Also during the week devices are only allowed upstairs for homework use only.
It's basically a safe with a timer and no override, so you can say, lock up for 2 hours, put your (de)vice inside, and push the button. The only way to open it early is to break the safe.
As someone who has struggled with impulse control, especially around technology, I have used it to great effect. Spent an uninterrupted two hours playing guitar and reading physical books for the first time in ages.
I use it personally, but I could see it being useful for families as well.
You know though, you are mostly using the safe in your own home or office, for increments of 30 minutes to a couple hours. For many folks I think the risk is very low.
I guess, I find this emergency access sentiment really similar to something my wife's students say when there phones are taken away: "what if my parents need to contact me in an emergency?"
It's a really sincere worry they have that seems totally foreign to me, having grown up in an era when my parents often couldn't contact me for hours at a time. Food for thought.
I think leading by example is a good parenting technique in general, kids figure out when their parents are being hypocritical pretty fast.
No. My phone is my alarm system. It is what wakes me up at 5:20am every morning to start things going. My wife uses hers for white noise.
That said, you can easily buy a simple analog alarm for a few bucks.
Writing as a parent who has had to deal with children staying up late at night, way after they should be sleeping, and looking up things on devices that I would consider inappropriate for both children and adults.
This sounds like something an addict would say. Not calling you out as an individual but instead highlighting the dangers of “I can stop anytime I want”.
Adults have myriad privileges that children do not. It is not unfair.
Surely you meant something else.
Try to see things from the perspective of a child. Or if that's too far away, a teenager. Didn't it always feel unfair to you that the adults could do all these things, were free to decide what they do and especially what they didn't have to do? Althewhile you were literally forced to go to school and could decide almost nothing? Especially later on, when you felt like an adult but just weren't on paper (not even talking too much about myself here, I had more freedom than most).
And that wouldn't have been completely unjustified. The way society forces teenagers, young adults even, into these states where they get no freedom about their lives is not something that's necessary natural, not necessary the right thing to do. I mean, for something easier, look at the utter harmless jokes of PC games that were censored back then for non-adults (and effectively even for adults, depending where you lived). That really was unfair and ridiculous. Heck, one of the most influential games I played back then was Deus Ex, would be seen as completely harmless today, it was rated 18+. Crazy.
Being completely unjust with things like phone usage can't help with all of that. Do as I say, not as I do can't be a great guideline for how to handle these things.
Children and teenagers should not be able to do some things that adults are allowed to do.
These are not mutually exclusive.
An 18+ rating on Deus Ex is dumb for a mature 16 year old. Cannabis should be legal for adults.
I'm also glad that 12 year olds can't drive cars. Even if I wished I could drive at 12.
In other words, the rules can be set up unfairly AND still have room for just differentiation between children and adults.
But exactly:
> In other words, the rules can be set up unfairly AND still have room for just differentiation between children and adults.
That's the point I wanted to make. The other that some of the rules just are unreasonable. And that the whole years of pseudo no responsibility (because that's never really true) and no freedom isn't as straightforwardly a fair deal as some comments here want it to be.
Kids don't understand life because they're kids, but they do intellectually develop to observe hypocrisy and contradictions. And if you spot one contradiction then the whole house of cards starts falling down. So our parents went out of their way to hide their vices from us. We were kids, we didn't understand at the time, but it was the thrill of finding something 'forbidden' that drove us to do it more than anything. The twisted little perverse curiosity of childhood. :)
You’ll get to lead by example and perhaps even improve your sleep.
2.) I need phone anyway. And even old flip phones had alarm. Phone with alarm does not need to be fancy at all.
I prefer to set example of not buying all the available crap. That one is more important all I all.
I guess they decided to err on the side of not selling things rather than risk giving away a good deal
Like, I wonder if someone is running ML models on all of our sleeping habits based on phone alarms. Would be interesting to get some of the telemetry/tracking output from the clocks app.
Edit: for the downvoters, you're the problem with the education system and parenting, your kids aren't little adults, they need some guidance and boundaries to learn a bit of self-control.
