This is very affirming of what I sometimes feel like is lazy parenting on my part. My kid is 17 and I am not on her devices at all, nor do I check her grades other than at grading periods. She knows what we expect of her and keeps us informed when she's struggling. We do track each other--all 3 of us--, but mostly in a "are they at home or at work?" when deciding whether to call or to text. I do sometimes notice she's not where I expect and text her to ask about it rather than accusing her of anything nefarious. I am sure that sometimes she abuses our trust, but she's nearly an adult and needs to start learning how to make decisions for herself and handle the consequences. She definitely tells me about stuff I would have kept secret from my parents, which feels like a win, even when said "stuff" stresses me out a little!
I'm trying to be proactive about opting out of helicopter parenting (my kid is only 7) , and found this piece incredibly helpful and validating.
My kid is a natural risk-taker, which I admire and which of course also scares me, and we are already having very in-depth conversations about how we can build mutual trust around risky behavior -- with me increasing my trust in his decision making in step with him increasing HIS trust that when I do say NO to something that it's because I think that no is an important one. It's truly much harder then just saying no to all risk taking!
A friend of mine is dealing with this with her similarly aged son and skiing - how do you figure out how to teach him to land well, to scout well, to have good judgement etc when it comes to jumps? Well, you have to let him go on a bunch of jumps - and do exactly what you’re doing when it comes to saving “no” for when it really matters
Yes, this is exactly it! (also with biking, climbing, and other activities)
Our process:
-At the beginning of the day (and then as needed) we talk about what he might want to do, how he is going to decide what to jump off of, where he wants to stop so we can scout. I tell him if there are any hard lines from my side (ie that cliff over there is off limits) and why. And then I let him go for it and cross my fingers. He almost always makes good decisions, and this increases my trust.
- If he blatantly ignores one of my hard limits (rare but it happens) then we are done with risky activities for the day.
- We also signed him up for a trampoline/tumbling class, so he can learn how to manage his body while in the air from someone who actually knows how to do it safely. It's been fantastic so far.
I was a middle school teacher when these online grading information systems first came into use and were required of us. It was a problem to work around.
I had a son in middle school and told him up front I would never check his grades. He should just keep me informed. I didn't want him to feel micromanaged, and I trusted him. There was no reason not to.
But I remember the ordeal it was for many students whose parents were watching, checking every day. I remember once giving a particularly difficult exam on which the grades were relatively low. I asked the kids, who had their papers back and knew there own grades, whether it would be easier for them if I delayed posting until a few more grades had come in (which would have raised their averages). The poll was overwhelming yes, as they expected their parents would over-react.
When my kids were first in middle school I was way too in to the grade app and was totally the over-reacter! It had a bad effect on my relationship with my kid - who was actually a great student! I tell friends now that if they are going to check grades treat it like the stock market - don't get too worked up over the daily ups and downs, rather look for trends over time. I took it off my phone for my high schooler and try to only log in maybe monthly. And I tell him when I'm going to look. Like "How's your grades?" "Fine." "I'll probably look at powershool on Friday. Anything I should be aware of?" "Bruh. [eyeroll]"
I think one of the best approaches to these apps is to work on some real empathy on how it would've felt to be surveilled that way when you were a kid. I think the "I'm going to look at this on Friday, what should I know?" approach is pretty great (I also think the app itself should only update once a week)
I definitely agree on the limitations for the app updating. I actually just discussed this yesterday with a class of seniors, and I was surprised at how divided the group was. One half strongly thought that limiting the grade updates to once a week (they all thought Monday morning was preferable to Friday, though I can see benefits to both) would help them stress less, while the other half strongly thought it would increase their anxiety. Their reasoning was that they'd have to endure the not-knowing for a whole week and it would make them feel "less in control." I thought both of these reasons were interesting, because as it is now, they don't know when a grade will be entered and they don't have any more "control" when it's random. One student said that he stopped checking altogether and only sees his grades when progress reports come.
I was also thinking about the workplace parallels - I work in manufacturing which is a data- and reporting-rich environment. The shift leader does a report out at the end of each shift. The department manager reports to the site leader every day. The site leader does weekly progress reports and then there is an 'executive' review on a monthly basis. In principle the division president has access to every shift report, but it doesn't make sense for him to monitor things at that level because he'd constantly be tilting at windmills. Just like over-interested parents maybe?!
My wife is also a middle school teacher, and the one instance (of many) that sticks out to me is a parent who emailed her late on a Friday because their child had a zero for an assignment. My wife knew that the reason was completely benign, like she hadn't graded it yet or something like that - the kid wasn't missing it and it was fine. But the parent said in the email that their child was going to be grounded all weekend! My wife tries to keep good boundaries about not answering/sending emails outside of working hours, both for her own health and to not set bad expectations for parents and colleagues. But here she is feeling she needs to respond ASAP so the poor kid isn't grounded! I don't completely fault the parent; the product is designed to do this, intentional or not.
This one anecdote sums up SO MUCH of what this newsletter talks about in this broad space.
I have an 8yo and was anti-device until I realized younger kids don't have easy access to phones anymore. If they're in a jam and need to call mom or dad, there are no payphones, no landline at their friend's house, and all the adults' phones are locked with a passcode. While we're more connected than ever before, kids are actually more isolated than we were in the 80s! To top it off, I'm divorced from a man who makes some very poor choices. So, a smartwatch it is!
i think about this a lot too! i sincerely wish we had a landline for this exclusive purpose. if i run to the store for milk, i'd love for my nine yr old to be able to call me! ditto having kids make their own plans! it was very mortifying to have my dad answer the phone when boys i liked called to talk, but we survived!
Erin, I installed an Ooma VOIP phone for precisely this purpose. You can get one for only a couple dollars a month that runs off your house internet, but since I live in the land of frequent power outages and our internet is shaky, I paid for the one that runs off a cell signal and has a battery back-up. It's about $27/month, and it runs through a big yellow phone with a corded receiver (you can use basically any landline phone you want for it though) that is permanently on the kitchen counter.
When my eight-year-old is home sick, I don't have to put her in the car to go pick her two-year-old sister up from daycare. If she doesn't want to come to the store with me, I can take just the toddler and leave the eight-year-old at home for 45 minutes. She can call me, my husband, 911, you name it...but she can only make voice calls on it.
It works with E-911 systems.
She's also allowed to call her friends on it (within reason on hours) but none of the kids her age seem to know how to do a voice call, only video!
I did get a landline for this reason, when my kid entered 6th grade and now is home alone for a little while after getting off the bus. One nice benefit is that the grandparents can call to talk to the kids directly! And it's a good way to teach phone etiquette.
Yes, they make smartwatches for kids that only do calling and messaging. They also offer tracking, and I don't like that, but do like knowing my daughter can reach me if needed.
That's a really interesting point. I've thought about getting a flip phone but so many things need a smart phone now. Honestly, I would only really miss the maps app.
When I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I studied abroad in England. Between the end of the semester and my flight home, I had nine days to just bum around England and Scotland. Cell phones existed (and were quite common in the U.K. then) but were not yet anything but for rich people in the U.S. yet (many areas did not yet even have cell service) and I certainly couldn't have afforded international calling on one.
I had no specific plans, just got on a train to wherever, would stop by the Thomas Cook booth in the station and see what hostel availability there was for that night, and stay there. Every couple of days, I would either pay a couple of pounds in a train station pay phone to leave a message with my mom about what city I was in or I'd use the email on the shared computer in the hostel living room to shoot her a quick message. Other than that, she had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and I didn't know what was going on at home.
I figured if anything really bad happened to me, the embassy would figure it out and contact her soon enough, if anything really bad happened at home it would realistically take me a few days to get there anyway, and exactly what was anybody going to be able to do about any of this? I was thousands of miles away in another country.
Anyway, those were some of the greatest days of my life, and I think about that when I hear about students whose parents have Life 360 on them from afar. What, exactly, are you going to be able to do about where your adult child is?
I was abroad in France at about the same time. I emailed with my mom a lot, but I only called her once all semester — from a payphone on Mother's Day! And the emails would come sporadically, whenever I had access to an internet cafe — nothing like what we have now. She just had to believe that 20-year-old me was figuring things out.
I still kind of can't believe that 20 yr old me went to study abroad in Italy taking my first international trip solo and navigating trains/ airport transfers without a phone. We were given a plane ticket and an address. I didn't speak Italian and I had to figure out how to get from point a to point b with paper maps and dictionaries. And called home maybe once? Different world entirely!
