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Retro-Tech Parenting

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Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#211

Post by picofarad »

bitwize wrote: post #72
jdhawk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Yoto, our kids (5-7) have abused them for years. The Make Your Own cards let me create full length audiobooks, playlists, etc.. super stuff

The concept is super cute, and it'd be nice if there were content actually on the cards. But it's 2026 and the rightsholders would never actually allow that. As soon as Yoto's servers go dark, there goes any content not already cached on your machine. (And maybe the stuff that is, due to licensing arrangements.) Fuck that shit so hard. If I had kids, they're getting a cassette player. Bonus: it'll double as data stor…

I wonder if minidisc can be used as a tape drive on a c64... ATRAC doesn't mess with audio fidelity much at all, and c64 tape bitrate has to be real low, right?

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#212

Post by picofarad »

bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #206
utopiah wrote: post #204

IMHO the intent is good but amalgamating problems causing confusion and strange solutions. What actually does make "old" tech good? I'd argue it's agency. It can be the physicality of it too but if so then one has to pinpoint actually what it is, e.g is the presence of CD covers in the living room as reminder that you do have a collection? If so would a poster suffice? I think kids can absolutely use contemporary tec…

Partly agree. I agree that what makes old tech good is agency, but I find it strange that you offer as an example "handing a 5yo a phone with a documentary". Phones give you no agency, other than play and stop. They don't work for you, they work for their master (Google or apple).

I think the point was that the five-year-old will get bored of the documentary, so it's not merely the phone that's addictive, it's the content that the apps have on them.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#213

Post by anthk »

masterj wrote: post #128
anthk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18. I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences. Cracking up wifi and such…

I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less. With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.

Indeed. But in the skills case, ahem, formally, in paper. When I did a finished and advanced trade (pre-University IT, syadmin role), I aced the results as I had plenty of time to even make small patches to BTTV to support my $ELCHEAPO Conceptronic TV card. Having no internet at home made me really 'roguery' on how to achieve stuff, from cracking cable TV to inspect DVB packets, hack cable modems and pirate wifi. No formal education, just by myself, and I could do a trade from age 23 to 27 being lazy as hell because everything was trivial as I could read tons of the bundled books in the Debian Sarge DVD's.

I became really competent on how to 'survive' offline and Unix skills, far more than even the best ones in the grade (and even some math skills from a first year of College, among Lisp), but with really bad social skills but better since I met my SO at age 23 which convinced me to earn a trade. But I'm still a bit depressive for what I suffered.

Parents, listen to your kids, listen to your kids instead of sending them to a therapist, that won't work. Help on their tastes, support them, don't be a hardcore Mc Scrooge Cheapskate. Spoiled kids are bad, OFC, but the polar opposite can be pretty much as dangerous if not more.

I coudn't even spend the money I had on Christmas on my own preferences since age 14 to 18, and I had to return a Chinese Megadrive console clone I won in a holyday lottery bingo in 1997 because you had to actually buy a separate cartridge.

I coudn't even buy cartridges for a NES I've got from my parents' friends because that was 'wasting money'. So, yes, I played all the games my peers got... about 7 years later, feeling myself more and more disconnected from the world and having to do huge efforst to switch from PC gaming and such back and forth. It was tiring. That would really burn you because you are like having to swtich back and forth from totally opposite cultures, my parents' one and my uncle/aunts' one.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#214

Post by dosisking »

hx8 wrote: post #58
nostrademons wrote: post #29

I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction. I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the…

What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21. I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people. I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.

I am much older but I consider Ivy Bridge and the iPhone 4S to be the best. So that's around 2012. I also think the 11 inch MacBook Air was the best laptop, but there is no equivalent nowadays because Apple wants you to buy an iPad+keyboard, which is actually heavier. The last year for that MacBook Air was 2015. Nothing has come out after 2012 that interests me at all, including the 'AI' stuff

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#215

Post by utopiah »

picofarad wrote: post #212
bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly agree. I agree that what makes old tech good is agency, but I find it strange that you offer as an example "handing a 5yo a phone with a documentary". Phones give you no agency, other than play and stop. They don't work for you, they work for their master (Google or apple).

