Smartwatches may be an overlooked answer to the kid phone conundrum. Watches have the communication and location tracking that parents demand without the distraction of phones.
I'm not sure I agree with less intrusive. Having a tracker attached to your body that can notify you of anything it wants is very intrusive. It is, however, seemingly less addictive in some capacities. No doom scrolling, etc.
Considering the number of times I've heard cell phones referred to as being "attached at the hip", I think that ship has sailed.
Also, almost every smart watch allows you to block notifications on top of what you phone already blocks, so if you have apps that you want notifications from for when your attention is on your phone, but not all the time, you can only allow those through. It's not "anything it wants", it's anything you choose.
Just turn off notifications for the vast majority of apps. I don't even auto-install third-party apps on the watch. I use my watch as mainly a fitness tracker and I allow notifications from fewer than 5 apps.
This is absolutely what I worry about for my kids, down the line. A boyfriend could easily pass her an inherited iPhone with a prepaid SIM card so they could keep in touch away from parental prying eyes. Most families around here (SV) have old devices lying around, and $20/mo for a cellular plan is nothing for many teenagers.
I think you've sort of missed the forest for the trees, here. If you've gotten to the point where the kid is hiding a phone from you, you're already in an adversarial relationship with a young adult who has lost trust in your ability to be a reasonable authority figure.
You seem to think that there aren't any kids that, under pretty much any circumstances, would want to have a private device. Speaking from experience (having been a kid myself) I can assure you that these kids exist.
Pretty much all teens have stuff they are hiding from their parents. Some of it is trivial, some might be pretty serious. For example I'd guess it's not very common for your kid to come home and announce he's started having sex (though one of mine did).
Ha! my dad celebrated my announcement by inviting me to a good restaurant. I would never have thought about hiding that from my parents and I had their full support to bring my girlfriend back to my room (and later for the night)
> A minor is going to get a phone plan w/o a guardian signing for it?
In the US at least, it is trivial to get a phone plan without being 18 or having an adult sign for it. There is no credit check nor identity check.
Just walk into any Walmart and pick up any one of a dozen prepaid kits. These plans require you to bring your own devices, but you can get a used/unbranded smartphone for under $100 and a plan with data for under $10/month.
It has been this way for at least 10-15 years, if anything post-pay/credit line plans are quite an outdated concept, and mostly used by older generations who are overpaying. Plus T-Mobile specifically have had three data breaches leaking all of their customer's personal information (which they wouldn't even have with a prepaid plan).
lol kind of funny something like 35 can be bargained down with cash. if im selling a used phone for 35 im for sure expecting to deal with cash but of course accept other payments as well since its at my store. i guess its even hard to pay for drugs in cash these days huh. i do know in korea cash is not even a thing anymore. either are plastic cards its just all through phones
The trick is whether or not he’s a true believer in the rules you promulgate. If he’s not, he may find ways around them, and you probably don’t want to foster a game of cat and mouse with your child lest they end up resenting you.
Not YOU, specifically. I’m speaking in general terms, and somewhat from experience.
When I was in high school we barely had smartphones. A friend of mine had a Windows Mobile 6 device, some kids had Blackberry devices. The iPhone had just come out. Devices were somewhat less personal back then so my experiences may not be practically replicable today, but back in the day I would lend my phone to my friends at the end of the school day if they had been grounded and their phone taken away.
Again, that was almost 20 years ago (dear god), but there’s something to be said for the unchecked determination of a teenager in search of a gadget.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your stance, nor am I criticizing you. For every watchful parental eye, there’s always a bit of sleight of hand. It’s the way of so many of us here, and likely something passed on to the kids of many of us here.
I think the issue at hand is yes you can enforce this at the family level. However unless high maturity / self awareness the kid will struggle if his peers all have phones.
This needs to be a campaign pushed at the school or even county level.
Yeah there's discussion about this in scientific articles I've read, where at a certain point the social circle exists on these apps, and by a single individual removing themselves they are forced to effectively choose isolation.
I experienced it myself when I deleted instagram. I realized that certain friendships that had been thriving on that channel didn't flow as well outside it, via texting for example.
So I redownloaded and set a screen time limit and I'm calling that good enough.
> I realized that certain friendships that had been thriving on that channel didn't flow as well outside it, via texting for example.
I think it's a strain to call that friendship. Communication channels don't matter in case of friendship. I may text, call, email, etc... and it's all good. But it being exclusive to a specific platform is more a social circle or a club as you said.
