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.
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?
People monitor their kids so their kids do and are exactly what they've been told to be, and nothing else.
I'm sorry, are you serious or is this a joke?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The mind boggles.
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.
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.
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.
Those are learning experiences too.
- 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.
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 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.)
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”.
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.
Or, as the classic Brass Eye segment put it: https://youtu.be/MIAJemmO-bg?t=238
> 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.
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.
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.
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.