Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

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> Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.

surveillance [1]

n. Close observation of person or group, especially one under suspicion.

n. The act of observing or the condition of being observed.

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This is CERTAINLY your responsibility toward your children. (The lack of it is known as "neglect".)

Personally, I do not let my 6 year old go to the small neighborhood park by himself. But if he has a remote monitoring device, I do.

As he gets older, there will be other cases where he will be allowed to do things only under some type of supervision.

Obviously it varies by age and maturity, where age 0 requires earshot proximity, and age 17.5 requires comparatively minimal attention to diet, education, and recreation.

"No surveillance full stop" is simply wrong.

"No electronic surveillance" is I think unwise and ignores opportunities for safe, constructive experiences.

"No secret surveillance" is I think a fair statement.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/surveillance

Just be careful and know when to change strategy.

There will come an age where your son's concepts of trust and responsibility will undergo a metamorphosis, and ordering them to keep a surveillance device on them might make them develop trust issues, and atypical expectations of privacy in their personal relationships, which may take them their entire young adulthood to work through.

I can't agree with this enough, and I feel like the slope along which you slide as you start treating your offspring as a human and not a ward should be steeper and start earlier in almost all cases.

P.S. '93 til ;)

That song is the soundtrack to my life.

As someone who still had a bedtime of 8pm in high school, I agree with you. I ended up leaving home at 16 just so I could live on my own terms.

Usually surveillance is something parents aren't mature enough to handle. It wouldn't be a big problem if the parents were mature enough to step back and say 'is there any actual probability of actual harm here?' Unfortunately, most parents use surveillance to actively do harm. Not intentionally, of course, but parents lack a basic understanding that change and growth in maturity and capability in their children is a GOOD thing. They typically see it as their primary responsibility to prevent their children from changing, to "protect" them against the exact experiences which are completely necessary and required to induce development. Brain development does not occur automatically. It is not a function of growth of new neurons or a function of age. It is purely a function of experience, with novel experiences and intense experiences being the primary drivers. Most parents (certainly not all, luckily) are so focused on blocking things their children aren't "ready for" that they never once stop to ask themselves what they need to do to make their child ready for the thing they're blocking.

I think that is the main sticking point people have with parents surveilling their children when concerns are expressed. Especially when doing things like reviewing all of their childs text messages, web browsing history, etc, the worry is that the parent will likely seek to moderate almost every interaction their child has with another person which is a very scary overstepping of boundaries that has never even been possible before. This rises to a level that concerns everyone in society, really, as they will be interacting with those children as they grow and when they reach a premature adulthood, having been robbed of many formative experiences 'for their own good.'

I think the next generation is going to be so used to surveillance from their parents and schools that they'll hardly bat an eye when corporations or governments impose similar systems.

supervision != surveillance

Not exactly equal, but a lot of overlap. Thesaurus lists them as synonyms. [1]

[1] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/surveillance

That’s a good point and I think an important distinction.

surveillance !== supervision

A quick look and they might seem equal but when you compare the underlying values they’re nothing alike.

We're not talking about 6 year olds here. We're talking about "children" that are at times not even minors, whose parents are trying to control every aspect of their lives well beyond any reasonable limit.

Let's talk about a 12 year old then.

Old enough to use technology well, but young enough to require oversight of some manner.

As a 12 year old me and my peers had no mobile phones and most of us went home from school alone, using public transportation in Budapest, a city of 2 million. This was already this century.

Americans seem to have a very strange notion of what children can do at what ages. Kids at age 8 can reasonably go to and from school if it's close enough. This of course relies on living in a walkable area and I guess that's partially where the problem starts in the US. Parents got used to the idea that kids need to be transported by car or a specific, restricted-use school bus, leaving no freedom or agency for the children. Yes, growing up involves making mistakes, doing mischief, testing boundaries, learning what it is like to lie, feeling what a resulting bad conscience feels like, what a secret feels like etc. Yes, it may mean that the kid may skip a class or go somewhere they are not supposed to, but usually these aren't life shaking mistakes, unless there are deeper problems at home and with the parental environment.

What children can do at what age is a direct function of how they are raised. Americans, unfortunately, have been sold on the notion that what a child is capable of is instead somehow a biological limitation. There are some biological limitations, of course, such as the inability for average children before around age 10 to perform abstract reasoning, etc, but they are very few. And those limitations are misunderstood, as well. While the truth is that a child exposed to something 'before they can understand it' will experience confusion (or misunderstanding... 'kid logic' can be amazing in the lengths to which it stretches to attempt to integrate new knowledge), it is assumed they will instead experience intense, damaging trauma. I think there is also a component involved of 'doing something is better than doing nothing' when, in many cases, doing nothing would definitely be the better solution. I don't believe there are hardly any parents who, for instance, could come across a string of 'dead baby' jokes in a group chat their 11 year old is participating in and conclude 'my child is developing a sense of humor and fitting in with a peer group.' They would instead conclude 'my child is uncaring, incapable of empathy, foul-mouthed, and I need to make them understand how serious this is.' A reaction like that, from your parent, would be devastating. They know you better than anyone. If they tell you that you are an uncaring, unkind, vicious person, you are not going to be able to step back and see that your parent is being ridiculous in most cases. You will simply be hurt, and that parent has certainly not prepared you for how to handle emotions like that. It ends up with an immature person (the parent) inflicting distress on another immature person (the child) and no one benefits.

Also, parents overestimate their explicit influence on kids and thereby their importance and responsibility in explicitly teaching them by setting rules and "preaching". Instead, kids brains are very good at filtering out the bullshit, learning by observing actions rather than talk and learning from peers and other adults.

However, a truly dictatorial parental surveillance scheme, as is now possible through tech, may inhibit the information transfer even more. Combined with practices like constant parental transportation, structured extracurriculars every day, no recess at school or homeschooling a very dystopian picture emerges.

I really hope this wave won't hit Europe.

And the effects are already showing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/02/27/generati...

I grew up in a home where my parents separated when I was in 1st grade.

Mother who gained custody had sever bipolar which led to days where she literally would not get out of bed.

When I was in 6th grade I remember having to pack lunches for my sister who was 4 years younger and make sure we both went to the bus stop and got to school each day.

It was a bit more difficult when I hit the 7th and 8th grades as the school in the area started those grades an hour earlier than K-6 and my sister and I no longer rode the same bus at the same time.

We managed pretty good, and my sister and I are very close to this day because of how we took care of each other growing up.

I also had immense freedom, no curfew/bedtime and freedom to roam unsupervised unless my grades slipped. I enjoyed the freedom so I managed to keep my grades up my entire education.

It helped that cell phones in the hands of every child were still not a thing, just as I turned 18 and moved out on my own is when I remember getting my first cell phone.

> As a 12 year old me and my peers had no mobile phones and most of us went home from school alone

Again that is cherry-picking.

Yes, I walked to school alone when I was 12. Also when I was 7.

But school is a consistent, well-known location with adult supervision at the destination. The amount of maturity required for traveling to school is minimal.

Kids can do a lot more open-ended activities than walking/taking the bus to school.

I used to walk my self to school at 5 - the trend for helicopter parenting has gone to far

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