.
I was a kid who wandered. Sometimes through bear infested forests at night. Sometimes through abandoned factories with collapsing roofs. Sometimes to the homes of people my parents strongly disapproved of.
I lived. So did pretty much everyone else. I had a few significant fuck-ups. I learned from them, and didn't repeat them. In my childhood, I knew one kid who died from misadventure - grain silo - and many who died from disease - meningitis, cancer, sepsis. Perhaps parents should keep their children in protective plastic bubbles, if they're going to be consistent about it.
My kid - no tracking, and autonomy that I see makes other parents writhe with discomfort, as they're like "she'll be stolen! Her kidneys!", and I'm going "you guys don't understand statistics, and your kids are going to live with you until you die, and lead stunted lives".
"If you don't buy a $300 sensor or track your kid's location every second, they subtly make you feel like an irresponsible parent."
It's not just marketing - the laws are getting more and more restrictive too. Not having some tracking on your kid starts to be used against people in court cases (criminal or civil). The think of tha children crowd has the ear of law enforcement and prosecutors.
Some of that baby phase and younger kid stuff in the article sounds pretty insane.
My daughter is a teenager and I appreciate being able to look at her phone's location when I pick her up from a place. I don't tend to monitor her phone use, occasionally I will check it out but the "deal" I have with her makes sure she understands she is an individual and I respect her individuality. I have a few apps blocked.
This stuff feels like the industrialisation of women's neurosis. I read the first 1/4 of the article, then stopped to check the gender of the author: A woman ("Sarah"). I am not surprised. Many of the people interviewed are also women. The primary consumer of these tools and services are women.
I asked a few good fathers that I know about this trend: Universally, they agreed that it mostly appealed to their wives. And yes, they thought a lot of it was "too much". One gets daily reports (handwritten!) from the daycare about their kid with specific details about what they ate, toilet visits, nap time, play time, etc.
I'll never forget a tense phone call I had with my mother. She was upset that I wasn't responding faster to her WhatsApp text messages. I was flabbergasted. I asked her: What did you do 10 years ago when you didn't have a mobile phone? There was a long pause, then a sigh from her. Plus, I lived many timezones away from her, and I worked a very demanding job, where it is not uncommon to be away from my mobile phone for hours at a time.
Everybody needs to chill the fuck out about raising children. When did it become socially acceptable to get a text message about the cookie your kid just ate at daycare? It is ridiculous.
> In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public-health advisory about the mental health of parents, echoing a similar advisory about youth mental health three years earlier. In a national survey in which 18 percent of teens reported anxiety, so did 18 percent of parents. For all the recent concern about a crisis in teen mental health, parents are clearly struggling too.
The cause is very likely multi-factor. Yes, one factor is excessive monitoring and loss of childhood independence. However, a much more important factor is social media. It is a curse on childhood. I remember listening to a radio show where a reporter was interviewing American middle school kids about how they used social media. At the end, she reflected upon her own middle school experiences and said (paraphrase): "It is sad that modern social media lets you know with precision how much you are liked. When I grew up, you had an idea of your popularity, but it wasn't measured so precisely. It feels cruel."
My mother also complains that I do not reply faster. My response is that I want to be in the here and now. With cellphones people are constantly elsewhere and I don't think the human brain is made for that, nor to monitor dozens of little pieces of information.
Many parents are self-monitoring their own sleep with smart watches, their jogging routine, nutrient intake, etc, etc. Knowing everything their kids do at the daycare is just a natural next step.
I think it's important to say that this problem isn't innately about women: it's about the interpersonal social dynamics between women in our society. Whether or not those social dynamics could have developed in a society between men instead is irrelevant: they are where they are.
My philosophy (as someone who is not a parent) is that the real problem is engagement.
Social media cannot replace parental engagement. What people tell each other is that it can, only that it does so in a negative way. That's not true. Social media cannot replace parental engagement. The only void it can fill is time.
Parents who invade the privacy of their children incidentally engage with them. That engagement alone is the cause of their success, even though they attribute that success to the boundaries and standards they set.
Childhood surveillance may become a very lucrative proving ground for new tech. The usual outrage about privacy doesn't apply here because of a combination of a very helicopter parenting-friendly society and a common understanding the even older children have zero latitude in making any choices for themselves and are owned by their parents and institutions, who can at any point choose to force them into any new schemes.
I think the next direction these surveillance companies are going to head into is even more invasive aggregation and processing. Instead of just giving parents a basic rundown of what's happening now, have phones record every spoken word and then mine it for sentiment analysis to reveal hidden thoughts and opinions. Schools could deploy software onto all students that tracks everything they say to each other on school property, which then could be used to build social graphs, identify misbehavior, rank social cohesion and obedience to understand which groups are good and bad influences - with all this data immediately provided to teachers and parents so they can take action. Once this is normalized, it will come for us all, just a bit more covertly.
It touches on it a bunch of times, most of it falling under the umbrella of how constant surveillance does not teach kids how to be independent and capable of functioning on their own as an adult as well as they should be.
I generally agree but would love to see data on it. I know some adults who had little oversight as kids and they became very independent, while others did not because they knew they could just have their parents fix things later for them even if they weren't there. It seems money related to me. Something like the saying of I know how to do so many things because I can't afford to hire someone to do it for me.
It seems to me that there are many people who never really grew up, never had a struggle that only they could solve or a situation where they were responsible for somthing that could cause great damage (and they cared). Many people just seem to defer to someone else - just call the guy to fix things, repeat their political stances from the "news" (talk show) they perfer, etc. As the percentage of voters who share this mindset increases, this is not a future I look forward to.
Surveillance from parents while I disagree with it is about protecting the child. Surveillance from companies/state is about protecting the company/state not the individual being surveilled.
You assume the parents have good intentions - not all do. You also assumes the state is protecting itself and not the innocent people they claim. Even if I agree, I think it's worth pointing out the biases.
Being accused of hurting children is a social death sentence. Parents don't want to be accused. Politicians don't want to be accused. Nobody ever does.
So parents keep their children indoors for fear of being arrested from them crossing the street on their own. Politicians are unable to renege on "child safety" laws because the populace will believe they are harming children and vote them out.
But these things work the way they do because of the social consequences embedded in our culture, caused by the perceived harm to children from inaction. People want to avoid accusations of being complicit in harming children by supporting politician X or failing to do Y, as that has legitimate societal consequences when taken far enough, so there little incentive to diverge from this narrative.
Some of that might be true, but I can assure you, people _really do_ want to prevent harm to their children. Most of the people I know who are using this stuff do it completely voluntarily, not because of how they will be seen, but because they genuinely want to increase safety for their child.
Maybe its not perfect, but most parents would give everything they have if it meant saving their child's life or health, so spending a few hundred at the chance is a no-brainer.
Seems like "people only wear seatbelts so that they won't get tickets" type of reasoning, which is true for some, but many (myself included) like the additional safety and wear it regardless of law enforcement. I do actually care about my safety and health, and will take reasonable measures for a chance to preserve it; and that same feeling extends to my children.
> Some of that might be true, but I can assure you, people _really do_ want to prevent harm to their children.
They do, and they should. But due to the fact that this really is a legitimate concern in society, and always will be, it is also an infinitely renewable source of discontent that sways public opinion towards pursuing policies and parenting methods that don't actually help or protect children. Nothing short of a total panopticon can prevent 100% of harm to children, if even that. Yet saying "we will have less visibility into the safety of children if we choose to do this instead" is seen in the current climate as one of the most distasteful things you can say. So people are afraid to speak up and find alternatives.
Anything short of absolute perfection in child safety is seen as an unacceptable failure that merits new barriers to autonomy to prevent the next failure. To preserve the freedom of childhood, there has to be a middle ground.
This is a classic short-term/long-term trade-off. Being informed at all times is gratifying in the moment. It is harmful for everyone, including the parent, long-term.
And seatbelts are one of the cases where it is good short-term and long-term, but you’re right, the same mechanic applies. No one wears a seatbelt because “over a lifetime. I have a lower chance of dying in a car crash“. We wear it because “I’m less likely to die today.“
Strange, I wear the belt because I believe it may save me some day over my lifetime. I have very little concern for it happening this particular day. Or at least I used to. Its just SOP now.
> Maybe its not perfect, but most parents would give everything they have if it meant saving their child's life or health, so spending a few hundred at the chance is a no-brainer.
Any price? What about a portion of your child's development and autonomy?
The problem is that protecting children overzealously in the short term can make them more vulnerable in the long term. By attempting to protect them from every concievable risk, real or imagined, you risk preventing them from developing the defences that they will need later in life.