A few years ago, we took our then-four-year-old daughter with us to Japan. She is ADHD as hell and also has ZERO issue about darting off after squirrels or what have you. Our big fear was NOT someone would kidnap her (which isn't actually a thing but is the reason so many parents of littles put AirTags in their kids' backpacks) but that she'd jump onto a crowded subway train before we determined it was the correct one and the doors would close and she'd be halfway across Tokyo before we were able to (with the language barrier) figure out where in the hell she was.
We used a kid leash for some of the trip, but we also got her a medical ID style bracelet that she couldn't take off. The back side had her full name, our full names and our relationship to her, and our full cell phone numbers with international code. We taught her that if she got separated she was to find an adult and show them the bracelet and tell them she was looking for her parents and these were their names and phone numbers. We were banking on her finding some Japanese stranger who either spoke English or was able to figure out that this obviously not-Japanese child was lost and looking for her parents and he/she would find a police officer or security guard or someone who spoke at least rudimentary English and could figure out the situation. (Fortunately, we never needed to do this in Japan, but it happened locally at the zoo once.)
I reckon things would have worked out exactly as you predicted — so many Japanese people went so far out of their way to get us where we were going in the metro in Tokyo, and we were adults! My hot tip for kids is an accidental discovery — I ordered lots of stick-in name tags for my son's possessions when he started school; they allowed two lines so I put my phone number on the second line. When we are out exploring, it is helpful to remind him that his coat/bag/water bottle has my number in case he gets lost
My ex-husband’s parents used to dress his younger brothers in identical clothes when they were going to a zoo/amusement park/what have you so if one wandered off they could say “This is exactly what he’s wearing.” Now a lot of friends take a picture at the beginning of the day to show the outfit in case that happens. Also no one knows anyone’s phone number anymore but we had to memorize ours as kids. I still remember friends’ home phone numbers from childhood but couldn’t tell you one current friend’s number.
100% I arrived in Hong Kong for a semester abroad in 2005 and somehow made it from the airport to my dorm via 3 types of public transportation without GPS. I called my parents via a very sketchy Skype connection on my laptop like... twice? And I wrote a blog (2005!!) that my family could read to hear about what was happening with me. I posted pictures taken with my DIGITAL CAMERA and was then interrogated by my mother in the comments section on names and backstories of all my new friends. I emailed my parents that I was heading to the airport something like 20 hours before they were scheduled to pick me up back stateside. Somehow they found me in O'Hare airport the next day.
I once had to dramatically cry in an Italian airport because I didn't have the second paper ticket for one leg of my journey (that the airline had not given me). After about 100 per favores and some ugly crying, the attendant heaved a deep sigh and printed it for me.
It makes me so sad that this generation doesn't experience the same kinds of freedom that we did in pre-cell days. I'm an elder millennial(1981) and I think I'm one of the last to have most of my college experience with my parents unable to text me regularly. I feel the same about my study-abroad days.
Same! I did study abroad in England at 18, and did some backpacking at the end of the school year. It was my first year of university, 2004-05, and cell phones were expensive for us. Long distance was expensive. Skype and the like weren't common, and my family's clunky old computer couldn't really handle it. My mom said when she talked to my friends' parents back home, they would say they spoke to their kids on the phone all the time (like at least once a week?) and ask what I was up to. Mom would kinda shrug and be like, "She emailed me a few days ago I think? Last I heard she was going to Scotland." I did keep a public LiveJournal so I could share things with folks back home, but that was on my own terms, and it was done from the computer lab, uploading pictures from my digital camera every now and then.
It was bewildering to those other parents, but it was just too expensive for us to talk on the phone regularly, and my mom firmly believed that at university I needed to be left to do my own thing. A friend in my hall had a cell phone and *hated* it - his parents made him have one because they wanted to be able to keep tabs on him while he was abroad. They had zero concept of time zones and what he might be doing so he'd get interrupted during a movie or studying. I felt bad for him, but also grateful, because even if I could have afforded a phone at the time I know my parents wouldn't have been trying to monitor me, it just wasn't their style.
My kids are in their 20s and I am observing that once you start tracking your kids, it becomes really hard to stop! One friend reports checking on her 25 year old daughter every night because otherwise she cannot sleep. Another friend described panicking when she tracked her kids phone to some random field where it sat for hours, and while she was sure his body had been dumped or something terrible, it turned out her kid was at a friend's barn watching football, having a great day. I say this with such empathy because I really struggled with anxiety when my kids started driving but feel very strongly that most typical teens* are being robbed of privacy and feeling safe in the world, as well as not being taught the habits of common courtesy like sending the, "I'm on my way home, can I pick anything up?" text or the opportunity to respond to a kid's "hey, here safe, all good" with a "have a blast" text from mom and dad. The hard truth is that tracking makes us feel like we have some kind of control but that is an illusion. The work of parenting teens and older kids is in disentangling from one another and setting up healthy boundaries, and that means doing the work to learn to manage your worries/anxieties.
* I absolutely understand there are individual instances where tracking feels more necessary, so I am adding that caveat.
This gets to the heart of it: if you track your kids *instead* of working on trust or making good decisions, what’s going to happen when you’re no longer tracking them or it fails? They don’t have the necessary backup skills. It’s the illusion of security.
I say this as a 48 year old who lives alone: my mom makes me text her every day to tell her I’m alive. I would NEVER do tracking with anyone (I do share my ETA from Apple Maps on my way to my parents’ house so they know when to expect me) but the text lets her sleep so I don’t argue. It didn’t start until I separated from my ex-husband (on good terms) in my 30s. She was like “How will I know you’re alive?” My response was “There are people I talk to every day” and hers was “I don’t know those people.” I went away to college etc. and moved out of their house 6 months after graduation and lived alone when I first moved to NYC when I was 27, but somehow the advent of texting in the intervening years made it a necessity for her. This is a woman who was in bars with stolen baptismal certificate fake ID at 16.
We have a tradition in our family of texting when we cross state lines, which started as a compromise with mom when my sister and I went to college far from home (in an early texting era). She didn't want to smother us, but she also wanted to know in which state's ditches to start searching for our (presumably) dead bodies. So now as I'm approaching 40 my most active group text is a family chain that's 80% people just texting the names of states. It includes my two sisters, their husbands, my parents, my husband and our 2 nearly adult kids.
Over Christmas it was like 5 straight days of "Kentucky" "Indiana" "Illinois" "Iowa" "Us too! Iowa!" "Illinois" "Iowa finally!! See you in 1 hour!" "Illinois" "Illinois" "Michigan" "Iowa" "Illinois"
I wish my 82 year old mom who lives alone would agree to to text me every morning. Also: I feel like the last sentence of your comment is the start of a good short story.
They stole the baptismal certificates from the convent at their high school. My grandparents were very permissive as far as curfew, and my mom’s cousin was a bandleader in NYC so she was allowed to go anywhere he was playing. Of course then there would be side quests from that location!
As far as your mom - my neighbor’s dad fell on Christmas Day, so they got him an Alexa and an indoor motion sensor camera. But I also follow someone on Twitter who does fitness tracking with her elderly father using their Apple Watches - so she knows he is up & about every day because she sees his steps.
So yes, a entire novel in that baptismal certificate!
My mom remains resistant to any kind of tracking. She remains in her too-large home and and keeps her cellphone in a ziplock bag in a drawer in the kitchen. I am learning that I have to treat my mom a lot like I treat my young adult kids - like a full-fledged adult with agency who makes decisions I dislike but to whom I feel obligated to support no matter what.
I have younger kids and my oldest is in 1st grade. I was amazed at how many of his peers got smartwatches for Christmas. Where I struggle most is how to navigate the pressure from other parents in our community who do track their kids. My son asked for a watch but couldn’t communicate why he needed one when I asked other than his friends have one. We also had an incident with a neighbor who saw my sons out riding their scooters alone and felt it wasn’t appropriate. They were less than 2 blocks away and we live in an extremely safe place. It’s hard for me to verbalize why I don’t want to track my kids without feeling judged or as if I’m a bad parent.
One of the useful things about the book is how helpful it is when it comes to generating scripts for those sorts of situations - they’re not, like, in a list (at least not that I remember) but will give you a bunch of ideas!
This interview was so reassuring, thank you so much!! I’ll have to get a copy of the book.
Our family has always been Team Screen Time- as in, we don’t limit it.
