If teenage me had something that tracked every location, and I knew it, and my friends had them on too, I'd probably miss out on a lot of stuff I cherish.
I had time limits, and a hard immovable low budget that made a lot of the bad stuff impossible. The rest was up to us to figure out and learn and improvise as we go. I'm better for those learnings.
Having said that, I'm not in this teenage parenting position today and so I have no idea what I'm going to do when i'm in that spot.
My kids started walking to school and friends houses at 7 and are still preteen. After school they can be anywhere as they'll go to a friend's house or just hang out somewhere for a while on the way home. Neither of my kids has a device that I can track, only one of them as a dumb Nokia phone, which end up being left at home most of the time.
If I want to know where they are to reduce worry then either I have to call them, which feels intrusive to what they're doing; or it relies on their friend's parent letting me know where they are. I know people who worry a lot more than us, so a non-intrusive location finding of a 10 year old would reduce parental worry without making the child feel like they were being hassled. Currently these parents are giving their young kids smart phones, often without any parental controls, and I think that's a lot worse than a watch option. My main worry with these watches is about how good the security & controls are on them to prevent unauthorized messages or calls.
Having something to track them between 8 and 12 years old I think is useful. I remember when I lived in Japan (where children start walking to places as early as 5 years old) before the iphone came out, there were plenty of children phone that sent gps to the parents and only allowed calling to a select set of numbers.
Kids are a lot more clever than you give them credit for :)
For example, we had this issue -- kid would "forget" the phone and then go out. We set the expectation that if they forgot they had to come straight home or else face a week or two long grounding. Lo and behold they quickly got very good at remembering.
Similar issue with "forgetting" to do all the homework and we followed a similar strategy with some success.
It's a useful technique to combat weaponized incompetence. It's nice and appropriate to reward effort instead of outcomes for new things that are still being learned, but once you know they get it, and if you suspect weappnized incompetence-- try tying an outcome they care about that you're OK with them losing on if need be, directly to the goal, and provide support and model appropriate behavior regarding reminders, todo lists, etc.
Not sure if maybe you misinterpreted my comment backward.
With the social pressure going on, I expect she'll get a smartphone earlier that I'd honestly prefer (not that we are there any time soon), and quite a bit before she's a teenager.
So I honestly expect we'll be location sharing for a while, but I don't expect it to continue into the teenage years. By then it'll be up to her, if she wants to continue sharing it.
Our kids (8 & 10) keep telling us nearly every kid in their class has a smartphone, but we're still not letting them have one. Fuck social pressure; that's an important lesson to be learned in itself.
Hard disagree to this idea as justification for purchasing something for a kid.
The most useful gift that my parents gave me is a cultivated disregard for what is popular. It's not that I go out of my way to alienate my peers—I try to get along well with everyone and it mostly works—but the habit of wanting to participate with the crowd is one that I've watched hamper many a life, and the lack of that habit has allowed me to get a lot further in my career and in my personal and social life than most of my peers.
Then maybe, just maybe, your whole career is just happy accident of right time (software eating world) and right predispositions (STEM). I know mine is.
And if I would not have that I would be earning what 85% of my peers here in Poland do (barely enough to pay bills).
The only ones that are doing ok without this are the ones that invested everything in social skills (by happy accident of not having socially akward parents or by themselfs intuitively knowing that your group is everything).
So this is just implementation of my deepest believe that the best what we can do for our children is to make them as socially sklled as possibile. And limiting channels of communication does not look like a good way to this.
Of course Im not advocating unlimited access to everything for everyone - it depends on emotional development and predispositions.
Hopefully the age where a smartphone becomes a requirement to not be marked as a social outcast will gradually rise again.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and other books and investigations on the topic of childhood smartphone usage are only starting to get traction.
Try to hold out as long as you can.
The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily. Add multiple kids into the mix and it can be a real challenge to keep them all together when you're out.
Besides, in the coming years I very much want him to grow up knowing that if he gets lost or in a dangerous situation, he will have to rely on himself in the first place. That means not freezing and just waiting for the helicopter parent to swoop in to a blinking dot on the map, but knowing how to get help and how to be safe. He'll need to do that if his parents are unavailable (some freak accident?) too in any case.
And kidnapping? Don't kid yourself. If you live somewhere where this is even remotely probable and your kid is a target (kidnapping is usually done by family), the chance that the kidnapper will take the tracking device along are remote, unless you intend on hiding it in their clothing or chipping them like a pet.