I had this happen when I got rid of facebook years ago. I just lost touch with certain groups that were going to the movies or out for drinks or whatever. I just wasn't aware things were happening. Occasionally I'd get "where are you?" texts. No big loss, as I had other much closer groups where the communication mechanism matters less and varies, but I can imagine it could be isolating for some without that.
Let's say I'm in a group of 6 close friends and every year we have 20 poker nights, 4 barbecues, and attend 2 sports events or concerts.
If I decide I don't like poker and I'm not going to attend the poker nights - my friends will still welcome me to the barbecues and sports events. We'd still be friends.
But they're not going to cancel poker night. And if at poker night Bob tells the other guys how proud he is his daughter Jenny has gotten accepted to the fancy college she applied to - nobody's going to summarise that in an e-mail to me.
We'll still be friends - but I'll be spending more time alone, and the social fabric won't be quite as tightly knit.
> nobody's going to summarise that in an e-mail to me.
You don't need to know everything that's happening in your friends' life. They may want to share some news and it'd be ok to not know if you were not present and you haven't heard from other channels. Every now and then, you call them and ask them what's news and how everything's going.
I liked Facebook when it was about getting status updates from a friend. It was blogging for people that did not know how to set up a wordpress website. Then it became...something else.
> We'll still be friends - but I'll be spending more time alone
Social activities are not the same as social platforms. And as for me, I'm not forcing myself to attend events and use platforms I don't like just to not be alone.
Agree, won't be easy -- he already has many peers with phones. But we have a lot of rules like that (e.g. no unsupervised YouTube use, wear helmets on the bike, etc) and he lives an otherwise well-provisioned life -- I think we'll work something out.
I’m amazed no one is pushing back on this. I respect your decision as a parent — it’s your decision — but not letting them have a phone until 16 or privacy in their YouTube sounds miserable for them. I would be, but everyone is different I suppose.
In contrast, I was watching gore videos by the time I was 13. I think I turned out ok.
We’ll see if it’s survivorship bias, but personally, I plan to give our daughter Kess most of the freedom she’ll want. She’ll figure it out. The worst situation would be for her to develop feelings for someone and not trust her parents with that info. I suspect restricting smartphone usage is exactly how to end up in that situation.
Yes. But, having the freedom to watch something and decide for yourself is a different question. 16 is two years short of military age, and old enough to pay taxes on your income.
16 does seem late for a first phone and likely they will find the phone necessary by the time their child reaches high school (age 14). Still, I appreciate the goal of trying to protect their child from the always connected lifestyle until they have some mental tools and life experience to understand and manage it.
My kid is college age now and a couple years ahead of the first iPad generation. There is a huge difference in how those kids handle the internet even though they are nearly the same age.
I had unrestricted (dial up) internet access from a very young age and I _do not_ think it was good for me. I don't think having that access in my pocket at all times would have helped either (I didn't get smartphone until I was out of college in 2013).
Despite all the rules I've outlined in this thread, I really do believe in giving my kids as much freedom and autonomy as possible. I do not want to manage their time, I do want them to pursue their own interests and grow into their own person.
That being said, developing brains are not adult brains. It is a parent's job to fill in for that immature prefrontal cortex when needed. I can't expect a child to handle the asymmetric onslaught of the attention economy without negative side-effects. Have you seen the manipulative kids content on YouTube? How can a kid escape the recommendations tab with thumbnail after thumbnail specifically designed to draw them in?
So I will work with my kids to learn how use technology without experiencing all the ill-effects. At the end of the day, technology is just one of many tools they will use throughout life -- I don't let them use the bandsaw without help yet either. We'll make adjustments as they get older, but at age 7 things are still pretty hands-on.
I don’t mind the content they watch on kids YouTube (mostly, streamers can be awful), but the exposure to the algorithm turns them into tiny zombies and led to behavior problems. Even adult brains have trouble navigating the dopamine hits of recommendation algorithms optimized to keep you engaged.
We’ve stuck to a middle ground where they are limited to a certain amount of YouTube per day (but have no time limits for Netflix, games, etc). This has worked well so far
Totally agree. To your point, I personally have disabled watch history on YouTube so there is no recommendations feed at all. I just search for the videos I want or scroll through the new videos from my subscriptions.
It is these kinds of tactics that I want my kids to develop.