Traffic collisions and drowning are the major causes of death in children in developed countries; not childhood illness, as it was formerly, thanks largely to vaccination. Better road safety - that starts with _you_, car owners! - swimming lessons, and greater adult supervision when children are near water, are the most important things here, not surveillance.
When people do horrific things to children, it is almost never a stranger, but someone close to home, and again surveilling the child will not prevent that.
People have become very fearful. Here in the UK people (especially people on social media!) express fears about letting their children have the same freedom they had as children because "its so dangerous now".
Crime rates are far lower, road accident fatalities and injuries are far lower, but people are a lot more afraid of both of them.
> Seems like "people only wear seatbelts so that they won't get tickets" type of reasoning, which is true for some, but many (myself included) like the additional safety and wear it regardless of law enforcement
I wore them and made by kids wear them even in a country where they were not required by law. Admittedly I had become accustomed to wearing them in a country where they were required.
That's not an adequate comparison. A ticket is simple. Child services (in the US) is very powerful and complex. I would easily choose to risk my life and a ticket over risking child endangerment or neglect charges and possibly even having them sent to a foster home.
I agree, but i was replying to a comment that made the comparison.
My other point is that it is also happening in the UK where a lot of people do the same without the same fear of child services, so i think its a cultural change that is common to both countries.
I think the problem is that parental instincts are protective, and it takes a conscious effort to let go. Its easier if you understand enough maths to weigh up the risks rationally.
It's so wild to me as a millennial who grew up with a single mom who worked all day to see the obsession with child surveillance/protection that permeates society today. When I was a kid, my mom required only that I let her know where I was gonna be, call her if those plans changed and let her know the new ones, and apart from that I was basically out the door by 7am and home for dinner, absent like sleepover plans or something. In the wintery months I was regularly gone for all daylight hours, and yeah she knew where I was, in theory, but I wasn't wearing a GPS, and her up-to-date information on my place of being was strictly down to my communicating that info.
And this situation was not unique to me, my friends all had basically the same thing going on with minor differences. And like, I dunno maybe this is a reach, but these were the foundations that IMO made me a responsible human, who is able to move and function in the world autonomously, and it seems like newer generations of kiddos are really struggling with that in particular. Perhaps these are connected?
> my mom required only that I let her know where I was gonna be, call her if those plans changed and let her know the new ones, and apart from that I was basically out the door by 7am and home for dinner, absent like sleepover plans or something.
> but these were the foundations that IMO made me a responsible human
These are the same foundations that the surveillance of kids today is build on. It is the same reasoning just further down the slope (enabled by technology).
You probably also knew friends that did not have to call their parents at the same frequency (or more).
Let's be honest that was the average of that day, and today the average is tracking location at any time. If your mom was taking the average measures in that environment she would probably exercise the average measures in the current day environment.
I'm not saying that it was bad. I am saying we should probably be careful with the balance between autonomy and tracking since the same reasoning is used with your mom having you call in vs the current day tracking.
I have heard people say "free range kids" about this.. the one that gets to me is the line of cars in front of each school now.. this is a different age
And yet we know the damage Meta, amongst others, knowingly inflict on children and young adults. We know about the poison that is a modern diet and sedentary lifestyle. We see suicides going up.
Both your points and mine can be true at the same time.
I lived a chunk of my childhood on a road where most of the traffic was tractor trailers. I went outside and even waited for the bus. Nobody died, nobody got hurt.
I don't know about worldwide, but in Germany[1] the number of children injured or killed in traffic has been on a downward slope for about 40 years. That includes pedestrians. And despite the fact that number of cars has gone up up up[2].
Of course parents being more restrictive with their kids may well be one of the reasons why the number has gone down (there are many confounding factors).
And not just dog owners; car drivers are apparently invulnerable to criticism or shame as well. Big SUVs have been demonstrated to kill children; people buy them, they don't care. Driving fast has been demonstrated to kill children; people speed, they don't care. They think it will never happen to them, as they believe themselves to be Good People, and getting to their destination fast in their nice big car is important to them, and any attempt to curtail that an affront to their freedom.
And when they mow children down, as statistically some of them always will, it's then always described as "an accident", as though performed by some capricious god beyond all human control.
I doubt it’s so easy. More likely they’ll overtly break rules and violate norms with no sense of shame or embarrassment, like…(the future is now, just not evenly distributed)
Youth crime started declining in the mid 90s, far before the modern surveillance boom. What it did correlate with was an explosion in the availability of accessible and affordable at-home entertainment. e.g kids playing inside instead of finding trouble out in the streets.
My cousin still tracks her 23-year-old daughter's location - I thought that was bananas, but in this article there's a 29-year-old who's being tracked by her mother. WTF???
I've learned it's not that uncommon. Even letting friends track you. I remember a thread on X where people in NYC were posting their friend's real time location and saying things like 'I can always tell when she had a bad day' because her icon was at a particular juice bar. It does seem smart, especially for 20-somethings in major cities. But posting your friends location isn't terribly smart
It's a thing.
I, personally, don't think I've ever trusted anyone (parents included) enough to let them track me. I wouldn't feel safer. But maybe some people have good and healthy relationships with their parents (not that forcing your child to be tracked is healthy, but if your child chooses to have that safeguard...).
> I've learned it's not that uncommon. Even letting friends track you.
This is actually somewhat old news. Snapchat pioneered this with the Snap Map, where essentially the whole purpose was to broadcast where you are to your friends.
That was so long ago now that even Snapchat is long last its peak relevance.
There was also Google Latitude way before that. I remember how excited my friends were to watch other friends move about the city. It did come in handy one time when a friend left his phone behind at a corner store and didn't realize until later.
I don’t get how posting their location in this instance matters. Unless the friend has a stalker, is a famous celebrity, or is operating under some really unusual threat model, what risk is there in the whole world knowing some random 20-something is at a random juice bar in NYC? They aren’t being targeted, this isn’t a controversial location, etc.
If a friend is posting a person's location, they likely post other information about that person. The aggregate information could allow the assembly of a much more complete picture of a person than is possible by observing a person at a random juice bar.
For example: are they married? Do they live alone? Who are some of their friends? Where do they work? What do they do at work? Have they recently lost/found/experienced something interesting? These are the kinds of details that can enable social engineering in digital and physical spaces. It's likely easier to lure a person into a dangerous situation if you reference minute details from their personal life.
Sometimes the threat model is "has $10k in a bank account" or "is young & attractive" or "practices a religion I don't like" or "it's Tuesday."
It's data entrusted to that specific person with the social contract to not share that data (assuming no permission for sharing was given). I would argue the same way if someone posted my full address online for example, you're breaking the social contract by sharing data I entrusted you with.
Perhaps they didn't tell their friend about that one abusive ex or an affair their having. Additionally in this case it is telling people that when this person is in a certain location they are having a bad day, possibly opening them up to harassment a scam or manipulation.
There are a lot of people that will use that information to their advantage, even if it is just for trolling.
For me, if I found out about a post like this I would stop any contact with the person effective immediately after informing them of not appreciating the post.
well in my particular example it's a juicebar she frequents when she's had a bad day. So, she probably lives or works in the neighborhood. And a detail I didn't share was that she was attractive (her icon on the map was her headshot). So someone could get it in their head to approach the person and know what she looks like, where she might be, and believe she needs cheering up
And it's NYC which has all sorts of people, many of which you may not want to be approached by.
If the juicebar gets tagged, then the people working there may start interacting with the friend in a way she may not appreciate.
Sending out life specifics, even if your not famous or have a stalker can be detrimental. And, it wasn't the friend's choice either. So, the original poster may loose a friend in exchange for likes on X.
The thing that never makes sense about this threat model is she lives or works in this neighborhood, which in NYC is many thousands of people. They see her, they can approach her, they can follow her back to her apartment if they chose. To get to said juice bar, she’s likely walked past a dozen mentally ill homeless people and maybe ridden the subway, where you’re confined to a metal tube underground with NYC’s most interesting for minutes at a time.
But none of that registers as a risk: instead it’s a hypothetical X user who is so struck by a headshot on a map that they travel across the city on the off chance she’s still at the juice bar? That’s like worrying about being struck by a meteorite, but paying no attention to the risk of getting hit by a car.
I'm younger than both of these people and WTF. I don't think I know anyone that is being tracked by their parents and I'm just wondering what kind of family dynamic causes this.
It seems to be a trend that is gaining popularity, and it is showing up in media as well. In the newest season of Ted Lasso, two characters share location while dating, and hijinks ensue when one turns it off.
