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Comment by temp84858696945 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of that is actually parents texting kids, and how much of that is that kids are using that as an excuse to why they checked their phone mid class.

That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.

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No, no, it's the parent.

Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...

Yeah, there was a recent NYT article about the ongoing phone ban/pouch discussion and one parent reported having a shared Google Doc for emergency communication with their kid to work around the lack of a cell phone. The nature of such emergencies was not discussed, but I cynically suspect it was along the lines of "do you want mac n cheese or nuggets for dinner?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-...

Consider how many people are clingy and/or just have questionable judgement about boundaries with their friends, family, and acquaintances in general, usually with a healthy dose of neuroticism thrown in for good measure.

Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid.

These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.

It's some of both. Parents do text their kids during the day, but kids also pull out all the excuses when caught.

Even when I was in high school "I was responding to my mom" was the go-to excuse when caught using a cell phone. I had one teacher who would actually read what was on the screen (this was before locking your phone was common and probably lawsuit material today, but things were different) and call kids out when they were lying. The threat of having a teacher read your text messages was enough to put an end to cell phone usage in class.

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