I grew up memorizing my dad's number and was told to go find a trusted adult, stranger danger, etc. There was only one time I needed to use it, and I recalled it perfectly fine. If your kid has trouble memorizing it then turn it into a song, give the letter version, or change numbers. It worked fine then and works fine now. Get a grip.
Cant imagine growing up under that kind of parental surveillance.
One of my memories was losing track of where my mum was when we went shopping. She was right behind me, but 5-6 year old me panicked and ran out of the main doors.
There was a school trip to teach us personal safety issues (not sure the age, I'm going to say 11 with low confidence), and one of the tasks was (to the entire group) "Go along this corridor to meet the policeman, Officer FooBar"; we went along the corridor, someone not in uniform asked us where we were going, one of the group said "to meet Officer FooBar", and this un-uniformed person said "I'm Officer FooBar, wait in this room". Then he left and the real Officer FooBar came in and asked us to explain the situation, and that we'd been fooled because we'd volunteered too much information. (The fake Officer FooBar was also an officer, but one who was pretending to be a Bad Man™ who was pretending to be an officer).
The UK school system, at the time I went through it, the year before you finished you were sent to a "trident work experience" thing for a week (I think to keep them out of the way of those doing exams) — mine was to be a teaching assistant in a primary school. The kids all called me "Mrs Ben" because to them "Mrs" was the title given to all teachers and they didn't get the difference between family names and given names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Georgia_area_codes
Of course, they're increasingly meaningless now that everyone has cell phones and gets to pick an area code.
OK, technically my parent's number was 10 digits rather than 5 because it was <areacode>577099, but that didn't matter as I'd almost always be local to that code, and if not could state my home town if talking to an adult who was doing the calling (or if I'd dialled the operator number, which I'd need to do anyway for a revere-charges call) and they'd know that bit.
Is that really true? I guess I'm not sure what the age cutoff for "small child" is. I was at Disneyland with my seven-year-old nephew recently, and he was able to immediately and without hesitation recite both his mother's and father's phone numbers. Incidentally, I still remember the phone number of the house my family moved out of when I was five years old, nearly 40 years ago.
Admittedly, I don't think my four-year-old niece knows her parents' phone numbers, and my other nephew, who is two, certainly does not. But that's why their parents don't let them out of sight in public.
And yes, there's the possibility that someone screws up, and they get lost. But I'm not convinced that assuaging fear of that is worth the trade-off of getting kids used to being tracked 24/7. (Regarding kidnapping, nowadays only the dumbest of kidnappers won't know to spot a smartwatch or smartphone on a kid and ditch them immediately. And regardless, the risk of a kid getting kidnapped is likely orders of magnitude lower than their parents might believe it to be.)
>The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily.
Kids can be taught at a very young age too. Teaching our kids our address and numbers was really important and surprisingly easy when they were still toddlers. To this day they still know our numbers despite rarely if ever having to actually dial it into a keypad.
There's a solution for this already. Face tattoos.
/s
So the kids need to figure out that in order to do this kind of thing they need to attach their watch to some less-cool kid's wrist that stays at school while they do the fun things. At least that less-cool kid hopefully gets some kind of reimbursement for offering that service.
They don’t have to sit at school, and they can wander around, without telling me — but if there is a serious trouble then it’s in everyone’s interest to have a up to date location data.
Are you kidding me? I remember being a teenager in the 90s. I had a great relationship with my parents (not perfect, of course, but who does?), and I absolutely would not have wanted them to have my exact location on-demand. I didn't get up to all that much that they didn't want me to do, but being tracked would mean I would not have done those things, and would have missed out on valuable experiences, because I would have been afraid that they'd randomly check up on me when I was in a place I wasn't supposed to be. (And no, I'm not talking about drinking or drugs or anything like that.)
The difference is you can leave your spouse, an option not really realistic for a child.
If I finally agree to something after being nagged interminably - have I consented, or have I just given in?
At the other end of the spectrum, if someone asks for something which doesn't particularly suit my purposes, but I agree to it as it seems fair enough - is that consent?
One situation seems like it is, the other one probably not. But where is the line? To me, consent seems like a vaguely letter-of-the-law, CYA type of word.
I feel like as a teen I would consent to being tracked by my parents but that doesn't mean it would be a good idea. It all depends on intent and parent-child relationship in the first place (looking back I didn't have a great one :shrug:)
Google doesn't need to know who I am to track me, Google cannot lock me up in my room, Google cannot gaslight/manipulate/abuse me based on where I went today
And even in the context of abusive relationships, sometimes the more tools the abuser has, the more secure they feel in their abuse, the less impactful is their abuse on daily lives of the abused. The abusers get worse when they feel like they are loosing control.