Perhaps our boys are anomalies when it comes to using technology, but we figured that the chances of them having careers that use screens most of the time were high, so why not get used to that? They will independently switch from screens to an analog activity without our input.
We also don’t track location or messages with our middle schooler, but App Store purchases need to be approved. He isn’t allowed to have social media accounts yet (and I’m not sure when is best for that to happen).
I was surprised to discover his friends have much different setups- lots of screen time limitations, trackers, surveillance.
There was only one time I asked my kid to hand over his phone because he was acting different (his texts were totally fine), and we’ve told him that we trust him to make good decisions and to trust his gut. We’ll trust him until he gives us a reason not to trust him--that’s how trust works, right?
Virginia Sole-Smith has written about how screen time anxiety functions similarly to diet culture - restriction is what leads so many kids (and adults) not to figure out ways to self-regulate. One of my favorite things in the world is watching a kid willingly put down their tablet.
I've never tracked my kids (17 and 20) locations even though almost every parent I know does track in some way. I do ask them to keep me generally apprised of their location - mostly for the younger one at this point. When the older one is home I'll still ask her to "text me when you get there" if its bad weather or she's going out of the area, but I try not to get too up in her business. Sometimes I feel silly about even that remembering that my parents never knew where I was as a teen, but then again my mom is the biggest "text me when you get there" person so I know she would have been a location tracker if she'd had the technology! Only one time did I wonder if not tracking was a serious mistake. When my oldest was in high school she was the victim of a crime which led to a - very brief, but it felt like eternity - period of time where we did not have any idea where she was but knew for sure she was in danger. Would tracking her have resolved the situation quicker and with less trauma? For me and her dad, yes. for sure. For her? I don't know. We were very lucky that things didn't turn out worse - she was shaken up pretty bad and also deeply embarrassed for getting into a bad situation in the first place, but she's recovered emotionally and was physically unharmed. It also was a real inflection point in her life and she ended up on a much stronger path after that situation.
I'm so glad your daughter is ok. I think we spend a lot of our time parenting in the mind of the worst case scenario, but I think that is a recipe for pretty profound anxiety for both parents and kids. I am also a non-tracker and keep my phone out of the bedroom at night, and my son ended up in an lengthy lockdown during an active shooter situation at his uni. I also doubted my choices in that moment, but my son was adamant that he would never call us if he was in that kind of danger because first of all, he needed to be fully present and focused on his safety and survival and that he would never allow, in the worst case scenario, for that kind of wrenching conversation to be our last one.
I recently read that NYT ethics question about the parents who installed a camera in their daughters room to know what’s going on with her boyfriend--and still have it years later! Absolutely insane.
I was thinking about this too! My jaw was on the floor! The most absolutely wild question I’ve ever heard! And that *now* they don’t want to betray her trust by telling her they’ve been spying on her for years??? I would legit never talk to my parents again.
Two kids, two different experiences with such tracking technology.
My 17-year-old son is an underperforming student. If it weren't for PowerSchool, he would lie about his grades and make excuses for missing assignments, etc. (He's in therapy for anxiety and depression, and we hope things will turn around by his senior year.) I wish I could trust him more to be more open about his grades—we tried this tactic in his freshman and sophomore year, but there was an obvious disconnect between his effort and results. So we're forced to use PowerSchool as an accountability tool--it's much harder for him to lie about his efforts and grades when it's all right there. Trust me, I HATE being "that parent" who has to go to her kid and say 'PowerSchool is showing a 69 in history and 58 in Lit, how can we help you get caught up?"
There are a lot of extremely driven, high performing students in his high school and I get the anxiety that they must feel from their own parents. I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son.
My younger son is in 5th grade and definitely relies on technology for entertainment and as a way to ease his insecurity in the world. He has a lot of separation anxiety; to my great shame, he still makes his way to our bed in the middle of the night and has difficulty getting to sleep on his own. Frankly I'm surprised by how many of his classmates have smartwatches. We've debated getting him a smartwatch when he starts middle school, but we want him to mature a bit more -- he needs to make a few more social-emotional developmental leaps. I'm afraid that having a smartwatch might exacerbate his insecurity even more. He doesn't need a piece of tracking technology on his person--he needs to build up confidence!
"I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son." Hard agree! As a teacher, having online grade books has profoundly affected the expectations (ahem, pressures) directed at me from admin--most notably, pressure to be updating the gradebook multiple times a week. It's not feasible as an English teacher to be reading and fully assessing 300 pieces of writing every week (that's 150 students x2), so this translates to many teachers either 'assessing' stuff that shouldn't be 'assessed' (like exit tickets or weekly reflections) or just putting in 'completion grades' (which, to me, is basically just 'paying' the kids in points for doing the work). In the end, this means that kids who aren't super diligent with the work quickly get hopelessly behind, and the kids who are doing their work often just get 'points' instead of more meaningful feedback. In all cases, it has the tendency to reduce the theoretically-meaningful work they're doing in school to a number. I truly believe that the way online grading systems work now is extremely detrimental to teachers, students, and learning.
When I was in grade school, there were three report cards each term, two for progress and one with the final grade. Report card anxiety was a thing back then. I never had a problem, but it was assumed that kids hated having to bring home their report card and have their parents sign it. I can't imagine what it must be like going through that level of anxiety daily. There's a lot to be said for regular reports a lot less often.
Very good point! The mistake was to think that the 'solution' to zero access (i.e. a teacher kept hand-written grades in their private grade book) was 24/7 access. A middle ground would be a much less-stressful solution for everyone, I think.
This is right up my alley! When my kids were little (one is 20, the other is 22) we were encouraged to join the social media apps our kids were on and friend them (and because they were middle school aged, they agreed). It's why I'm now a Twitter addict, because I joined when my son wanted to follow some gamers. I'm still friends with some of my kid's childhood friends on Instagram who may not realize I am still there (I don't comment or like). For my own kids I am friends with them on Instagram, which they barely use, and Facebook, which they don't at all. I don't have the time in my day to add yet another social app for Snapchat.
But what I'd like to really get into is Life 360 for this college/young adult age. I'm in a HUGE parenting group for this age range (278,000 members, just checked), and the number of parents who track, who 'say' their kids are ok with it, who use it as almost a social app, like "let's see where Susie is right now" is... a lot.
There's lots of "the entire family is on it, including my elderly parents", "my daughter drives alone a lot", and articles on how people who got in car accidents are able to be helped because of it. Of course, what the parents (mostly moms) are ACTUALLY doing is seeing if the kids are in class, at a bar or their boyfriend's/girlfriend's place. There was a thread not long ago about a daughter whose roommate constantly had her boyfriend over because she is tracked, so can't spend time ay the boyfriend's place, so they just hang out in her room all the time.
Tracking for a limited time, I can see, like a long car trip (although we just text when my son drives 12 hours back to school). Or if it helps the CHILD feel more secure. And to be frank, the only time I felt the need to track my daughter (driving to an unfamiliar area to meet friends) I simply asked my son to use Find My Friends on his phone to see her location, then asked him to send her a meme to get her reaction. Done! And I went on with my night.
And kids whose Instagrams look like they're not using them.....are definitely using them, just posting to a select group in stories (using it more like Snapchat) and/or they have Finstas. The grid is for olds lol
I teach college too and I went to lunch with a couple of graduating seniors last spring and this came up and I was AMAZED at how chill they were at being tracked. They were all similarly amazed that like my husband and I didn't have location tracking on for each other for "safety" purposes. The normalization of it was truly mind blowing to me. And I had a really close relationship with my parents, but thinking back, I know some of that was because they had a lot of trust and faith in me.
And that's a frequent comment to the tracking parents. I think some parents in that particular chat even gave suggestions to the OP to tell her daughter to tell the roommate so the daughter can have the room to herself, lol.
This is a little funny to me - we do have Life360 with our college-aged daughter (started out as a condition of being allowed to road trip with friends when she was in HS and has never been disconnected) and the most common feedback she gets from us is "why are you at home on a Friday night? Don't you know you are young? Go find a party! Have some fun! Make some bad decisions!".
Middle and high school parent here. We do some “toggle-tracking” -- if you’re riding your bike home and it’s dark, or you are roaming and going between friends’ houses, please either text location updates or turn on share location. Their choice, but laziness wins out and they usually just turn on share location for the duration of the activity.
