I got my kid on all Apple devices and set screen time to completely block him out outside of school hours, when unfortunately he is required to have his computer all day. He's never been as respectful, attentive, or creative as he is now, and after an angry adjustment period, I only regret not doing this sooner.
About self-governance, honestly I don't know. I know that what kids are dealing with online is crack compared to the coffee I grew up with. I don't know if anyone can have a healthy relationship with Roblox, Tiktok, and Youtube.
I also know that now he finishes his school work, is learning guitar entirely on his own, and talks to us about school and his friends. Before he would stare at the computer until dinner and go back to it after unless we forced him to do something else.
It took a lot to convince my wife to enable the time limit on our Amazon Fire tablets. They get 1 hour of videos and apps, but unlimited book time.
Anyone judging and trying to lecture on how doing actions like this is actually counter productive - well, chances are you don't have kids or you yell a lot.
The counter-balance for that is plenty of love, support, and one-on-one time. Building trust, essentially. With that, the kids will understand the reasons for the rules.
> I really question that decision to completely block him out.
I have two children. One child has always successfully-self moderated her screen time and we have never had to step in and correct anything. Zero worries about her.
The other child is the exact opposite. He is not that young anymore but still has no self-moderation. He has his own computer on which he can do an unlimited number of things but if given the choice, he will spend literally ALL of his time on it not even playing video games, but watching YouTube videos of other people playing video games.
Even if we tell him, "here's your computer, you can do ANYTHING except watch YouTube gaming videos," he still ends up watching YouTube gaming videos when he thinks we aren't looking. When he gets caught, we take the computer, tablet, or phone away, and remind him what the rules were. He gets angry and throws an enormous temper tantrum. Rinse and repeat, for years on end. He doesn't seem to be learning any lesson here so the only option we are left with is banning him from Internet-connected devices most of the time.
It's a real bummer to me because free access to computers (as a kid) and the Internet (as a teen) are the only things that turned me into a half-capable human being. I'm worried he won't have that chance due to his inability to self-moderate his screen time, combined with the fact that the Internet is now more of a shopping mall than a library.
Get them on Linux or a BSD and explain their purpose and value.
Working backwards, at some point they are going to be on their own, and if up until that point they are entirely leaning on the fences set up by the parents, and/or don't understand the 'why' behind those fences, they will fail badly.
I've seen situations where the opposite happens. People who aren't exposed to something when they're kids, and then have almost no interest in it when they're on their own as adults. Whereas people who are exposed to it develop an interest and addiction that lasts through adulthood.
> He's never been as respectful, attentive, or creative.
I hope the latter statement is true and is not just satisfaction from completely controlling your childrens life. Because blocking all electronic after school is certainly the harshest thing I've ever heard of.
In fact, I exert less control than I used to because now I trust him to be taking care of himself. He gets his work done, he learns new things on his own, and he takes more responsibility for his own health and well being.
My grades didn't get measurably worse when I got the computer back, and my parents stopped taking it away from me when they saw that I was teaching myself how to code for fun, because I think they realized that is a marketable skill, and I think I taught myself to code (and my grades started improving) because I simply grew up a bit.
Granted, there weren't really "smartphones" throughout most of my high school years, and I didn't even have a laptop at that point either, so it's possible my information is out of date.
Hell, I can barely control my own urges to look up some interesting fact whenever a thought pops into my head---and for years I was the guy everyone mocked for never looking at his phone.
they cannot google stuff or check wikipedia when they are at home? no internet access at all?
I think online educators have a lot to offer young students, but they help accelerate the process - they don't replace it.
You say that as if the official elementary- and middle-school curriculum are the only things worth looking up. There is much one can profitably learn from the resources which are freely available online beyond the least-common-denominator taught by schools.
The right time to start "independent research" is approximately from birth. We should be overjoyed that any child is curious and eager to learn. Standing in their way by limiting access to educational resources based on arbitrary ideas of "age-appropriate materials" is absolutely a crime.