I know some families who have enabled location sharing family-wide. It gives them a sense of security. I feel it invades my privacy, and so I do not mandate this for myself or anyone in my family, and would actively refuse to engage.
The ensuing argument is almost always "are you hiding something", but it's not that I have anything to hide (my location history would be quite boring, really), but just that I have an aversion to it entirely out of principle.
I have nearly the exact same situation. I like being able to see when my mom is visiting my sister or some other place we used to go, and I like my mom being able to see what I'm up to, like when I visit museums or parks. Sometimes on a phone call she'll say "I saw you visited ...some place... so I looked it up online. Did you know ...something interesting about it...?"
Exactly my take. There can be a privacy and trust issue with tracking and location sharing, but the way my wife and I use it, it's a very casual thing so I can see if she's on her way home yet or something like that without having to have her text me while she drives.
Is it okay to track phones if you pay the bill? Want to be independent, they buy your phone and pay the bill. Is it okay to track you if you are driving a vehicle titled in my name and insured by me? Yes!
Can you give a justification for either of those things? Would you not let your older child be on your phone plan or drive your car under your insurance 20 years ago because both of these things weren't really trackable back then? If you would, what changed? I simply don't get what 'lesson' this is meant to impart on them.
First, I responded to examples of 23 and 29 year olds. Second, I pay for my adult children's phones and don't track their locations, but I would if they asked me. They have lost phones and mentioned that they should at least setup find-my-phone and give access to someone. I would let them track me, but I'm still using a flip phone.
Vehicle insurance and owner liability is a whole different topic. I prefer to have them hold title and therefore liability, even if I were to give them the money to purchase and insure.
Absolutely, unequivocally: I reject this line of thinking.
My parents were these types of people. It's bullying. A grown adult with a degree and full-time job justifying this behavior is ridiculous. Where does a kid with a part-time minimum wage job and undeveloped brain get the money to afford a fully independent life? They simply can't and the adult saying that knows it. It's a way to feel good about exerting power.
If a person is so perturbed at the idea of providing something to their child while simultaneously not having full surveillance into its use, they should've worn a condom. People like this make stupid decisions, have a kid as a result, and then make it the kid's problem that they exist in this world.
Unfortunately, some parents don't understand the idea of respecting boundaries of their child. It is _their_ child after all. An object to do with what they wish.
I do see that you yourself do not do this thankfully. But that logic is still incredibly flawed and perverse in my opinion.
"My cousin still tracks her 23-year-old daughter's location - I thought that was bananas, but in this article there's a 29-year-old who's being tracked by her mother. WTF??"
My comment is regarding the 23 and 29 yo examples in the parent comment. If you as a 29 yo consent to your mom tracking you in order to get a free phone, then that is your choice. Can't you just disable tracking or buy your own phone?
I clearly was not referring to 'a kid with a part-time minimum wage job.'
I don't see how that follows, at all. You can pay the bill and not track them. Do you have them hand over their phone everyday to check their Internet history because you pay the bill? If you don't want to pay their bill, don't, but spying on your kids isn't justified and is a weird control issue.
As I responded below, I do pay but have never tracked. The point is if you want to be independent of a parent that does not respect your privacy, then pay for own cell plan.
So, my kids are in their mid-thirties, I pay for their phones and I never tracked them. Also, they can and do at times live with me rent free. I am a safety net, not an umbilical cord. Just as my parents were for me.
So from this I sound like I would cheat on my taxes?
Most safety nets don't require you to agree to their terms. If the kid is a drug addict or there are other circumstances, tracking might be reasonable but not as a precondition of "if you want me to pay for your phone I get to track you".
In this decade and going forward, literacy in network protocols, cryptography, operating system, and userspace software is literacy. Lack of this is illiteracy.
Take a moment to remember that, among the masses, illiteracy rather than literacy has been the norm throughout history.
Perhaps surface knowledge of the applied uses of semiconductors and ISA-agnostic languages like C was a "niche" topic still in the 1970s. But for over a decade and a half now, carrying an internet edge device as Steve Jobs called the iPhone on one's person, among the most of relatively sophisticated (but not too sophisticated) professionals, has been the norm.
Nowadays in first world countries and large swaths of the third world countries too, "global south" not excluded, "everyone" carries an internet edge device on their person.
Knowledge of the applied uses of semiconducters, internet protocol, and ISA-agnostic languages, isn't really a "niche" anymore now is it?
Those of us with modern literacy who don't choose to practice ignorance of human nature, those who heeded Richard Stallman's warnings, will do fine.
For the illiterate and arrogantly naive, the coming decades and ultimately humanity in perpetuity may be very tough.
I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time people in the west were shocked at the level of surveillance that we found had been going on in East Germany.
Now we accept a greater level of surveillance as normal for ourselves.
It's not making them better prepared for it at all. Surveillance from parents is about providing safety for the child, if the child grows up confusing surveillance with a sense of safety that's the opposite of prepared.
Twenty years ago, the level of tracking we have today already would have seemed idiotic. But we've accepted it for convenience, not through choice but through the arms race of tech companies offering "free" services in exchange for convenience which in turn gives its users a temporary boost in their productivity.
I've come to the conclusion that it is primarily our instinct that drives this process and we cannot control it, except by refusing the tech altogether.
An individual refusing the tech simply disadvantages them against others and the state. Also, individuals who used to be railroaded by those who were more powerful gained the power to expose it with the advent of technology.
However, now that video editing is cheap and easy, perhaps the individual loses this advantage since one video recording might just be one version of the truth and you need more recorded angles/versions that prove consistency.
> An individual refusing the tech simply disadvantages them against others and the state. Also, individuals who used to be railroaded by those who were more powerful gained the power expose it with the advent of technology.
But how long will the advantage of that exposure last when technology envelops us all and we have no recourse?
The point of watching your children is to make sure harm doesn't befall them, if you have to harm them to watch them then you've lost the plot.
Would you mail your child's location & schedule to anonymous strangers? You are making the world much more dangerous by doing this, by many orders of magnitude.
I find that violent and bad behavior is shifted to environments without surveillance with both children and parents. The verbal and physical abuse is not on camera and is amplified off camera. They know this, they just don't care.
I'd go a step further and ask why a psychologist should know every single piece of stalkerware that's advertised to parents as being a good thing to install on their kids' computers.
Isn't this whole "tracking kids locations" an American thing, first of all? I haven't heard of parents doing this stuff in Sweden or Spain, just as two examples.
With that, comes the possibility that maybe this is some sub-section of parents in American, not all of them. Maybe middle-class and above, the people who can justify more subscriptions in their life with not much effect on their economy? Maybe some other segment(s) make more sense, just thinking out loud.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this is maybe not widespread among all types of parents in the US, since it isn't a "every parent in the world" thing at the very least.
> What in that article made you think the psychologist didn't know parents track their children?
My own thought when reading that was that the psychologist was aghast at the extent of the tracking of that particular app, not by the idea of parental tracking in general.
Then again, I've also got a niece who has expressed that her phone is a constant source of anxiety. She feels like she has to immediately respond to every text and social media post from her friends no matter what or there will be consequences which could range from causing others worry to losing social status and being potentially excluded as punishment. It sounds like a nightmare.
It’s impossible to say for sure, it I think I’d tell some to get concerned at a certain time if I hadn’t checked in. I still wouldn’t want people reaching out to me for every unscripted move I made.
Take a survey of women and let us know the results. I think you are profoundly underestimating the safety net phones are seen as by women, but would be fascinated to be proven wrong. Could segregate by age and location - but even elderly rural women raised 90% of their life without phones routinely cary them these days for medical assistance.
My immediate thought was "ok so you're a young white male in a safe location running short distances in good weather during daylight hours only". Because any variation from that set means more gear.
EDIT
Gender specific question about your post: What is it that appeals so much to young men about minimalism? I have never been able to explain it. Look at their first apartment. It is skin and bones. Look at a young woman's first apartment. There are all of these nice (but cheap) homely touches. Same for fashion.
I think in contrast (most) young women's homes have more social signalling in them, homely touches, which has its own benefit equal to or most likely greater than minimalism.
I can say myself that I've always been minimalistic. My flat was bare bones because I treat the place mostly as a place to eat and sleep between spending most of my time outdoors or away from home. As soon as my girlfriend moved in a few years back, the flat went from everything white and "minimalistic" to being colourful and filled with little decorative things.
I'm glad there is more colour to the place and that somebody with an eye for it has taken charge of it, but I know if I went back to being single again tomorrow I'd go back to not having much around the place.
