I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
So yeah, they're basically saying "one can get around the rules" and nothing more than that. Therefore, there is no argument here, just a truism.
>generally speaking
I felt like I couched and prefaced enough that somebody wouldn’t read this and go “this guy thinks you literally can’t ban teens from anything ever,” which is a ridiculous stance that no reasonable person would hold. I’ll be more explicit in the future.
Wholesale banning teens from screens is generally highly ineffective, like many but not all things people try to prohibit at that age. It leads to their seeking it elsewhere, perhaps in less safe environments and certainly with less guidance. It also means they won’t communicate about it with their parents, which has a lot of bad secondary effects.
Personally, if my kid experiences or witnesses something disturbing (or illegal/potentially dangerous) when they are young, I want to make sure the lines of communication stay open between us so I can help - or at least help them process it - when they need me.
TL;DR: banning smartphones when they can easily access them elsewhere is almost certainly going to end in a net negative. I am not saying we can’t ban anything. That is a ridiculous interpretation of my comment. I hope this clears that up for you.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
The intention of the iPad was to watch some educational videos, check out books, magazines from the library.
They still have occasional access but only with direct active supervision (i.e we are next to them vs we are making dinner).
As they get older, we will revisit.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
Or base it on sites that have advertising. Products/services that are targeted to minors shouldn't be permitted to have advertisements anyway.
I don't find "We've done a bad job with X so we should abandon X rather than attempting to do X better" to be a compelling argument on its own.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
It applies solely to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
Imagining that these laws will be precisely written to avoid any services you like is a dangerous fallacy. That's how people rationalize bad laws.
Remember when all of the surveillance laws were only going to target the terrorists? Look how far that drifted.
Of course, this says nothing about the many kids who will be hurt by being denied access to social media, such as the many gay or trans kids living in conservative families that found some solace in online communities that would accept the real selves they otherwise have to hide.
Ideal scenario? Meta decides it's not worth operating in my country, geoblocks us, and pulls their apps from the app stores.
I'm sympathetic to the people who get real value from meta platforms, but on balance, I see meta as a massively negative force, and their business model and leadership make it effectively un-fixable.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
Excellent education
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
In this case, seems pretty topical to just take the phone away entirely for a few days.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.