7 ms·

I don't get it. Why did Kelly's parents not just stop paying her phone bills and change the Wifi password? Heck, why not just take the phone away and replace it

I don't get it. Why did Kelly's parents not just stop paying her phone bills and change the Wifi password? Heck, why not just take the phone away and replace it with a flip-phone? How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions? This is not a rhetorical question. I will be parent soon and stories like these, terrify me.

latortuga 8y ago
Classic instance of a technical solution to a people problem. Even if you change the WIFI password, most phone plans come with a data plan. Trying to engineer a technical solution just punts the people problem down the road - you have to address it at some point. And in the article, they mention that the defining event was when the parents went to take the phone away. So they did try to take the phone away.
- jayjayok 8y ago
  Fair enough. I was almost going to suggest signal jammers from China or Faraday cage wallpapers but then I remembered that taking the phone away might have done the trick as well ;)
allcentury 8y ago
You're missing the point - it's not the physical device that the parents are fighting, it's what the device is doing to the child. They took it away and she threatened to kill herself. This story, for you (as a soon to be parent) and for me (a new parent) might be great timing - it certainly makes me never want to get my child a cell phone that could even start them down this path.
- jayjayok 8y ago
  I agree, that this was not the point of the article. Nonetheless if a child doesn't have access to a phone/the internet that child won't have access to all these Skinner boxes and whatnot. I guess the bigger picture I'm trying to paint is that parents don't seem to be doing their job. >"Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there.
  - ars 8y ago
    > Nonetheless if a child doesn't have access to a phone/the internet that child won't have access to all these Skinner boxes and whatnot. That might work on a 9 year old. It doesn't work on a teenager. > Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there. You have it backward. As a parent you HAVE to teach kids to own a phone, and not let it dominate them. If instead you just take it away, then when they are old enough to get one themself (around age 14-15 I'd say) it will utterly consume them, since they have no ability to resist, and no parents to help them.
    - jefurii 8y ago
      My parents resisted getting a TV for awhile when I was a kid. When we got one it was an old second-hand black-and-white (this was the 1970s). This TV sometimes broke for weeks at a time (my dad now admits that he removed the fuse). I remember my dad watching TV with me and deconstructing it mercilessly--I now understand he was teaching me media literacy. Later on when we got a computer my folks would only get construction-set games (e.g. Pinball Construction Set) or simulations (Flight Simulator, M.U.L.E.). Later they expanded and got some strategy and role-playing games. If I wanted arcade games I had to use my own money or type them in myself from the magazines (printing game source code was a thing for a bit in the 1980s). I recently discovered a book from the 1980s that my folks must have read, and which handles media literacy really well: "A kid's TV guide : a children's book about watching TV intelligently", by Joy Wilt. Yes, I'm just as annoying to my kid as my parents were to me.
      - nojvek 8y ago
        I remember creating flash games after watching tons of kirupa.com tutorials. That was fun. I don’t think i’d be motivated enough to do that with html. The iPhone / modern smartphones are very much designed to be consumer devices. You can’t do much creation. There’s something about building. You feel so accomplished. Even more amplified if other people want what you’ve created.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Your child is calling your bluff, hopefully with another bluff. Threatening to kill yourself should have serious consequences. Because it's either a very serious threat, or it's perniciously bad behavior that needs to be corrected immediately. If you take your kids phone away and they threaten to kill themselves, take them to a mental health professional.
SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
In this story, it sounds like they just didn't understand how bad it was. The parents might not also be very good with technology themselves, and so some easy options might not occur to them. I'm not a parent, but in friends of mine who are, I often see the scenario play out in reverse. They use technology as a way to pacify their rambunctious kids or otherwise get a few moments of respite - and so they foster that tech addiction without knowing it, until its really taken hold.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions? First, it's “nip...in the bud” (cut off before it flowers) not “nip...in the butt” (annoy it by biting it's backside.) More to the point, the kind of sharp cutoff you suggest is exactly equivalent to what the parents did here, and would likely produce the same result.
ars 8y ago
How would that help? They are trying to fix her thinking. I mean they could also just lock her in cage right? But that's not the issue, the issue is how she thinks and behaves. > How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions? Very very very very hard. Take a phone away, and a kid will borrow one from a friend, or buy one, or steal one, or go to the library and refuse to come home. You can't fix these things by focusing on the item, you need to focus on the person. > This is not a rhetorical question. I will be parent soon and stories like these, terrify me. They should. Phones are destroying society and rebuilding it, different. Not just kids. Adults too. Will the new world be better or worse? Time will tell I guess.
bradford 8y ago
Parent dealing with this question myself. The two main challenges that we face: 1) A smartphone is increasingly required for getting by in society. My kid doesn't really need it, but I worry about him navigating the transit system to/from school and extra curricular activities. A smartphone takes some of the parental anxiety away here. 2) Sadly, a flip-phone is a sign of poor status and it invites bullying at school. I feel there is a genuine need for parental controls on smartphones, but getting it right is, from an engineering standpoint, not as trivial as we might think. It's also probably not as profitable either (we have a lot of battles over the phone in our house, but a lot of parents just don't care about setting similar boundaries).
- madengr 8y ago
  Hell, I'm about to smash this stinking iPhone and go back to a flip phone. Better yet, a 2 meter amateur radio HT.
  - kawfey 8y ago
    APRS has come a long way since flip phones, now you can send email natively [http://www.aprs-is.net/email.aspx http://www.aprs-is.net/email.aspx] and SMS via SMSGTE [http://smsgte.wixsite.com/smsgte http://smsgte.wixsite.com/smsgte]
    - madengr 8y ago
      My Yeasu VX8 doesn’t have predictive text entry, which is a shame. I don’t know of any that do. I’d love to have an APRS radio with a slide out keyboard for quick texting.
- jayjayok 8y ago
  Would it be enough to disable/block social media apps, Youtube/Twitch and problematic games? The kid would still have a smartphone but without the addictive stuff.
  - bradford 8y ago