Isn't that how the vast majority of the net worth of NH readers was generated?
Work for one of the FANGS, a social media platform, in ad tech, in big data (anything with humans) or any company that monetises through a) advertising or b) selling user data.
I am sure there are some people who work in financial services as well but they are probably considered to have lower moral standards.
But kids don't get to consent to this. Their parents decide for them, regardless of what they do or don't want. I don't think kids should be forced to submit to 24/7 tracking, regardless of the intent behind it.
“huh, I guess they went to get some boba, we’ll just go get dinner without them”
on the flip side, I would have killed to know where the hell my parents were when they didn’t show up for 30+ minutes after school, pool, or baseball practice.
I don't have kids, so of course my opinion is irrelevant. But I do remember decently well what it was like to be a teenager in the 90s. I was a "good kid" and didn't get up to much that my parents didn't want me to do, but a) I did do some things my parents didn't want me to do, things that they would figure out real-time if they'd been able to track me, and b) despite me doing things they didn't want me to do, everything turned out fine. The idea that I wouldn't have been able to do those things, and the feeling of being trapped and constantly surveilled... that's gross.
And... you mention spouse, too? I would never let my spouse track me 24/7, and would never ask her or expect her to allow me to track her. To me, that would be creepy and an invasion of privacy. I get that some people do this (and know some of them), but I just think it's weird.
She doesn't share her location because she thinks it's creepy and I'm okay with that too.
People are different, and that's okay.
a big part of parenting is making sure your kid actually is at school, or monitoring more closely a child that has done improper things.
Also - when my daughter hacks all of her ex-boyfriend's social media accounts, should I monitor her activities by going and talking to the snooping neighbors?
I know we're not supposed to assume reading comprehension problems here, so I just have to assume that your dealing with it when they stray does not have any component of monitoring in it? Because I said "or monitoring more closely a child that has done improper things." and everyone seems to think that you shouldn't monitor someone that has done improper things - I really don't get it?
Seems like apathy, oh your kid is sneaking out with other kids to drink, well give them a talking to and then whatever you do, don't monitor them!
Oh your kid got a sugar daddy on Roblox, hmm, well go talk to the neighbors next door, the 1980s neighbor network was the best way to ever keep track of your kids for every kid that didn't grow up in the 1980s.
Half of the commentators here seem to think I'm living in the 80s, and the other half seem to think I'm living in Kansas, but everyone is in agreement on one thing which is that I should definitely behave myself to their model of raising kids in 1980s Kansas.
(but I 100% agree with you, trust is not achieved with panopticon control)
Indeed, it is actually eroded.
Quite sure that is the schools job. At least where I live the schools tend to assume several of the rights and responsibilities that normally fall on the parents.
> or monitoring more closely a child that has done improper things.
Do I want to know what you fucked up in your childhood that you assume your kids need constant monitoring to prevent a repeat?
whoops, you got me - I live where you live too so your argument is like really super good.
>> or monitoring more closely a child that has done improper things.
>Do I want to know what you fucked up in your childhood that you assume your kids need constant monitoring to prevent a repeat?
Do I want to know what you was done to you in your childhood that you uh, whatever that was?
Yes. The school is responsible for their safety and whereabouts. US K-12 public schools, if the child is missing from school, parents are contacted immediately. Teachers are responsible for attendance. All this is accomplished without device tracking. Federal law explicitly defines the school's responsibilities with regard to privacy rights of children in school. If parents wish to contact their child during school hours, they are asked to call the school, and school personnel will contact the child.
Device use is an enormous problem in schools. Talk to any teacher / admin: they will tell you allowing devices into schools has been a disaster.
The US is definitely the world, and I am definitely in that world, and the people who make that assumption are definitely super smart all around.
For me spause tracking was mostly for knowing when to go out of our apartment building to help her carry groceries from the car when she arrives.
If they want to do something that they don't want me to know, they can just turn off location sharing, or leave their watch at home.
Mine are grown now, but I’ve always told them: I’m not worried about where you are, I want to know where to go when something happens and you need a rescue. I want them to have the peace of mind that, if needed, the safety net is within reach. When I was a teen, my parents were in reach if I was in reach of a [wired] phone, but I didn’t always know how to tell them where I was at that moment.