You could bet I'd have a secret phone, and somehow knowledge on every wifi password in the neighborhood.
The effects of things like gore at 13 are not well understood, I think, but content like this is prevalent, so I see the point in either restricting or allowing it. The definition of "fine" also varies, what's fine for some, is certainly not fine for the other. Also, simply surviving, or turning out to be a degree of fine might not be something that parents want for their children. For example, people overcome trauma all the time, and doing so is great achievement and a source of life satisfaction, but we generally don't cause trauma to achieve this outcome, in fact, most of the time we actively prevent it.
At the end of the day, I think it's mostly just risk, and dealing with it is risk management. It's not that there are any clear paths, many excellent people and outstanding contributions come from unlikely circumstances, and many times even the safest bet fails.
I have seen a couple of videos on youtube about people only using an Apple Watch with LTE, but I have found nothing long term or about android smart watches. I would really like to explore this possibility for myself
My watch changed my relationship with my phone very positively, so I offered to get my kids watches as a phone alternative. Not that they couldn't have phones at all, but they'd leave them at home when going on, and not carry them in their pockets around the house.
They declined because they think watches are lame and nerdy. Only the most unfortunate kids get watches. They still can't carry them around the house, but I didn't gain much ground overall. I've gradually increased controls on and over the phones in my home, but the watch offer has never been taken up.
I think you're right that it could be an overlooked solution, but I suspect you need to sneak in before the kids are accustomed to a phone.
Not the poster, but since getting a smartwatch with a cellular plan, I've found myself more often leaving my phone when out and about - especially with my kids. I'm still be able to make calls, text, listen to pods and music, pay for stuff, navigation etc. but without any of the distractions.
I stopped using it as much. I had some reports of using it for several hours per day, which as an adult with kids was sort of internally shameful and humiliating. Yet it kept happening despite efforts to prevent it.
The watch did a few things. It made it so I didn’t feel like I needed my phone around since my urge to have it was communication with my family or work. So, with that handled I could relax and leave the phone at home.
It also allowed me to see quite clearly how unnecessary my phone actually was. I rarely actually use my watch while out and about because the instances in which I imagined I’d need my phone were mostly false. The watch is useful, but maybe a few times per week rather than per day.
Finally it demonstrated that the utility I imagined my phone had outside of necessity was a lot more limited than I thought. Apps and cameras are cool, but not using them is, too. I really don’t care that my phone is gone when it’s gone.
So, I’ve gained up to hours per day of my life back and broke a terrible habit. I tried willing myself out of it but failed. Ultimately the watch was a great solution.
The trick is actually putting the phone away, though. If you carry both you’ll just use the phone anyway.
I’m not kidding when I say I’ve filled it with great things. I’ve always wanted to dive deeper into robotics but “never had the time”. Well, a couple hours a day is a lot. I’ve made huge strides in learning and I’m actually building practical things with that recovered time.
If someone told me this two years ago I’d think I knew better and they didn’t understand my situation or something. I didn’t realize this was happening until it occurred to me that I was finally learning and building all the stuff I’d intended to. I wondered what changed.
Prior to this I’d built a hydroponics automation and monitoring system, and all said I think it took me ten years. I’m pretty sure I could have quartered that if I wasn’t glued to my phone so much.
In public I very rarely have my phone out of my pocket or bag. 75% of the notifications that would make me look at my phone, I get on my watch. I also never miss a notification when my phone is not in my hand/pocket and as such have reduced the notifications significantly.
Ha, now that you mention it, my phantom vibrations are gone as well.
Like you I ended up culling a lot of notifications. I also added focuses which only allow certain people to call or apps to notify me throughout different parts of the day. It’s really nice to pare this stuff down on top of obviating the phone’s ability to deepen distraction if you happen to be notified.
There's a fix to the "nerdiness" issue: Have the kids pick awesome bands or band/frame combinations from AliExpress. (They're about $5-20 rather than $60-200.) There are plenty out there to transform a watch to look nothing like an Apple or Samsung watch, and look nothing like anyone else's watch.
It's true. Design, aesthetics, and impressions cannot not be made, and so are always constructed even without attention. People, especially kids, associate much of their identity with their appearance. Sometimes, I pine that we ought to live as Quakers in some ways.
Funnily enough a lot of people trotted out the "only old people wear watches" argument when the Apple Watch came out as a reason why it was going to be a failure.
