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> Freeing children from nonsense like drugs and social media isn’t holding them back But surveilling on them will. You're using your own active involvement as

> Freeing children from nonsense like drugs and social media isn’t holding them back But surveilling on them will. You're using your own active involvement as a crutch to compensate for the fact that you can't leave them to their own devices and know they'll do the right thing. But how can they do that if you don't teach them and you don't give them the right chance to show they can do it? You're not teaching them to independently use the technology responsibly (or not at all), but rather you're forcing a behavior into place. It's a very short-term solution that will backfire when they're put out there on their own and you're not there to push them in the right direction. Sooner or later they'll need to figure out how to do things independently. Maybe some active handling is okay for a while, but eventually, you've got to take off the training wheels, no?

austincheney 5y ago
I am not allowing them to grow and learn right from wrong… only because social media? Seriously? They aren’t locked away from people and sunlight. They engage socially in the real world. They don’t need social media to fail and learn from failure. They have every opportunity to fail for real among real people. When they get out on their own hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol. At that point they are free to make their own decisions and face all the consequences without the help of a parent.
- yowlingcat 5y ago
  > hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol Ah, but how would they have learned that? After all, they're not doing it because they "learned" it, they're doing it because you're forcing them to do it. You're never actually "unit testing" their ability to come to the right independent judgment on their own, because you don't trust them to. But because you don't trust them to, they may not develop the experience to independently come to probably the same conclusion you came to. And if they do, you certainly aren't helping them. Rather, what they're learning is that they'll have to go and buy their own prepaid cell phone on their own and get better and better at hiding it because "Dad is an uptight Boomer so what he doesn't know about this prepaid cell phone won't hurt him" which is probably not the lesson you're trying to teach them. If that mentality gets to drugs, alcohol, and sex, you may be in for more than you bargained for -- whether you pick up on it or not. Kids are very, very smart. They have much more time than you, the vigor of youth, the ability to see everything with fresh eyes and work things out from first principles -- and not just that, they have a whole network of /friends/ who have the exact same resources and who they can work with as a team. You're not going to stop them from experimenting. You'll just stop them from being open about it with you.
dogman144 5y ago
I was part of the set of kids who had the first versions of Net Nanny and “find my iPhone” equivalents rolled out. NetNanny, which was basically a very visible firewall, automatically incentivized a search for more network access, and treating that access like a fat kid in a candy store for much longer than I’m happy with today. The early “find my iPhone” tech that cell providers rolled out probably worked well until it sent me, a 16 y/o with angst issues, a text saying my cell phone was now enrolled and being tracked. Fairly enraging at the time. The counter though is with some knowledge of silent firewalls and IAM, I could see considering something similar But significantly More silent, as a parent. There is fairly shocking discussion around kids<>porn access<>serious issues with healthy sexuality. Screen time is turning young kids into zombies; there is just no planet where unrestricted tech access is good for the growing brain. The current Gen pop attitudes towards tech don’t offer much form of support - their kids are buried in an iPhone, my personal parenting policy will be a inherent critique of their parenting. PTAs see no issue with default Facebook use, thus enrolling my children in an data logging system I specifically work to avoid. Add in disinfo campaigns and the young mind… All this to say: invisible training wheels, or rather invisible walls and some tracking, seem to be the only way to raise a kid who must know tech, but won’t learn how to handle full exposure to it until well after 18 (bc adults are struggling too). Conversely, if that surveillance is discovered, it’s hell to pay as a parent. Tricky.

austincheney 5y ago

I am not allowing them to grow and learn right from wrong… only because social media? Seriously? They aren’t locked away from people and sunlight. They engage socially in the real world. They don’t need social media to fail and learn from failure. They have every opportunity to fail for real among real people. When they get out on their own hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol. At that point they are free to make their own decisions and face all the consequences without the help of a parent.

yowlingcat 5y ago
> hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol Ah, but how would they have learned that? After all, they're not doing it because they "learned" it, they're doing it because you're forcing them to do it. You're never actually "unit testing" their ability to come to the right independent judgment on their own, because you don't trust them to. But because you don't trust them to, they may not develop the experience to independently come to probably the same conclusion you came to. And if they do, you certainly aren't helping them. Rather, what they're learning is that they'll have to go and buy their own prepaid cell phone on their own and get better and better at hiding it because "Dad is an uptight Boomer so what he doesn't know about this prepaid cell phone won't hurt him" which is probably not the lesson you're trying to teach them. If that mentality gets to drugs, alcohol, and sex, you may be in for more than you bargained for -- whether you pick up on it or not. Kids are very, very smart. They have much more time than you, the vigor of youth, the ability to see everything with fresh eyes and work things out from first principles -- and not just that, they have a whole network of /friends/ who have the exact same resources and who they can work with as a team. You're not going to stop them from experimenting. You'll just stop them from being open about it with you.

dogman144 5y ago

I was part of the set of kids who had the first versions of Net Nanny and “find my iPhone” equivalents rolled out. NetNanny, which was basically a very visible firewall, automatically incentivized a search for more network access, and treating that access like a fat kid in a candy store for much longer than I’m happy with today. The early “find my iPhone” tech that cell providers rolled out probably worked well until it sent me, a 16 y/o with angst issues, a text saying my cell phone was now enrolled and being tracked. Fairly enraging at the time. The counter though is with some knowledge of silent firewalls and IAM, I could see considering something similar But significantly More silent, as a parent. There is fairly shocking discussion around kids<>porn access<>serious issues with healthy sexuality. Screen time is turning young kids into zombies; there is just no planet where unrestricted tech access is good for the growing brain. The current Gen pop attitudes towards tech don’t offer much form of support - their kids are buried in an iPhone, my personal parenting policy will be a inherent critique of their parenting. PTAs see no issue with default Facebook use, thus enrolling my children in an data logging system I specifically work to avoid. Add in disinfo campaigns and the young mind… All this to say: invisible training wheels, or rather invisible walls and some tracking, seem to be the only way to raise a kid who must know tech, but won’t learn how to handle full exposure to it until well after 18 (bc adults are struggling too). Conversely, if that surveillance is discovered, it’s hell to pay as a parent. Tricky.