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"I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest" I disagree, I have 2 kids in elementary school and it is very useful to b

• raxxorrax 5y ago
  As I said, as a kid I would have hated this. I don't think kids benefit from this kind of overbearing parenting in the long run. Better than being neglected, I guess. Perhaps this is useful for very young children, but knowing myself I would have broken out of there as quickly as possible.
  • wonderwonder 5y ago
    I can understand personal preference of a child but study after study show that children whose parents are actively involved with their education and schooling get better results.
    • jacobolus 5y ago
      Active involvement = parent teaches child various skills and ideas, reads books aloud, suggests interesting problems to solve, works together with them on extra-curricular projects, obtains materials and resources related to the child’s personal interests, ... Micromanaging the completion of their school-assigned busywork is something different.
      • wonderwonder 5y ago
        I don't know if you have kids, I am guessing not, if I am wrong, my apologies. Knowing what your kids have due for school is not micromanaging its a core part of being a good parent. I know if my kid has a math test so it lets me sit down with him and review for his test, it allows me to ensure he knows the basis for whatever comes next in his curriculum. Terribly overbearing parents are not good but I think people are for some reason assuming the worst from this app and more so the parents that use it and it seems very odd to me. I ensure my kids study for their weekly spelling tests for 10 minutes a day, and review with them before tests and that is seen as micromanaging and negative? Strange times.
        • redis_mlc 5y ago
          Yeah, that's micromanaging.
        • Symbiote 5y ago
          Active involvement would be talking to your children and asking them what they have for school. Looking up their schedule on a website is passive involvement. I'm relieved these systems didn't exist when I was a child.
          • tata71 5y ago
            (Reading about people) breaking Blackboard et al was some of the best fun in school days....
          • kfarr 5y ago
            Of course these systems existed, they just used paper or other mediums. Did you not receive calendars, directory books or yearbooks, permission slip for upcoming museum trip, etc? Save the date slip or important school numbers magnet for the fridge?
          • falcolas 5y ago
            If there's one thing I remember from my own childhood, and know from my various nieces and nephews - children can't be expected to tell the whole truth, or sometimes even remember the whole truth. One bad test, one missed homework, turns into a spiral of shame that makes children hide the truth out of a fear for their parent's and other trusted adults' disappointment (real or imagined). If my parents knew the truth - when I know the truth - we can fix it before it spirals into an unfixable situation, and not after. Not all children are perfect, nor perfectly able to remember every event and assignment they have.
    • Loughla 5y ago
      I guess this comes down to the definition of actively involved versus overbearing. There is a fine, fine, fine line to walk between the two. Knowing how your kid is doing, asking questions, and being interested in their schooling is okay. Using it to force action without learning consequence is not. It is, sometimes, okay for a kid to miss an assignment because they're not great at time management. That's how they learn consequences for their actions. Anyway, you two have a fundamental disagreement, I believe, about the level of interaction and control required to be involved.
    • raxxorrax 5y ago
      Kids primarily benefit from parents education and their engagement in their children. But more by providing stimuli, not by surveillance. This isn't a black and white issue and as I said, it depends on their age. As I understand it we are talking about more or less preteens here.
    • willcipriano 5y ago
      Correlation does not equal causation. Parents more involved in school are more likely to be involved at home more generally.
    • GhettoComputers 5y ago
      That assumes an environment that your parents will be actively involved and understand how to use the non functional swedish site.
    • eptcyka 5y ago
      I don't know anyone personally whose parents were involved with them during their school years and they achieved moderate or high grades.
    • cutemonster 5y ago
      I was a bit happy for sometimes getting help with reviewing homework and someone to practice English words with (that is, one of my parents). And who reminded me of things I'd forgotten, be it homework or the sports bag. Some people here (not you) seem to think that one shoe fits all -- that because they didn't want the parents to be involved, that's what best for everyone. When in fact kids (and grown up people too) can be very different from each other
  • wonderwonder 5y ago
    All kids are sent home with a folder that lists the homework they have due, tests they have taken etc. This just puts it online? Are you saying that putting it online is the issue or that parents should have no insight on what their kids are doing unless the kid decides to tell the parent?
    • matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > parents should have no insight on what their kids are doing unless the kid decides to tell the parent As a kid this is exactly what I believed. Parents believe otherwise, of course.