That said, I canceled my cellular plan on my original one and really mostly use it as a GPS device when hiking. It's easier just to use a watch that doesn't need charging day to day.
Yes, charging is a legitimate pain in the ass. At first I didn’t mind, now I find it annoying. Maybe because I took a long hiatus from work and I’m rarely at a desk; that’s where I used to charge it.
I got an Apple watch for my 11-year-old for precisely this reason - he can text, call, and play some games on it.
Subscription to cellular is $10/month.
And it let me set parental controls on it.
No way was I getting him a phone, it's already way too distracting with the other devices he has access to at home.
It only needs to be paired to an iOS device for initial setup and configuration. A watch with cellular can operate independently of the iOS device after setup and configuration.
It's been a year or so, but some carriers refused to sell me a watch only plan, it had to be a new cell plan for a phone too. (And pairing with an existing phone meant it had that cell's number, not a watch only one.)
I also have an 11 year old with an Apple Watch and it has been such a good introduction to connectivity as well as social media (iMessage/texting...)
She has gained a lot of independance because we are able to track her with the watch, and she is now proactively communicating with it to let us know where she will be etc.
I'm not enthusiastic about the teen years with TikTok/Instagram,etc but at least she will have been onramped gradually and hopefully it's a natural progression.
Overlooked answer? Aren't you are literally describing a mobile phone. You know, before they were smart phones with distractions. The nice thing about this solution is its less likely to be forgotten because its on the wrist.
Considering how often my three-year-old niece wants to play around with my Apple Watch, including at bedtime, it seems like it can be just as big of a distraction.
I'll add that while that may be true. I find that it doesn't matter what kind of screen it is - my kids are like moths to flame. Its the backlit lighting + some kind of interactivity that makes it attractive to play with.
The color is part of it. I put a greyscale filter on my phone and it’s insane how much it’s reduced the device’s ability to suck me in and keep me staring at it.
The original Game Boy and Tamigotchi weren't colour, or backlit, and they were disruptive in classrooms when they came out. For at least some individuals, even simple black and white, non-networked games, are kind of compulsive. This is probably particularly true for younger children without guidance.
When I was a kid I wanted a slick James Bond style smartwatch that had lasers, tools, and other badass capabilities, not this baby-ified fitness tracker.
As soon as you invent the In Live and Let Die watch that deflects bullets with magnets or something, I'll buy one for my kids as long as you leave out the buzzsaw.
If it had an IR emitter and camera in the right place, one could play laser-[watch-]tag, although the classic cheat of obstructing the sensor would still exist.
The James Bond watch was a tool for James Bond to use. This watch is a tool for parents and Google to use. They are not so easily comparible beyond both having the appearance of a watch and being called "spy tools"
I just hope this is not a repeat of the Versa 4 where no third party apps were allowed[1] (unlike the prev versions which allowed them). That's a head-scratcher. This is the thing that gets people to spring for a Garmin.
There's no mention of software support lifetime. If this is just another multi-hundred dollar electronic gadget that's going to be useless in 2 years, why would I buy it for my kid?
I can get a refurb Apple Watch SE 2nd gen direct from Apple for $209. I'm clearly not going to buy this Google watch because of the price.
If it's going to be broken, have a shot battery, or be useless in 2 years it doesn't matter which of those happens, I am not willing to spend >$200 initially and then a monthly fee on it.
If I needed to track my kids' locations, I'd give them each an Airtag. $20ish and free tracking. I mind much less if they destroy/lose a $20 thing with a replaceable battery.
2 years is an eternity in the field of kids tracking devices. I sure wish it's supported for longer, but also don't expect to use it that much longer if there's a better device 2 years from now.
In particular you'll be paying a monthly subscription, so you'll still be paying the same price whether you stick to this device for 10 years or not.
On the Apple Watch it's a completely different proposition, in particular you absolutely need to pair to an active iPhone.
I am amazed by the way decisions are made at Google.
In my imaginations the story was something like that:
- How to keep next generations hooked into useless technology?
- Oh, let's make their parents buy smartwatches to their kids, this way we A. will track them 24/7, sell other useless stuff too.
Fitbit has been making smartwatches for like a decade. They've been making models specifically for kids before Google even bought them. It's the Fitbit Ace line. Why is continuing that product line something you're amazed by?