Lazy in the sense that we only think of bare essentials for most things, especially something like jogging. We don’t want to create more work for ourselves by dirtying more clothes than necessary, accessorizing, etc. We also generally just care a lot less about fashion and how people perceive us. Probably because we hardly even get noticed compared to women. It’s not like people are gawking if we wear the wrong bra. Women are more self conscious and care more in general about how they’re perceived.
The apartment comes with bare walls. Inertia is bare walls.
My wife likes putting everything on display. Like if there’s any surface, her urge is to cover it with what I call knickknacks, trinkets, and probably a dozen pictures. For me, it’s all clutter. Collects dust, creating a chore. If there’s an open wall she wants to hang stuff on it. She likes a wall of 100 small pictures, I’d prefer 1 large framed art. To me her way makes me feel things are chaotic. My way makes her feel it’s clinical and uninviting. We’ve found a balance that works for both of us. I like to have things decorated it’s just I really value white space as a design element. But I think if I were to psychoanalyze it, it’s rooted in the same thing that makes women’s brains always running/worrying and not understanding what men mean when they say “nothing” when asked “what are you thinking about?”
It's hard to generalize, and I myself am probably atypical here, but I suspect that most young men have their own 'little homely touches'. They might be less likely to run out and buy curtains or hang up pictures but I've seen things like random sports stuff (team merch or equipment that hasn't seen use in ages), old bear cans, action figures, books, guns, watches, guitars, and the occasional dead animal being displayed (or at least constantly left out and in view). It can look more organic than put together, but I've moved a guy's stuff only to find it put back in what was apparently its spot more than once.
It's not like I've never suffered for it, for whatever that's worth. I turned an ankle at about the worst imaginable place a few years back and had to limp home nearly ten miles, which took half the day. Definitely having a phone with me would have made that more convenient, but I lived, it's still only half a day, and I've now got an amusing story to tell alongside all the times I've had to shit on the sidewalk in front of a building in downtown Dallas because the world refuses to have usable toilets anywhere outside of daytime business hours. I've broken my hand once on a run, but you don't need a hand to keep running.
I've also had a phone and it didn't help. I faceplanted hill bombing on a longboard a few years back and it turns out no rideshare driver will let you into their car when you're covered in blood, so I had to take my swollen shut eye, hanging limp separated arm, and go back home on the board and drive myself to the ER in my own car.
I feel like this kind of goes back to the entire point of the article. Like the guy who started this thread, I was a child of the 80s with a teen mom who put basically no restrictions on me and let me do anything, so I was walking around the neighborhood at 1 AM in 1st grade, riding my bike every weekend to the LA County public library 15 miles away when I was 8, going to skid row to hand out cash to homeless people when I got a car at 16. I capsized a canoe in the middle of Lake Arrowhead my freshman year of high school and had to swim back to shore dragging a boat behind me, which took over an hour. I got assaulted by a crazy dude living under a table on a pedestrian bridge skateboarding past him early in the morning, and I won the fight but he burned the hell out of my eye throwing hot sauce at me of all things. I've had my house flood. I've had my car smashed by a city dump truck while it was parked. I've had 9 orthopedic surgeries since turning 35 and my lumbar spine is now one solid bone held in place by screws and rods. I've been divorced twice. I've survived combat. I'm not afraid of bad things happening to me because they already happened and I ended up fine. This also gets at the other point already raised that, though women certainly seem to feel more threatened by the world, men are more likely to experience violence, injury, and early death because men take more risks.
I will, of course, meet a fate I can't overcome at some point. I'm going to die and there will likely be at least one thing I could have done differently that might have put that off by anywhere from a few minutes to a few decades. Maybe at the minute of death I'll even regret that. But I doubt it. I've been extremely close a few times and I was at peace with the idea. It has to happen eventually. I've still enjoyed most of the time I've had and intend to continue doing that. I've seen the lives of the extremely scared and it doesn't seem like they're doing any better than me.
Know how often something bad happened? Never.
I find it a very strange assumption, especially given the fact that men are much more likely to become victims of aggression.
(This also doesn't necessarily mean that such concerns are irrational, just that the risks are not so high that you should expect every woman going out for a run in the dark is eventually going to be assaulted)
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ackchyually-actually-guy
I am not like you, from a long lost generation before the twisted pair gave way. summers from age 8 and beyond were days of unfettered freedom. I feel very fortunate
EDIT: Why is this thing not letting me post?
I feel like ideation around safety and its feeling depend on context, but there are some who never feel safe and some who (blissfully) can around walk freely without feeling endangered.
Even while they can point to no personal experience of violence or danger, some (men) insist they must be allowed concealed carry to assure safety.
This is not a gender issue. People have amygdala and it develops differently in each of us, shaped early and continuously by experience and by random chance
They hated us for it. Other parents called us crazy. “They should learn how to handle social media!” And now their kids are unmanageable and ours thank us for shielding them.
It has got crazy. I recently read an article by a journalist whose son had just started university who was watching his tracking app and worrying when he did not get out of bed on time. Not as old as the 29 year old in the article, but she said she could not concentrate on her work because she was worried he would missing things. There are Whatsapp groups for parents at some universities - apparently discussing your now adult child with a group of strangers is normal.
I asked my daughter (also at her first term at university right now) what she though of the idea of having a tracking app on her phone, and (as I expected) there was no way to tolerate this. I think children who have been tracked normalise this. IMO is stalking once they are adults.
I think the perception that kids (or adults!) need constant entertainment is also harmful.
I never GPS tracked them even when they were younger. They got inexpensive Android smartphones in 8th grade, with a talk about what to watch out for. I didn't read their email or text messages, I didn't lurk on their school website checking grades every day. If a teacher or administrator emailed me, I'd deal with that, but otherwise I tried to let them learn to run their lives. They made some mistakes. That's how you grow.
Militant anti-technology parenting guarantees nothing.
Edit: as for tracking I only use findmy to time dinner from time to time (my oldest is driving)
FWIW, I let my boys spend a good chunk of hours on video games because I would be a hypocrite otherwise. But there comes a point when their behavior takes a turn for the worse (I mean after so much video game time) that I end up taking it away for awhile. All things in moderation and such.
When did this start? And what ages did they start to appreciate the shielding?
Mine are 7 and 10 now and we don't have any complaints... at least not yet. But I feel like parents around us are pretty aware of the dangers here. I'm not seeing their peers getting phones yet; maybe some smart watches. Definitely not social media. We had a principal mention "wait until 8th" at a back-to school meeting and receive enthusiastic applause.
I'm wondering if the culture is catching up, or if they're just a little too young and the pressure is still incoming.
The hardest period was when they were 10-13 I think. Because around that time all other kids got their own phones without any screentime limitations, or app store limitations. We'd hear about their friends being on tiktok and snap until 03:00am on schoolnights. Our kids were really jealous about that. But to us, it was like other parents had forgotten that they could actually... you know... parent.
'shielding' is a responsibility, but it is also a responsible act of parenting to require them - demand of them - to develop their own autonomous safety systems and awareness, independent of our controls or consultations 24/7.
Life's about boundaries, if you don't set them for your kids they won't grow properly and other people will have to explain them the rules (or they'll be parasites their whole life)
That is not how that works.
I’m glad your kids turned out how you wanted them to, but I’d be careful jumping to conclusions.
Maybe you did other things right too. Like listening to them. Spending time with them. Passing your genes. Who knows what else. Maybe you’re "just" great parents.
We decided early on to treat them as inexperienced tiny teammembers. So many little tricks and nuances. Learned a lot from the book "How 2 Talk 2 Kids".
Like: don't refer to yourself as "Mommy" or "Daddy". Instead use "I": "I'm going to cook dinner now", not "Daddy's going to cook dinner now".
Or: don't tell them what to do, but point out the problem: "Oh, look, those shoes are now blocking my way to the kitchen. Could you help me out?"
(Use that last one at work too. ;-))
But yeah - tiny teammembers because we are a team. We are not against them. Therefor they don't need to fight us. Instead we fight alongside them. And they seem to realize that.
But I'll post back in this thread in 15 years and we'll see how it all turned out by then. ;-)
I talk to my kids like I talk to other people. "Go to the bathroom" is the notable example. By no means a pro and many flaws in my process.
Frankly, I think the best thing you teach them is not how to do or not do anything but instead the implications of thoughts and actions and what it means to handle and feel comfortable with their choices.
Mine are 8.5 and 4.5. They watch TV like plenty of kids. Rarely used iPads, and my older kid uses a laptop here and there. I will not let them use my phone casually.
