What constant surveillance is doing to children and parents (theatlantic.com)

So we'd sit them down and discuss what Meta et al were doing to them. And why we thought that was a bad idea. They still hated us for haha but a little less I guess. Rephrase: they still thought it was unfair because their friends got to be on tiktok 24/7 and they couldn't even get a phone.

We told them 'life is not fair', and other parents were ignorant of the dangers but that didn't make the dangers any less.

I don't know - maybe we just got lucky with our kids.

When is the last time you wrote a “thanks for not letting get eaten by a shark” card?

Parents don’t get thanked for things that didn’t happen. If you are waiting around for that, you’re in the wrong care taking business!

I never GPS tracked them even when they were younger. They got inexpensive Android smartphones in 8th grade, with a talk about what to watch out for. I didn't read their email or text messages, I didn't lurk on their school website checking grades every day. If a teacher or administrator emailed me, I'd deal with that, but otherwise I tried to let them learn to run their lives. They made some mistakes. That's how you grow.

The hardest period was when they were 10-13 I think. Because around that time all other kids got their own phones without any screentime limitations, or app store limitations. We'd hear about their friends being on tiktok and snap until 03:00am on schoolnights. Our kids were really jealous about that. But to us, it was like other parents had forgotten that they could actually... you know... parent.

But: they have phones. Since they were about 12. But with screentime, with us controlling the apps, without tiktok, behind a pi-hole and pivpn. With the initial agreement that we - the grown ups - were _always_ allowed to open their phone and look at any content.

For the past year or so the eldest doesn't have any screentime limitations anymore, but she still does not use insta or tiktok.

What we did was constantly explain our decisions. And showed them how boundaries were there for protection, not holding back. And if they showed us that they could handle lifting of a boundary we would lift a boundary.

Other parents in our neighbourhood just gave phones to their kids at age 11 and never set boundaries. Those kids now take pictures of girls in their classroom, and turn them into nudes. And send them around large groups on snapchat. Police was involved. But I look at the parents. Kids _need_ boundaries.

We decided early on to treat them as inexperienced tiny teammembers. So many little tricks and nuances. Learned a lot from the book "How 2 Talk 2 Kids".

Like: don't refer to yourself as "Mommy" or "Daddy". Instead use "I": "I'm going to cook dinner now", not "Daddy's going to cook dinner now".

Or: don't tell them what to do, but point out the problem: "Oh, look, those shoes are now blocking my way to the kitchen. Could you help me out?"

(Use that last one at work too. ;-))

But yeah - tiny teammembers because we are a team. We are not against them. Therefor they don't need to fight us. Instead we fight alongside them. And they seem to realize that.

But I'll post back in this thread in 15 years and we'll see how it all turned out by then. ;-)

  > like in the rafters in the garage, or in various forts and hideouts 

Privacy is in my opinion one of the most important human rights that exist and the most frequently diminished or ignored, especially around parent/kid relations. Hence why it is a part of the UDHR (universal declaration of human rights).

With regards to kid/parent relation we are often too lenient as a society. One good measurement that you can keep in the back of your head to judge a kids invasion of privacy is the following question "If this kid was suffering from abusive parents, would this allow the parent to intervene the kid reaching out?".

When I was about 8 years old I was allowed to go with the bus by myself between my mom and my dad.

I can remember two times I fell asleep on the bus, and ended up some other place, and had to figure out how to get home from there, by myself.

I'm sure of the technology was available at the time, my mom would have placed an airtag on me, and without a doubt, would have seen me miss my bus-stop and jumped into her car to pick me up wherever I ended up. Bless her heart, but I'd miss the opportunity of figuring it out by myself.

Of course, just one silly example, but I could see if this was constantly happening, a child might get accustomed to this "saving" being automatic, and not even trying to solve things yourself because you know your parent will come save the day. Until they don't, of course.

Do you want to install an app on your phone that will track you and your online activities for the government? They won't interfere, they just want to know what you're up to and help. Children are people and want some privacy too. I know I did.

It instills a Panopticum-like philosophy in said kids since their very early ages, meaning they become aware that they're being watched at every moment of their lives. In my opinion that does affect said kids' future look on life (once they will have become adults, that is).

