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My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

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Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#141

Post by nikisweeting »

transreal wrote: post #126

As a technologist and parent myself, I find the biggest problem to be the lack of fine grained parental controls. Yes, technology in of itself is not the issue, it is the highly addictive nature of certain software, but on different devices, limiting what they can/can't do is very difficult. When school started online, my 8 year old was initially really engaged, but then started getting a bit bored once she got into…

Learning to jailbreak and flash routers to get around these parental controls is what got me into programming.

I had managed to get myself unrestricted internet access from pretty much age 10 onwards using a "broken" laptop I had secretly fixed, and the "restricted" iPod Touch that I had unlocked by editing the Springboard.plist.

At age 14 they had a talk with me where they said they finally were going to give me some restricted internet access and I almost burst out laughing because I had been online hours per day for the last 4 years, but managed to keep it together.

Ten years later and it's a fun story we all laugh about. I wonder what I would be doing today if it wasn't for those parental controls motivating me to break systems.

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#142

Post by scottlamb »

devenblake wrote: post #114
ttul wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done home schooling and regular public schooling. If you can afford to have a parent be at home full time with your kids, you are amongst the wealthiest in the world. You are fortunate.

It's ridiculous that you were downvoted because this is exactly right. Assuming one works federal minimum wage for 40hrs/week and 52 weeks a year with no days off and no taxes, they make roughly $15k by my math. How could a three-person family, with two parents making $30k total, possibly afford to homeschool the child?

It's right, but it's kind of a non-sequitur. It seems to be a response to "you should be homeschooling your kid", which sequoia didn't actually say. They suggested the problem is "school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention", and obviously homeschooling is how they are addressing it themselves, but you can imagine other solutions. Off-hand:

* For starters, school doesn't last until 6:30pm unless you let it. Extracurriculars are extra. If you need afternoon child care (and most of us do), there may be less directed, more creative options available.

* Schools can make changes, and you can encourage your teacher / school / district to do so. Less homework (an idea which has some science behind it iiuc) at least. Maybe a later start time (although this runs into tension with parents' schedules).

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#143

Post by [deleted] »

ttul wrote: post #96
sequoia wrote: post #87

Buried lede: > My daughter doesn’t return home from school until 6:30 pm and still has to eat, bathe, and get ready for bed. Perhaps it is not just the iPhone, but school taking up 100% of her time, energy, and attention that is preventing her from pursuing creative interests? As a homeschooling parent whose kids have been in school at times, I see this first hand. School is exhausting . Between rising unnaturally ea…

I have done home schooling and regular public schooling. If you can afford to have a parent be at home full time with your kids, you are amongst the wealthiest in the world. You are fortunate.

[deleted]

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#144

Post by whywhywhywhy »

parksy wrote: post #45

My dad smashed my computer around the laundry (where the computer lived) with my cricket bat because I was "playing games" instead of studying. "playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game. With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation. But just like my dad coul…

>"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.

None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with. Even if they did escape the attention algorithm long enough to get bored and explore there is nothing to discover it's a locked black box.

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#145

Post by [deleted] »

martokus wrote: post #135

The forbidden fruit tastes best, right. My theory is that like everything this requires a balance and gradual introduction. Start early, let kids make mistakes, punish them for said mistakes, let them learn lessons. Enforcing super strict rules has never helped anyone I think. 1h a day is quite strict in my opinion especially if consumed in multiple sessions. If I had just started doing something and it took me 15min…

[deleted]

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#146

Post by donmcronald »

transreal wrote: post #126

As a technologist and parent myself, I find the biggest problem to be the lack of fine grained parental controls. Yes, technology in of itself is not the issue, it is the highly addictive nature of certain software, but on different devices, limiting what they can/can't do is very difficult. When school started online, my 8 year old was initially really engaged, but then started getting a bit bored once she got into…

I share this opinion. The parental controls are so bad it almost seems intentional. Look at the mishmash of trash you need to deal with between a Microsoft account and an XBox account (which are sort of the same thing). That's with a company that IMO is trying to make it work, but the experience still sucks.