Re: grades - not my business/not my problem unless it becomes my business/my problem. Escalating involvement as required, starting in August with:
1. Trust
then
2. Trust but verify
then
3. Surveil and manage
It’s up to them! And there’s no judgment, sometimes we need accountability and support in different ways at different times.
Most toxic act of love was installing Life360 on my FIL's phone without telling him. After his wife passed and he didn't go for any of our suggestions to move into a less isolated situation (move in with us! move in with your other son! move into an apartment near us! move into a community built for retirees!) we indulged our fears and put tracking on him. His hearing is very poor so if he doesn't pick up it's extremely nice to be able to see that he's at the grocery store or whatever. He's very un-tech-savvy and has no idea what any of his apps do, so the chances of him discovering this are very slim. I recognize that this is pretty uncool, but also I have no regrets.
Everyone’s situation is different, and yours absolutely makes sense! In my realm though it’s mostly parents of teens/young adults looking for control or acting out of perceived danger.
So I have a 7th grader and a 4th grader, and due to bus delays and general school-crisis-related anxiety, I dropped an airtag in each one's backpack a couple years ago and was very clear that they were there-- I couldn't contact them that way but I could see where they were.
When my oldest went into 6th grade, we got him an old iPhone 8 with a cheap plan, because his robotics team would meet unexpectedly after school and a text to the family group chat was more likely to get seen/noticed than a call (husband and I both work and can't take calls during meetings). We have always been very clear that, as long as we don't see any risky or inappropriate language or behavior, we won't be up his butt about his phone. At the beginning of 7th grade, there was a 36-person group chat of 7th graders (not including him) that included someone making a school shooting threat that was caught by a parent who looked at their kid's phone. So we talked to him and installed Bark on his phone-- it looks at his chats, his internet use, and his spotify use for language and references to self-harm, sexual content, bullying, drugs, etc. He's aware that we have an eye on his use, but I have never seen anything that causes me concern-- he and his friends are mostly self-described queer, their group chat is old Twitter memes, dumb jokes, pictures of drawings, and other stuff I would have had in a group chat at 12/13 years old. I don't repeat what I've seen to the other kids' parents (if I saw something truly harmful/dangerous, I would, but I'm not gonna out someone to their parents), but at 12, he's very much a "IDK" kid when I ask him about his friends and what they like/talk about/do. He's a sweet, happy kid, and I am fine with some cussing and "omg lol it's a joke about marijuana" memes.
We do check grades every few weeks, not for low grades, but for missing assignments-- he has ADHD, I have ADHD, and missing assignments were the bane of my existence-- I'd get to the end of the quarter and my parents would get a list of 15 assignments that were missing and then I'd be bulldozed into doing them all over a weekend and it was always a huge fight and hassle.
This convo seems a bit more centered on teens, but something a coworker in the Boston area recently mentioned was the rising popularity of smart watches (like Apple Watches) for their middle schoolers in lieu of phones. I guess the idea is the kids can easily message one another and their parents, and parents can do location tracking if desired. Obviously not a cheap solution, but I liked the idea of popularizing lower tech communication solutions among adolescents to accommodate socializing without social media.
Oh, also.... the year when I was in kindergarten (in 1985, in a much less supervised time), they were doing renovations on two of the three local public K-4 schools, so regardless of what district you were in, you went to kindergarten at Rosenmund.
The elementary school divide was Rosenmund was K-4, Washington and Billings were grades 1-4, and Jerman was 5-6. All of the school buses stopped at Jerman after going to their respective lower elementary schools, and some kids had to switch buses (and of course some kids lived right across the street, and that was their ordinary stop).
I normally would not have to switch buses, because I lived in Rosenmund district anyway. One day, I accidentally got on the wrong bus at Rosenmund, inwardly panicked NOT because I thought anything bad would happen but because my mom would kill me if she had to come pick me up from the bus garage at the end of the day, and then when we got to Jerman I saw my correct bus across the parking lot. So I hightailed it onto the right bus across the parking lot full of 5th and 6th graders.
And then other days after that I'd deliberately take the wrong bus and switch to the correct one at Jerman. I went all over town for shits and giggles and no one paid me any mind!
Sometimes I'd also deliberately ride the correct bus past my stop and then walk home the long way.
I was five years old at the time, and I didn't tell my mother about my adventures until I was about 25. She just laughed and said that wasn't surprising.
Now, do I think EVERY kid would be able to do this at five years old without freaking out? No. Do I recommend setting kindergarteners loose on the city? Also no. But I also see college students who are living off campus without cars and bankrupting themselves/missing class because they are taking Uber every day and even when I pull up the RTA website and I show them EXACTLY which bus/streetcar routes they should take and that a monthly pass is only $45, even when I explain that I did this every day for 13 years without incident and it's perfectly safe, even when I show them that there's a real-time app on it that will let them know when the bus is coming, they will not do it because they are too scared of getting lost. (NB: most of my students are Black, so this is not a race-based fear about public transit).
I remember vividly when 5-year-old me was taking the school bus home the first time, and I knew the corner the bus picked me up on, but (obviously) it dropped _off_ on the other side of the street at the other end of the block, so I did not get off the bus, and then I just...didn't say anything (because as a child I would have allowed heavy machinery to crush me rather than say to someone that I needed help), and then...ended up solo on the bus at the garage at the end of route when the kindly bus driver found me. I can't remember the outcome, I suspect he drove me back home and I don't recall if any alarm was sounded about my not showing up on time or what happened...
Very weird how the ubiquity of GPS has made people afraid of getting lost? I have a terrible sense of direction / memory for routes so I spent my first 10 years of driving getting constantly lost. It was never really a crisis? I'd stop and ask for directions, or keep driving until I saw something familiar. In the Midwest if you drive on the grid of roads long enough you eventually run into one you know! Similar with public transportation, you can always just get back on the same train headed the opposite direction or ask a bus driver how to get back to where you're meant to be. Or like, absolute worst case, waste the money on Uber after you've gotten lost.
This conversation covers so many things I've been thinking about with my own children for so long. The information is invaluable. Appreciate you both for sharing this convo with us anxious parents.
Helpful!!! We're not there yet for our kids, but my oldest does keeps mentioning wanting a phone/watch *specifically* so we can track her and (by her reasoning) allow her to move around the city more freely. At nearly 10, she's already allowed more solo mobility than most of her friends (walking to and from the park/ballet class/etc) and I have no plans to start digitally tracking her (or buying her a device of any kind), but it is fascinating to me that it's something she's *requesting* we might do. Brave new world, etc.
Similarly, when I talk about my phone-free adolescence in the 90s, my current high school students almost always ask me if I felt "afraid" to be out in the world without a phone. After I explain that I couldn't because I didn't have a smartphone existence to compare it to, I tell them that being out on my own or with friends made me feel *free* since that was the one time I wasn't being observed by an adult.
I've thought a lot about this paradigm shift: Do teenagers feel fear because of the fact that they've always been observed--physically and digitally--and being without a phone is akin to, like, disappearing altogether? Is it because they've learned to navigate their physical spaces with the aid of a map, so not having a phone makes them feel [literally] lost? Is their fear actually just the itchy anxiety one feels when they don't have the object they habitually and reflexively use? Is it because their online existence is so integrated into their identity that, without access to it, they feel some small existential crisis around their sense of self? My guess is probably that all of these are simultaneously true, plus a whole bunch of other things I'm not accounting for.
I have been teaching for 20 years, so I feel connected with teenagers and spend a lot of time talking with them about how they see the world. I try hard to not clutch my pearls at cultural changes that will inevitably happen, but I do feel pretty deeply concerned that so many of young people right now live with a perpetual background noise of fear and paranoia. And it's hard to see that, on a fundamental level, the device that has caused their discomfort and anxiety is the thing they also see as the solution to it.
"And it's hard to see that, on a fundamental level, the device that has caused their discomfort and anxiety is the thing they also see as the solution to it." So, so interesting.
This is very affirming of what I sometimes feel like is lazy parenting on my part. My kid is 17 and I am not on her devices at all, nor do I check her grades other than at grading periods. She knows what we expect of her and keeps us informed when she's struggling. We do track each other--all 3 of us--, but mostly in a "are they at home or at work?" when deciding whether to call or to text. I do sometimes notice she's not where I expect and text her to ask about it rather than accusing her of anything nefarious. I am sure that sometimes she abuses our trust, but she's nearly an adult and needs to start learning how to make decisions for herself and handle the consequences. She definitely tells me about stuff I would have kept secret from my parents, which feels like a win, even when said "stuff" stresses me out a little!