Providing a safety net while allowing freedom boosts self confidence.
I have no reason to think they're impacted by me knowing where they are. They're confident, run around for hours, and are growing up just fine. So what if their parents can look up their location... big deal.
Pushing the alarmist argument, though: should I just take away their cell phones, to give them the same experience I had growing up? I didn't ever have even a dime for a phone booth.
Neither did I, but I knew how to place a collect call and my mom knew that if she got a collect call while I was away it was most likely me.
Everything must become better.
It's easy to have no reason to think something (especially when you don't want to), but that's not evidence it's false.
Why not just ask them?
I do wonder how they will feel after the first time you ask them, "Hey, why were you at place X, I thought you told me you would be at place Y?" (even if there's an innocent, reasonable explanation). Sometimes kids don't recognize the negatives to agreeing to something until they experience them.
However, if the consequences are dire, you encourage them to feel oppressed.
First, I have to say again that I'm not sitting there watching the map icon when they're running around.
But to your direct point, I'm very mindful not to call them out like that unless it was a very strong concern warranting a serious talk (which hasn't happened yet). I don't think that's wildly different than my parents not busting me for all shit they knew I was getting into, because they (more or less) trusted I knew right from wrong.
I probably wouldn't try to evade surveillance but if I got into the wrong(?) company I would probably be instructed on how to fake location (give devices to someone or put them in place etc).
I was born in the mid 90s and remember some of my friends getting flip phones in the early 2000s. One friend was given a phone that would report its location to their parents, presumably through some web-portal. I vaguely remember the conversation where my friend told me about this phone and the location tracking, and I remember the uncomfortable feeling that new idea provoked. I believe that reaction is a natural one to the idea of being followed everywhere you go, but that reaction is only possible if the idea hasn't been normalized from birth.
Just because surveillance is largely ubiquitous and societally normalized doesn't mean it has no impact, and that impact is unlikely to be articulated by those experiencing it.
I wish more people in these threads would think about this and understand this point.
In an imaginary world where tracking tech isn't available, and it's feasible and affordable to do so, I worry that some of these parents would hire someone to follow their child around all day. Any parent who thinks that's absurd should agree that device tracking is similarly crazy. (And any parent who actually would make that hire... wow, I just don't know what to say, other than that I feel sorry for your children.)
I think it comes down to trust in whether your watcher provides dire consequences. The likelihood that parents are honest with their children that there is little consequence to avoiding the tracking is greater than the same being said of a (perceived) larger, distant group/organization/agency.
We must all remain vigilant against the latter. But trust in the former is where we must start.
This is the biggest reason why I'm not against this tech. When I was a kid I was almost always within reach of a wired phone: at school they had a phone explicitly available for kids to use, and while out and about I was almost always in reach of a pay phone. Even if I had no cash I occasionally would call collect.
These days, the network of wired phones that I relied on is mostly gone. My kids aren't quite old enough to roam far enough for it to matter, but soon they will be, and a smart watch (with a limited set of contacts and no distracting features) currently seems like our best bet in the absence of the strong wired phone network that my parents relied on.
This is an aspect discussed in “‘I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy“
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. The value of protecting against chilling effects is not measured simply by focusing on the particular individuals who are deterred from exercising their rights. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity.
That's a bit tricky, though, because 24/7 tracking is the antithesis of freedom, regardless of the intent behind it.
Like a kid who won't climb a tree cause they're afraid of falling... But then will climb way higher with a parent there to catch them. And as a parent, you have to be willing to let them fall sometimes too - to show that they can handle it.
I find it kind of hard to believe that they just happen to have location sharing on without any sort of incentive
I'm not sure what's worse: enforcing that outright or having them see that level of invasion of privacy as normalized
The incentive might be as simple as not being bothered by a phonecall from a parent.
I'm sure most kids would be delighted to wear a brick if it reduced the stupid "where are you?" phonecalls by 90%.
Or even a small bacpack if it had a satiety sensor and cut out "have you eaten?" phonecalls as well.
Choppers flying around and all that. But sure, its 'convenient' for you. It would be also convenient if we all had tracking chips under our skin, so that good ol' government can fight crime better, a wonderful world to live in.
That’s creepy.
Your kids, however, freak out that you could be tracking them at any time. They are effectively barred from going anywhere that might not elicit parental approval, ALL THE TIME - not just when you are actually tracking them. It's the panopticon principle.