But I don't think that them not using it is teaching them much about the phone. Instead it's about opportunity. Do something else! READ, draw, write, sketch, paint, run, craft, build, talk. I'm working on teaching my oldest how to be, well, bored.
Not talking about physical ailments, just tough personalities (mine)
They should learn how to handle reality before being inundated with an endless overwhelming deluge of unreality, outright bullshit, and lies. Kudos to you for giving them that chance.
A similar question as the European vs American approach to handling alcohol. In Europe (vast oversimplification incoming, big continent with lots of cultures and jurisdictions) it's normal to drink beer the first time by 14, in the presence of your parents, and are typically able to buy it freely at around 16. In the US (oversimplification incoming) you typically have your first experience with alcohol in secret, or binge-drinking once you are 21 and free from your parents. The European version typically results in more alcohol being consumed, but in healthier habits
One crux is that this only works if the parents are actually using alcohol/social media in a healthy way. A heroin addict can't teach their children how to responsibly use heroin
You did disclaim about this, but my understanding is that most European countries no longer allow you to buy alcohol before you’re 18 (but with some major exceptions like Germany and Belgium). Culturally, you are however quite spot on.
It is a very particular kind of person who gets addicted right away.
Of course, in a social context where consumption is expected, many more may reach the point where they keep consuming in order to stave off withdrawal.
Those were the literal words we used!
Why no TV? Only connect a DVD player to it and there wouldn't be anything on the TV that they couldn't get on laptop.
But movies sure are a lot nicer on a TV than on a laptop, especially if you have a decent sound system connected to the TV and DVD player too.
I’d like to hear more, if you don’t mind, about your kids’ experience:
1. At what age did they start recognizing your rules benefited them (and start tanking you) 2. Was it a daily nonstop fight to keep telling them “no” to these things? 3. Did your kids feel sincerely ostracized and, if so, for how long?
Thanks!
And this week they both said how thankfull they had so few advertisements in their lives. Because we block with pi-hole and ublock origin, and showed them how online ads work and how to avoid them.
(Sidenote: If you have kids: talk to your teachers and schools and ask to setup firefox+ublock origin on their classroom computer. Or just install 'brave'. All teachers use youtube during classes. With ads. You will be lifted to instant hero status for blocking those.)
I wish more people would see the value it has in everyday life!
Thanks to the hundreds of people who didn't punch me in the face or ram me with their car today
When is the last time you wrote a “thanks for not letting get eaten by a shark” card?
Parents don’t get thanked for things that didn’t happen. If you are waiting around for that, you’re in the wrong care taking business!
> And now their kids are unmanageable and ours thank us for shielding them.
I'm not looking for thank-you's, I'm just looking to understand what GP meant when he said his kids thanked him.
At the same time children are exposed to things and if they don't know how to navigate it, it's critical.
I take small people through what the screens and computers are trying to do their brains and then ask them to watch their brain watching the thing that catches their interest.
It could be someone's smart watch, someone's phone, or a tv.
One time a small humanoid self reported to me that sugar makes them want to have more sugar, and some screens seem to do the same thing, but other screens don't make them feel bad.
So we'd sit them down and discuss what Meta et al were doing to them. And why we thought that was a bad idea. They still hated us for haha but a little less I guess. Rephrase: they still thought it was unfair because their friends got to be on tiktok 24/7 and they couldn't even get a phone.
We told them 'life is not fair', and other parents were ignorant of the dangers but that didn't make the dangers any less.
I don't know - maybe we just got lucky with our kids.
The simple proof is how impossible it is to even create a single playlist for children on YouTube. The brands actively create more and more official channels to offset parents who are saying to not show a channel in their feed anymore.
You have a great point about what other children do you or don't do. The Every Family is Different Angle is one that I like and also that people who know how to talk to each other will be more able to lead themselves and others compared to anyone who just listens and watches all the time.
There are so many dangers out there and really especially with AI now able to ramp up everything, those dangers are going to increase and there's going to be something needed because otherwise the entire world directly or indirectly is coming into the little screens and little brains unfiltered and unmanaged.
Banning kids from social media seems to be the present-day equivalent of that and I commend you.
And recently they confessed that they sneakily watched once in a while. :-D
So they got the boundary. Found it to be unjust. Tested it. Crossed it. Got away with it. Grew from that. All without having to steal lipstick, smoke joints, or drink themselves into a coma.
Honestly: wife and I are awesome at parenting.
But: they have phones. Since they were about 12. But with screentime, with us controlling the apps, without tiktok, behind a pi-hole and pivpn. With the initial agreement that we - the grown ups - were _always_ allowed to open their phone and look at any content.
For the past year or so the eldest doesn't have any screentime limitations anymore, but she still does not use insta or tiktok.
What we did was constantly explain our decisions. And showed them how boundaries were there for protection, not holding back. And if they showed us that they could handle lifting of a boundary we would lift a boundary.
Other parents in our neighbourhood just gave phones to their kids at age 11 and never set boundaries. Those kids now take pictures of girls in their classroom, and turn them into nudes. And send them around large groups on snapchat. Police was involved. But I look at the parents. Kids _need_ boundaries.
doubt that ppl care about you or your kids so much that they have feelings of hate towards you.
So now they are out in the world, in potentially dangerous situations, without a way to call for help, lookup a map, get a ride, etc.
We were always clear with our kids: We're not tracking you, we trust you, and you can call us for help without getting in trouble.
You can tell them not to do stupid things all day, but life finds a way, and I want them fully equipped when it happens.
I think people can understand the nuance and tradeoffs between your parents knowing your locations, Big Tech tracking you to profit off your data, and companies who's raison d'etre is to sell your data to law enforcement.
Surveillance is already normalized and mostly unavoidable, but I believe tolerance for abuse of the data is higher than you think.
I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.
Of course, with pervasive tracking being normalized, and the apps doing this being subject to law enforcement and the government, it kind of ends up as the same thing.
(Whether parents have access to this voluntary tracking, I don't know. My kid uses it with his friends, but I've never wanted to track him. Seems creepy and distrusting. Sure, he lies to me about some things, but I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't a lie. Feel free to disbelieve me.)
I use Find My friends on my iphone, I trust them enough they can know my location and I trust Apple enough to carry that data (I realize this is implying "nothing to hide", but I also consent to giving Apple my location). I get that it seem creepy, but its also a cool new technology if you can get over how creepy it seems. Not trying to sell you one, but give you another perspective.
I'm not a parent, but when I was teen my parents monitored me as much as they could. Personally, I think location tracking is less of an issue than parental surveillance of internet browsing. I do think if parents are going to track their kid's location, they should let their kid track the parents, too.
Right it's not even a question of new data-- a mountain of historical privacy leaks were benign because it was a needle in a haystack. In the future everyone will be electronically stalked by a fleet of AI private detectives. To limit the damage we must substantially restrict the collection and retention of personal information.
I think the issue isn't the collection, or retention (although there should still be data retention laws to protect against the liability of holding that data), but the ways the data is shared or used by third-parties. If businesses were no longer able to be shared or sold to 3rd parties, or be used for advertisements, the remainder of issues are largely ideological.
Or trust their parents. Discuss why and how they're tracked and the boundaries the parents will keep as well, and make do with it.
The article paints condescending and alarming portraits, but most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance.
People here seem to completely overlook that parents have been managing the whole life of their kid for more than a decade and teenagers are really bad at hiding things in general. Perhaps it's different if the parents are working three jobs and never talk to their kid, but I don't see that as a general case.
That is decidedly not the way I've seen most people handle the convenience/privacy tradeoffs we all face every hour of every day. So I'll put a question mark on that..
I can't imagine every family setting up the admin features to be in psychological crisis.
In the "One Battle After Another" movie there was a (semi)funny subplot about this, except in the other direction, the parent wanted the kid to ditch the phone, and the kid had a secret one.
Mine's following her uncle's footsteps: he's BJJ black belt (and instructor) and she's into her 4th year of BJJ. She already dislocated another person's arm (another teenager who wanted to "see if BJJ works").
The goal is not to overpower a 25 y/old muscular man: but to win her just enough time to be able to ring an alarm/pass a distress call, grab her pepper spray in her purse, etc.
I trust her and she can do all the crazy shit teenagers do she wants to do: it's some of the others I don't trust.
Oh, the horror
The general backup plan was to go to the nearest friends’ house.
I wish kids could go out like I used to but the world is just different and some of the failsafes I took for granted like payphones don't exist anymore
These are choices we make, we dont need to give in to what "everyone" does.