I love Kathryn Jezer-Morton's reframing of helicopter/total surveillance parenting as the *actually* "lazy" style — trust is actually much more arduous to cultivate! https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/what-does-helicopter-parenting-do-to-kids.html
I'm trying to be proactive about opting out of helicopter parenting (my kid is only 7) , and found this piece incredibly helpful and validating.
My kid is a natural risk-taker, which I admire and which of course also scares me, and we are already having very in-depth conversations about how we can build mutual trust around risky behavior -- with me increasing my trust in his decision making in step with him increasing HIS trust that when I do say NO to something that it's because I think that no is an important one. It's truly much harder then just saying no to all risk taking!
A friend of mine is dealing with this with her similarly aged son and skiing - how do you figure out how to teach him to land well, to scout well, to have good judgement etc when it comes to jumps? Well, you have to let him go on a bunch of jumps - and do exactly what you’re doing when it comes to saving “no” for when it really matters
Yes, this is exactly it! (also with biking, climbing, and other activities)
Our process:
-At the beginning of the day (and then as needed) we talk about what he might want to do, how he is going to decide what to jump off of, where he wants to stop so we can scout. I tell him if there are any hard lines from my side (ie that cliff over there is off limits) and why. And then I let him go for it and cross my fingers. He almost always makes good decisions, and this increases my trust.
- If he blatantly ignores one of my hard limits (rare but it happens) then we are done with risky activities for the day.
- We also signed him up for a trampoline/tumbling class, so he can learn how to manage his body while in the air from someone who actually knows how to do it safely. It's been fantastic so far.
I love that trampoline/tumbling idea so much - also seems like a ton of fun
I was a middle school teacher when these online grading information systems first came into use and were required of us. It was a problem to work around.
I had a son in middle school and told him up front I would never check his grades. He should just keep me informed. I didn't want him to feel micromanaged, and I trusted him. There was no reason not to.
But I remember the ordeal it was for many students whose parents were watching, checking every day. I remember once giving a particularly difficult exam on which the grades were relatively low. I asked the kids, who had their papers back and knew there own grades, whether it would be easier for them if I delayed posting until a few more grades had come in (which would have raised their averages). The poll was overwhelming yes, as they expected their parents would over-react.
When my kids were first in middle school I was way too in to the grade app and was totally the over-reacter! It had a bad effect on my relationship with my kid - who was actually a great student! I tell friends now that if they are going to check grades treat it like the stock market - don't get too worked up over the daily ups and downs, rather look for trends over time. I took it off my phone for my high schooler and try to only log in maybe monthly. And I tell him when I'm going to look. Like "How's your grades?" "Fine." "I'll probably look at powershool on Friday. Anything I should be aware of?" "Bruh. [eyeroll]"
I think one of the best approaches to these apps is to work on some real empathy on how it would've felt to be surveilled that way when you were a kid. I think the "I'm going to look at this on Friday, what should I know?" approach is pretty great (I also think the app itself should only update once a week)
I definitely agree on the limitations for the app updating. I actually just discussed this yesterday with a class of seniors, and I was surprised at how divided the group was. One half strongly thought that limiting the grade updates to once a week (they all thought Monday morning was preferable to Friday, though I can see benefits to both) would help them stress less, while the other half strongly thought it would increase their anxiety. Their reasoning was that they'd have to endure the not-knowing for a whole week and it would make them feel "less in control." I thought both of these reasons were interesting, because as it is now, they don't know when a grade will be entered and they don't have any more "control" when it's random. One student said that he stopped checking altogether and only sees his grades when progress reports come.
I see this behavior with grade apps and think about what sort of Slack and email habits it will lead to in the workplace
I was also thinking about the workplace parallels - I work in manufacturing which is a data- and reporting-rich environment. The shift leader does a report out at the end of each shift. The department manager reports to the site leader every day. The site leader does weekly progress reports and then there is an 'executive' review on a monthly basis. In principle the division president has access to every shift report, but it doesn't make sense for him to monitor things at that level because he'd constantly be tilting at windmills. Just like over-interested parents maybe?!
I like the stock market analogy. You don't want to sell your kid short.
My wife is also a middle school teacher, and the one instance (of many) that sticks out to me is a parent who emailed her late on a Friday because their child had a zero for an assignment. My wife knew that the reason was completely benign, like she hadn't graded it yet or something like that - the kid wasn't missing it and it was fine. But the parent said in the email that their child was going to be grounded all weekend! My wife tries to keep good boundaries about not answering/sending emails outside of working hours, both for her own health and to not set bad expectations for parents and colleagues. But here she is feeling she needs to respond ASAP so the poor kid isn't grounded! I don't completely fault the parent; the product is designed to do this, intentional or not.
This one anecdote sums up SO MUCH of what this newsletter talks about in this broad space.
I have an 8yo and was anti-device until I realized younger kids don't have easy access to phones anymore. If they're in a jam and need to call mom or dad, there are no payphones, no landline at their friend's house, and all the adults' phones are locked with a passcode. While we're more connected than ever before, kids are actually more isolated than we were in the 80s! To top it off, I'm divorced from a man who makes some very poor choices. So, a smartwatch it is!
i think about this a lot too! i sincerely wish we had a landline for this exclusive purpose. if i run to the store for milk, i'd love for my nine yr old to be able to call me! ditto having kids make their own plans! it was very mortifying to have my dad answer the phone when boys i liked called to talk, but we survived!
Erin, I installed an Ooma VOIP phone for precisely this purpose. You can get one for only a couple dollars a month that runs off your house internet, but since I live in the land of frequent power outages and our internet is shaky, I paid for the one that runs off a cell signal and has a battery back-up. It's about $27/month, and it runs through a big yellow phone with a corded receiver (you can use basically any landline phone you want for it though) that is permanently on the kitchen counter.
When my eight-year-old is home sick, I don't have to put her in the car to go pick her two-year-old sister up from daycare. If she doesn't want to come to the store with me, I can take just the toddler and leave the eight-year-old at home for 45 minutes. She can call me, my husband, 911, you name it...but she can only make voice calls on it.
It works with E-911 systems.
She's also allowed to call her friends on it (within reason on hours) but none of the kids her age seem to know how to do a voice call, only video!
Brilliant tip - thank you!
This is so smart! The no house phone situation is de. tricky...
I did get a landline for this reason, when my kid entered 6th grade and now is home alone for a little while after getting off the bus. One nice benefit is that the grandparents can call to talk to the kids directly! And it's a good way to teach phone etiquette.
My kid texts me off messenger kids on the tablet!
I don't know much about smart watches! I don't understand: can your kid text and call you from the watch without it being connected to a smart phone?
Yes, they make smartwatches for kids that only do calling and messaging. They also offer tracking, and I don't like that, but do like knowing my daughter can reach me if needed.
Wow, that's really cool! Thanks for your response :)
That's a really interesting point. I've thought about getting a flip phone but so many things need a smart phone now. Honestly, I would only really miss the maps app.
When I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I studied abroad in England. Between the end of the semester and my flight home, I had nine days to just bum around England and Scotland. Cell phones existed (and were quite common in the U.K. then) but were not yet anything but for rich people in the U.S. yet (many areas did not yet even have cell service) and I certainly couldn't have afforded international calling on one.
I had no specific plans, just got on a train to wherever, would stop by the Thomas Cook booth in the station and see what hostel availability there was for that night, and stay there. Every couple of days, I would either pay a couple of pounds in a train station pay phone to leave a message with my mom about what city I was in or I'd use the email on the shared computer in the hostel living room to shoot her a quick message. Other than that, she had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and I didn't know what was going on at home.
I figured if anything really bad happened to me, the embassy would figure it out and contact her soon enough, if anything really bad happened at home it would realistically take me a few days to get there anyway, and exactly what was anybody going to be able to do about any of this? I was thousands of miles away in another country.
Anyway, those were some of the greatest days of my life, and I think about that when I hear about students whose parents have Life 360 on them from afar. What, exactly, are you going to be able to do about where your adult child is?
I was abroad in France at about the same time. I emailed with my mom a lot, but I only called her once all semester — from a payphone on Mother's Day! And the emails would come sporadically, whenever I had access to an internet cafe — nothing like what we have now. She just had to believe that 20-year-old me was figuring things out.