sulam 8y ago
The issue here is that you have to teach your children about what a healthy relationship with technology looks like from a very young age these days. You also have to be able to demonstrate that you yourself have a healthy relationship with technology. Device-free dinners, time spent outside, healthy exercise, engaging activities that aren't the latest app craze, etc -- you need to both help your children learn what "good" looks like and demonstrate good behavior yourself. It's hard, and it can't be suddenly turned on when there's a "problem". The problem happened long before the grades started dropping.
floatrock 8y ago
Another possibility: create good parental controls (time limits, time fencing, insight into usage, etc.) Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS? That's the real solution here... start demanding with your wallet that you would pay for these counter-measures. One thing I've always appreciated about iOS (and contributed towards my brand loyalty and sales) is better security permissions (no, I'm not going to grant my flashlight app access to my microphone). I hear Android's gotten better about it, but even just the other weekend, an android-using family member asked me if I can figure out why some annoying ad appears somewhere on her lock or home screen (aka who is the spammy app). A walled garden does have its benefits if the gardener is incentivized with devices sales not eyeballs... Similar attention-control features wouldn't even be for kids -- it's something I would even use myself. The brain-hacking dopamine drip strategies talked in the article don't only affect kids, after all. Start showing there's profit in counter-measures.
- photojosh 8y ago
  > Another possibility: create good parental controls (time limits, time fencing, insight into usage, etc.) > Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS? Yep, and it's happening. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-time-as-a-parent-on-a-childs-iphone-or-ipad/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-t...
robotracers 8y ago
I don't have kids but alot of the people I work with in my tech startup do and they seem to commonly speak (as if this is common knowledge amongst techy/modern parents) about no screen time. They have no screen time and start this at a very young age so it is not questioned later. Anything with a bright screen is not allowed during certain times of the day. The most interesting feedback I heard over lunch at work was this: That kids do better with no screen time (complain/argue/fight less) when their parents ALSO abide by no screen time. If you tell your kid no screen time but sit on the couch perusing your iphone all night but don't want your kids playing games on their ipad, what are you teaching them? Furthermore this example was used by a dad with an 18month yr old girl. He says she is very entranced as any child would be by a bright screen. It's very mysterious and alluring of course. While she has not screen time she is very interested in the bright lights coming from his screen, so now during no screen time he also puts his iphone away. So my advice is implement no screen time as a standard habit in the house, and also try to abide by it yourself. So maybe the best way to prepare for kids its to start by training yourself to have no screen time. (just an idea, I don't have kids what do I know).
jerf 8y ago
"Why did Kelly's parents not just..." Remember there is a selection process that led to this story. It is an extreme, not the norm. It is likely that Kelly had a mental illness of one sort or another, as evidenced by the fact she was committed for a time. If not that, then there is some other reason this is an exceptionally extreme story. Statistically speaking, you are unlikely to end up with that. (Not that that stopped me from coming up with some pretty bad genetic hands with my children. But it was still stastically unlikely....) There are ways in which it is easy and people make it hard, but there are ways in which it is legitimately hard, too. My oldest is 10 and has made only the first initial noises about getting his own phone, but I won't be able to defer the matter forever. But I will say the current plan is to wait until he shows some understanding of what forces are arrayed against him before he gets anything of his own. To some extent, I suspect the average youngster is going to have to get stung a few times before they really get it, partially because I did myself. But to be stung "properly", you need to understand what is going on and why you were stung, not just be sitting there looking at your empty bank account one day wondering where all the money went, when the answer is "gems for some mobile game", and then doing it all again next week.
johngalt 8y ago
The best advice I can give to a soon to be parent. There is no single program that guarantees happy/productive/well adjusted kids and specifically adolescents. The biggest surprise with children is just how different they all are, even when raised in similar environments. Children can be certainly derailed by a poor upbringing, but that doesn't mean that they are always properly molded by a 'good' upbringing. I'm not sure why the parents didn't take a harder line earlier in the process, but I have my suspicions. By the time a child is 15, parenting tends to become more results oriented. They are going to be on their own legally inside of 3 years, and parents have to take the training wheels off. Kelly's parents may have been attempting to get her to see the deleterious effects of the phone. If an 8 year old is spending too much time on screens, you take them away. By 15 Kelly's parents probably want her to take more ownership over behavior. The parents can point to the failing grades, lack of social progress, and missed opportunities and say "are you proud of this? Is this what you want?" Some kids have to learn things the hard way via personal experience rather than parental instruction. Parents may want their kids to make this sorts of mistakes before adulthood hits them and raises the stakes. After all, the real world has phones without any screen time limits.
nrhk 8y ago
My parents use to lock up my laptop, refused to buy me games and all sorts of other stuff. I learned how to tether my computer to my phone, I learned how to hack into my router, I learned how to pick locks, I learned how to torrent. It's fucking hard to stop kids when they're determined, they have more time than you to figure out how to be deviant.
bsder 8y ago
The social problem is that these things are absolute Skinner Boxes and people really are not cognizant of that fact. The parental problem is that they let the problem go on too long. When your kids grades start to drop, you take action. Now. You don't let it go on. Taking the phone away now probably does feel pretty traumatic because their daughter has integrated it as her social life. She interacts with friends who interact with their phones the same way. etc. At this point, yanking the phone means hitting the reset button on her social circle at the age of 15--in the middle of a bunch of established social cliques. They probably need to change schools for her. I am reminded again, however, that the single characteristic that a parent seems to need is to be more stubborn than their children. If your children 100% believe that in a genuine conflict with you that they will lose, lots of things simply never get started.