Like, the only reason you seem amazed is because you've made up an outrageous story about how the product came to be. Except you admit that you've just made it up and know very well it's not true, so presumably that's not driving your amazement.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
As mentioned by others in this discussion, Apple does have a way to limit the functionality of an Apple Watch, as outlined: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109036
You can do similar things with an iPhone or iPad. Turn off all kinds of stuff entirely, require a request (comes through in the parent’s phone) to override. No Web browsing without asking? Done. No installing apps without asking? Done. Web browsing allowed, but allow-list only? Done. Allow some app, but max one hour per day? Done. Lots of stuff.
Apple purposefully leverages its closed ecosystem to generate social friction amongst kids in order to drive hardware sales, making them persona non grata in my book.
Does anyone else feel uneasy about the idea of children having to curb their behavior because they know they're being constantly monitored by their parents?
This product concerns me not only due to corporate advertising surveillance but also parental spying.
And then when they finally break free they don't have any feedback mechanism that they had since childhood. This can go both ways. They might turn out to be model citizen or your worst nightmare.
People raised children for 1000s of years without any technology. I bet we can do that too.
Possibly -- but we're looking at a smartwatch to give our 7 y.o. _more_ freedom. If he has a way to call home and we can check on his location, I'm much more likely to set him loose in the neighborhood.
In the US, the biggest danger to free-range kids is nosy neighbors, who are convinced kids out wandering alone are in danger of… something! Kidnapping? Sex trafficking? Darned if I know. But it’s a huge problem to those of us who want our kids to be free to walk to the corner store. My kid had a woman call the police on him at age 7, in a safe suburban neighborhood, when she wasn’t satisfied with his answers about why he was out alone. Having a phone would have helped: he could have called me right then. (As it is, he ran away before they got there, and I still chuckle wondering what the cops thought about the whole thing.)
I am pretty comfortable with him moving around w/o a cell device but it would give my wife peace of mind (which is fair). Plus the convenience of calling him home without driving around.
I don't disagree, but we didn't had a choice and now we have. How much guilt is a parent going to have in, the unlikely situation, that something unfortunate happens and that it could have been prevented by this device?
Correct me if wrong, but the anti-vaxxer movement is limited to Americans. I never once heard any other nationality talk about it, except to make fun of loonies from the US. In many highly developed countries, you cannot go to public schools without evidence of many vaccines.
From skimming the page, it looks like it mainly just lets you know their location. Were there other more invasive features than that? Parents keeping tabs on where their kids are and who they're with is associated with positive outcomes like reduced drug use risks.
My child has more freedom now, because I can let her walk further from home, unsupervised, to see if a friend can play - because she can immediately text me and let me know she's staying at the friend's house for the next few hours. She no longer has to wait for me to be ready to walk with her.
She can text me if she wants to be picked up from aftercare early. Or if she wants to stay later. Or if she wants to make plans for afterwards with a friend.
I don't mean to dismiss your concerns, they're valid. But this question also varies hugely with age. It would feel very odd tracking every step of my child's life if they were 16; it's different if they're 8.
Germany showing its incredible infrastructure again then. But then giving the kids a cell phone really is a necessity huh. Can't even call parents at work if they're back from school or on break and something happens.
Thank you to share. My experience (different countries) was similar to yours.
Do you know anyone who grew up in a big city in the same era? I do. They didn't experience the same type of freedoms. Their parents were much more concerned about crime/kidnapping/"the boogey man".
Anecdotally, where I live in a more rural area now, it's common to see kids out riding bikes during the day. Contrast that, I work in the city and unless it's right after when school lets out, I don't see nearly as many kids just riding around. Perhaps it's because they really stay inside the neighborhood or culdasac, but the city is small enough and well connected (Netherlands) with bike infrastructure, that I would expect to see more kids around.
Perhaps this is also influenced by the number of expats in the larger cities and those people are unsure of the safety/normalcy aspect and tend to lean towards caution? I'd be interested to see some data!
I grew up in a socialist apartment block neighborhood with more apartment blocks around and more even further.
You came home from school, watched tv, did whatever, then around three, parents would start coming home, so we (the kids) went out, you knew approximately when dinner would be ready to go home and eat, and that was it. The playgrounds, benches, basketball courts, etc., where full of kids and noone really cared. Sometimes when someone was needed at home, a mom would yell his name through the window, and someone heard it and told someone else, and than that third person knew where that kid was and told him that his mom is looking for him, and the kid went home (usually to eat, or if some relative came to visit).
You're talking about giving the kid the ability to send messages to their parents - I don't think anyone thinks that's a bad thing.