I still kind of can't believe that 20 yr old me went to study abroad in Italy taking my first international trip solo and navigating trains/ airport transfers without a phone. We were given a plane ticket and an address. I didn't speak Italian and I had to figure out how to get from point a to point b with paper maps and dictionaries. And called home maybe once? Different world entirely!
A few years ago, we took our then-four-year-old daughter with us to Japan. She is ADHD as hell and also has ZERO issue about darting off after squirrels or what have you. Our big fear was NOT someone would kidnap her (which isn't actually a thing but is the reason so many parents of littles put AirTags in their kids' backpacks) but that she'd jump onto a crowded subway train before we determined it was the correct one and the doors would close and she'd be halfway across Tokyo before we were able to (with the language barrier) figure out where in the hell she was.
We used a kid leash for some of the trip, but we also got her a medical ID style bracelet that she couldn't take off. The back side had her full name, our full names and our relationship to her, and our full cell phone numbers with international code. We taught her that if she got separated she was to find an adult and show them the bracelet and tell them she was looking for her parents and these were their names and phone numbers. We were banking on her finding some Japanese stranger who either spoke English or was able to figure out that this obviously not-Japanese child was lost and looking for her parents and he/she would find a police officer or security guard or someone who spoke at least rudimentary English and could figure out the situation. (Fortunately, we never needed to do this in Japan, but it happened locally at the zoo once.)
I reckon things would have worked out exactly as you predicted — so many Japanese people went so far out of their way to get us where we were going in the metro in Tokyo, and we were adults! My hot tip for kids is an accidental discovery — I ordered lots of stick-in name tags for my son's possessions when he started school; they allowed two lines so I put my phone number on the second line. When we are out exploring, it is helpful to remind him that his coat/bag/water bottle has my number in case he gets lost
My ex-husband’s parents used to dress his younger brothers in identical clothes when they were going to a zoo/amusement park/what have you so if one wandered off they could say “This is exactly what he’s wearing.” Now a lot of friends take a picture at the beginning of the day to show the outfit in case that happens. Also no one knows anyone’s phone number anymore but we had to memorize ours as kids. I still remember friends’ home phone numbers from childhood but couldn’t tell you one current friend’s number.
Ha! I am in the cusp of changing our iPad pin to my phone number so my son learns it, I learned my husband’s number that way :)
100% I arrived in Hong Kong for a semester abroad in 2005 and somehow made it from the airport to my dorm via 3 types of public transportation without GPS. I called my parents via a very sketchy Skype connection on my laptop like... twice? And I wrote a blog (2005!!) that my family could read to hear about what was happening with me. I posted pictures taken with my DIGITAL CAMERA and was then interrogated by my mother in the comments section on names and backstories of all my new friends. I emailed my parents that I was heading to the airport something like 20 hours before they were scheduled to pick me up back stateside. Somehow they found me in O'Hare airport the next day.
I once had to dramatically cry in an Italian airport because I didn't have the second paper ticket for one leg of my journey (that the airline had not given me). After about 100 per favores and some ugly crying, the attendant heaved a deep sigh and printed it for me.
It makes me so sad that this generation doesn't experience the same kinds of freedom that we did in pre-cell days. I'm an elder millennial(1981) and I think I'm one of the last to have most of my college experience with my parents unable to text me regularly. I feel the same about my study-abroad days.
Same! I did study abroad in England at 18, and did some backpacking at the end of the school year. It was my first year of university, 2004-05, and cell phones were expensive for us. Long distance was expensive. Skype and the like weren't common, and my family's clunky old computer couldn't really handle it. My mom said when she talked to my friends' parents back home, they would say they spoke to their kids on the phone all the time (like at least once a week?) and ask what I was up to. Mom would kinda shrug and be like, "She emailed me a few days ago I think? Last I heard she was going to Scotland." I did keep a public LiveJournal so I could share things with folks back home, but that was on my own terms, and it was done from the computer lab, uploading pictures from my digital camera every now and then.
It was bewildering to those other parents, but it was just too expensive for us to talk on the phone regularly, and my mom firmly believed that at university I needed to be left to do my own thing. A friend in my hall had a cell phone and *hated* it - his parents made him have one because they wanted to be able to keep tabs on him while he was abroad. They had zero concept of time zones and what he might be doing so he'd get interrupted during a movie or studying. I felt bad for him, but also grateful, because even if I could have afforded a phone at the time I know my parents wouldn't have been trying to monitor me, it just wasn't their style.
My kids are in their 20s and I am observing that once you start tracking your kids, it becomes really hard to stop! One friend reports checking on her 25 year old daughter every night because otherwise she cannot sleep. Another friend described panicking when she tracked her kids phone to some random field where it sat for hours, and while she was sure his body had been dumped or something terrible, it turned out her kid was at a friend's barn watching football, having a great day. I say this with such empathy because I really struggled with anxiety when my kids started driving but feel very strongly that most typical teens* are being robbed of privacy and feeling safe in the world, as well as not being taught the habits of common courtesy like sending the, "I'm on my way home, can I pick anything up?" text or the opportunity to respond to a kid's "hey, here safe, all good" with a "have a blast" text from mom and dad. The hard truth is that tracking makes us feel like we have some kind of control but that is an illusion. The work of parenting teens and older kids is in disentangling from one another and setting up healthy boundaries, and that means doing the work to learn to manage your worries/anxieties.
* I absolutely understand there are individual instances where tracking feels more necessary, so I am adding that caveat.
This gets to the heart of it: if you track your kids *instead* of working on trust or making good decisions, what’s going to happen when you’re no longer tracking them or it fails? They don’t have the necessary backup skills. It’s the illusion of security.
I say this as a 48 year old who lives alone: my mom makes me text her every day to tell her I’m alive. I would NEVER do tracking with anyone (I do share my ETA from Apple Maps on my way to my parents’ house so they know when to expect me) but the text lets her sleep so I don’t argue. It didn’t start until I separated from my ex-husband (on good terms) in my 30s. She was like “How will I know you’re alive?” My response was “There are people I talk to every day” and hers was “I don’t know those people.” I went away to college etc. and moved out of their house 6 months after graduation and lived alone when I first moved to NYC when I was 27, but somehow the advent of texting in the intervening years made it a necessity for her. This is a woman who was in bars with stolen baptismal certificate fake ID at 16.
We have a tradition in our family of texting when we cross state lines, which started as a compromise with mom when my sister and I went to college far from home (in an early texting era). She didn't want to smother us, but she also wanted to know in which state's ditches to start searching for our (presumably) dead bodies. So now as I'm approaching 40 my most active group text is a family chain that's 80% people just texting the names of states. It includes my two sisters, their husbands, my parents, my husband and our 2 nearly adult kids.
Over Christmas it was like 5 straight days of "Kentucky" "Indiana" "Illinois" "Iowa" "Us too! Iowa!" "Illinois" "Iowa finally!! See you in 1 hour!" "Illinois" "Illinois" "Michigan" "Iowa" "Illinois"
I wish my 82 year old mom who lives alone would agree to to text me every morning. Also: I feel like the last sentence of your comment is the start of a good short story.
They stole the baptismal certificates from the convent at their high school. My grandparents were very permissive as far as curfew, and my mom’s cousin was a bandleader in NYC so she was allowed to go anywhere he was playing. Of course then there would be side quests from that location!
As far as your mom - my neighbor’s dad fell on Christmas Day, so they got him an Alexa and an indoor motion sensor camera. But I also follow someone on Twitter who does fitness tracking with her elderly father using their Apple Watches - so she knows he is up & about every day because she sees his steps.
So yes, a entire novel in that baptismal certificate!
My mom remains resistant to any kind of tracking. She remains in her too-large home and and keeps her cellphone in a ziplock bag in a drawer in the kitchen. I am learning that I have to treat my mom a lot like I treat my young adult kids - like a full-fledged adult with agency who makes decisions I dislike but to whom I feel obligated to support no matter what.
I have younger kids and my oldest is in 1st grade. I was amazed at how many of his peers got smartwatches for Christmas. Where I struggle most is how to navigate the pressure from other parents in our community who do track their kids. My son asked for a watch but couldn’t communicate why he needed one when I asked other than his friends have one. We also had an incident with a neighbor who saw my sons out riding their scooters alone and felt it wasn’t appropriate. They were less than 2 blocks away and we live in an extremely safe place. It’s hard for me to verbalize why I don’t want to track my kids without feeling judged or as if I’m a bad parent.
One of the useful things about the book is how helpful it is when it comes to generating scripts for those sorts of situations - they’re not, like, in a list (at least not that I remember) but will give you a bunch of ideas!