You mean exactly how every human existed every minute before <20 years ago?
Perfect.
My family spends a large majority of our time out of cell service - downhill and back country sking, canoeing, hiking, camping and everything else.
We love it, and plan to never give our daughter a phone (I don’t have one). Hopefully our town will ban them for kids anyway.
The thing is the parents normalizing this kind of intrusion of privacy think they are in the right while creating a very dangerous world. Even things like going through your kids rooms (yes even when they live at home) is a huge privacy violation.
No wonder the "but think of the kids" argument is so effective, we all grew up being propagandized by or own parents and environment.
Privacy is in my opinion one of the most important human rights that exist and the most frequently diminished or ignored, especially around parent/kid relations. Hence why it is a part of the UDHR (universal declaration of human rights).
With regards to kid/parent relation we are often too lenient as a society. One good measurement that you can keep in the back of your head to judge a kids invasion of privacy is the following question "If this kid was suffering from abusive parents, would this allow the parent to intervene the kid reaching out?".
I have seen famous influencer (parents) commonly say things like "If you live in my house I can go through your room any time I please.". I understand the sentiment and some kids and situations require that, however I think openly incentivizing others to do so or normalizing that is not right. Especially knowing that it can make reaching out of abused kids much more difficult.
Both of my parents grew up in very small houses with a lot of children, and my wife shared a room with her sister. I'd guess that the vast majority of humanity now, and certainly in the past, had very little individual privacy because there was no room!
It seems like a modern luxury in western suburban living. Nice if if you can get it, I suppose.
In the past or in communities today where physical privacy is not always possible you will find there are a lot more accepted ways for people to separate themselves. Third spaces where you can be uninfluenced by the other party will be more common, going out for dinner alone or to the park alone are examples of activities that will be more normalized in those communities.
Your parents could probably be out the whole day without being tracked or recorded fully. However the modern day surveillance (including tracking of kids) means you will be tracked everywhere. You don't have the luxury anymore of going somewhere anonymous.
Ask your parents what they did when their sibling annoyed them.
It’s like accidentally ending up in the background of someone’s photo at a public park versus someone actively following and taking photos of you. Or sharing a room with a sibling versus that same sibling digging through a personal journal.
My parents parented a few hours a week; most of my childhood hours were spent in adult-free development - with peers or on my own. I ranged everywhere.
My kids ranged not at all. Instead they grew up under 24/7 adulting. They had little of the opportunity I had to grow ambition, problem solving skills and basic independence.
Adults traded their growth for car culture, trespassing culture and extreme beliefs about stranger risk that never reflected reality.
I spent 20x the time parenting that my parents did. We parents spent hours trying to manually recreate (via camps, events) the slivers of the childhood that we experienced organically. As good as these events were, they didn't come close to replacing what adults have taken away (daily adult-free, free ranging).
The end result, I have 5 adult sons and will probably never have grandchildren. Besides being economically impossible for a couple to support themselves on typical wages, parenting is immeasurably more complex and time consuming than what my parents experienced.
In short, parents give way more and kids get way less.
We're already seeing things like predictive policing, surveillance pricing, judges using AI to write rulings and parole-boards using AI to decide the fate of prisoners, extensive (and often illegal) background checks used by landlords and employers, careers being ended by people's ancient social media posts, and literal bombs being dropped based on AI's flawed assumptions.
AI is making it ever easier to trawl through the massive piles of data being collected and output results, which will randomly contain errors people will probably never be told about even when they're being used to make decisions that have major impacts on their lives.
It's become so normalized, even by their own parents, that kids growing up in this environment don't even question it. I wonder if we're raising generations of stunted adults who've been denied the opportunity to develop confidence and independence as children, training them to submit to constantly being monitored and recorded, and then throwing them to the wolves who are eager to use all that data to maximize their ability to take people's money, manipulate them more effectively, or pass judgement on them.
There’s a ton of rare, negative scenarios where risk reduction is so cheap and easy that you’re silly not to do it. Car accident deaths are about 1 in 100 million miles driven, you certainly can’t control other drivers, but not putting on a seatbelt is stupid.
if they have a phone they can call for help. before mobile phones they used payphones.
> Kid is riding bike, falls and knocked out:
Unless its somewhere very lonely, someone sees the kid, calls emergency services, who contact the parent. I do not know how this works in the US where you pay for ambulances though.
It probably works out fine, but relies on someone noticing. A tracker or phone wouldn't require that helpful stranger as a pre-req.
You do not have to install a tracking app, so it does not distort the relationship between parent and child so much.
IMHO the key question is: what do you with that fear? If you let it rule you, there is a high risk of becoming such a controlling and overprotective parent that the child never gets the real-world experience that they need in order to survive.
I have seen many real-life cases of parents who were way too overprotective, out of a motivation of love and concern. But it really hurt the children because while they were kept safe, they hadn't developed a lot of street smarts. By the time they then ended up in college, they were a ripe target for predators.
Timeless problem faced by probably every halfway decent parent that ever lived.
Growing up in the 2000s was the perfect balance of tech + IRL. I don't think I would enjoy being a kid in this day and age.
I think most people will say that about the 1980s and 1990s (and maybe 1970s) as well. Depending on when they grew up.
My age got on AIM during the transition to college, would have loved it in high school
Then facebook came to colleges right as I was finishing
Tinder came around after my dating days were over
But, I got to roam around town on my BMX and remember only having 3 tv channels as a kid. And I got to be an early adopter of so many things. So I think that’s a better mix. I love being bored and trying new IRL hobbies other than constantly losing time to a screen.
Tinder has an interesting arc. At first, it seemed really awesome and many people liked it. It supplemented the traditional dating process. This is what I wish I could have participated in. I think there was about a decade of that after which it replace and became the dating process. Meaning, talking to strangers, flirting, starting a conversation and asking someone out at a coffee shop or whatever became unusual. Then it became awkward. Then it became cringe. I don’t want to participate in today’s dating scene at all, largely because of this app dominance and how it’s changed the society and norms.
Awful practices that have always been done in some form, like lending rates shifting per "intangibles" all are re-enabled by tech like this. Predictive pricing and insurance premiums seem top of mind.
Now, think through: Mom and Dad got you your pulseox sock from Owlet for your 4 month old foot. If something irregular shows up in that data set, are your insurance premiums changing?
Or, think through: savings the kids via counter-encryption can lead to a lot of kids-savings in other ways. If your nanny cam shows anything but a baby on a blank crib, can your nanny cam call CPS on your for you exposing your kid to SIDS risk?
The fact we can't answer this should set off alarm bells on the future for our kids.
Before you tell me this is far off: if you did standard pre-natal testing, in the last 12 months, you didn't mind which vendor was actually processing your standard tests, your kid's genetic data was auto-included in the dataset for an opt-out only Israeli genetics research company (thinking of one company and one kid I know of). I'm sure this was totally benign.
Also, after reading the free part of the article, I propose the word "pramopticon".
I think there will be a nice time window before all hardware is released with some sort of DRM, and while losses from people who reject the surveillance (similar to AdBlock) are small enough, where you will be able to hack this hardware to run for yourself only.
Then Snowden happened, and Cambridge Analytica, and Event X and everything else. Now I'm the same, all "family data" lives on harddrives that are physically in my home, I prefer paper notes over anything on my computer, for my journal at least, and my perspective is basically that secrets are impossible over the internet. If you want something secret, it cannot go through internet pipes even once.
it is, indeed, "not impossible", but I could also win a Nobel prize or sleep with Sidney Sweeney -- not impossible, but probably never gonna happen.
Nice
It's actually sad for kids. In childhood being able to stay out a bit longer, solve sudden problems without calling mom, or just sit alone taught you how to cope with the world. But if someone monitors a child all the way to their college dorm door, it's unclear how they're supposed to develop personal autonomy at all
There's a big difference between all your neighbors running purely on-premises camera setups versus all of them running individual nodes of a giant panopticon.
none of these are prevented when you have an airtag in your pocket
my hesitation is from knowing these _dont_ work: by the time airtag shows where someone actually is that isnt a 500m circle, you can see them with your analog eyes :/
Technically true. However I think there is a very small percentage of parents that can keep themselves from interrupting in such a situation. Actually I think it leads to a slippery slope situation (the article calls it a downward spiral) where the interruptions will be easier to make the more you do it as a parent. The only question remaining is how high up the slope do you start and how fast do you slip?
When I was about 8 years old I was allowed to go with the bus by myself between my mom and my dad.
