> This advice doesn't seem like it could help anyone.

I did sneaky shit to get around my parents' rules when I was a kid, most people here probably did. To some degree kids need to learn how to push boundaries, for everything else device related there's MDM[1].

There are MDM solutions that are specifically for parenting.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management

Apple came out and said MDM was not a suitable way to do parental device control and could pose a security risk, which killed apps like OurPact.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-is-nixing-iphone-pare...

Was it meant to promote ScreenTime? Perhaps. But ScreenTime is another iOS feature that was highly touted at first and then became a neglected unusable mess in the years since.

Honestly, I don't blame the guy for setting up a signal jammer because the whole cat-and-mouse game you play with teens is fucking exhausting.

My parents simply chose to not have internet. We used an old WRT router to boost the neighbors wifi, cracked it, and then had free internet. They had no idea.

My dad would take the modem with him to work, and when he was at home using the internet he would turn it on, wait for it to boot, load a web page, and then turn it back off until he needed to load another webpage. That was the only way he actually stopped me from getting to the internet, but it was a too much effort and he didn't keep it up for long.

Statute of Limitations, but...

A "friend's" parents chose to go without a phone. My "friend" realizing how simple the old phone systems were rewired the second line of "his" parents' house to the line of a neighbor from a near by junction between houses. "He" would have to quietly pick up the phone to see if the line was free, and quietly hang up if not to try later. It worked well for a period of time until "he" forgot to unplug the phone before leaving. "His" parents were quite surprised when the phone in "his" room started ringing.

Oh man. I too have a "friend" with a similar story. Except my friend was connected to a pay phone line at a nearby store and managed to route the line all the way into his bedroom via existing unused pairs along the way. All so that he could dial into long-distance BBSes. (Because there were none locally.)

Eventually the phone company caught on and probably _could_ have charged my friend with theft of services or something, but instead just disconnected the rogue line and put a lock on the payphone interface box and placed a large "property of the telco" sticker on it. Probably dodged a significant bullet there, in retrospect.

I would be proud of my kid if they did that. I would ground them, but proudly.

Speaking of pushing boundaries. Parents in the generation had to get a physical box with a padlock in which the phone was placed. You could still pick up the handle to answer a call but you couldn't reach the dial. Some figured out how to tap dial but I never did.

If it's possible for a parent to set up MDM in a way that a child can't remove, then what's stopping a domestic abuser from setting up MDM in a way the victim can't remove?

Nothing is stopping that from happening and there are many many apps that give you very granular control and reporting on phones, sometimes in very sneaky ways.

The police. If you're an adult and someone messed with your phone, you have [or should have] a case under CFAA or some similar law. It's basically a blinking neon sign that says "abusive partner".

A simplified comparison: if it's possible for a parent to take away a kid's phone, what prevents a domestic abuser from taking away their victim's phone?

> The police. If you're an adult and someone messed with your phone, you have [or should have] a case under CFAA or some similar law. It's basically a blinking neon sign that says "abusive partner".

If "just go to the police" were an option for all domestic abuse victims, I'd expect that there'd already be plenty of other blinking neon signs they could point to.

> A simplified comparison: if it's possible for a parent to take away a kid's phone, what prevents a domestic abuser from taking away their victim's phone?

The difference is that the phone doesn't sprout legs and run away from the victim, or otherwise assist the abuser in taking it away.

>If "just go to the police" were an option for all domestic abuse victims, I'd expect that there'd already be plenty of other blinking neon signs they could point to.

Not really. Proving domestic abuse is not easy. It's mostly "he said, she said" until somebody ends up in the ER. That's why restraining orders are so common, because the evidence available won't lead to a conviction, but the legal system still wants to provide some kind of protection to victims, even though the protection afforded by a restraining order isn't that reliable. A big limitation for victims in going to the police is that if there isn't evidence to convict, the system does not effectively protect them from retaliation.

Now, on the other hand, if you can produce a device with some software illegally installed on it, you've got physical evidence that can be presented in front of a jury leading to a felony conviction. It's easily more reliable than most evidence used to prove abuse, which tends to be testimonial.

A remarkably high proportion of abusers walk away even when the police have been involved, cf Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito. So no, there are not plenty of blinking neon signs. There are almost never blinking neon signs.

>The difference is that the phone doesn't sprout legs and run away from the victim, or otherwise assist the abuser in taking it away.

This is trivial and irrelevant.

If you are actually in this position, then you should understand that the advice is not to fix the other issues, but to stop doing what you are currently doing, not because it's not working, although that is a very good reason to stop expending the energy, but because it's making the situation worse.

