Parents, your child’s specific location and current activity should be none of your goddamn business. (Yeah, I know this one will get love.)
Called “Safe Campus Smartwatches,” the wearables “send the children’s locations in real time to their respective parents’ smartphones”https://t.co/cAJW9FR7NC
— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) July 29, 2019
When I was young, I walked the streets of downtown Vancouver at age 6. I took the bus on my own to the YMCA. After class there, I wandered around downtown before going home. As a teenager, I walked through Calcutta’s slums alone.
My parents knew where I was in very general terms, and I was expected to show up for meals and bedtime. Other than that, I did what I wanted outside of school.
Modern parents seem to have this idea that children are incapable of taking care of themselves. This may be true, if they are never given any freedom or the right to make their own decisions, but it’s not true otherwise.
So what I see is that modern adults get to 18 and suddenly the supervision stops and guess what? A lot of them are incapable.
The conversation around adulting is absurd. “Adulting” is simply the removal of close support and supervision. More of life is now up to you. (Minus, of course, your boss, who also has far more control over you than a boss did 40 years ago.)
This isn’t to say that taking care of oneself is necessarily easy. It’s harder now, in many countries (and especially in the US) than it was two generations back, because jobs are shittier, inequality is up and the social safety net has been reduced. No question, it’s harder. But it’s not harder than it was, say, in the 30s.
We are what we do. We become what we do. Children who are subject to constant monitoring, who cannot make their own decisions about what to do, who cannot be free, never learn to be free. When they are suddenly given the partial freedom we grant after high school, is it a surprise they don’t know how to “adult?”
Nor are children possessions. They are people. They deserve a reasonable amount of freedom, an amount that is far more than we currently grant in the US and Canada. The idea that they are incapable is ridiculous, for most of history, children (and certainly teenagers) had many of the same responsibilities as adults far younger than we now allow.
Yeah, it’s good we don’t have actual child (pre-pubescent) labor. It’s not good that we keep them firmly under thumb.
(And yeah, it’s not about danger. The danger is miniscule, and such danger as exists is almost all from family and other known adults, not from strangers.)
Children treated like they can’t make choices and can’t handle freedom will not learn how to make good choices or handle freedom.
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450.org
The watch seems redundant considering the younger generations are attached, almost quite literally at the hip, to their smartphones 24/7. Even when they’re asleep, they dream of electronic sheep as their smartphones jump the gap to feed, or starve, their brain & psyche.
No need for the watch when the smartphone that’s always on them is always keeping track. Slavery in another form. Thanks for the new & improved bondage, Massa Jobs. Wherever you are if anywhere except your urn. As if we have a choice to reject it — our overseer the smartphone. We do, but we don’t. Left behind is a very real consequence. Keep up, or cease to exist because relevance is existence in this brave new world.
The Addict in Us All: How Smartphones are Creating a Population of Addicts
450.org
First came Children of the Corn.
Now the sequel: Children of the Smartphone.
Who are the real parents, I ask you? Certainly not the impotent, lost, biological meat sacks who naively believe they are, that’s for sure.
Eric Anderson
Eeesh.
This is the single biggest point of contention b/t my wife and I.
Let them fail! Let them get cuts, bruises, scrapes, stiches and broken bones. Black eyes and busted lips. Let ’em jump in the deep end of the pool and flail for a while. Let them be embarrassed and shamed.
And always, pick them up, dust them off, give them a kiss on top of the head and let them know that I let you fail because I love you.
Eric Anderson
That said, I live rural in the extreme.
Anon
It doesn’t surprise me that this is coming out of China. There are helicopter parents in the USA for sure, but it’s still very much a part of Asian culture for parents to view their children as their property. Traditional Asian parenting can be very authoritative and abusive. My mother is Asian, and I could not wait until the day I went to college to be free from her control. Even as a grown adult who has lived on my own for a long time, my mother still expects me not to stay out late and makes snide comments about very normal adult decisions such as spending the night at my partner’s house, how I choose to dress, what I choose to eat, etc. Unfortunately, this Tiger Mom style of parenting seems to have spread to Western society. It’s ironic that despite living in increased fear, we as a society still refuse to address issues that endanger us the most. We don’t address gun control and we’ve accepted a sharing economy that has normalized opening up and going into homes and vehicles of complete strangers.