I can remember two times I fell asleep on the bus, and ended up some other place, and had to figure out how to get home from there, by myself.
I'm sure of the technology was available at the time, my mom would have placed an airtag on me, and without a doubt, would have seen me miss my bus-stop and jumped into her car to pick me up wherever I ended up. Bless her heart, but I'd miss the opportunity of figuring it out by myself.
Of course, just one silly example, but I could see if this was constantly happening, a child might get accustomed to this "saving" being automatic, and not even trying to solve things yourself because you know your parent will come save the day. Until they don't, of course.
if it involved asking a business (car service in my case) to let you use their phone, or already having a quarter and using a payphone to call mom... thats an airtag :)
> a child might get accustomed to this "saving" being automatic
i dont fear a perfectly functioning society; im an adult and am also used to 911/999/etc being available. some people watch Demolition Man and get the wrong idea...
How so? Mom has no way to know where you are until you initiate the call. Isn’t a big part of the developmental point to have kids recognize they’re lost on their own and then ask for help from a friendly stranger? What’s the ‘no airtag’ scenario you imagine?
I had enough coins for 2 phone calls in a sealed envelope in my school bag for emergencies - probably still in the bottom of my bag wherever it may be.
No. An airtag works for your mom no matter if you want it or not, some payphone on the street places the agency about calling help into your hands.
It instills a Panopticum-like philosophy in said kids since their very early ages, meaning they become aware that they're being watched at every moment of their lives. In my opinion that does affect said kids' future look on life (once they will have become adults, that is).
Santa Claus has been around since before airtags; you dont need technology to make kids fearful of invisible retribution, just a clever song ("he sees you when youre sleeping, he knows when youre awake")
I dont get your point
We have at least a several thousand year history of instilling a 'Panopticum[sic][1]-like psychology' in enormous swaths of society. More of the same.
1. please tell me this is a typo
God is also perfectly good, outside time, unlikely to question your actions, and completely forgiving. Rather different from being watched by human beings.
I do not think belief divine omniscience by itself had much impact on people's behaviour.
There is no religious reason for more surveillance - which its with the point I made.
The reasons for wanting more surveillance are entirely secular: things such as catching criminals, protecting children etc. They are about giving power to the authorities, and how desirable more surveillance is depends on how much you fear what it is supposed to stop, and on how much you trust to authorities to use the powers you give them ethically and effectively.
Unfortunately, even those who escape such beliefs now have to face the reality of surveillance not by gods, but by men, many of whom don’t have your best interest in mind.
Do you want to install an app on your phone that will track you and your online activities for the government? They won't interfere, they just want to know what you're up to and help. Children are people and want some privacy too. I know I did.
I was a kid who wandered. Sometimes through bear infested forests at night. Sometimes through abandoned factories with collapsing roofs. Sometimes to the homes of people my parents strongly disapproved of.
I lived. So did pretty much everyone else. I had a few significant fuck-ups. I learned from them, and didn't repeat them. In my childhood, I knew one kid who died from misadventure - grain silo - and many who died from disease - meningitis, cancer, sepsis. Perhaps parents should keep their children in protective plastic bubbles, if they're going to be consistent about it.
My kid - no tracking, and autonomy that I see makes other parents writhe with discomfort, as they're like "she'll be stolen! Her kidneys!", and I'm going "you guys don't understand statistics, and your kids are going to live with you until you die, and lead stunted lives".
It's not just marketing - the laws are getting more and more restrictive too. Not having some tracking on your kid starts to be used against people in court cases (criminal or civil). The think of tha children crowd has the ear of law enforcement and prosecutors.
My daughter is a teenager and I appreciate being able to look at her phone's location when I pick her up from a place. I don't tend to monitor her phone use, occasionally I will check it out but the "deal" I have with her makes sure she understands she is an individual and I respect her individuality. I have a few apps blocked.
I asked a few good fathers that I know about this trend: Universally, they agreed that it mostly appealed to their wives. And yes, they thought a lot of it was "too much". One gets daily reports (handwritten!) from the daycare about their kid with specific details about what they ate, toilet visits, nap time, play time, etc.
I'll never forget a tense phone call I had with my mother. She was upset that I wasn't responding faster to her WhatsApp text messages. I was flabbergasted. I asked her: What did you do 10 years ago when you didn't have a mobile phone? There was a long pause, then a sigh from her. Plus, I lived many timezones away from her, and I worked a very demanding job, where it is not uncommon to be away from my mobile phone for hours at a time.
Everybody needs to chill the fuck out about raising children. When did it become socially acceptable to get a text message about the cookie your kid just ate at daycare? It is ridiculous.
The cause is very likely multi-factor. Yes, one factor is excessive monitoring and loss of childhood independence. However, a much more important factor is social media. It is a curse on childhood. I remember listening to a radio show where a reporter was interviewing American middle school kids about how they used social media. At the end, she reflected upon her own middle school experiences and said (paraphrase): "It is sad that modern social media lets you know with precision how much you are liked. When I grew up, you had an idea of your popularity, but it wasn't measured so precisely. It feels cruel."Many parents are self-monitoring their own sleep with smart watches, their jogging routine, nutrient intake, etc, etc. Knowing everything their kids do at the daycare is just a natural next step.
My philosophy (as someone who is not a parent) is that the real problem is engagement.
Social media cannot replace parental engagement. What people tell each other is that it can, only that it does so in a negative way. That's not true. Social media cannot replace parental engagement. The only void it can fill is time.
Parents who invade the privacy of their children incidentally engage with them. That engagement alone is the cause of their success, even though they attribute that success to the boundaries and standards they set.
I think the next direction these surveillance companies are going to head into is even more invasive aggregation and processing. Instead of just giving parents a basic rundown of what's happening now, have phones record every spoken word and then mine it for sentiment analysis to reveal hidden thoughts and opinions. Schools could deploy software onto all students that tracks everything they say to each other on school property, which then could be used to build social graphs, identify misbehavior, rank social cohesion and obedience to understand which groups are good and bad influences - with all this data immediately provided to teachers and parents so they can take action. Once this is normalized, it will come for us all, just a bit more covertly.
It seems to me that there are many people who never really grew up, never had a struggle that only they could solve or a situation where they were responsible for somthing that could cause great damage (and they cared). Many people just seem to defer to someone else - just call the guy to fix things, repeat their political stances from the "news" (talk show) they perfer, etc. As the percentage of voters who share this mindset increases, this is not a future I look forward to.
It's very different.
So parents keep their children indoors for fear of being arrested from them crossing the street on their own. Politicians are unable to renege on "child safety" laws because the populace will believe they are harming children and vote them out.
But these things work the way they do because of the social consequences embedded in our culture, caused by the perceived harm to children from inaction. People want to avoid accusations of being complicit in harming children by supporting politician X or failing to do Y, as that has legitimate societal consequences when taken far enough, so there little incentive to diverge from this narrative.
Maybe its not perfect, but most parents would give everything they have if it meant saving their child's life or health, so spending a few hundred at the chance is a no-brainer.
Seems like "people only wear seatbelts so that they won't get tickets" type of reasoning, which is true for some, but many (myself included) like the additional safety and wear it regardless of law enforcement. I do actually care about my safety and health, and will take reasonable measures for a chance to preserve it; and that same feeling extends to my children.
They do, and they should. But due to the fact that this really is a legitimate concern in society, and always will be, it is also an infinitely renewable source of discontent that sways public opinion towards pursuing policies and parenting methods that don't actually help or protect children. Nothing short of a total panopticon can prevent 100% of harm to children, if even that. Yet saying "we will have less visibility into the safety of children if we choose to do this instead" is seen in the current climate as one of the most distasteful things you can say. So people are afraid to speak up and find alternatives.
Anything short of absolute perfection in child safety is seen as an unacceptable failure that merits new barriers to autonomy to prevent the next failure. To preserve the freedom of childhood, there has to be a middle ground.
And seatbelts are one of the cases where it is good short-term and long-term, but you’re right, the same mechanic applies. No one wears a seatbelt because “over a lifetime. I have a lower chance of dying in a car crash“. We wear it because “I’m less likely to die today.“
Any price? What about a portion of your child's development and autonomy?
Traffic collisions and drowning are the major causes of death in children in developed countries; not childhood illness, as it was formerly, thanks largely to vaccination. Better road safety - that starts with _you_, car owners! - swimming lessons, and greater adult supervision when children are near water, are the most important things here, not surveillance.
When people do horrific things to children, it is almost never a stranger, but someone close to home, and again surveilling the child will not prevent that.