Depending on their age, this could have major effects on their development. If they are 6, it is probably fine - especially if they don't know you can track them. If they are 16, not so much.
Honestly, it's because I just don't care. I'm not worried about her changing plans or going somewhere without telling me (the feels dirty just thinking about) and at a certain age, I also won't care what my kids do. They will also change plans, or explore off the path. So what? But that one time I _really_ need to call them or they need help, we will be glad they have a little bit of tech on them.
I also find it somewhat interesting that many of the same people who are so worried about this type of surveillance _already_ have the devices and/or technical knowledge to surveil others and choose not to for whatever reason. For example, we have home networks and could track what our families do online. We _could_ put a malicious app into someone's phone, or a tracker on someone's car. Simply having the ability to do something does not imply that it will be done, and certainly doesn't imply that it will be done maliciously.
I've heard other parents say they only track their kids in case of an emergency, while you admit you admit you track your kids for trivial issues.
I'm not a parent, so I wouldn't know, but I'd like to think I can trust my kid if he tells me he goes to school on time. Seems more useful to build trust than to know for sure his precise location, because there are a lot of things which can't be tracked by technology.
They need to be able to do things their parents disapprove from time to time, or just hide some behavior that they feel shy about.
Sex, meeting people outside of your social norms, attempting stupid stunts, and all that is part of growing.
The simple fact you can know where they are at all time steal those opportunities from them, and normalize spying so that they grow into citizens that will accept it in the future by the gov.
It also removes the parts of the day when they are on their own, and have to figure things out, then deal with the consequences of their action because the parents are not there to get them out of trouble.
My daughter is loving a little book of a little girl that her mom sends to buy milk on her own for the first time. It's a Japanese book. Now Japanese and Taiwanese and much Asia for that matter are not famous for letting children just roam without freaking out every step of the way, but there is a pretty common theme in Japan of letting small children do groceries, sometimes as young as 4 years old.
When I grew up in Germany, it too was a very safe society, so we would play in the street on our own. Before that I still have memories of my older brother taking me to buy Bread when I was 3 years old in the Normandie, I think in more remote places in France you can still do that.
Part of the issue is safety from people and the other part is actually just the proliferation of cars, but if I had children in the US I would not let them out of my eyes even one second.
That being said, I do sometimes put a Xiaomi smart band on her when I'm concerned about her heart rate. It's way less intrusive than fitbit. To put a device on a child where the makers used to brag internally about being able to know when people have sex is insane to me.
That ship has sailed, regardless of parental tracking. I feel very lucky I was still among the generations that could do stupid stuff and not immediately have ten cameras dump my personal live on YouTube or a livestream.
Unless you live in India/China, there are plenty of places where you can get privacy, and kids look for them.
Do you think they have sex in public?
Sex,
You think kids shouldn't have their location tracked so they can have sex?
That’s an American cultural fallacy, like how Germans believe you’ll get sick if your kidneys get cold. Asian kids in America are strongly discouraged from doing these things (some do it anyway, but there’s measurable differences in aggregate behavior: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/tables/3...) and have vastly better outcomes than European American kids, especially in the bottom 20% of the income distribution. Similarly regimented communities like Mormons are also highly successful.
Cultivating impulsiveness has its benefits. If you’re trying to build a world empire, maybe give your kids the freedom to succumb to the impulses of their underdeveloped brains. If you’re trying to maintain and perpetuate an orderly civilization, carefully regiment their behavior until they’re capable of controlling themselves.
I gained very very significant experiences by lying to my parents about where i was. I never got hurt, not once, we were never running from the cops or anything and i solved every problem on my own. Those are invaluable experiences! A 6 year old simply cannot, but a teenager must.
What is your true motivation in tracking them? Is it based in fear? And I'm sure you're aware that any apps they have installed on their phone can also be capable of storing and selling this location data you'd like them to provide. Are you comfortable with Google storing a record of every movement your child makes?
You think someone keeping track of their small child means they will somehow track their location when the child is 30 years old?
Can you explain why this completely abnormal behavior is an accurate prediction?
“Abnormal” is ambigous. It can either mean “unhealthy” or “uncommon”. I mean that this behavior, while unhealthy, is not uncommon. Most parents absolutely do not trust their kids to be adults, since in the eyes of the parents, the kids still are just that; kids. It takes an uncommonly strong sense of self-discipline and insight on the side of the parents to force themselves to break out of that thinking.