latortuga 8y ago

Classic instance of a technical solution to a people problem. Even if you change the WIFI password, most phone plans come with a data plan. Trying to engineer a technical solution just punts the people problem down the road - you have to address it at some point. And in the article, they mention that the defining event was when the parents went to take the phone away. So they did try to take the phone away.

jayjayok 8y ago
Fair enough. I was almost going to suggest signal jammers from China or Faraday cage wallpapers but then I remembered that taking the phone away might have done the trick as well ;)

allcentury 8y ago

You're missing the point - it's not the physical device that the parents are fighting, it's what the device is doing to the child. They took it away and she threatened to kill herself. This story, for you (as a soon to be parent) and for me (a new parent) might be great timing - it certainly makes me never want to get my child a cell phone that could even start them down this path.

jayjayok 8y ago
I agree, that this was not the point of the article. Nonetheless if a child doesn't have access to a phone/the internet that child won't have access to all these Skinner boxes and whatnot. I guess the bigger picture I'm trying to paint is that parents don't seem to be doing their job. >"Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there.
- ars 8y ago
  > Nonetheless if a child doesn't have access to a phone/the internet that child won't have access to all these Skinner boxes and whatnot. That might work on a 9 year old. It doesn't work on a teenager. > Here honey, here's your phone back. Please don't kill yourself. We cool?" Mother/father of the year award right there. You have it backward. As a parent you HAVE to teach kids to own a phone, and not let it dominate them. If instead you just take it away, then when they are old enough to get one themself (around age 14-15 I'd say) it will utterly consume them, since they have no ability to resist, and no parents to help them.
  - jefurii 8y ago
    My parents resisted getting a TV for awhile when I was a kid. When we got one it was an old second-hand black-and-white (this was the 1970s). This TV sometimes broke for weeks at a time (my dad now admits that he removed the fuse). I remember my dad watching TV with me and deconstructing it mercilessly--I now understand he was teaching me media literacy. Later on when we got a computer my folks would only get construction-set games (e.g. Pinball Construction Set) or simulations (Flight Simulator, M.U.L.E.). Later they expanded and got some strategy and role-playing games. If I wanted arcade games I had to use my own money or type them in myself from the magazines (printing game source code was a thing for a bit in the 1980s). I recently discovered a book from the 1980s that my folks must have read, and which handles media literacy really well: "A kid's TV guide : a children's book about watching TV intelligently", by Joy Wilt. Yes, I'm just as annoying to my kid as my parents were to me.
    - nojvek 8y ago
      I remember creating flash games after watching tons of kirupa.com tutorials. That was fun. I don’t think i’d be motivated enough to do that with html. The iPhone / modern smartphones are very much designed to be consumer devices. You can’t do much creation. There’s something about building. You feel so accomplished. Even more amplified if other people want what you’ve created.
hinkley 8y ago
Your child is calling your bluff, hopefully with another bluff. Threatening to kill yourself should have serious consequences. Because it's either a very serious threat, or it's perniciously bad behavior that needs to be corrected immediately. If you take your kids phone away and they threaten to kill themselves, take them to a mental health professional.

