> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child
This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I'm in the minority of parents.
Holy shit what happened to "have fun, just be back by dinner time"? I'm not that far from my teenage years so the fact that this is already happening to today's teens is a bit terrifying to me. We had cellphones back then and I had an early smartphone (Nokia N95 - anyone remember those?) when at least half my school didn't even have a brickphone, so the capability was there. Bot neither my parents nor the parents of any of my peers ever used it, even later when all of us had proper smartphones with parental control options only a few clicks away.
So what happened? Crime rates are down, kinds these days do drugs and drink at lower rates than back then, I can't remember the last time I heard of a kid go missing... We now have many privacy-preserving options for emergency tracking so there's less of a reason for total control than ever. Even monitoring Internet usage - there are fewer "predators" out there and kids are better at recognising and avoiding them than ever. I don't get it.
> Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc.
I'll be very blunt: Do they really want to read text messages from their teenage daughter/son? They might regret that decision really fast.
> One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her
If he doesn’t trust her why is she driving his car?
Neurotic people are neurotic, they just use whatever tools are available to them. I can locate my daughter, my son, my wife, and even my own mother if I want to. I don't stalk them, ask questions about where they are going or where they have been, etc. But if I need a little peace of mind, I know where my loved ones are. We use the location & communication tools with respect, just like anything else.
I want to let me kid (now 5) be more independent. These days, at least in the USA, kids aren't allowed out until they are 10 or even older, and even then they often don't get to take the bus alone (I started doing that when I was in 2nd grade, in the 80s when crime was much worse than it is today, I was biking on my own outside when I was in Kindergarten). But I thought...something like an air tag, cellphone, and maybe a bodycam, might be a great way to balance a need to let the kid explore some things independently and keep safe at the same time. I don't know, I'm still in the planning stage on this.
I think GP is trying to find ways to feel like they're giving their child freedom without actually giving them any at all. But it's hard to think of anything worse for freedom than attaching a camera to to someone. Yes, technically they wouldn't be directly prohibiting the child from anything, but the presence of a camera means the child is forced to assume that everything they do will be judged by the parent even when the parent has no present physical control over the child.
He is only 5, he isn’t going to think like that, it’s not for judging reasons. It’s just to enable some early independence that would otherwise be impossible here (if we were in Japan, totally different story, but the USA doesn’t let 5 year olds go by the selves to the corner store to buy eggs).
Well, if I want to let him explore on his own somewhere outside, it might be an option. It isn’t something that we would sneak on him, he is already into gopro. It might work for some early trial runs? Like, walk around the block by yourself with this on (for a five year old, definitely not for a 10 year old).
a bodycam would be mostly useless since if anything "unsafe" happens like falling down a hole, or being kidnapped, the bodycam is going with them. even if it was streaming live and you were watching every second of it you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
honestly it just sounds nuts that your you are even considering any of this but maybe things are that bad in the US these days i dunno
> These days, at least in the USA, kids aren't allowed out until they are 10 or even older
Or, you could ignore the overprotective parents and just let you kid run around. Maybe wait a few more years to align with your second grade goal, I don't know.
But it amazes me you live in a neighborhood where most parents don't trust their 10 year olds to take the bus.
I’m sure the meth smokers often sitting in the back of the bus make our situation a bit special. Ever since Seattle metro stopped fair enforcement or really any kind of security on the buses, things have gotten a bit out of hand.
You meant a metro bus? I will say it reads as though with ten-year-olds, parents are still escorting their children to the schoolbus stop every morning.
Dealing with drug users is difficult. I'm not sure fare enforcement is the panacea you seem to think it is. But then again, I don't really know a solution.
It’s not just that they are drug uses, they are often having their crisis on the bus, which is where the danger lies. The D Line isn’t as bad as the E Line, at least. We don’t really have that many school buses in Seattle, most kids are taking city buses. But that specifically isn’t a problem until middle school or so.
When they decided to stop enforcing fares is just when the problem got really bad. I’m not sure what would happen if they started back to the old normal, but the current changing point is probably not a coincidence.
I definitely did things as a teenager that were dangerous, unnecessary, detrimental to my physical or mental health, etc. etc. I don't have kids, but I would probably make some effort to dissuade my kids from doing the same things I did. How do you approach that, without heavy surveillance? Did you just get lucky with good kids? Is having conversations about it enough?