Then add in the need for a parent account (or two) plus a child account (or two or three) for every service / app kids want to use and all of a sudden you're asking people to manage dozens of accounts. Throw in multiple platforms and you could literally be trying to manage two or three dozen sets of parental controls and it's not static. The apps / services are constantly churning.

It's easy to criticize the OP of this article, but I know the feeling. The intent to be a good moderator is there, but the tooling isn't and after a while you just give up, turn a 10 year old into an 18 year old, and moderate over their shoulder instead.

The distinction between apps is huge too. Things like Minecraft, Roblox, educational games, etc. are pretty harmless and somewhat creative. Apps like TikTok and Facebook are worthless and should be banned (by parents) IMO.

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#147

Post by watwut »

devenblake wrote: post #114
ttul wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done home schooling and regular public schooling. If you can afford to have a parent be at home full time with your kids, you are amongst the wealthiest in the world. You are fortunate.

It's ridiculous that you were downvoted because this is exactly right. Assuming one works federal minimum wage for 40hrs/week and 52 weeks a year with no days off and no taxes, they make roughly $15k by my math. How could a three-person family, with two parents making $30k total, possibly afford to homeschool the child?

Every time there is discussion about kids on HN, someone wants me to leave the work and stay at home. Usually someone who would not do it himself. I did not downvoted, but I see how it is getting old.

Also, middle school that is from morning till 18:30 is definitely not the norm here. There is also this part where every single flaw of every educational system is assumed to be unchangeable and universal.

So it is not even like the argument would made sense.

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#148

Post by souprock »

ccleve wrote: post #38
KungFuJohnny wrote: post #2

Title is completely misleading. The problem has nothing to do with an iPhone. It has 100% to do with bad parenting. The author even acknowledges this, but I guess blaming the iPhone gets more clicks than "Poor parenting harms child".

As the parent of a twelve year old, I can tell you that it's not so simple. I gave my son an old computer a couple of years ago because he expressed a vague interest in learning to code like his daddy. That really didn't work out. But he discovered a great big world out there, and the computer was his window to it. And yes, the effects on his creativity were the same as for the child in the article. So we tried, and…

It was a trivial problem until remote education. Simply remove the network connection.

As a kid I had a computer and a few precious programming books. I could program, or... not much really. I guess I could have enjoyed WordPerfect.

As a parent now, I really need an answer for the remote education. I've tried keeping screens visible to parents. That really limits the parents, who have other things to deal with. Parental availability causes a massive reduction in time for online classes.

For reference in case somebody has ideas of a technical nature, mostly I'm dealing with Chromebooks going via DD-WRT, and I don't know much about either. There's also Android and Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Problems are web games, pointless videos, and reddit. Classes are at FLVS, EFSC, Khan Academy, and various textbook publishers like Pearson. Class video appears on all the popular video platforms, not counting the NSFW ones.

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#149

Post by nikisweeting »

martokus wrote: post #135

The forbidden fruit tastes best, right. My theory is that like everything this requires a balance and gradual introduction. Start early, let kids make mistakes, punish them for said mistakes, let them learn lessons. Enforcing super strict rules has never helped anyone I think. 1h a day is quite strict in my opinion especially if consumed in multiple sessions. If I had just started doing something and it took me 15min…

This seems to be a growing trend in parenting literature, enforce things more laxly, teach good habits, and let kids self-regulate.

https://www.mother.ly/news/should-you-let-your-kids-eat-as-m...

Re: My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone

#150

Post by _lffv »

JoeCianflone wrote: post #109

What a load of shit. I’m sorry I have an 11 year old who has an iPod touch the real problem here is lax parenting. My son cannot use his phone alone in his room alone, he doesn’t have TikTok or any social media apps. He cannot take it to school (not that there’s a school to go to at the moment) or take it out of the house unless he asks first and 95% of the time we don’t let him. Kids test—that’s like an iron law of…

I had parents sort of like you when I was younger, which is why I attempted suicide at 14.

Strict parenting puts weights on your kids' backs. Eventually they'll snap in half.

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