Mentioning that a parent gets to do X while they do not is just a way for a child to score a point against foolish parents in an argument.
You are right to a degree. Clearly a parent can lose credibility by being too hypocritical. But you shouldn't feel any general obligation to treat children as adults or yourself as a child.
And the reason the cables broke is that the distance from their bed to the nearest outlet was 2m, and they would lay in bed on their screens, with the cable stretched to its limits.
Eventually you'd reach crisis mode when we simply couldn't find a cable anywhere and someone was trying to call a plumber or talk to grandma with a dying phone. Anker charging stations came to a partial rescue, The Rules were that the cables in that charger should stay there. But kids (and sometimes my partner) rationalize 'needing' things and eventually I had to zip tie a daisy chain across all of the cables to make it easier to ask for a new cable than to try to take one.
It wasn't perfect, but about half of the devices ended up living at that charging station, because spare chargers [were] still in short supply.
One is 6m, but that one is truly excessive.
Now their options are to use the phone or let it charge (or squat inches from the outlet). Haven’t had to buy any more cables.
I don't want to intentionally cause discomfort to them or me either.
Having a game eat the battery in two hours might be enough gaming for one sitting. I have a couple games that used to eat my laptop battery in a few hours even when plugged in (60W charging off the monitor) but the new monitor has a bigger power supply, and that can almost keep up with the game. I’ve had a few late nights that I didn’t plan because of it.
I could also see a black market of kids selling each other their old phones so that the kid can have a 'prison phone' they use at night.
I could say that I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life doing root cause analysis, how you can steer people away from self-sabotage, how you can empower people to help themselves instead of being reliant on you for everything, but that's only the book jacket version of the real story.
The real story is sadder and I'm still actively dealing with the consequences of feeling like I needed to become an autodidact at the age of 8 to ever have any success at anything. Which necessitated spending a lot of time thinking about thinking. Self-teaching morphed into self-mentoring, self-doctoring, and self-parenting. Me, me, me (what could go wrong?) I watched my parents (from my perspective) abandon Discipline almost entirely with my kid brother, who has struggled his entire adult life, and even at 14 I could see this road ahead of him. I wish I had been like some stories where the eldest child takes care of the younger ones, but unfortunately he spent most of his childhood finding ways to push my buttons and we were never close (something my mother has pointed out as a mistake that is playing out now between his own kids, to which I responded, "Tell him this is why I never call.")
That story about my friend's kid reminds me a lot of my little brother and as you can imagine by the length of that reply, was a little triggering.
Sneaky little devils. I can totally see it, especially pre-teens and older.
I worked on a contract one time where they were trying to alerts for college sports, and I insisted on adding some security to the system. The manager reasoned that the cost/benefit analysis for someone deciding to hack a sport score feed did not add up and so nobody would think to try that.
I pointed out that college students have poor risk assessment. I pointed out MIT/Stanford. I pointed out it was already written. They made me rip it all out. And then the customer cancelled the project because 'we' had given them exactly the system they already had and why should he pay for it again. I just stared at the manager, who avoided eye contact. (If I'd been a bigger and braver person I would have jumped in here with a counterproposal that amounted to restoring all of my changes, but I did not think of it)
Which is just as well because there totally would be fake messages sent out during the last timeout stating that <our team> won by 6 points just for the lulz. Because of course they would.
How are you enforcing that one?
How do you prevent them from going downstairs after you've fallen asleep?
When my oldest child was 2, he snuck an allen wrench in his diaper and disassembled his whole crib. He is atypical with aspergers syndrome.
You "just don't know" how difficult it is for some children to learn self control through reinforcement.
I have to tell a colleague/friend about this, his kid is quite similar to yours in that respect.
Tried this, didn't work. The problem is that we go to sleep earlier than the kids, so the kids will go get their devices after they figure we are probably asleep.
Isn’t that considered a fire hazard? I mean to charge gadgets overnight when there are no one close by in case something catches fire.