Herman
I agree with you, Ian. I would not trade places with a young person today even if it meant getting rid of my aching back and other problems of middle age. In addition to the overblown “stranger danger” element and the pernicious influence of technology, I would add a class/economic element. As this article puts it: “Intensive parenting is a style of child-rearing fit for an age of inequality, indicative of a stratified past, present, and future.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/intensive-helicopter-parenting-inequality/580528/
Even less affluent families now try to engage in helicopter parenting because it is seen as the best way to prepare a child for the intense competition for the few good careers left. When you were growing up in a more egalitarian age it was assumed that a person didn’t need to be an academic superstar with a loaded resume by the time they were 18 to have a decent future. Society was such that there were many different paths to a decent life. Not so much today when many good jobs don’t exist anymore, have been outsourced or crapified in various ways.
Additionally, the disciplinary apparatus of modern society is much harsher today. For example, even a minor criminal record can prevent you from getting decent employment and the justice system is much harsher today compared to the mid-20th century when the trend was briefly toward more rights for defendants. Furthermore, as you mention employers have much more power today. Not only do they benefit from a generally pro-employer political system (neoliberalism) but tech has made it easier for employers to monitor and discipline you.
Because of these factors I can understand why parents choose to engage in helicopter parenting even though I think it is a bad practice. For many parents “free range” parenting is now viewed as neglect and even among parents there is intense competition and status anxiety over parenting styles. Look at some of the mommy blogs to see how anxious and obsessed modern mothers are with being a “good mom” and how vicious and judgmental parenting culture is now. It is just another example of our civilization’s terrible decline.
Eric Anderson
450.org:
Just finished completely deleting anything google related off my platforms. Buh bye.
Herman:
Helicopter shmellicopter. I won’t be goading my son toward anything even resembling mainstream “achievement.” If he’s curious, like me, he’ll figure all that out in time. He’ll find his interests and pursue them. That’s what they’re What baffles me is why so many parents today just make the rote assumption that the skills required today to get by will be the skills their kids actually need in the future. Frankly, as you all well know, I’m future dubious. I live in the “exclusion zone” Ian has written about in the past. Tick tock … bring it on.
What I will ensure; however, is that he knows how to: hunt, fish, garden, fall trees, split wood, build shelter, fix an engine, etc. etc. These skills never go out of style. My Dad taught me, and I’ll teach my son.
One hiccup in the system and the urbanites will quickly learn the errors of their educational ways.
Eric Anderson
* they’re built for.
Ten Bears
Interesting Times, we live in. Are they Orwellian, Nineteen Eighty-Four? Or did Huxley nail it twenty years earlier, is it a Brave New World?
Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would want to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information and conceal the truth; Huxley feared the truth would be drown in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared would become a trivial culture.
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared that we will love what will ruin us.
gnokgnoh
@Ian, I will offer a contrarian position here, entirely from my personal experience. Most teenagers I know, including my 17 year old daughter, are acutely aware of what “adults” are saying about them. She is a young adult as are her friends, as well as all 50 students in her high school class (small school, small town, one mile from the Philadelphia border). They police each other and classify the ones that are cellphone-obsessed. They all use cellphones a lot, but mostly in appropriate moments.
They work hard in school, roam everywhere in our town and the city (commuter rail into Philadelphia), and all work summer jobs or jobs after school during the year. They all volunteer at hospitals, clinics, senior centers, and animal shelters. The public school they go to requires service hours in the community. We partly chose our town, because there is no school busing. Most kids walk to school, with older students walking with their younger siblings. This is a town with 1/8 acre and smaller house lots, many twins (paired houses with a party wall), and rowhomes. Two streets have large homes on large lots, where most of the doctors’ families live. Such as it ever was since the 1700’s when our town was founded, before the suburbs grew up around us.
I’m not saying that all kids and teenagers are like those in my town. But, they’re not stupid. They know what’s being said about them. They study the social problem in school. Many are mildly bemused by the hysteria of the “adults” of every generation. I don’t even want to get into how much better the issues of teenage pregnancy, drunk driving, LGBTQ integration into their daily lives, and the climate crisis are being handled by this new generation of kids and teenagers. Don’t lose all hope.
gnokgnoh
I realize that my post is somewhat of a misdirection. It’s not about parents using watches and cellphones to track their kids. My sympathies to Chinese kids. Apologies to Ian.