The person you're responding to is talking about the location "sharing" feature, where the watch constantly reports the kids location to their parents without the kid doing anything.
Your kids won’t appreciate it once they grow up and they found out later that their whole childhood been recorded and being used to train AI or even worse, a data breach, since they didn’t have the choice to opt in or out.
This is about the same price as the Apple Watch SE w/ LTE -- seems tough for Google to compete with an established, reliable alternative at the same price point.
> Fitbit Ace LTE is designed to protect your child’s privacy and wellbeing. Parents can see their child’s recent activity and goal progress, but older data will be automatically deleted from our systems. Location data is only shown to parents and is automatically deleted after a short time.
> There are no third-party apps or ads shown to kids, and health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.
Interesting definition of "protecting your privacy", which means: Sending location information remotely to a US-hosted centralized server + a third-party (the parents) can track you all the time
Does this include the cellular plan? Then it's probably fine. But if we'd still have to get an additional cellular plan on top of this, then it's silly.
Exactly. Anyone in the tech industry who buys this is a fool. But I feel sorry for everyone who doesn't keep up with tech news to know everything Google releases is dead in the water and gets duped by this and the inevitable shutdown.
If this lasts as long as Stadia it will shut down on Thursday the 5th of August 2027.
It's not like this is a uniquely Google-y model, it's just a fitbit. Based on their past history of dropping support for legacy devices, I'd expect it to remain supported for a minimum of 5 years, but maybe a decade or more. And if this page is up-to-date, then it seems like they've only EOL'd 7 out of ~40ish models in the company's ~15 year history.
We've been happily using the Verizon Gizmo watch for a while now. It's a deliberately crippled smart watch. No games, no apps (it has a step counter and a stopwatch, but that's about it) -- some calling functionality, some messaging functionality, tons of oversight (limited contacts, all contacts must be approved by a guardian), and location tracking.
It's kind of bad at all of these, but our primary thought is to have it be a limited capability device -- similar to a flip phone but a wearable.
This looks like it's trying to enter the same market, but with a bunch of really really really really stupid shit.
"Meet the eejie. The eejie is the center of the Fitbit Ace LTE. The more your kids move, the more goals they hit and the happier they make the eejie."
You'd have to be an "eejie"-it to buy into this cutesy bullshit.
Quite possibly I am not the target demographic -- I never really got the tomagotchi thing either, so maybe I'm just a soulless monster.
My kids have access to other electronic devices, but don't yet have a smartphone. The Gizmo is a nice intermediate step. They know what real games are like and they want those. As a parent I don't want the phone to be a source of distractions. Having these sort of half-assed games feels like the worst of both worlds; disappointing games that the kids don't like, and stupid distracting games that the parents don't want.
I agree that some kids would like this, but in my family we wouldn't give our kids smartwatches at that age (6-8?). I don't think this will hit with tweens/teens, both because of the UI and because Apple Watches will be perceived as more prestigious/elite (not endorsing the feeling — just saying that will likely be the impression).
Tried a Gizmo when my daughter hit 5th grade; a big increase in independence comes around then (at least in our town which is still quite old fashioned with many, many kids walking, shopping, socializing, and playing outside unsupervised all over town in the nicer months).
The thing was an absolute turd. I think over 9 months I managed to get one message to go through to her, maybe two or three calls worked. She was never able to reach us when she wanted, and we could never reach her. End result was that we both experienced far more anxiety than if she'd had nothing at all - utterly counterproductive. Whether on wifi or 5 bar cell coverage, the damn thing just wouldn't ever reliably actually communicate. Support never figured it out though we did try.
The final straw came when she walked over to a friend's house across town one afternoon for a playdate, then I tried to call her an hour later to make sure all was ok and it didn't ring, as usual. I tried the location tracker thing and it told me she was in a dodgy neighborhood 20 miles away from where she was supposed to be. (People here will probably guess that it was getting location info from the address formerly associated with the WiFi AP at the house she was at - the parents had recently moved.) After that panic she and I both decided it was a piece of crap and we upgraded her to an Apple Watch as a "graduation present" from elementary school. It's worked perfectly, and it has been easy to manage controls and restrictions.
Agreed on the turd aspect. It's really amazingly poorly done, everything from the bad charger to the incoherent interface to the badly designed and operating app.