I mean, that's what Big Tech pays many here for, isn't it?
I mean maybe so, but if I knew what they were, I'd already be doing them. This advice doesn't seem like it could help anyone.
1) With anything, it's good to take a step back and ask yourself if you're addressing a symptom or a problem. Again, don't have a lot of details, but this sure looks like the dad was addressing a symptom. This doesn't solve anything (and the problem will manifest again 10 different ways later), it almost certainly does more harm to the relationship, and it leads to everyone feeling terrible.
2) It's easy to /think/ you'd tackle the problem if you knew what it was, but that's often not true at all. This probably applies to all relationships, but as a parent at least it's often much easier to fixate on a symptom. If I suspect my kid is lying to me often, it's realllly easy to go down the rabbit hole of trying to come up with ways to catch them and then to punish them, and it's far harder to focus on healing/strengthening the relationship, getting to the bottom of why the kid feels the need to lie, confronting the flaws in my parenting style etc. :)
In many families, the adults are both working full- or overtime jobs, the children are at school or in school-adjacent activities (commuting, extracurriculars, homework, etc.) for 9+ hours per day, and 90% of parent-child interactions are rule-reinforcement (Did you do your homework? Did you put your shoes away? Haven't you already used your screens for an hour?)
Actual concrete advice, which is "have one parent leave the workforce so they have more time to parent, reject destructive social norms at the family level, and move away from bad social environments" is not only financially impossible for most, but for those that it is possible for may find that they still can't reach their children, because their children have already adopted a "reject-parent" identity and will continue to prefer online-and-friends over offline-and-family.
The most useful advice that I think that any parent can take is to learn about what the world is really like to a kid or teenager, not what it appears to be [1]. It is very difficult to do this, because you have to enter a mindset where a child is not a subsidiary of their parents, but rather a totally foreign and separate entity, capable of the same depths of rage, cruelty, laziness, vindictiveness, passion, joy, etc. [2] No Gen-X parent I know models their kids like this; they reserve the true spectrum of emotion for themselves and their age cohort, and treat their children as less-able to think and feel.
[1] = (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html#:~:text=The%20world....)
[2] = As a example, I often hear parents discuss with amazement the shenanigans that their kids (even up to and around pre-teen) will pull when video games are restricted: full-body tantrums, claims of hatred, physical violence, etc. From the parents' perspective, their child is being completely unreasonable and upset over inconsequential things, but the parent is assigning their own assessment of consequence to the video games, and not accepting their child's version. To the child, these games often represent the only hours in their life when they feel excited, proud, and free; to deprive them of this gives them the short-term chemical emotions that an adult might feel if their house burned down.
The simple reality is that we will need to make some adjustments to make it happen though, because we both see it as a desirable outcome.
I have yet to deal with real child issues ( and I know I was a terror to my parents ), but having time is a pre-requisite to not slap a simple 'solution' on the problem.
True, but I'm sure a heroin addict would say the same thing about being deprived of heroin. At a certain point it's a parent's duty to limit destructive addictions. And these social media networks and games are made to be extremely addictive, companies spend billions of dollars on this goal.
Part of the problem is, like you've said, most kids are going to be spending a lot of their time not with their parents, but with other kids. You can tell them what you want at home, but then you're sending them off to a school full of addicts, almost all of whom are exerting an immense social pressure on your kid to partake.
Yes, I agree. I actually typed out a bit about my own experience with playing Gameboy at 10 and comparing it to drinking and partying at 21, but I didn't end up appending it to my comment.
It's one of those things that parents don't get--modern stuff (video games, social media) is like heroin for kids. You can't just give them "an hour of heroin time" per week and then expect them to think about anything else for the periods of time you suspend them from it.
When I was younger, I could think about playing Donkey Kong Country for literal days at a time. I'd imagine levels in my head, draw pictures, stare at old video game ads, hum the music to myself, and once I made a cardboard Gameboy and pretended to play it to scratch the itch. My life was measured as blocks of time in between playing DKC. My parents didn't get how single-minded I was and thought that by "restricting it" they could redirect my attention to other, more wholesome things. Impossible. I am so thankful I didn't have unlimited internet access or Fortnite when I was younger.