Joan
I agree with Ian’s post and with a lot of the comments here. Eric and Gnokgnoh, I am encouraged to hear about your parenting style. I think those methods, and definitely within the context of what seems like a reasonable community, will result in stable and capable adults.
I want to add that suburban sprawl enables helicopter parenting. Once as a teenager, I tried to walk to the gas station on the corner, which was a half mile away. No big deal: get out of the house, buy a soda, spend some time outside. I was stopped what felt like every ten feet by a neighbor driving by and asking if I wanted a ride or if something was wrong. Someone must have called my mother because then she drove up, threatening me to get inside, and if I didn’t, she would idle right next to me the entire walk and lay down on the horn so the whole neighborhood would know I refused to listen to my mother. I should have called her on it. Instead, I got inside. Never made it to the gas station.
The structure of sprawling suburban neighborhoods means you cannot escape from abusive or neurotic parents. You can also never escape from the TV turned up loud.
I was required to take the Mommy Taxi in order to leave the house, which meant I never got to stay over with friends, and friends never came over. A library visit maybe once every six months. I applied and was accepted into a prestigious academic boarding high school, and my parents sent in a refusal letter for me. I then was accepted to a military high school, anything to get me out of the house, and they sent that letter in as well.
What will come next is chipping children like the pet cat. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard someone remark that systems like Amber Alert would work much better with chipped children. And why should someone’s pet dog have more protection than their own child?
Stirling S Newberry
I was a latchkey kid. My daughter while be one if she wants to be. (And with the number of libraries around….)
Ed
The cultural pressure to not let the children free roam is intense, even in areas where the parents don’t get arrested for it. It’s one me and several of our neighbors have discussed. When we were kids, everyone walked to school. Now, if our kids do it, they’re the only ones. Fortunately, we have yet to have the cops called on us…
And in an amusing, wonderful counter-case, the local library (a short walk for our kids) allows unsupervised children once they turn eight. Guess what’s now my son’s favorite hangout? Oh, gee, darn. It’s awful, I tell you, awful, to not know what my son is up to at the library. He might be, gasp, learning things on his own!
450.org
Amy Chua loves these watches, I’m sure. Tiger Moms & Tiger Parenting are her thing, afterall.
No amount of parenting, no matter how absurdly & obnoxiously misguided, can prepare this next generation and the generation after that for what’s to come related to climate change.
Tiger Mothers: Raising Children The Chinese Way
Fyi, my wife & I have two children and we most assuredly are not their parents. We never were except in DNA only. They, since taking their first breath, have always belonged to the Borg as we all do.
Rubenfeld. What a nice Irish name.
ponderer
Why anyone would give their kid a tool perfectly suited to abuse by sexual predators is beyond me. It’s just a matter of time before we start hearing stories of these systems getting hacked. Cell phones are about the same. If a technological idiot (most parents) can track their children then so can everyone else.
450.org
The Chinese surveillance state has been growing for quite some time now with the aid of Silicon Valley. A match made in heaven. Afterall, what is social media except social control? China and America have arrived at the same destination by separate paths and that destination is State Capitalism. It’s a tyranny, of course. It always is in its myriad forms.
Here’s an excellent 2008 article related to a book authored by Naomi Klein on the topic. Think about Huawei in all of this with its 5g & 6g & 7g and smart cities. What will it mean to be human in 30 years if climate change and/or nuclear war doesn’t finish our species off first?
China’s All-Seeing Eye
Eric Anderson
Some damn good points being thrown around here.
Joan — I’ve a degree in regional planning & community design. You nailed it and I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t beat you to it. The suburb is designed for one thing alone, cars. Not kids.
450 — the Borg quip? Yup. We give ourselves waaaay too much credit as parents.
ponderer — That absolutely needed to be stated.
Creigh Gordon
Cellphones schmellphones. I had the privilege of living as a young adult in a town with no TV. Not in homes, not in bars and restaurants. Broadcast was blocked by mountains, cable hadn’t got there yet, and satellite wasn’t invented. We had to make our own entertainment, and social life was much richer. I’d go back in an instant.