This interview was so reassuring, thank you so much!! I’ll have to get a copy of the book.
Our family has always been Team Screen Time- as in, we don’t limit it.
Perhaps our boys are anomalies when it comes to using technology, but we figured that the chances of them having careers that use screens most of the time were high, so why not get used to that? They will independently switch from screens to an analog activity without our input.
We also don’t track location or messages with our middle schooler, but App Store purchases need to be approved. He isn’t allowed to have social media accounts yet (and I’m not sure when is best for that to happen).
I was surprised to discover his friends have much different setups- lots of screen time limitations, trackers, surveillance.
There was only one time I asked my kid to hand over his phone because he was acting different (his texts were totally fine), and we’ve told him that we trust him to make good decisions and to trust his gut. We’ll trust him until he gives us a reason not to trust him--that’s how trust works, right?
Virginia Sole-Smith has written about how screen time anxiety functions similarly to diet culture - restriction is what leads so many kids (and adults) not to figure out ways to self-regulate. One of my favorite things in the world is watching a kid willingly put down their tablet.
I've never tracked my kids (17 and 20) locations even though almost every parent I know does track in some way. I do ask them to keep me generally apprised of their location - mostly for the younger one at this point. When the older one is home I'll still ask her to "text me when you get there" if its bad weather or she's going out of the area, but I try not to get too up in her business. Sometimes I feel silly about even that remembering that my parents never knew where I was as a teen, but then again my mom is the biggest "text me when you get there" person so I know she would have been a location tracker if she'd had the technology! Only one time did I wonder if not tracking was a serious mistake. When my oldest was in high school she was the victim of a crime which led to a - very brief, but it felt like eternity - period of time where we did not have any idea where she was but knew for sure she was in danger. Would tracking her have resolved the situation quicker and with less trauma? For me and her dad, yes. for sure. For her? I don't know. We were very lucky that things didn't turn out worse - she was shaken up pretty bad and also deeply embarrassed for getting into a bad situation in the first place, but she's recovered emotionally and was physically unharmed. It also was a real inflection point in her life and she ended up on a much stronger path after that situation.
I'm so glad your daughter is ok. I think we spend a lot of our time parenting in the mind of the worst case scenario, but I think that is a recipe for pretty profound anxiety for both parents and kids. I am also a non-tracker and keep my phone out of the bedroom at night, and my son ended up in an lengthy lockdown during an active shooter situation at his uni. I also doubted my choices in that moment, but my son was adamant that he would never call us if he was in that kind of danger because first of all, he needed to be fully present and focused on his safety and survival and that he would never allow, in the worst case scenario, for that kind of wrenching conversation to be our last one.
I recently read that NYT ethics question about the parents who installed a camera in their daughters room to know what’s going on with her boyfriend--and still have it years later! Absolutely insane.
IT WAS SO BONKERS GAHHHHH
I was thinking about this too! My jaw was on the floor! The most absolutely wild question I’ve ever heard! And that *now* they don’t want to betray her trust by telling her they’ve been spying on her for years??? I would legit never talk to my parents again.
That was wild. Absolutely wild. That poor, poor girl.
Two kids, two different experiences with such tracking technology.
My 17-year-old son is an underperforming student. If it weren't for PowerSchool, he would lie about his grades and make excuses for missing assignments, etc. (He's in therapy for anxiety and depression, and we hope things will turn around by his senior year.) I wish I could trust him more to be more open about his grades—we tried this tactic in his freshman and sophomore year, but there was an obvious disconnect between his effort and results. So we're forced to use PowerSchool as an accountability tool--it's much harder for him to lie about his efforts and grades when it's all right there. Trust me, I HATE being "that parent" who has to go to her kid and say 'PowerSchool is showing a 69 in history and 58 in Lit, how can we help you get caught up?"
There are a lot of extremely driven, high performing students in his high school and I get the anxiety that they must feel from their own parents. I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son.
My younger son is in 5th grade and definitely relies on technology for entertainment and as a way to ease his insecurity in the world. He has a lot of separation anxiety; to my great shame, he still makes his way to our bed in the middle of the night and has difficulty getting to sleep on his own. Frankly I'm surprised by how many of his classmates have smartwatches. We've debated getting him a smartwatch when he starts middle school, but we want him to mature a bit more -- he needs to make a few more social-emotional developmental leaps. I'm afraid that having a smartwatch might exacerbate his insecurity even more. He doesn't need a piece of tracking technology on his person--he needs to build up confidence!
"I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son." Hard agree! As a teacher, having online grade books has profoundly affected the expectations (ahem, pressures) directed at me from admin--most notably, pressure to be updating the gradebook multiple times a week. It's not feasible as an English teacher to be reading and fully assessing 300 pieces of writing every week (that's 150 students x2), so this translates to many teachers either 'assessing' stuff that shouldn't be 'assessed' (like exit tickets or weekly reflections) or just putting in 'completion grades' (which, to me, is basically just 'paying' the kids in points for doing the work). In the end, this means that kids who aren't super diligent with the work quickly get hopelessly behind, and the kids who are doing their work often just get 'points' instead of more meaningful feedback. In all cases, it has the tendency to reduce the theoretically-meaningful work they're doing in school to a number. I truly believe that the way online grading systems work now is extremely detrimental to teachers, students, and learning.
When I was in grade school, there were three report cards each term, two for progress and one with the final grade. Report card anxiety was a thing back then. I never had a problem, but it was assumed that kids hated having to bring home their report card and have their parents sign it. I can't imagine what it must be like going through that level of anxiety daily. There's a lot to be said for regular reports a lot less often.
Very good point! The mistake was to think that the 'solution' to zero access (i.e. a teacher kept hand-written grades in their private grade book) was 24/7 access. A middle ground would be a much less-stressful solution for everyone, I think.
This is right up my alley! When my kids were little (one is 20, the other is 22) we were encouraged to join the social media apps our kids were on and friend them (and because they were middle school aged, they agreed). It's why I'm now a Twitter addict, because I joined when my son wanted to follow some gamers. I'm still friends with some of my kid's childhood friends on Instagram who may not realize I am still there (I don't comment or like). For my own kids I am friends with them on Instagram, which they barely use, and Facebook, which they don't at all. I don't have the time in my day to add yet another social app for Snapchat.
But what I'd like to really get into is Life 360 for this college/young adult age. I'm in a HUGE parenting group for this age range (278,000 members, just checked), and the number of parents who track, who 'say' their kids are ok with it, who use it as almost a social app, like "let's see where Susie is right now" is... a lot.
There's lots of "the entire family is on it, including my elderly parents", "my daughter drives alone a lot", and articles on how people who got in car accidents are able to be helped because of it. Of course, what the parents (mostly moms) are ACTUALLY doing is seeing if the kids are in class, at a bar or their boyfriend's/girlfriend's place. There was a thread not long ago about a daughter whose roommate constantly had her boyfriend over because she is tracked, so can't spend time ay the boyfriend's place, so they just hang out in her room all the time.
Tracking for a limited time, I can see, like a long car trip (although we just text when my son drives 12 hours back to school). Or if it helps the CHILD feel more secure. And to be frank, the only time I felt the need to track my daughter (driving to an unfamiliar area to meet friends) I simply asked my son to use Find My Friends on his phone to see her location, then asked him to send her a meme to get her reaction. Done! And I went on with my night.
I teach college, and the kids have ALL KINDS of ways of making their Life 360 say they are places where they are not.
Also, half the kids with Life 360 have cheap burner phones.
And kids whose Instagrams look like they're not using them.....are definitely using them, just posting to a select group in stories (using it more like Snapchat) and/or they have Finstas. The grid is for olds lol
I teach college too and I went to lunch with a couple of graduating seniors last spring and this came up and I was AMAZED at how chill they were at being tracked. They were all similarly amazed that like my husband and I didn't have location tracking on for each other for "safety" purposes. The normalization of it was truly mind blowing to me. And I had a really close relationship with my parents, but thinking back, I know some of that was because they had a lot of trust and faith in me.
And that's a frequent comment to the tracking parents. I think some parents in that particular chat even gave suggestions to the OP to tell her daughter to tell the roommate so the daughter can have the room to herself, lol.
This is a little funny to me - we do have Life360 with our college-aged daughter (started out as a condition of being allowed to road trip with friends when she was in HS and has never been disconnected) and the most common feedback she gets from us is "why are you at home on a Friday night? Don't you know you are young? Go find a party! Have some fun! Make some bad decisions!".