It is a sobering thought to hypothesize that, due to incentives beyond our control, the most earnest and hard-working creative minds inadvertently feed the addictions of millions of people. Whenever I look at the view counts of a successful creator, I have to wonder what percentage of the people behind those views specifically asked to be shown the content.
Having been subjected to strict time limits on electronics when I was growing up, they didn't do much except to make me a more bitter person. As an adult I now spend the majority of my time on a computer. I don't consider myself addicted to personal computers specifically, but that is what's most sinister about addictions such as these - it's a socially acceptable drug that still changes some peoples' lives for the better, and is in some cases necessary to participate in modern society. That acts as a mental wedge to excuse the addictive parts that aren't yet held to the same standard to other addictions on a whole - "watching videos" or "playing video games".
I have to wonder if it's something intrinsic to human nature that leads people down pathways such as these. Many kinds of media feed on our curiosity, which we're taught is an important virtue growing up. And I think curiosity tends to motivate us to find better and more effective ways at succeeding, such as developing and shipping a game that receives critical acclaim and breaks sales records. But soon we might have to start judging ourselves on metrics besides how successful we are, if success is based on how well our thoughts can capture the hearts and minds and attention spans of the world population.
Under this train of thought, the following activities could be considered "addictions" for me
1. Getting up in the morning
2. Making breakfast
3. Going to work
4. Spending time with friends
5. Walking around the neighborhood
6. Going to the park
7. Riding my bicycle
8. Working on my house
9. Lifting weights
I could list many more things, but I think I have made my point. You tell me I can't do any of those things and I'm going to be very upset. The only difference is that as an adult I realize there are other things I can seek out as alternative activities. I also fundamentally _more_ activities than most children. Take away all of what I just listed and I am going to be exceptionally irate. Is there any individual in society which we expect to tolerate a removal of almost all of the activities in their life which they selected? Even prisoners get access to a library to prepare their own legal defense or educate themselves as they see fit.
Children have nearly zero autonomy in the US nowadays, the opportunity to participate in an interactive world (even a single player city building game for example) is one of the limited times they have a high level of autonomy. Suggesting that those activities are equivalent to hard drug addiction is facetious.
Edit: This is being downvoted; if someone wanted to disagree, they could respond and say "yes, I have both done hard drugs and played superstimulating video games as a nine-year-old, and there's no comparison".
I have done both, and I think the comparison is valid.
I did sneaky shit to get around my parents' rules when I was a kid, most people here probably did. To some degree kids need to learn how to push boundaries, for everything else device related there's MDM[1].
There are MDM solutions that are specifically for parenting.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-is-nixing-iphone-pare...
Was it meant to promote ScreenTime? Perhaps. But ScreenTime is another iOS feature that was highly touted at first and then became a neglected unusable mess in the years since.
Honestly, I don't blame the guy for setting up a signal jammer because the whole cat-and-mouse game you play with teens is fucking exhausting.
A "friend's" parents chose to go without a phone. My "friend" realizing how simple the old phone systems were rewired the second line of "his" parents' house to the line of a neighbor from a near by junction between houses. "He" would have to quietly pick up the phone to see if the line was free, and quietly hang up if not to try later. It worked well for a period of time until "he" forgot to unplug the phone before leaving. "His" parents were quite surprised when the phone in "his" room started ringing.
Eventually the phone company caught on and probably _could_ have charged my friend with theft of services or something, but instead just disconnected the rogue line and put a lock on the payphone interface box and placed a large "property of the telco" sticker on it. Probably dodged a significant bullet there, in retrospect.
A simplified comparison: if it's possible for a parent to take away a kid's phone, what prevents a domestic abuser from taking away their victim's phone?