Technically true. However I think there is a very small percentage of parents that can keep themselves from interrupting in such a situation. Actually I think it leads to a slippery slope situation (the article calls it a downward spiral) where the interruptions will be easier to make the more you do it as a parent. The only question remaining is how high up the slope do you start and how fast do you slip?

There’s a ton of rare, negative scenarios where risk reduction is so cheap and easy that you’re silly not to do it. Car accident deaths are about 1 in 100 million miles driven, you certainly can’t control other drivers, but not putting on a seatbelt is stupid.

You're not helping them if when they go off to college they don't know how to be a cautious pedestrian.

  > my mom required only that I let her know where I was gonna be, call her if those plans changed and let her know the new ones, and apart from that I was basically out the door by 7am and home for dinner, absent like sleepover plans or something.

  > but these were the foundations that IMO made me a responsible human

Let's be honest that was the average of that day, and today the average is tracking location at any time. If your mom was taking the average measures in that environment she would probably exercise the average measures in the current day environment.

I'm not saying that it was bad. I am saying we should probably be careful with the balance between autonomy and tracking since the same reasoning is used with your mom having you call in vs the current day tracking.

And seatbelts are one of the cases where it is good short-term and long-term, but you’re right, the same mechanic applies. No one wears a seatbelt because “over a lifetime. I have a lower chance of dying in a car crash“. We wear it because “I’m less likely to die today.“

Traffic collisions and drowning are the major causes of death in children in developed countries; not childhood illness, as it was formerly, thanks largely to vaccination. Better road safety - that starts with _you_, car owners! - swimming lessons, and greater adult supervision when children are near water, are the most important things here, not surveillance.

When people do horrific things to children, it is almost never a stranger, but someone close to home, and again surveilling the child will not prevent that.

Any price? What about a portion of your child's development and autonomy?

They do, and they should. But due to the fact that this really is a legitimate concern in society, and always will be, it is also an infinitely renewable source of discontent that sways public opinion towards pursuing policies and parenting methods that don't actually help or protect children. Nothing short of a total panopticon can prevent 100% of harm to children, if even that. Yet saying "we will have less visibility into the safety of children if we choose to do this instead" is seen in the current climate as one of the most distasteful things you can say. So people are afraid to speak up and find alternatives.

Anything short of absolute perfection in child safety is seen as an unacceptable failure that merits new barriers to autonomy to prevent the next failure. To preserve the freedom of childhood, there has to be a middle ground.

Crime rates are far lower, road accident fatalities and injuries are far lower, but people are a lot more afraid of both of them.

> Seems like "people only wear seatbelts so that they won't get tickets" type of reasoning, which is true for some, but many (myself included) like the additional safety and wear it regardless of law enforcement

I wore them and made by kids wear them even in a country where they were not required by law. Admittedly I had become accustomed to wearing them in a country where they were required.

To what point though? Overprotective upbringings could delay development or produce adults lacking development in critical areas.

And when they mow children down, as statistically some of them always will, it's then always described as "an accident", as though performed by some capricious god beyond all human control.

It seems to me that there are many people who never really grew up, never had a struggle that only they could solve or a situation where they were responsible for somthing that could cause great damage (and they cared). Many people just seem to defer to someone else - just call the guy to fix things, repeat their political stances from the "news" (talk show) they perfer, etc. As the percentage of voters who share this mindset increases, this is not a future I look forward to.

It's very different.

I know some families who have enabled location sharing family-wide. It gives them a sense of security. I feel it invades my privacy, and so I do not mandate this for myself or anyone in my family, and would actively refuse to engage.

The ensuing argument is almost always "are you hiding something", but it's not that I have anything to hide (my location history would be quite boring, really), but just that I have an aversion to it entirely out of principle.

YMMV.

This is actually somewhat old news. Snapchat pioneered this with the Snap Map, where essentially the whole purpose was to broadcast where you are to your friends.

That was so long ago now that even Snapchat is long last its peak relevance.

However, now that video editing is cheap and easy, perhaps the individual loses this advantage since one video recording might just be one version of the truth and you need more recorded angles/versions that prove consistency.