I'm not really in this position, but the advice sounds way too general and blunt for it to be generally useful.

I think it is too blunt; the sort-of truth around the matter is that the "stuff you have to stop doing" is often entirely out of reach for most parents.

In many families, the adults are both working full- or overtime jobs, the children are at school or in school-adjacent activities (commuting, extracurriculars, homework, etc.) for 9+ hours per day, and 90% of parent-child interactions are rule-reinforcement (Did you do your homework? Did you put your shoes away? Haven't you already used your screens for an hour?)

Actual concrete advice, which is "have one parent leave the workforce so they have more time to parent, reject destructive social norms at the family level, and move away from bad social environments" is not only financially impossible for most, but for those that it is possible for may find that they still can't reach their children, because their children have already adopted a "reject-parent" identity and will continue to prefer online-and-friends over offline-and-family.

The most useful advice that I think that any parent can take is to learn about what the world is really like to a kid or teenager, not what it appears to be [1]. It is very difficult to do this, because you have to enter a mindset where a child is not a subsidiary of their parents, but rather a totally foreign and separate entity, capable of the same depths of rage, cruelty, laziness, vindictiveness, passion, joy, etc. [2] No Gen-X parent I know models their kids like this; they reserve the true spectrum of emotion for themselves and their age cohort, and treat their children as less-able to think and feel.

[1] = (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html#:~:text=The%20world....)

[2] = As a example, I often hear parents discuss with amazement the shenanigans that their kids (even up to and around pre-teen) will pull when video games are restricted: full-body tantrums, claims of hatred, physical violence, etc. From the parents' perspective, their child is being completely unreasonable and upset over inconsequential things, but the parent is assigning their own assessment of consequence to the video games, and not accepting their child's version. To the child, these games often represent the only hours in their life when they feel excited, proud, and free; to deprive them of this gives them the short-term chemical emotions that an adult might feel if their house burned down.

> From the parents' perspective, their child is being completely unreasonable and upset over inconsequential things, but the parent is assigning their own assessment of consequence to the video games, and not accepting their child's version. To the child, these games often represent the only hours in their life when they feel excited, proud, and free; to deprive them of this gives them the short-term chemical emotions that an adult might feel if their house burned down.

True, but I'm sure a heroin addict would say the same thing about being deprived of heroin. At a certain point it's a parent's duty to limit destructive addictions. And these social media networks and games are made to be extremely addictive, companies spend billions of dollars on this goal.

Part of the problem is, like you've said, most kids are going to be spending a lot of their time not with their parents, but with other kids. You can tell them what you want at home, but then you're sending them off to a school full of addicts, almost all of whom are exerting an immense social pressure on your kid to partake.

> At a certain point it's a parent's duty to limit destructive addictions. And these social media networks and games are made to be extremely addictive, companies spend billions of dollars on this goal.

Yes, I agree. I actually typed out a bit about my own experience with playing Gameboy at 10 and comparing it to drinking and partying at 21, but I didn't end up appending it to my comment.

It's one of those things that parents don't get--modern stuff (video games, social media) is like heroin for kids. You can't just give them "an hour of heroin time" per week and then expect them to think about anything else for the periods of time you suspend them from it.

When I was younger, I could think about playing Donkey Kong Country for literal days at a time. I'd imagine levels in my head, draw pictures, stare at old video game ads, hum the music to myself, and once I made a cardboard Gameboy and pretended to play it to scratch the itch. My life was measured as blocks of time in between playing DKC. My parents didn't get how single-minded I was and thought that by "restricting it" they could redirect my attention to other, more wholesome things. Impossible. I am so thankful I didn't have unlimited internet access or Fortnite when I was younger.

I'm thinking there should be a new term for these kind of addictions to activities that remained socially acceptable for decades despite globalization and increased media scrutiny. Saying that you "watch videos" or "play video games" can now have drastically different implications based on the unstated degree of the activity. And some degrees of these activities have been gradually distorted beyond recognition from their counterparts in the 80's and 90's when nobody asked the question of how much was enough. Actual hard drugs were never going to gain mainstream acceptance because they're addictive and destructive by their physical nature. In contrast, a "game you can't put down" can be interpreted as a piece of critical acclaim for an indie developer or a dire alarm for the guardians of the consumers.

It is a sobering thought to hypothesize that, due to incentives beyond our control, the most earnest and hard-working creative minds inadvertently feed the addictions of millions of people. Whenever I look at the view counts of a successful creator, I have to wonder what percentage of the people behind those views specifically asked to be shown the content.