If "just go to the police" were an option for all domestic abuse victims, I'd expect that there'd already be plenty of other blinking neon signs they could point to.
> A simplified comparison: if it's possible for a parent to take away a kid's phone, what prevents a domestic abuser from taking away their victim's phone?
The difference is that the phone doesn't sprout legs and run away from the victim, or otherwise assist the abuser in taking it away.
Not really. Proving domestic abuse is not easy. It's mostly "he said, she said" until somebody ends up in the ER. That's why restraining orders are so common, because the evidence available won't lead to a conviction, but the legal system still wants to provide some kind of protection to victims, even though the protection afforded by a restraining order isn't that reliable. A big limitation for victims in going to the police is that if there isn't evidence to convict, the system does not effectively protect them from retaliation.
Now, on the other hand, if you can produce a device with some software illegally installed on it, you've got physical evidence that can be presented in front of a jury leading to a felony conviction. It's easily more reliable than most evidence used to prove abuse, which tends to be testimonial.
A remarkably high proportion of abusers walk away even when the police have been involved, cf Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito. So no, there are not plenty of blinking neon signs. There are almost never blinking neon signs.
>The difference is that the phone doesn't sprout legs and run away from the victim, or otherwise assist the abuser in taking it away.
This is trivial and irrelevant.
Teach self-control.
Talk to your kids and have discussions instead of resorting to passive aggressive style parenting.
That second part is unavailable here.
I have actually set up two different ssid’s and the kids only connect to one, but I haven’t enabled time limits on theirs (yet). I need to, because the 13 year old doesn’t understand not to use devices which don’t have easy parental controls (switch) at night.
Previously I also edited /etc/hosts to localhost youtube, which was most effective (but not available on iOS/switch.
The big cause of the problem? Fortnite. I would love to just kill Fortnite but it would also mean disconnection from part of his social network (which he is experiencing currently)
So anyway, as a parent, you are up against a social network and an addicting game company - the odds are stacked against you.
Doing something that is clearly illegal to stop your kids from accessing the Internet certainly is. Bonus points if it is also heavily enforced and easily traceable. All of that is true for using a signal jammer.
A Pihole gives a nice GUI to what you are doing, and has some nice config options.
my teenage kids have figured how to get around that
Wonder if you can channel their abilities somewhere.
In a perfect world I'd agree that parents shouldn't do stuff like this, but the world is far from perfect.
"This modern world is too complex", "I have no time for it", "I can't afford such a luxury", "kids are just going to be contrarian". So they come out with easy punishments as a "solution".
It isn't an easy task, but it's not an insurmountable one to have a chat with a teenager to figure out what kind of life they want to lead in the future and work out with them *as a peer* what they objectively need to do to get there and how they can manage that. Then revise and review the plan every year or so. Let them figure out what time they can allocate to their hobbies and only make suggestions if you disagree.
If your child is a kid, where they can't possibly be mature enough to start discussing his adult life, then just let them play the freaking game. If you're giving them love, they're socializing enough not to feel isolated, are getting basic education, not suffering from malnutrition, and are not being traumatized by helicopter parenting, cults and other similar shit, you're likely doing your job fine. Don't ruin it by trying to architect the ever-living shit out of someone else's life.
I'm not talking about helicopter parenting, I'm talking about combating multi-billion dollar companies with full-time psychologists on staff that are making concentrated efforts to get children addicted to their platforms, sometimes at the cost of their mental health.
"Let them play the freaking game" isn't a counter-point to the concept of children losing sleep and failing classes because they're up at 3am doom-scrolling instagram and falling into depression about the way they look. A phenomenon that the company is aware of and has done nothing about[1].
Large social media companies are creating social dynamics that they barely understand to generate ad revenue, and to opt-out of these networks can lead to social isolation amongst peers. This isn't a simple matter of having more conversations with your kids or instilling specific values. The cards are so stacked against parents this is akin to telling your kids that all the feedback the world gives them (peers, popular media) is wrong. Many adults are even ill-equipped to handle this for themselves.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
On one hand (and as a parent) I agree, there are deep-seated issues around boundaries and authority... on the other hand if my folks had followed that advice I would have never been incentivized to learn to hack.