I look at it the other way around: I did things as a kid and teenager that were dangerous, unnecessary, detrimental to my physical or mental health... and those things made me... me.
So why should I, or do I have a right to, keep my kids from doing the same?
We aren't only the product of our positive lessons. A lot of life is learned through burning yourself on the hot stove. And by and large, it usually doesn't kill you.
IMHO, no humans are self-actualized enough to possess omniscience and act ethically. We have too many neuroses.
And, at the more obvious end of the spectrum, all of the suburban crowd complaining about how their children fail to launch, lack initiative in life, and aren't independent.
After their entire childhood was spent being monitored and constantly corrected by the parent.
I have a lot of coworkers who are bigger self-starters than I am despite growing up with far more type-A parents than I did. Even to the point of there being stereotypes about the people who can't relax cause their parents drove them so hard for some Asian immigrant groups.
So I think a claim that "controlling parents" -> "adrift young adults" would be hard to support.
Kids need to learn from mistakes, but if not monitored, you can hit the opposite end where the lesson isn't learned because there are no real consequences. For instance, goofing off in high school won't give you consequences until you graduate high school at the earliest, and possibly not until you graduate collect (still goofing off) and suddenly hit a wall in terms of what you can get employment-wise.
I'm not advocating for no consequences. I'm advocating for no pre-consequences.
And yes, sometimes kids get away with things if they aren't monitored 24/7. They're supposed to. Figuring out the boundaries of attempting that, and dealing with the consequences when you fail, is a very important lesson for children.
Yep. Literally every prior generation, including ours, went through this process. If anything the world is safer: everyone has cell phones in an emergency, cars are made to handle accidents better, and there's winder cultural awareness about how to spot abuse.
And frankly, the kids have the upper hand. Monitor texts and they'll switch to "Finsta"—or whatever came after that.
All it's going to do is mess up their ability to understand trust or cause them to avoid taking any sort of basic social risks.
This is how I feel about it too. In some cases, I can look back at times when I did something that my parents would have considered bad and I felt like it helped me rather than hurt.
Before my daughter starts driving, I'm going to take her around where I grew up and show her the places where people I knew died in car accidents / other issues, and explain why they died:
- These two girls were speeding to make it home by curfew, ran off the road, and died in a car fire over the side of this hill - don't speed if you're running late. Let me know, and get home safely.
- This is where a guy was on drugs and ran into a telephone pole. - don't do drugs. If you do drink and no longer feel comfortable in the situation, call me and I will pick you up to get you home. Don't try to drive.
- Here's the parking lot where my friend OD'd on Heroin. Don't try it. Not even once. There is a huge difference between weed and harder drugs, even though weed and harder drugs are sold by the same people. Stay clear of all of them if you can.
- Here's the cliff where my friend fell 60 feet and died trying to showboat his climbing skills. So many things today have been made extremely safe (car driving assistance, etc.) - you need to know which activities have real consequences and treat them accordingly.
- Here's the parking lot where my friend and I almost flipped his truck trying to do slides on snow at 60 mph. Don't do that.
It will be a rough day, but driving is a serious responsibility and learning from others' mistakes is better than making your own.
What I like about this approach is where you say hey don’t do that, but if you do, just call me, don’t worry about getting in “trouble”, I just want you to be safe and I’m here for you.
I don’t have kids but my parents were like this and I valued it immensely. They never wanted us to be in a position where we needed help but thought we couldn’t ask.
My father did something like this. He wasn’t even trying to teach us a lesson or anything. We had gone back to his hometown to see some relatives and we took a drive around. He told us all those stories you mentioned above. It did not make me think about being safer. It just made me think, “Wow, now I know why my father is such a @#$% downer all the time. Note to self: Dad is broken, don’t take anything he says seriously.” So be careful how you present it because your kids’ thought process is not the same as yours.
I don't necessarily disagree with your ideas here but I do want to offer some of the "child's" perspective.
My father was an EMT for 20 years, overlapping most of my childhood. My memories (particularly of car trips) are peppered with stories like you describe. The "being there to help" part is the part I'd recommend you emphasize (and is something I try to do with my daughter). I carry some mental "scars" from my father's stories 30+ years later. Beyond a point the stories didn't offer any more lessons and were just disturbing.
(I don't hold any of this against my father. I think his heart was in the right place. I count myself lucky to have had the best parents in the world.)