Regulation and technical improvements can do a lot for road safety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Killed_on_British_Roads_1...
Crime rates are far lower, road accident fatalities and injuries are far lower, but people are a lot more afraid of both of them.
> Seems like "people only wear seatbelts so that they won't get tickets" type of reasoning, which is true for some, but many (myself included) like the additional safety and wear it regardless of law enforcement
I wore them and made by kids wear them even in a country where they were not required by law. Admittedly I had become accustomed to wearing them in a country where they were required.
In both cases occurance rates should be low.
My other point is that it is also happening in the UK where a lot of people do the same without the same fear of child services, so i think its a cultural change that is common to both countries.
To what point though? Overprotective upbringings could delay development or produce adults lacking development in critical areas.
I think the problem is that parental instincts are protective, and it takes a conscious effort to let go. Its easier if you understand enough maths to weigh up the risks rationally.
And this situation was not unique to me, my friends all had basically the same thing going on with minor differences. And like, I dunno maybe this is a reach, but these were the foundations that IMO made me a responsible human, who is able to move and function in the world autonomously, and it seems like newer generations of kiddos are really struggling with that in particular. Perhaps these are connected?
Let's be honest that was the average of that day, and today the average is tracking location at any time. If your mom was taking the average measures in that environment she would probably exercise the average measures in the current day environment.
I'm not saying that it was bad. I am saying we should probably be careful with the balance between autonomy and tracking since the same reasoning is used with your mom having you call in vs the current day tracking.
And yet it is so endlessly frustrating what genuinely harmful, awful practices persist anyway.
Both your points and mine can be true at the same time.
Datum vs Data, again.
Of course parents being more restrictive with their kids may well be one of the reasons why the number has gone down (there are many confounding factors).
[1] and, at first glance, most of Europe https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh... (pages 53 onwards among others)
[2] +40% more cars, in absolute terms, than in 1990!! Crazy.
You're not helping them if when they go off to college they don't know how to be a cautious pedestrian.
Not really. Dog owners hurt children all the time, we have zero problems blaming 3 years old for "provoking" an adult!
They were scared and acted in self defense!
Child deserved to go to hospital! Hopefully it learned valuable lesson to respect dog owners and treat them better!
And when they mow children down, as statistically some of them always will, it's then always described as "an accident", as though performed by some capricious god beyond all human control.
It is going to be weird when the next generation of teenagers doesn’t rebel or break any rules at all
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709250/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yef_HfQoBd8
Some episodes seem just a bit too much. And then, just like that, rumours of David Cameron fucking a pig come to light.
https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Arkangel
It's a thing.
I, personally, don't think I've ever trusted anyone (parents included) enough to let them track me. I wouldn't feel safer. But maybe some people have good and healthy relationships with their parents (not that forcing your child to be tracked is healthy, but if your child chooses to have that safeguard...).
This is actually somewhat old news. Snapchat pioneered this with the Snap Map, where essentially the whole purpose was to broadcast where you are to your friends.
That was so long ago now that even Snapchat is long last its peak relevance.
For example: are they married? Do they live alone? Who are some of their friends? Where do they work? What do they do at work? Have they recently lost/found/experienced something interesting? These are the kinds of details that can enable social engineering in digital and physical spaces. It's likely easier to lure a person into a dangerous situation if you reference minute details from their personal life.
Sometimes the threat model is "has $10k in a bank account" or "is young & attractive" or "practices a religion I don't like" or "it's Tuesday."
It's data entrusted to that specific person with the social contract to not share that data (assuming no permission for sharing was given). I would argue the same way if someone posted my full address online for example, you're breaking the social contract by sharing data I entrusted you with.
Perhaps they didn't tell their friend about that one abusive ex or an affair their having. Additionally in this case it is telling people that when this person is in a certain location they are having a bad day, possibly opening them up to harassment a scam or manipulation.
There are a lot of people that will use that information to their advantage, even if it is just for trolling.
For me, if I found out about a post like this I would stop any contact with the person effective immediately after informing them of not appreciating the post.
And it's NYC which has all sorts of people, many of which you may not want to be approached by.
If the juicebar gets tagged, then the people working there may start interacting with the friend in a way she may not appreciate.
Sending out life specifics, even if your not famous or have a stalker can be detrimental. And, it wasn't the friend's choice either. So, the original poster may loose a friend in exchange for likes on X.
But none of that registers as a risk: instead it’s a hypothetical X user who is so struck by a headshot on a map that they travel across the city on the off chance she’s still at the juice bar? That’s like worrying about being struck by a meteorite, but paying no attention to the risk of getting hit by a car.
I know some families who have enabled location sharing family-wide. It gives them a sense of security. I feel it invades my privacy, and so I do not mandate this for myself or anyone in my family, and would actively refuse to engage.
The ensuing argument is almost always "are you hiding something", but it's not that I have anything to hide (my location history would be quite boring, really), but just that I have an aversion to it entirely out of principle.
YMMV.
Vehicle insurance and owner liability is a whole different topic. I prefer to have them hold title and therefore liability, even if I were to give them the money to purchase and insure.
My parents were these types of people. It's bullying. A grown adult with a degree and full-time job justifying this behavior is ridiculous. Where does a kid with a part-time minimum wage job and undeveloped brain get the money to afford a fully independent life? They simply can't and the adult saying that knows it. It's a way to feel good about exerting power.
If a person is so perturbed at the idea of providing something to their child while simultaneously not having full surveillance into its use, they should've worn a condom. People like this make stupid decisions, have a kid as a result, and then make it the kid's problem that they exist in this world.
Unfortunately, some parents don't understand the idea of respecting boundaries of their child. It is _their_ child after all. An object to do with what they wish.
I do see that you yourself do not do this thankfully. But that logic is still incredibly flawed and perverse in my opinion.
My comment is regarding the 23 and 29 yo examples in the parent comment. If you as a 29 yo consent to your mom tracking you in order to get a free phone, then that is your choice. Can't you just disable tracking or buy your own phone?
I clearly was not referring to 'a kid with a part-time minimum wage job.'
if you have a corporate cell phone it's telling on you. they pay for it, they have the right to track and read anything your doing on it.
So from this I sound like I would cheat on my taxes?
Take a moment to remember that, among the masses, illiteracy rather than literacy has been the norm throughout history.
Perhaps surface knowledge of the applied uses of semiconductors and ISA-agnostic languages like C was a "niche" topic still in the 1970s. But for over a decade and a half now, carrying an internet edge device as Steve Jobs called the iPhone on one's person, among the most of relatively sophisticated (but not too sophisticated) professionals, has been the norm.
Nowadays in first world countries and large swaths of the third world countries too, "global south" not excluded, "everyone" carries an internet edge device on their person.
Knowledge of the applied uses of semiconducters, internet protocol, and ISA-agnostic languages, isn't really a "niche" anymore now is it?
Those of us with modern literacy who don't choose to practice ignorance of human nature, those who heeded Richard Stallman's warnings, will do fine.
For the illiterate and arrogantly naive, the coming decades and ultimately humanity in perpetuity may be very tough.
Review 001: THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS https://www.metanoia-research.com/review-001-the-power-of-th...
Essay 001: ON WHAT THE PANOPTICON CANNOT SEE https://www.metanoia-research.com/essay-001-on-what-the-pano...
I find the the constant surveillance of our online, and increasingly of our offline, lives infuriating and push back when I can.
Twenty years from now perhaps it will all be accepted as perfectly normal, and I'll be an old man yelling at clouds.
I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time people in the west were shocked at the level of surveillance that we found had been going on in East Germany.
Now we accept a greater level of surveillance as normal for ourselves.
I've come to the conclusion that it is primarily our instinct that drives this process and we cannot control it, except by refusing the tech altogether.
However, now that video editing is cheap and easy, perhaps the individual loses this advantage since one video recording might just be one version of the truth and you need more recorded angles/versions that prove consistency.
But how long will the advantage of that exposure last when technology envelops us all and we have no recourse?
Would you mail your child's location & schedule to anonymous strangers? You are making the world much more dangerous by doing this, by many orders of magnitude.
With that, comes the possibility that maybe this is some sub-section of parents in American, not all of them. Maybe middle-class and above, the people who can justify more subscriptions in their life with not much effect on their economy? Maybe some other segment(s) make more sense, just thinking out loud.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this is maybe not widespread among all types of parents in the US, since it isn't a "every parent in the world" thing at the very least.
My own thought when reading that was that the psychologist was aghast at the extent of the tracking of that particular app, not by the idea of parental tracking in general.