Having been subjected to strict time limits on electronics when I was growing up, they didn't do much except to make me a more bitter person. As an adult I now spend the majority of my time on a computer. I don't consider myself addicted to personal computers specifically, but that is what's most sinister about addictions such as these - it's a socially acceptable drug that still changes some peoples' lives for the better, and is in some cases necessary to participate in modern society. That acts as a mental wedge to excuse the addictive parts that aren't yet held to the same standard to other addictions on a whole - "watching videos" or "playing video games".

I have to wonder if it's something intrinsic to human nature that leads people down pathways such as these. Many kinds of media feed on our curiosity, which we're taught is an important virtue growing up. And I think curiosity tends to motivate us to find better and more effective ways at succeeding, such as developing and shipping a game that receives critical acclaim and breaks sales records. But soon we might have to start judging ourselves on metrics besides how successful we are, if success is based on how well our thoughts can capture the hearts and minds and attention spans of the world population.

What is with the nonstop comparison of video games to hard drugs? There is no basis for comparing an activity of a person to the administration of chemicals that directly affect the physical and mental state of someone.

Under this train of thought, the following activities could be considered "addictions" for me

1. Getting up in the morning

2. Making breakfast

3. Going to work

4. Spending time with friends

5. Walking around the neighborhood

6. Going to the park

7. Riding my bicycle

8. Working on my house

9. Lifting weights

I could list many more things, but I think I have made my point. You tell me I can't do any of those things and I'm going to be very upset. The only difference is that as an adult I realize there are other things I can seek out as alternative activities. I also fundamentally _more_ activities than most children. Take away all of what I just listed and I am going to be exceptionally irate. Is there any individual in society which we expect to tolerate a removal of almost all of the activities in their life which they selected? Even prisoners get access to a library to prepare their own legal defense or educate themselves as they see fit.

Children have nearly zero autonomy in the US nowadays, the opportunity to participate in an interactive world (even a single player city building game for example) is one of the limited times they have a high level of autonomy. Suggesting that those activities are equivalent to hard drug addiction is facetious.

Have you ever done hard drugs?

Edit: This is being downvoted; if someone wanted to disagree, they could respond and say "yes, I have both done hard drugs and played superstimulating video games as a nine-year-old, and there's no comparison".

I have done both, and I think the comparison is valid.

This. We are above average US earnings for the region and we do not feel comfortable leaving current dual income setup. It is ridiculous, because on paper, we should be able to.

The simple reality is that we will need to make some adjustments to make it happen though, because we both see it as a desirable outcome.

I have yet to deal with real child issues ( and I know I was a terror to my parents ), but having time is a pre-requisite to not slap a simple 'solution' on the problem.

I am sorry to hear that but I am also not surprised. Time, money, and support from other friends/family are essential for avoiding serious internal family strife, and those are the three resources that are stripped from by any go-getter in a wealthy country merely by the act of moving up in the world.

Just to break it down a bit more (and with this particular article we are speculating some since there aren't a lot of details, but the situation in the article sure looks similar to what parents deal with a lot):

1) With anything, it's good to take a step back and ask yourself if you're addressing a symptom or a problem. Again, don't have a lot of details, but this sure looks like the dad was addressing a symptom. This doesn't solve anything (and the problem will manifest again 10 different ways later), it almost certainly does more harm to the relationship, and it leads to everyone feeling terrible.

2) It's easy to /think/ you'd tackle the problem if you knew what it was, but that's often not true at all. This probably applies to all relationships, but as a parent at least it's often much easier to fixate on a symptom. If I suspect my kid is lying to me often, it's realllly easy to go down the rabbit hole of trying to come up with ways to catch them and then to punish them, and it's far harder to focus on healing/strengthening the relationship, getting to the bottom of why the kid feels the need to lie, confronting the flaws in my parenting style etc. :)

Yes, thank you for saying it more clearly than I did.

My thoughts exactly. It's as helpful as telling people to not be poor. I've known parents doing all kinds of things to prevent their drug-addicted kids from getting drugs. Yes, there are fundamental issues, and yes, it would be nice to resolve them, but in the meantime you do what it takes to stop your kids from getting their hands on drugs.

Well, it's meant to be broad-based. Like if your friend called you, saying "Can I borrow your fire extinguisher; my Internet isn't working", you can say "Whatever you're doing, it's likely to be wrong" and you're most likely correct! Of course, since that is a two-way channel you would ask for clarification after.

That second part is unavailable here.

Set expectations, boundaries and define responsible use beforehand.

Teach self-control.

Talk to your kids and have discussions instead of resorting to passive aggressive style parenting.