Now you're either saying that 'most' parents track the live location of their children into their 30s or you're saying something vague and irrelevant.
What are you saying exactly? This was about location tracking.
It seems like you're either talking about your own irrelevant frustrations or you're saying things that you have no evidence of.
The question, as posed by you, was whether a parent who was keeping track of their child while the child was very young, would still do so when the child comes of age and into adulthood. I proposed that the likelihood was very high indeed, since most parents have trouble reevaluating their perception of their child, even though that perception was formed and solidified while the child was very young. It follows, that parents would not see a good enough reason for deliberately altering their habitual tracking as the child turns into an adult.
You keep avoiding saying location tracking. Are you seriously talking about location tracking an adult in their 30s? Say it directly.
Are you saying this happens with knowledge or without? With consent or without? Are you saying parents are putting live location trackers on their 30 year old children's owned phones?
Why do you keep ignoring the actual point and saying abstract irrelevant things like 'parents want to keep track of their children' ?
Address the actual point and show some evidence.
> You keep avoiding saying location tracking. Are you seriously talking about location tracking an adult in their 30s? Say it directly.
Yes, of course. I did not intend to be obscure.
> Are you saying this happens with knowledge or without? With consent or without? Are you saying parents are putting live location trackers on their 30 year old children's owned phones?
I’m saying that parents will probably keep location trackers on their kids’ phones, and never get out of the habit of installing them, regardless of how their child ages into adulthood. Show me a parent who had such a tracker installed in a child’s phone, but go out of their way to make an effort to uninstall it the day the child turns 18, and I will show you a rare parent indeed. With or without knowledge and/or consent? Of course without their child’s consent; the parents originally put the tracker in the child’s phone without consent, and so the habit will continue. They key word in all of this is habit; parents acquire habits about their kids, and will continue to follow these habits regardless. The same goes for knowledge; if the child originally was always told about the tracking, this will continue, but if the child was never informed, this will also continue.
Parents, like all people, are creatures of habit, and will not easily change their ways and opinions, even though time passes, things change, and children grow up.
> Why do you keep ignoring the actual point and saying abstract irrelevant things like 'parents want to keep track of their children'?
You are quoting something I did not write, and I can therefore not answer this question.
> Address the actual point and show some evidence.
If you think I am ignoring the point, please state what you would like the point to be, and I will comment on it as proper in this forum. Contrary to what you seem to believe, I am not trying to be obtuse.
Regarding evidence, I am not aware of any research about any of this.
You don't say. In other words you are making up and hallucinating these vague scenarios. You saying things like 'parents are creatures of habit' is not evidence that these made up things actually happen.
This smart watch is being advertised for actual kids. 6-12 year olds. Do you actually think a 30 year old is going to keep using their toy watch for 20 years, stay on their parents phone plans and their parents are going to track their 30 year old child?
If you ask 100 people if they think a child is going to keep their toy watch that is made for tracking kids for 20 years and let their parents track them decades into adulthood, they wouldn't just say no, they would look at you like you're speaking a different language.
This has never happened and you aren't even close to showing this is something that happens normally because all you keep doing is repeating your claim without evidence.
You are using very combative and insulting language, which is not helping.
> This smart watch is being advertised for actual kids. 6-12 year olds. Do you actually think a 30 year old is going to keep using their toy watch for 20 years, stay on their parents phone plans and their parents are going to track their 30 year old child?
No. I was not discussing the watch. I made a comment specifically on your statement about whether a parent, which initially has used location tracking on a child, will keep doing so as the child has reached the age of 30. And my position is that yes, very many parents will do so if they don’t need to alter their habits significantly in order to keep doing it.
No I'm not. This is something people do when they say things without evidence, they try to attack how the other person is pointing out they have no evidence.
If you don't want to be told you're making things up, prove that you're not. You keep repeating the same claims and you haven't shown anything to support that.
No. I was not discussing the watch.
You might want to look at the title because that's what this thread is about.
I made a comment specifically on your statement about whether a parent, which initially has used location tracking on a child, will keep doing so as the child has reached the age of 30. And my position is that yes, very many parents will do so if they don’t need to alter their habits significantly in order to keep doing it.
You have definitely made the comment over and over, it's just that it's nonsense and you have zero evidence that it's true. Repeating yourself isn't evidence and rephrasing your claims isn't either.
It doesn't even make sense. Why would someone become and adult and never get a new phone so they can keep using what they had when they turned 10 for multiple decades?
Who has ever heard of this happening let alone enough that "very many parents do so"?