I think the point was that the five-year-old will get bored of the documentary, so it's not merely the phone that's addictive, it's the content that the apps have on them.

Exactly, thanks for clarifying.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#216

Post by utopiah »

bfkwlfkjf wrote: post #206
utopiah wrote: post #204

IMHO the intent is good but amalgamating problems causing confusion and strange solutions. What actually does make "old" tech good? I'd argue it's agency. It can be the physicality of it too but if so then one has to pinpoint actually what it is, e.g is the presence of CD covers in the living room as reminder that you do have a collection? If so would a poster suffice? I think kids can absolutely use contemporary tec…

Partly agree. I agree that what makes old tech good is agency, but I find it strange that you offer as an example "handing a 5yo a phone with a documentary". Phones give you no agency, other than play and stop. They don't work for you, they work for their master (Google or apple).

Indeed, the irony of me complaining that the article confuses problem... only for me to do the same!

Indeed a video on a phone provides very limited agency. I was mostly trying to highlight, as someone else pointed out, that demanding content will not have the same effect. Thus blaming the device itself is wrong.

Edit: shit... now when I acknowledge my mistake I sound like a sycophantic chatbot! Ugh. Edited to replace "You're right" by "Indeed". I'll have to remember that.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#217

Post by cambaceres »

I guess this is off topic, but my best advice to parents that worry about their kids screen time: Restrict kids screen time hard. My kids are only allowed to watch a movie in the weekend, plus a couple of episodes of a show they enjoy. No ipads, no phones. Fill your home with books and comic magazines, you can buy used ones online for very little money. My kids are 6, 4, and 4 years old. I understand that restricting kids screen time gets harder the older they get. At the same time, they are able to go out to play when they get a bit older.

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#218

Post by hgoel »

petemill wrote: post #209
hgoel wrote: post #176

Time for more anecdotes from people who think they're geniuses, about how socially isolating your children is actually good for them. Just going to be more of the same shit many of us dealt with in our childhoods, having productive pursuits mocked because the adults think they're the smartest people in the world.

It's not social isolation it's creating a learning experience filled with resistance instead of handing everything on a platter

"My interests are the only ones that matter and your interests are a waste of time so the resistance I add is actually a good thing. Be happy I don't outright block them"

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#219

Post by merelysounds »

> I’ve curated some sites about how to (...), or different ways to tie your shoes.

Perhaps Ian's Shoelace Site[1], a very informative and user friendly website that has been continuously updated for two decades at least. I'm now curious what are the other curated websites.

[1]: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

Re: Retro-Tech Parenting

#220

Post by jon-wood »

POBIX wrote: post #183

I think this is a misguided approach. Obviously children should not be let loose in this current digital world, but the restraints should be a very conservative blacklist, not a whitelist. For context I was born in 2005, so obviously much later than most people whose childhoods were enriched by technology, but all the same mine was. That is how I know succumbing to the Bad Side of the Internet is not inevitable. As a…

I'm glad I'm not the only person with this approach. We have a 12 year old son and we've never really gone overboard with restricting what he's permitted to do with his free time, if he wants to watch crap on YouTube then fine its his time. What we will do is talk to him about what he's doing, maybe sometimes ask why he's doing it ("hey, you appear to have watched the first 30 seconds of 5 videos in a row, have you considered doing something else?")

We also don't have any hard blocks on internet access, that's also managed via a combination of talking to each other and keeping half an eye on what he's up to. His computer is in a public part of the house, not hidden away upstairs, and anytime I'm passing by I'm going to take a glance at the screen and see what's going on.

Overall I think teaching kids how to do things in moderation, and to consider what they're doing and why, is far healthier than denying them access entirely. You can tell the kids who were never allowed a drop of alcohol in the first week of university - they're the ones who've passed out in a bar, and are being gently guided home by the kids who were given some freedom a bit earlier in an environment where someone's going to step in if they're getting out of hand.

Who knows, maybe he'll grow up to be an absolute monster, and one day I'll look back on this comment and how naive I was, but for now it seems to be working.

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