Thanks. Yeah I’m thinking this would be a one day thing before the driver’s test or before riding with others in high school, so she understands the responsibility of having a driver’s license, and that it can have life-altering consequences. And if she doesn’t feel comfortable riding with someone she can bail out and I’ll find a way to get her home.
> This is where a guy was on drugs and ran into a telephone pole. - don't do drugs. If you do drink and no longer feel comfortable in the situation, call me and I will pick you up to get you home. Don't try to drive.
Drinking is “doing drugs” and it sounds like you’re advocating for her to decide if she’s too drunk to drive based on how she feels, which is terrible advice.
God damn, alcohol is so endemic in society that sometimes people miss really obvious problems with how they think about it “because it’s not like ‘real’ drugs”.
Let me clarify - In that specific instance, the guy was on cocaine and his heart exploded, then he lost control of the car while speeding and hit the telephone pole. So “drugs”.
And the drinking part, to clarify - preferably my daughter doesn’t drink until she’s in college and legal (“don’t do drugs”). But if she is at a place and has even one drink, she should call me to get home, rather than try to drive because she is no longer comfortable staying at the party.
I was at parties at age 13 and 14 that had drinking. I was never pressured into drinking and didn’t until I was older, but others could be peer pressured. A 16 year old at a party with alcohol or weed is not unrealistic, and if she makes a mistake and accepts a drink or a hit, I don’t want her to compound the mistake and end up with a DUI or putting her or someone else’s life in danger.
I definitely also did things as a teenager that were dangerous, unnecessary, etc. And my parents were good parents, were involved in my life, had open communication with me, and tried hard to teach me the right things. But I was a teenager; I did it anyway. And I suspect that if I were being monitored like the kids today seem to be, I would just learn how to hide my activities more.
> How do you approach that, without heavy surveillance? Did you just get lucky with good kids?
I think partly I got lucky that my son is somewhat risk averse, which rules out a lot of bad stuff he could do. But I also am not fooling myself into thinking he isn't doing dumb things and not telling me about it. I certainly understand the desire to heavily surveil your kids to protect them, but it just doesn't sit right with me. I think it sends the wrong message that he doesn't have to take responsibility and can always just rely on me to bail him out. So I'm willing to take the risk in order to give him a sense of personal responsibility. I don't know that I'm making the right choice, parenting seems to be mostly doing the best you can and having your kids usually turn out ok in spite of you.
There's an excellent Black Mirror episode about tracking a child, looking through their eyes using implant, and even blocking stuff that could be scary or upsetting for them. Needless to say, it turned our quite bad for both child and parent.
Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.
That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.
The approach I'm trying to take with my kids is make mistakes while your mom and I are here to watch over you. Get this all out of the way now. Because after 18 we might not be around as much and that is not when you want the bulk of your stupidity to be tested.
In my case by talking to my teens about choices, consequences, and how to plan for good outcomes. It helped to start having that conversation long before they were teens.
We had an ios family group set up with location sharing enabled, which was great when they were 12 and losing things all the time (using a phone as backpack lojack isn't necessarily cost efficient, but it was a nice accidental outcome). When they got a little older, they figured out how not to share with us. I was peeved, but proud. Privacy respected.
When my son was in his teens, the phone company still sent with the bill a log of every call, maybe even every SMS. I marveled at the thickness of the list, but never inspected it.
You're still in the honeymoon phase. Wait till later when you're at the shopping mall and receive a text to come home now because they know where you are and it's been deemed a non-essential activity.
Parents can monitor their children's email. Phone call records are in your monthly billing statement. As long as you're up front with your child about the level of monitoring, I don't think this is unethical, let alone illegal.
Yeah, none of the surveillance I'm talking about with the other parents I know is secretive. The kids seem to have been groomed to accept it from very young ages, so they all know it is happening.
Legal matters always depend on the jurisdiction. Here in Finland, for example, everyone has the right to privacy and "secrecy of confidential message". The law has a couple exceptions, but things like age or who pays for devices are not among them. A parent may only read a specific message addressed to their child if there is justifiable reason to believe that reading that specific message is necessary for the child's safety.
Of course it's pretty rare for children to actually press charges against their parent for that, but it has happened. Using computer software "designed or modified to" violate the law is also specifically mentioned to make it an aggravated offense, with maximum penalty of 3 years in prison.
This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I'm in the minority of parents.