      • dgfitz 5y ago
        Do you have children? Honest question.
        • matheusmoreira 5y ago
          Not yet.
        • teawrecks 5y ago
          Also don't have kids. I'm in my 30s. Totally agree with the other commenter. As a kid in school, I had to learn to be responsible for things, it was my responsibility to decide what I could handle on my own and what I told my parents about, and I paid the price when I dropped the ball. Yeah, there are always a few kids who need more help learning these skills than others, and I could see the app in the hands of good parents being useful. But I don't want to live in a world full of people whose parents never trusted them. I feel like one of those old people complaining that "kids these days aren't allowed to go play on their own, climb a tree, scrape their knees, etc". But this seems really troubling on a whole new psychological level. IMO kids need autonomy to mature, which can't happen if their parent can "magically" know anything.
          • wonderwonder 5y ago
  • watwut 5y ago
    It is not like this would be secret in the past. The ones most likely yo not tell are actually 6-7 years old who genuinely forgot and then are stressed cause teacher is complains.
  • yibg 5y ago
    But kids have to do a lot of things they don’t want to do. Going to school in the first place is often one of them.
  • true_religion 5y ago
    Let me preface this by clarify that when I say 'children', I mean young children 12 and younger, not teenagers in secondary school who can reasonably be expected to care for themselves... Personally, I'm not seeing why this is a huge issue. In the 1980s, parents of at least the private school that I used would get a syllabus containing all the homework and class plans for the year. If you wanted to know what was happening on week #7, you just had to look it up on paper without having a handy app to put it on your calendar. It wasn't seen as surveillance, but rather normal planning. If the teacher and school system know what's upcoming, then why shouldn't parents. It was seen as obvious that parents would help their children with homework, and that education necessarily involved parental support. Along the way if there were any disciplinary or academic issues, parents would have to sign-off on handling minor problems, and would get a personal phone call from the school for major ones. This is in addition to monthly meetings, PTA, etc. Has the world changed so much nowadays that people just drop off young children at school and can reasonably expect to be totally uninvolved? Now to contrast, in my country, secondary school (13-17) is usually boarding so kids are 100% outside of your view for 4 years and are forcibly made independent.
• tata71 5y ago
  > its very helpful to look up what homework / tests are due as the kids tend to not manage this so well themselves How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills and mental models, besides experiencing things like the (comparatively low-impact!) consequences of not handing in your 5th grade homework....? Hopefully you're going full parabola and also providing disproportionately strong incentives to do the "right" behaviors, because otherwise it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp.
  • wonderwonder 5y ago
    The reactions people are expressing to a parent stating they like to know what their kids are up to in school and what assignments are due is pretty odd. "it's as likely they'll succeed as they'll become sand through your tight grasp" lol, I have no idea how my statement on working with my kids on their homework and liking to know what is going on has evolved into an image of me being some sort of god king in my house, but hey whatever makes you happy. My kids have homework, I sit down with them and work on it with them, we bond, we joke around, they learn and they turn it in the next day. The horror. Edit: "How do you expect they'll develop these sorts of self-starter skills" To add some color, my 9 year old decided at the spur of the moment while they were asking who wanted to stand up and give a speech to be on student council to do it and he won. I had no input and he just made the decision in the moment so I very much don't think sitting down with kids and doing homework with them or keeping an eye on their schedule kills any self-starter skills. There are always extremes but the overall reaction to this is a bit silly.
  • pawelmurias 5y ago
    Migrate them to keeping their own calendar, rather then using the old fashioned way of a mixture of scribbling stuff in random places and not giving a shift
  • watwut 5y ago
    What you propose is to not teach them nor give them gradually more responsibilities. You literally demand the system in which kids are expected to be well organized. If they are not they will be punished until they learn to be organized. If they don't despite punishments in school, parents won't be told until end of year. Then they get the surprising final report and only thing they can do is to yell at kids or something. That is rather poor pedagogy.
• antihero 5y ago
  > it is very useful to be able to look up what the kids have scheduled for the day to determine what to dress them in I swear we just had an A4 piece of paper with my lessons on it on the fridge.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    Wut? Does the school do anything that involves stuff that you need to dress differently for? Even when doing PE I’d always bring a separate bag of gym clothes.