I'm conflicted.
My hope is once we see total fertility rate shrink below one, we will start to see proper support for parents and children with things like paid paternity leave and medicare for all enshrined in our laws.
That being said, I absolutely do not condone frequency jammers and were this to happen in the US, I'd argue a minimum of six months in jail is an appropriate sentence.
Jail time for frequency jamming seems very extreme (if you want to see the failure of jail time to curb behavior, look at how many people are in American prisons and how high their recidivism rate is).
I find this comment interesting because I remember people were very supportive of Freakonomics (iirc) saying locking away people works.
>> Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) wrote a paper in 2004 that concluded that 58 percent of the drop in violent crime during the 1990s was due to incarceration. (pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf)
I am OK with no prison for the criminal in the OP. However, I would like a drop in jail time or prison sentences for more people at least for non-violent offenses. I agree that too many people are in prison in our country.
> The birth rate does indeed drop as countries develop more, and as more people get educated about birth control, but controlling it beyond that is likely not a good thing.
Sorry for my poor communication skills. I meant to say voluntarily, not through use of force or coercion. People are just way too optimistic about the future or maybe I am just too pessimistic...
As a society, I think US is not doing enough to support parenting - paternity leave, work hours, health system, and myriad other ways to provide support and help and assistance and relief to parents. I'm in Canada, I'm lucky and blessed and privileged, my wife is getting 18 months parental leave, and parenting is STILL hard. I cannot imagine trying to do it in USA :O
(If your post on the other hand is that you cannot win with the kids, you might need to elaborate to make your point clearer:)
Compassion much? What's the point of throwing them in jail? I can't see anything but a net negative for society. I'm having trouble understanding that desire for punishment.
How about educating people, how about going after those that sell these devices in the first place instead? Sure, give them a fine but jesus, don't throw them in jail.
A fine, community service or something like that seems more appropriate.
> A fine, community service or something like that seems more appropriate.
First of all, a fine doesn't hurt everyone equally. A thousand dollars is huge for me. It is nothing for someone who makes lets say thirty eight million dollars a year. How do you say we do fines? Based on net worth? Previous year's tax return?
(Allegedly, Steve Jobs paid a fine to drive without a license plate.)
See, there is awareness that jail and prison are horrible places. Yet, our "solution" seems to be people like us should not go to jail or prison for things people like us might do. That is not a solution. This "tough on crime" nonsense needs to stop.
1. Jails and prisons should not be able to charge for necessities like food or hygiene products. If we can commit to keep someone locked up, we can afford to keep them clean, fed, and read on taxpayer money.
2. Nobody in jail or prison should ever have to work without their consent. No more free prison labor.
3. No for-profit private services. Phone calls from jail or prison (excluding common sense things like premium numbers) ought to be free of cost, not collect. Public libraries coming up with services like free video visitations is nice but it is not enough. It is also not available everywhere in the country.
4. I cannot believe I have to say this but zero tolerance to sexual abuse or physical in prison. If that means there can only be one person in one cell, then so be it. If it means maximum occupancy of facilities are lower, so be it. If we can commit to keep someone locked up, we can afford to keep them safe from abuse from others there. If not, we have no business locking people up. It is insane that otherwise "good people" joke about "don't drop the soap" in prison.
You don't have to say it. Perhaps somewhere you should be talking like a schoolteacher to prison guards, but this is not that place.
How times change.
I'd bet most parents intuitively know this, the problem is nothing they have tried has worked. How have you solved this problem?
That doesn't mean you get rid of the rules - you still need to be the parent - but you need to put at least equal focus on coming to a shared understanding of why it's a problem, or building a relationship where they can have some faith that you might be able to see a danger where they don't, or seeing the wisdom in at least temporarily agreeing to some rules that they don't totally "get" yet.