This is not reality. This is like someone saying that bigfoot exists and when someone asks for evidence they just say "what I'm saying is that bigfoot exists".
> You might want to look at the title because that's what this thread is about.
A thread very frequently strays in topic, and comments are not all strictly about the article’s headline.
> It doesn't even make sense. Why would someone become and adult and never get a new phone
My thinking was that parents would typically keep installing tracking software on the child’s phone whenever they get the opportunity to do so, provided they have acquired the habit of always doing that.
It’s quite possible, of course, that, in practice, most adult children don’t have any tracking software on their phone, simply because they have gotten a new phone without the parents having access.
> This is not reality. This is like someone saying that bigfoot exists and when someone asks for evidence they just say "what I'm saying is that bigfoot exists".
We don’t have any hard evidence either way. I mean, either parents who track their children’s location do mostly stop doing that when the children become adults, or parents do try to keep tracking the kids as long as practically possible. Both are observable phenomena (unlike bigfoot, whose non-existence is not observable).
I think you mean that you started making outrageous claims that you can't back up.
My thinking was that parents would typically keep installing tracking software on the child’s phone whenever they get the opportunity to do so, provided they have acquired the habit of always doing that.
So in this made up scenario, a parent is stealing their 30 year old child's phone and installing tracking software on it?
Where are you even getting these ideas? You keep repeating them, what even made you think this stuff in the first place?
We don’t have any hard evidence either way.
You're the one making the claim and you don't have any evidence at all, hard, or soft. You can't even explain how it would happen.
I mean, either parents who track their children’s location do mostly stop doing that when the children become adults,
Now the backpeddling finally begins because you keep replying without evidence.
Both are observable phenomena
So observe it and show me evidence.
Here's some actual evidence. Most people replace their phone every 3.5 years on average. Not every 20 years while using the toy watch they got when they were 10.
https://www.sellcell.com/blog/how-often-do-people-upgrade-th...
If a parent did so for a 15-year old kid who got themselves a new phone, I would assume that a parent is likely to do it again when the child is at 18, and beyond.
> Where are you even getting these ideas? You keep repeating them, what even made you think this stuff in the first place?
People’s opinions and habits change slowly, if at all. This is especially noticeable in parent’s opinions of their kids; parents frequently treat their children as if they were underage, regardless of the children’s actual age. It’s a habit the parents fell into, and is hard to break, and most parents have neither the motivation nor the insight to do so.
This parental behavior is observable to most people. I used this information to deduce that parents who already track their kid’s location when the kid is underage would still do so, by mere force of habit and unchanging attitude, at 18 and beyond.
> Here's some actual evidence. Most people replace their phone every 3.5 years on average.
All right, in that case the parents who are habitually tracking the location of their children will probably only track their kids up to the age of about 20, when the child statistically has gotten a new phone without the parent’s access. This will make the tracking stop naturally in any case, whatever the parent’s wishes are.
My thinking was mostly about the attitude of the parents. I.e. whether the parents would wish and try to keep tracking the location of their children, given that the parents did keep track of their kids’ location when they were under 18. Your data, however, shows that tracking becomes infeasible as soon as the child acquires a new phone without the parent’s access, and therefore the wishes of the parent becomes moot.
I remain unmoved on my point about the attitude, wishes and inclinations of parents, but since your data has made those moot in most practical cases, the issue becomes uninteresting. I think we can therefore wrap up this discussion.
> you started making outrageous claims that you can't back up.
> in this made up scenario
> you don't have any evidence at all, hard, or soft. You can't even explain how it would happen.
> Now the backpeddling finally begins because you keep replying without evidence.
Your attitude is frankly terrible and can I see from your comment history that this has been a recurring problem for you. I would prefer it if you would refrain from commenting further on this forum until you have at least learned to restrain yourself.
Your assumption is wrong, why would an adult with a new phone let them? Where is your evidence that this happens?
People’s opinions and habits change slowly, if at all.
Not kids.
This parental behavior is observable to most people.
Prove it, you haven't linked a single thing.
All right, in that case the parents who are habitually tracking the location of their children will probably only track their kids up to the age of about 20,
More back peddling. Now it's not 30 year olds any more to try to save some face. This is like people doing rain dances or using leeches for medical treatments. Repeating the same thing over and over then seeing if you can get the other person to stop showing that it's made up is not the same as figuring something out. You need actual numbers, data, statistics and you have none of that.