Middle and high school parent here. We do some “toggle-tracking” -- if you’re riding your bike home and it’s dark, or you are roaming and going between friends’ houses, please either text location updates or turn on share location. Their choice, but laziness wins out and they usually just turn on share location for the duration of the activity.
Re: grades - not my business/not my problem unless it becomes my business/my problem. Escalating involvement as required, starting in August with:
1. Trust
then
2. Trust but verify
then
3. Surveil and manage
It’s up to them! And there’s no judgment, sometimes we need accountability and support in different ways at different times.
This sounds like really great parenting
Most toxic act of love was installing Life360 on my FIL's phone without telling him. After his wife passed and he didn't go for any of our suggestions to move into a less isolated situation (move in with us! move in with your other son! move into an apartment near us! move into a community built for retirees!) we indulged our fears and put tracking on him. His hearing is very poor so if he doesn't pick up it's extremely nice to be able to see that he's at the grocery store or whatever. He's very un-tech-savvy and has no idea what any of his apps do, so the chances of him discovering this are very slim. I recognize that this is pretty uncool, but also I have no regrets.
Everyone’s situation is different, and yours absolutely makes sense! In my realm though it’s mostly parents of teens/young adults looking for control or acting out of perceived danger.
So I have a 7th grader and a 4th grader, and due to bus delays and general school-crisis-related anxiety, I dropped an airtag in each one's backpack a couple years ago and was very clear that they were there-- I couldn't contact them that way but I could see where they were.
When my oldest went into 6th grade, we got him an old iPhone 8 with a cheap plan, because his robotics team would meet unexpectedly after school and a text to the family group chat was more likely to get seen/noticed than a call (husband and I both work and can't take calls during meetings). We have always been very clear that, as long as we don't see any risky or inappropriate language or behavior, we won't be up his butt about his phone. At the beginning of 7th grade, there was a 36-person group chat of 7th graders (not including him) that included someone making a school shooting threat that was caught by a parent who looked at their kid's phone. So we talked to him and installed Bark on his phone-- it looks at his chats, his internet use, and his spotify use for language and references to self-harm, sexual content, bullying, drugs, etc. He's aware that we have an eye on his use, but I have never seen anything that causes me concern-- he and his friends are mostly self-described queer, their group chat is old Twitter memes, dumb jokes, pictures of drawings, and other stuff I would have had in a group chat at 12/13 years old. I don't repeat what I've seen to the other kids' parents (if I saw something truly harmful/dangerous, I would, but I'm not gonna out someone to their parents), but at 12, he's very much a "IDK" kid when I ask him about his friends and what they like/talk about/do. He's a sweet, happy kid, and I am fine with some cussing and "omg lol it's a joke about marijuana" memes.
We do check grades every few weeks, not for low grades, but for missing assignments-- he has ADHD, I have ADHD, and missing assignments were the bane of my existence-- I'd get to the end of the quarter and my parents would get a list of 15 assignments that were missing and then I'd be bulldozed into doing them all over a weekend and it was always a huge fight and hassle.
This convo seems a bit more centered on teens, but something a coworker in the Boston area recently mentioned was the rising popularity of smart watches (like Apple Watches) for their middle schoolers in lieu of phones. I guess the idea is the kids can easily message one another and their parents, and parents can do location tracking if desired. Obviously not a cheap solution, but I liked the idea of popularizing lower tech communication solutions among adolescents to accommodate socializing without social media.
Oh, also.... the year when I was in kindergarten (in 1985, in a much less supervised time), they were doing renovations on two of the three local public K-4 schools, so regardless of what district you were in, you went to kindergarten at Rosenmund.
The elementary school divide was Rosenmund was K-4, Washington and Billings were grades 1-4, and Jerman was 5-6. All of the school buses stopped at Jerman after going to their respective lower elementary schools, and some kids had to switch buses (and of course some kids lived right across the street, and that was their ordinary stop).
I normally would not have to switch buses, because I lived in Rosenmund district anyway. One day, I accidentally got on the wrong bus at Rosenmund, inwardly panicked NOT because I thought anything bad would happen but because my mom would kill me if she had to come pick me up from the bus garage at the end of the day, and then when we got to Jerman I saw my correct bus across the parking lot. So I hightailed it onto the right bus across the parking lot full of 5th and 6th graders.
And then other days after that I'd deliberately take the wrong bus and switch to the correct one at Jerman. I went all over town for shits and giggles and no one paid me any mind!
Sometimes I'd also deliberately ride the correct bus past my stop and then walk home the long way.
I was five years old at the time, and I didn't tell my mother about my adventures until I was about 25. She just laughed and said that wasn't surprising.
Now, do I think EVERY kid would be able to do this at five years old without freaking out? No. Do I recommend setting kindergarteners loose on the city? Also no. But I also see college students who are living off campus without cars and bankrupting themselves/missing class because they are taking Uber every day and even when I pull up the RTA website and I show them EXACTLY which bus/streetcar routes they should take and that a monthly pass is only $45, even when I explain that I did this every day for 13 years without incident and it's perfectly safe, even when I show them that there's a real-time app on it that will let them know when the bus is coming, they will not do it because they are too scared of getting lost. (NB: most of my students are Black, so this is not a race-based fear about public transit).
I remember vividly when 5-year-old me was taking the school bus home the first time, and I knew the corner the bus picked me up on, but (obviously) it dropped _off_ on the other side of the street at the other end of the block, so I did not get off the bus, and then I just...didn't say anything (because as a child I would have allowed heavy machinery to crush me rather than say to someone that I needed help), and then...ended up solo on the bus at the garage at the end of route when the kindly bus driver found me. I can't remember the outcome, I suspect he drove me back home and I don't recall if any alarm was sounded about my not showing up on time or what happened...
Very weird how the ubiquity of GPS has made people afraid of getting lost? I have a terrible sense of direction / memory for routes so I spent my first 10 years of driving getting constantly lost. It was never really a crisis? I'd stop and ask for directions, or keep driving until I saw something familiar. In the Midwest if you drive on the grid of roads long enough you eventually run into one you know! Similar with public transportation, you can always just get back on the same train headed the opposite direction or ask a bus driver how to get back to where you're meant to be. Or like, absolute worst case, waste the money on Uber after you've gotten lost.
This conversation covers so many things I've been thinking about with my own children for so long. The information is invaluable. Appreciate you both for sharing this convo with us anxious parents.
Helpful!!! We're not there yet for our kids, but my oldest does keeps mentioning wanting a phone/watch *specifically* so we can track her and (by her reasoning) allow her to move around the city more freely. At nearly 10, she's already allowed more solo mobility than most of her friends (walking to and from the park/ballet class/etc) and I have no plans to start digitally tracking her (or buying her a device of any kind), but it is fascinating to me that it's something she's *requesting* we might do. Brave new world, etc.
Similarly, when I talk about my phone-free adolescence in the 90s, my current high school students almost always ask me if I felt "afraid" to be out in the world without a phone. After I explain that I couldn't because I didn't have a smartphone existence to compare it to, I tell them that being out on my own or with friends made me feel *free* since that was the one time I wasn't being observed by an adult.
I've thought a lot about this paradigm shift: Do teenagers feel fear because of the fact that they've always been observed--physically and digitally--and being without a phone is akin to, like, disappearing altogether? Is it because they've learned to navigate their physical spaces with the aid of a map, so not having a phone makes them feel [literally] lost? Is their fear actually just the itchy anxiety one feels when they don't have the object they habitually and reflexively use? Is it because their online existence is so integrated into their identity that, without access to it, they feel some small existential crisis around their sense of self? My guess is probably that all of these are simultaneously true, plus a whole bunch of other things I'm not accounting for.
I have been teaching for 20 years, so I feel connected with teenagers and spend a lot of time talking with them about how they see the world. I try hard to not clutch my pearls at cultural changes that will inevitably happen, but I do feel pretty deeply concerned that so many of young people right now live with a perpetual background noise of fear and paranoia. And it's hard to see that, on a fundamental level, the device that has caused their discomfort and anxiety is the thing they also see as the solution to it.
"And it's hard to see that, on a fundamental level, the device that has caused their discomfort and anxiety is the thing they also see as the solution to it." So, so interesting.
I honestly think they feel more fear because of their parents and other adults in the world who are always warming them about possible bad things.
I think that's a huge factor too, for sure!