But what's nice is that it is a limited capability device. I'd love to hear more about the controls and restrictions associated with an Apple Watch. Apple's documentation is pretty shitty so I don't have a good feel for how it operates; just that the features exist.
"Screen Time" under Settings on iOS controls most of the functionality. You can set downtime, school time, allowed apps, and permitted contacts for your kids' devices from that.
For example my daughter is permitted to contact anyone in her contact list (which I approve, so no strangers - and it auto rejects texts from non-contacts) from 0730-0900, then just me and mum from 9-3, then anyone from 3-7, then just parents again. And no apps of any kind from 7pm onwards. That way no distractions at school but she can reach us in an emergency and she can get hold of us when at sleepovers but no playing games at night.
It's a little confusing, and if the docs are shitty I'll have to take your word because I haven't even managed to find any yet, but it does work well. It does however all work once set up.
"happy" is a bitch of a stretch with the gizmo since it's pretty much garbage but it does deliver on being a restricted communication and crappy tracking device at an affordable cost.
I'm on the fence about switching to a dumb phone or an apple watch next year (middle school).
It's not up to Google. It's up to parents. The point of this product is to give parents an option other than a phone, which I assume you would believe to be worse (in cost and what it enables).
$59.98 a year for unlimited connectivity is a pretty good deal. My kids are getting to the age where we leave them for things like soccer practice or summer camps. Not really interested in giving them a phone yet... but want them to be able to keep in touch. This seems like a decent compromise.
No sleep or stress with heart rate seems like a missed opportunity. The games to help kids move is interesting but if a distraction in school more trouble than it’s worth.
If I have kids, I will never trust them with an evil and dangerous company like google, same goes for facebook too, the business model been and still exploiting, abusing, and selling users’ data.
An open source alternative, both software and hardware would be ideal for kids, in the meantime, being a good and dedicated parent is the best strategy, and keep your eyes on your kids, tech isn’t needed.
It's privacy-protecting; their location will be private, only you can track them all the time, the apps installed, Google and their SREs, the US government if they want to (but they most likely need to ask), etc.
Words have meanings. And I don't think you know what they are.
Google absolutely will be selling this location data to "improve the advertising experience".
Am I missing something? Is it not just a glorified fitness tracker? I can certainly understand privacy concerns but I don't get how a smart watch is the signifier of a 'broken' world.
What's the benefit of this over a cheap LTE Apple Watch? I'm not an AW fanboy (Pebble/Garmin for me), but I had always anticipated getting my kid an LTE AW when the time came.
It doesn't look like the pricing is much different, and for families with iPhones it would presumably be simpler to stay in the Apple ecosystem. Is there something I'm missing, or is this just for Android families?
Regardless, I'm happy to see innovation in the space.
Huh wow, I can see that. [1] I didn’t realize that not all carriers that support Apple Watch support the family setup feature. I hope that changes soon! I was counting on that for our kids, but we’re not going to triple our monthly bill to enable this one feature!
I feel somewhat in a twilight zone. I'm not a fan of this device, but I also don't understand the over the top paranoia around it. Why do we invent such absurdly terrifying discourse around kids?
If you don't want this for your kids, just don't get it. If you are worried about folks knowing where your kids are and what they are up to, I have bad news for you about neighborhood gossip.
> If you are worried about folks knowing where your kids are and what they are up to, I have bad news for you about neighborhood gossip.
Obvious strawman comparing Google knowing vital stats and location about your child at any time with neigbors knowing and talking to each other about a kid.
> Ace Pass required. Works with most phones running Android 11.0 or newer or iOS 15 or newer.
This is a bummer. It's still better than being android only or iOS only, but this would really have benefited from allowing standalone use with management from the web for instance.
A noble idea that looks to be mired in bad design.
Once again Google ties a product to a subscription service (beyond whatever lte connectivity which would be needed anyways). They seem to be always chasing getting that recurring revenue by adding unnecessary features. This adds little value, greatly increases the maintenance cost for Google, and puts the risk on the customer for whether Google will continue thinking it's worth it.
Worst of all, "Games". As a lover of games as an artistic medium, and a game designer myself, I'm just so tired of gamification crap being added to everything else. Flashy graphics and numbers going up are the "sugar" to games' "nutrition" of interactive experience, mechanical exploration, and emotional expression. Rewarding children with external rewards over building internal motivation is dubious at best, and incredibly harmful at worst.
I was hopeful this would be minimalist, secured contacts version of general purpose OS used in more powerful smartwatches. Regular phone and message apps, parent-limited contacts, communications logged where the parent can review/block it.