I would prefer it if you would refrain from commenting further on this forum until you have at least learned to restrain yourself.
I would prefer it if you had evidence when making claims. I've seen this dozens of times. Someone with no evidence and a ridiculous claim can't admit that they have no evidence so they repeat their claims more forcefully and say the other person is being a big meany by pointing out that without real data it's all made up.
The other two scenarios are trying to pretend the burden of proof is not on the person who made the claim and pretending you already gave evidence, but we haven't gone there yet.
Here's an actual outside perspective where people are universally mortified at the idea of someone tracking a 24 year old.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Adulting/comments/168eike/young_adu...
You said “a parent is stealing their 30 year old child's phone”, so consent is not required.
> Not kids.
Maybe, but we’re not talking about them. We were talking about parents.
> Prove it, you haven't linked a single thing.
This wikipedia article has some references: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conservatism_(bel...>
> More back peddling.
I’m not “back peddling”, I’m conceding that the point is now moot and uninteresting.
> I would prefer it if you had evidence when making claims.
I’ve seen no evidence from you, either, that those parents who track the location of their child will mostly give that up volontarily as the child becomes an adult. You have shown that those parents will lose the tracking anyway for technical reasons, and you have shown that most people find the tracking of adults to be disagreeable. But nothing which speaks to the issue in question.
> Here's an actual outside perspective where people are universally mortified at the idea of someone tracking a 24 year old.
Oh, I agree; most people do find the idea to be distasteful, especially when presented like in that link, i.e. from the now-adult child’s perspective. But we were not talking about “most people”, the issue is whether parents who already track their children’s location would continue to try to do so.
You: Oh, absolutely.
You: And my position is that yes, very many parents will do so
You said “a parent is stealing their 30 year old child's phone”, so consent is not required.
This is just a lie. I asked if that's what you were saying, which it seems to be since people switch their phones every few years.
I’m not “back peddling”, I’m conceding that the point is now moot and uninteresting.
I think you mean 'I realize what I'm saying is ridiculous and defensible'.
I’ve seen no evidence from you,
I certainly called this, the reversed burden of proof for your claims.
parents will lose the tracking anyway for technical reasons
Now it's 'technical reasons' and 'the point is uninteresting' instead of "parents that track their small children track them when they're 30 and very many parents will do it".
would continue to try to do so.
Now it's "try to do so". What does that mean? People turn into adults and get new phones. Now you're not saying they will, you're saying "they'll try".
This was ridiculous from the first reply, how many times are you going to shift these goal post, back peddle, lie and repeat yourself without evidence?
You seemed, however, from the start to argue against the “trying” part and not the “will succeed” part, which confused the issue, since I still think parents will try. If only you had been more clear, this could have been settled quite soon.
> This is just a lie.
I should perhaps have worded it like “the phrase you used was…”, which is what I meant. I did not mean to claim that you said some parent was actually stealing someone’s phone.
> I certainly called this, the reversed burden of proof for your claims.
Since we both claimed things which can be observed, any one of us could potentially give proof. I did not mean to push the burden on proof wholly unto you, only to point out that it was not completely mine.
> Now you're not saying they will, you're saying "they'll try".
Yes, that is my position. But it’s an uninteresting one, since they’ll fail (as your reference showed).
> This was ridiculous from the first reply, how many times are you going to shift these goal post, back peddle, lie and repeat yourself without evidence?
You have a real problem with following the guidelines for this forum. I suggest you re-read them. Note, for example, that most of your actual reply now consists entirely of references to what I wrote, and references to me, and not about the actual issue we are supposedly debating. This is usually something to be avoided.
Stop with the persecution complex. Pointing out that you don't have evidence is not a personal attack. You could avoid everything by showing evidence but you won't.
I could not show evidence I did not have, which is understandable since I was wrong. You did have a reference, which you showed, and so you did resolve the issue. And after some further confusion about the actual issue (the “will” vs. “will try”), the issue is now resolved.
This topic is always so alarmist. I have kids and a spouse. We all have Find My and Location Sharing on our phones. I don't FrEaK oUt that my kids are going to die if I'm not tracking their every movement. But it's nice to glance at Find My app and see if the kids are still hanging out at Starbucks or they got to school on time. It's convenient to see which corner of the park they're at when I need to go pick them up. I can see if my wife's still at Whole Foods and send her a message to pick up baru nuts. They can see if I'm still at work or headed home.
This idea of helicopter parents vs free-range glory is a false dichotomy.