  • falcolas 5y ago
    And printing out a schedule for every child is a bit silly when there is calendaring software... Everything once done on paper is now done electronically - and revisions (fixes) happen much more quickly to boot.
    • alibarber 5y ago
      You're not wrong, but, my school timetable changed once every quarter, that was sort of feature. It's not work, no one is flying in from $city on $day to kick off a project, students and teachers would follow a routine, it was easy. Frankly there are some aspects of it I miss...
  • watwut 5y ago
    It is literally the same thing then. If one is not causing outrage, nor should the other.
• rndgermandude 5y ago
  Back when I was in school we had a schedule, for the semester. That worked perfectly well for me and my parents. Our kitchen had a pin board with these schedules pinned to it. After a month or so we all had a new schedule internalized anyway. As for food, we had a cafeteria which served warm meals, usually at least two different options, and various other things like sandwiches, along with two "kiosks" where the janitors's wives sold some more snacks and sandwiches. And there was a supermarket across the street. I never had a packed lunch, ever, simply because there was no need for it. If I really hated the hot meals of the day, I would get a sandwich. We kids didn't really keep to the schedules anyway, we sometimes went early or stayed late to make use of the table tennis, foosball (or "kicker" as it's called in Germany) or billard tables, or play board games (our school had a sizable collection of these), or play soccer (or "football" as it is called correctly) outside on the school's fields. Mom's only order was to call her (from a pay phone inside the school) if we stayed longer than 1h, so she didn't need to worry (dad was at work). Pickups weren't a problem in this system, as we would always take the public bus or bike when it was warm enough. Our school had something like 1200-1500 students, and about only 30-50 were dropped off and picked up by parents regularly, simply because they lived in some tiny villages somewhere with shitty bus service. Homework and test prep was supposed to be managed by the students, not their parents, anyway, but most classes had just printed exercises and/or a sheet of what to expect in tests, so parents could always just check that. Test were also in about the same weeks of every semester, so my parents might not have known the exact dates unless they asked and I told them, but they knew that tests were happening. My parents kept interest, asked me how it was going regularly, if I needed help with something, when the tests are and what my results were, and so on. I think so it makes a big difference in the kid's experience if the parent asks them, or if the parent essentially goes over their head and consults some online resource. I personally was too proud to want help with school work from my parents from an early age on, and even felt that it only slowed me down; I wanted to be outside with my friends not slowly working through the homework as a team exercise. My grades were good, so my parents let me do my stuff. My sisters (they are twins) needed some help in some areas (they are very likely partially dyslexic), and got it. Should the grades of a student change abruptly for the worse or remain at a low level, teachers would just call up parents and discuss the situation and suggest ways to improve, and the semester reports had to be signed by a parent anyway, and that signature had to be presented at school. This was mid to late 90s by the way, my mid and "high" school time. In elementary school my parents were still more hands-on, of course. I too find "digital child managing systems" rather dystopian, enabling parents to micro-manage their kids even more, which I am convinced is not good for the kid's overall development. There has to be a balance between the parents need to care for a kid (and the care a kid actually needs, of course) and letting the kid grow up, and I feel such systems push that balance too much away from teaching kids self-reliance and let them make minor "educational" mistakes on their own. Then again, I of course realize that each kid has it's own needs, and some need a fair bit of micro-management at times. >what to dress them in May I ask, how old are your kids? Sounds like they are still young, if you dress them? Then of course, more micro-managing makes more sense. The younger the more care kids need.
• teawrecks 5y ago
  I'm not against the app, but the use cases you gave sound like things the child needs to learn to do. If they have gym, they need to be responsible for remembering their stuff. If the cafeteria has food they don't like, maybe they learn to develop new tastes that day. And most importantly, I'd they have homework or tests that are due, the child should 1000% be solely responsible for this. As you mention, I guess it can be a useful tool for a parent to keep their kid on track, because yeah obviously they're learning and they'll be forgetful. But IMO it would also make it too easy for an overbearing parent to prevent their child from learning important life skills, thinking they're helping.
• kwdc 5y ago
  I'd also say that a school denying access to this information should rightly expect pointy and sharp questions coming at them. Parents being part of the education system shouldn't come as a surprise to a school. It would be like hiding the school timetable. Usual common sense caveats still apply: Privacy and authentication are still valid aspects but not to block those who could reasonably expect to successfully authenticate, eg a parent of a kid in school.