Cracking the Code: A Toddler, an iPad, and a Tweet
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> ... this was a problem especially with early iPads (ours is ancient)—they can have trouble with time and date, which in turn can send the lockout time soaring.
> I was impressed by how many people posted substantive help, explaining that this was a problem especially with early iPads (ours is ancient)—they can have trouble with time and date, which in turn can send the lockout time soaring.
Once the system time and date was correct, the iCloud password reset feature worked without issue.
I finally thought to check the time and it was set to 2017. Apparently if its too far from the current date, automatic time setting does not work. I had to manually set it to the current date/time, wait a minute or two, then I could toggle on automatic time setting.
It’s been a while but I seem to recall ntpd behaving the same way on Unix/Linux and having to manually use ntpdate if the system clock is too far off.
It also usually corrects by slewing time, so that the time correction doesn’t upset timers so much. I believe it can take several weeks to correct for a large offset.
That information is true for most linuxes, and may not have any direct bearing on iOS.
So far the observations are:
- on days he uses it, it's between 1-2 hours total.
- he knows his alphabet and will sing the song while typing in each letter. So he kind of knows qwerty.
- he has complete access and basically goes into Netflix kids and YouTube. Ive never seen him find or watch anything inappropriate. This surprises me the most.
- some days it can be like crack. Grab it from his hands and he goes nuclear
- he gets bored and hands it back to you after 1-2 hours.
- he ignores it for days.
- he prefers going to the park or back yard over iPad time.
- I think he loves having control. He picks what the tablet does. He picks what video is on. A lot of his day is decided by what mom and dad need to do.
- some days we need to hide it because he's particularly fixated and getting him to bed time becomes difficult.
- he has an interesting obsession with a few videos that count in many languages. He can comfortably count to 20 in English, French, and Spanish. Mom, dad, and a Spanish speaking grandmother supported this and I think the iPad time helped reinforce the learning on his terms at his place
Overall I think it's a big win. But I expect this to change as he gets older. I expect we will have to start regulating it when he becomes capable of doing more complex activities on it.
As they got older, I had a tongue-in-cheek guideline of "no naked pics and no learning how to build bombs!" (They're my kids. They understood what I was trying to get at.)
I was a full-time mom and homemaker and we began homeschooling when they were 8 and 11. So I had a good idea of what they were being exposed to.
There were thousands of books in the house. I took them to the library regularly and to parks, museums, etc.
When they were about 11 and 13, we paid what was a lot of money for us at the time to get internet for all four computers in the house. A single line was the norm at the time and only one computer could be online at a time.
My oldest's addict-like behavior went away once he had unlimited internet access. Trying to get his needs met in x amount of time per day led him to play the most intense online games and did bad things to his headspace. Once he had all day, he read, played a variety of games, began writing fan fiction, etc.
I never found it necessary to limit anything.
Back in the bad old days, I remember staying up many nights until 1 or 2AM because of the slow dial up speeds. I told mom better internet would solve that problem. It did.
My cousin's youngest on the other hand... Every single family event since he's been old enough to pick up an iPad he has sat in a corner and not communicated with anyone (he must be 8 or 9 now). Earbuds in, fixated on the screen. Last family event I was at he came over to my cousin to get his fingerprint to authorise some purchase or other and the scuttled back off to his corner, which is the most I saw him move all day. He won't even put it down if we're singing happy birthday or taking a family photo etc.
I wonder what he'll be like when he grows up - whether he'll be able to communicate with people and form proper relationships. I know I've never managed to have a proper conversation with him. For what its worth, I do think my cousin and his wife are great parents and their other 3 kids grew up into perfectly respectable young adults, so I'm sure they know what they're doing.
Screens aren’t some magical thing that will poison your kids. I didn’t have an iPad growing up. Instead, I was obsessive (and sedentary) with books. Pushing kids to be active is orthogonal to letting them use screens when appropriate.
Do you have a device that supports night shift? I wonder if using that feature could work to your advantage in re bedtime. (I'm just a childless person speculating, but wouldn't that be grand?)
That might help a bit. But it's more about simply not wanting to stop what he's doing and move on to bedtime chores.
Reflecting a bit more. I don't think it's a struggle with addiction. I think it's a struggle between being in control and having to do what dad says.
For young kids on YouTube I’m a fan of coasterfan2105: https://www.youtube.com/user/CoasterFan2105
All train footage. It’s not the biggest hit, but keeps them entertained for a while.
Keep it up. If your kid is happy you're doing a good job.
Did you ever hear of Elsagate? I'd make sure to really check what he's watching, I found some incredibly disturbing videos in the YouTube Kids playlists my nephew was watching, never would have thought anything of it until I played the video, really nasty.
- Paw Patrol - Storybots (incredible, even if you're an adult, check it out) - Wiggles - Super Simple - Some weird series of YouTube videos where they do counting/colours in many languages. It's really low budget but quite harmless.
Is it common? I don't know. He's probably just marching at the front of the parade right now.
My mom's a kindergarten teacher (and has been to some rather low-income schools), there's kids who have essentially never been spoken to and struggle behaviorally and academically and haven't really even seen the alphabet.
At that age it's essentially all about their environment.
She'll figure that out too. "Hey, look at this picture I drew! Ignore that little hole at the top of the page."
I mean, or change the digits...
So my second kid (currently a toddler) will only get a Raspberry Pi. And a controlled amount of total screen time. Not going to do same mistake again.
That being said, I do worry I'm doing them a disservice. I make a very good living, relatively, in the IT field, and I ascribe that 100% to the fact that my parents bought a micro computer in 1982 and allowed me full access to it whenever I wasn't specifically doing anything else. I don't think I would be where I am if they had put some restrictions on my use of the computer. Admittedly I spent the majority of my time playing with BASIC rather than cutting fruit with my finger, so the use cases are totally different. However, by restricting their access I am limiting their ability to do anything with a tablet, including maybe discovering some programming application, or something that might light their imagination as mine was back in the 80's.
It does help with trust: if you know there was a specific date on which there was a cutoff of a vendor producing a certain type of weak certificate, for example, you can choose only to trust certificates from that provider after a certain NotBeforeDate.
All browsers will fail a certificate as invalid if your date is prior to the NotBeforeDate.
I wonder sometimes how much time is wasted on stuff like this.
In the end, why did anybody care? Was it just a pleasing respite from gruelling news? Like so much of our lives with technology, the episode could be read as a reason for either optimism or gloom. In an instant, people had raged and imagined conspiracies; most did not. Many helped. Above all, the scenario, in all its ridiculousness, seemed to satisfy the low-grade anxieties that have become our universal predicament, the feeling that we’re rarely more than a few clicks away from becoming captive to the tech we love. And, when it came time to share that angst, we did it online, of course. By the end of the week, the tweets were slowing down. The Internet had moved on. And the iPad was on a high shelf.