Part of my human experience may include checking how the babysitter is doing with the kids. I'm not going to do that in a way that disrupts the show, but I still want that access.
Meanwhile, the deal the kids struck with the babysitter was a simple one - they could stay up as late as they wanted just so long as they pretended to be asleep if mummy and daddy come back early. The next morning the kids sleep in and everyone is happy.
So you have to let go. Trust the babysitter. Trust your seven year old daughter to try and stay up extra late by showing the babysitter daddy's secret porn collection, hidden behind the antiquarian book collection but all too easy to find for an adventurous child. Of course none of these things or the strange noises the parents make in bed get to be an issue, you just pay babysitter and make them feel welcome and all is good.
So Jack White is right.
Most times when babysitters are hired, now or a generation ago, they're trusted to make reasonable decisions so the parents don't have to worry.
No one questioned the babysitter's competence. They're your children -- you're going to want to call and check to see how things are going.
The vast majority of the time consumed in that process is simply getting out from where you sit/stand and back, which is the same in the "unjailed" phone scenario.
Unless, of course, you were just going to go ahead and conduct that call right there in the venue anyway.
It all reminds me of DRM causing problems for legitimate, paying customers when the DRM should only be targeting those who go outside of the rules. That's where someone else's comment about treating everyone like adults and kicking people out who break the rules seems like the best bet, although they also admitted (and I agree) that this system just doesn't work as needed, either.
A lot of the time your mates aren't looking at the phone at the right time, or there are so many people that you don't get good reception. Looking up and just finding people works pretty well.
Surely not every time you go to the loo, if it's just the once it's hardly much inconvenience.
Yes. If you suffer from high levels of anxiety and don't trust your own decisions about who to trust, this is true. Many people, particularly Americans, are this way. It is not true for every parent, however.
Trust the babysitter to make wise choices. This is actully really tough as cell phones end up lowering the standard expected of babysitters, like the whole GPS/map thing.
I used to sit for my nieces and nephews before mobiles were in common usage. My sister would give me the number of the place they were going in case there was a problem.
Of course, this was useless if they had gone to somewhere where there may be more than a couple of dozen people?
So, in reality, people used to hire baby sitters and just trust them to be able to cope. It's not as if you could do much from the other end of a phone if there actually was an emergency?
The main difference is that you tend to plan less up front. When our children were younger, and we had babysitters, we'd point out where the obvious stuff was but if they needed something, they'd just text. You just don't bother with the 15 min tour that I'd have got when I was doing the babysitting.
As a tangential, vaguely amusing, anecdote. A few years ago, my eldest's phone was a bit dodgy and kept cutting out. He was going to meet up with my wife in town but was meeting friends first. The two of them, my wife and son, spent about 5 minutes trying to work out how they could contact each other.
I, genius that I am, proposed a radical solution. I suggested that they arrange to meet at an agreed time and place. It had been such a long time since this was necessary that it hadn't even occurred to my wife (for which I still won't let her forget). My son had never, in his 15 odd years at the time, needed to do this.
checking how the babysitter is doing with the kids
Yes, they did; before ubiquitous cellphones killed demand for them, basically every public place of any size (and many small ones, and even just public streets) had banks of payphones, and for many kinds of outings people would leave the phone number of the restaurant or other establishment that they were going to for emergency contact in the other direction.
The last generation that didn't have that “luxury” was whichever one was before landlines were ubiquitous.
Sorry but you talk about checking in on the babysitter as if it's some universal law. It's not you don't have to, and if you feel like you can't go out and enjoy a show without checking in then don't go to the show.
And yes I have kids.
It's perfectly fine if you don't want to take that chance but it's hardly an argument for why someone shouldn't do a show where they ban cellphones.