SmirkingRevenge 8y ago

In this story, it sounds like they just didn't understand how bad it was. The parents might not also be very good with technology themselves, and so some easy options might not occur to them. I'm not a parent, but in friends of mine who are, I often see the scenario play out in reverse. They use technology as a way to pacify their rambunctious kids or otherwise get a few moments of respite - and so they foster that tech addiction without knowing it, until its really taken hold.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions? First, it's “nip...in the bud” (cut off before it flowers) not “nip...in the butt” (annoy it by biting it's backside.) More to the point, the kind of sharp cutoff you suggest is exactly equivalent to what the parents did here, and would likely produce the same result.

ars 8y ago

How would that help? They are trying to fix her thinking. I mean they could also just lock her in cage right? But that's not the issue, the issue is how she thinks and behaves. > How hard can it be to nip these kinds of issues in the butt with simple pragmatic solutions? Very very very very hard. Take a phone away, and a kid will borrow one from a friend, or buy one, or steal one, or go to the library and refuse to come home. You can't fix these things by focusing on the item, you need to focus on the person. > This is not a rhetorical question. I will be parent soon and stories like these, terrify me. They should. Phones are destroying society and rebuilding it, different. Not just kids. Adults too. Will the new world be better or worse? Time will tell I guess.

bradford 8y ago

Parent dealing with this question myself. The two main challenges that we face: 1) A smartphone is increasingly required for getting by in society. My kid doesn't really need it, but I worry about him navigating the transit system to/from school and extra curricular activities. A smartphone takes some of the parental anxiety away here. 2) Sadly, a flip-phone is a sign of poor status and it invites bullying at school. I feel there is a genuine need for parental controls on smartphones, but getting it right is, from an engineering standpoint, not as trivial as we might think. It's also probably not as profitable either (we have a lot of battles over the phone in our house, but a lot of parents just don't care about setting similar boundaries).

madengr 8y ago
Hell, I'm about to smash this stinking iPhone and go back to a flip phone. Better yet, a 2 meter amateur radio HT.
- kawfey 8y ago
  APRS has come a long way since flip phones, now you can send email natively [http://www.aprs-is.net/email.aspx http://www.aprs-is.net/email.aspx] and SMS via SMSGTE [http://smsgte.wixsite.com/smsgte http://smsgte.wixsite.com/smsgte]
  - madengr 8y ago
    My Yeasu VX8 doesn’t have predictive text entry, which is a shame. I don’t know of any that do. I’d love to have an APRS radio with a slide out keyboard for quick texting.
jayjayok 8y ago
Would it be enough to disable/block social media apps, Youtube/Twitch and problematic games? The kid would still have a smartphone but without the addictive stuff.
- bradford 8y ago

sulam 8y ago

The issue here is that you have to teach your children about what a healthy relationship with technology looks like from a very young age these days. You also have to be able to demonstrate that you yourself have a healthy relationship with technology. Device-free dinners, time spent outside, healthy exercise, engaging activities that aren't the latest app craze, etc -- you need to both help your children learn what "good" looks like and demonstrate good behavior yourself. It's hard, and it can't be suddenly turned on when there's a "problem". The problem happened long before the grades started dropping.

floatrock 8y ago

Another possibility: create good parental controls (time limits, time fencing, insight into usage, etc.) Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS? That's the real solution here... start demanding with your wallet that you would pay for these counter-measures. One thing I've always appreciated about iOS (and contributed towards my brand loyalty and sales) is better security permissions (no, I'm not going to grant my flashlight app access to my microphone). I hear Android's gotten better about it, but even just the other weekend, an android-using family member asked me if I can figure out why some annoying ad appears somewhere on her lock or home screen (aka who is the spammy app). A walled garden does have its benefits if the gardener is incentivized with devices sales not eyeballs... Similar attention-control features wouldn't even be for kids -- it's something I would even use myself. The brain-hacking dopamine drip strategies talked in the article don't only affect kids, after all. Start showing there's profit in counter-measures.