While that is great, I think the problem parents have is with the steps/process to get there. What works for one child won't work for the other, etc. Like I said, the problem isn't that parents don't know these things, the problem is stuff they're trying isn't working.
When parents approach it with a mindset of realistic expectations (especially around timeframes), I think most of them can in fact figure out things that work (where 'work' means 'lead to improvement over time'). There are always some kids who simply don't respond, but speaking generally, I believe most do.
If communication is in a decent state, then another thing to look at is the rules for the kids, like: have we really given our kid a chance to weigh in on things or do we just dictate? As a parent you do sometimes just have to put your foot down, but there's a world of difference between shutting down pushback with "I'm the parent and that's the way it is" and a collaborative attitude and an open conversation with real listening and sharing of viewpoints/concerns and, where appropriate, some compromising. Are our rules based on solid principles or just things we pulled out of the air?
The article mentioned that the kids were addicted to social media. If it's an actual addiction, then that probably needs to be addressed with professional help. If it's more a compulsion/habit, then good communication is again key. Does the kid agree it's excessive but isn't sure how to reign it in? Or does the kid genuinely think it's just fine? Gotta figure that out first, but in either case, jamming the signal to their phones doesn't really address the problem.
If you don't take the phone away, the child won't interact at all, beyond the superficial, ``school was fine.'' If you do take the phone away, do you really believe interactions won't be tense or contentious?
These sorts of issues aren't things you address in a moment. Yeah, if you suddenly take a phone away, you kid will likely blow up. But the problem wasn't created in a moment, either. Things got to a bad place over time so it's unsurprising that improving them takes time. Further, in the heat of the moment everyone (including the parents) are less even-keeled, so most progress happens when tempers are cool.
One thing we did for awhile was, as a family, we came up with the rule that from 5-7pm (IIRC) each night there were no devices/screens and we had to be around each other during that time. (We settled on that after a family discussion and some back and forth negotiating, but eventually everyone committed to it.) We did it for /months/ before I felt like it really paid off, but eventually every one of the kids recognized that we were stronger as a family and that they actually enjoyed the screen breaks. And one side effect of it was that we all started talking to each other a lot more, but again, it was a slow process. What works varies by family and changes over time as the family changes, but the meaningful changes seem to always take a lot of time.
We do our best to limit screen time, but you can tell it's all they think about sometimes. When we say "You can play nintendo switch when your friends come over", their brains kick-in like limitless -- "i need to charge the controllers now, so they don't run out of battery. 2 need the usb cables while 1 needs more AA batteries". In comparison to when I recommend doing something creative, I have to push through "if you want to draw, the paper is on your desk"....
Which creative medium they use I don’t think I care as much about. The reality is that screens aren’t going away. If they want to draw on an iPad, I’d allow it.
Carseats come to mind immediately as I think of counterexamples to this ...
Didn't really cause much friction, worked well enough.
What I'm saying is that I could easily be the guy in this story, because short of a blackout, I've got kids on VPNs who are looking at extreme content (because everyone they know does, apparently), thinking QAnon is real, etc., and whose capacity for disrupting everyone around them without a moment's thought of anyone but themselves knows no bounds. Pandora's box is open, and I have no idea how to close it. On dark evenings when we've had another gut-wrenching round of horror stories, I'd probably buy one if I knew where to get one.
Don't let it bug you. People are how they are, more often than not. And your kiddos will probably relax in a decade or so when their testosterone levels start to drop.
I don't know you or your kids, but I can almost guarantee that this is not true at all, so please don't tell yourself that. You don't take credit for their good traits and accomplishments, right? :)
There are way too many variables involved, the largest being that they are each independent people. You have no idea how they would have turned out had you not been in their life - for all you know, things would have been much worse and your involvement was one of the things that made the difference. And their stories aren't finished yet... people figure things out at different times; they may yet turn out just fine and look back with gratitude to a stepdad who didn't write them off even though they gave him every reason to.