photojosh 8y ago
> Another possibility: create good parental controls (time limits, time fencing, insight into usage, etc.) > Wasn't it a group of Apple activist shareholders demanding some of these features get built into iOS? Yep, and it's happening. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-time-as-a-parent-on-a-childs-iphone-or-ipad/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/21/ios-12-how-to-set-up-screen-t...

robotracers 8y ago

I don't have kids but alot of the people I work with in my tech startup do and they seem to commonly speak (as if this is common knowledge amongst techy/modern parents) about no screen time. They have no screen time and start this at a very young age so it is not questioned later. Anything with a bright screen is not allowed during certain times of the day. The most interesting feedback I heard over lunch at work was this: That kids do better with no screen time (complain/argue/fight less) when their parents ALSO abide by no screen time. If you tell your kid no screen time but sit on the couch perusing your iphone all night but don't want your kids playing games on their ipad, what are you teaching them? Furthermore this example was used by a dad with an 18month yr old girl. He says she is very entranced as any child would be by a bright screen. It's very mysterious and alluring of course. While she has not screen time she is very interested in the bright lights coming from his screen, so now during no screen time he also puts his iphone away. So my advice is implement no screen time as a standard habit in the house, and also try to abide by it yourself. So maybe the best way to prepare for kids its to start by training yourself to have no screen time. (just an idea, I don't have kids what do I know).

jerf 8y ago

"Why did Kelly's parents not just..." Remember there is a selection process that led to this story. It is an extreme, not the norm. It is likely that Kelly had a mental illness of one sort or another, as evidenced by the fact she was committed for a time. If not that, then there is some other reason this is an exceptionally extreme story. Statistically speaking, you are unlikely to end up with that. (Not that that stopped me from coming up with some pretty bad genetic hands with my children. But it was still stastically unlikely....) There are ways in which it is easy and people make it hard, but there are ways in which it is legitimately hard, too. My oldest is 10 and has made only the first initial noises about getting his own phone, but I won't be able to defer the matter forever. But I will say the current plan is to wait until he shows some understanding of what forces are arrayed against him before he gets anything of his own. To some extent, I suspect the average youngster is going to have to get stung a few times before they really get it, partially because I did myself. But to be stung "properly", you need to understand what is going on and why you were stung, not just be sitting there looking at your empty bank account one day wondering where all the money went, when the answer is "gems for some mobile game", and then doing it all again next week.

johngalt 8y ago

The best advice I can give to a soon to be parent. There is no single program that guarantees happy/productive/well adjusted kids and specifically adolescents. The biggest surprise with children is just how different they all are, even when raised in similar environments. Children can be certainly derailed by a poor upbringing, but that doesn't mean that they are always properly molded by a 'good' upbringing. I'm not sure why the parents didn't take a harder line earlier in the process, but I have my suspicions. By the time a child is 15, parenting tends to become more results oriented. They are going to be on their own legally inside of 3 years, and parents have to take the training wheels off. Kelly's parents may have been attempting to get her to see the deleterious effects of the phone. If an 8 year old is spending too much time on screens, you take them away. By 15 Kelly's parents probably want her to take more ownership over behavior. The parents can point to the failing grades, lack of social progress, and missed opportunities and say "are you proud of this? Is this what you want?" Some kids have to learn things the hard way via personal experience rather than parental instruction. Parents may want their kids to make this sorts of mistakes before adulthood hits them and raises the stakes. After all, the real world has phones without any screen time limits.

nrhk 8y ago

My parents use to lock up my laptop, refused to buy me games and all sorts of other stuff. I learned how to tether my computer to my phone, I learned how to hack into my router, I learned how to pick locks, I learned how to torrent. It's fucking hard to stop kids when they're determined, they have more time than you to figure out how to be deviant.

bsder 8y ago

The social problem is that these things are absolute Skinner Boxes and people really are not cognizant of that fact. The parental problem is that they let the problem go on too long. When your kids grades start to drop, you take action. Now. You don't let it go on. Taking the phone away now probably does feel pretty traumatic because their daughter has integrated it as her social life. She interacts with friends who interact with their phones the same way. etc. At this point, yanking the phone means hitting the reset button on her social circle at the age of 15--in the middle of a bunch of established social cliques. They probably need to change schools for her. I am reminded again, however, that the single characteristic that a parent seems to need is to be more stubborn than their children. If your children 100% believe that in a genuine conflict with you that they will lose, lots of things simply never get started.