We are currently sharing a Verizon Gizmo 3 among multiple children. The GizmoHub app is not bad but its mandatory use is frustrating. Friends need substantial parental help to start communicating with the Gizmo user (account creation with Verizon). Forcing all communications through a dedicated and clunky app is a non-starter.
Battery life is the other challenge. Kids don't heed advice to conserve the less than all day battery life. Later when communications for pick-up are most needed, the watch is often low on power.
> You have control over when they can play on their Fitbit Ace LTE. Set downtimes during the day, while still letting them get in touch with you if they need to.
This sounds like a great feature. I want my kid to be able to reach me in an emergency, but I want there to be zero distractions during the school day. Hopefully Apple implements this on Apple Watches that use Family Setup.
Cool, good to know. Seems like the discussion forums have several requests for preventing the kid from exiting the school mode, or only allowing exit in order to send a message or call an approved contact. I'll be interested to see how the different school modes evolve. It sounds like some schools don't allow watches where the kid can exit school mode except to make an emergency call, which makes sense. I wouldn't want to be a teacher trying to catch kids slipping in and out of school mode!
Requires a $10/mo data plan. So that is 2x of the many $5/mo plans you can get for a standalone-setup apple watch SE. Price is $70 less than the SE. Ok, so that crosses over in just over a year.
But, I know the apple watch will be supported for 7 years or so. This is a google product, so I expect it to be EOLed tomorrow. No thanks. Fool me 100 times, shame on you, fool me 101 times, shame on me, google!
What? Why would my kid need Tap to Pay? That's just setting the user/Google up for a horror story where the watch wearer goes overboard on spending for some lame game with in-app payments...
Tap to pay with spend controls sounds ideal for things like after school snacks/activities and transit. It could also be an easy to way to manage things like allowance digitally?
If you read the the "4" footnote included in your copied section...
> Requires compatible payment card and internet access. Payment cards for supervised users may require a separate paid membership (not included with Fitbit Ace Pass). Payment card memberships or parents may restrict purchases of certain products or from certain retailers. Supports Tap to Pay only.
Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline.
This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
And yes, I totally admit, some kids (very few actually depending on the locale) didn't survive. But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively affecting their development. I highly recommend the writings of Jonathan Haidt - he not only has great arguments but also has a lot of data to back up his conclusions.
Kids don't need more tech, they need less of it (and FWIW, most adults, too).
> Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
And cars used to be safe even without seatbelts!
It turns out times change. Before you think I’m disagreeing with the entirety of your comment, my own kids are the most free-range in-the-dirt kids I know. But it’s location-dependent. I trust cities and their people far less than wild animals.
I met a guy who didn't wear his seatbelt. He was a delivery driver and in a collision at 20mph. His head went through the windscreen and it scalped him from the eyes up. He had a scar all the way across from ear to ear. He couldn't shut his eyes for months. He wears his seatbelt now.
I would rather we don't have to spend precious emergency responder time on preventable injuries and deaths that occur at much higher rates by people not wearing seatbelts. If we can require you wear glasses to drive, we can require you wear a seatbelt as well. When someone dies in an accident because they didn't wear a seatbelt, there is another driver who now has to live with the fact that they killed someone.
Your answer does not refute anything that I said. Because judging from your reasoning, we should ban McDonald's and other bad food, so that people would not get heart attacks and die, so that we wouldn't waste the precious time of first responders, when they could rather attend to other people who actually want to live - those who don't eat poison
If I'm in McDonald's and a fat person enters that does not increase my chances of gaining weight.
If I'm driving and a driver not wearing a seatbelt enters the road it does increase my chances of being in an accident because if something happens that makes them have to swerve sharply, such as a large animal leaping into the road in front of them, a seatbelt increases the chances they will be able to remain in control during that maneuver.
According to the CDC in the US every year 800k people suffer from a heart attack. It could happen while driving. While it does not increase your chance of gaining weight, it increases your chance of getting in a car accident, because that other person might be driving while having a heart attack
One of the primary aims of seatbelts are to stop you becoming a projectile and protect other occupants of your car and people outside it. It's not just a personal choice.
The purpose of cars is to get people from place to place. That purpose isn't hampered by wearing a seatbelt. There's not even a compromise involved. It's all upside.
The purpose of childhood is produce future adults. That purpose isn't fully served when kids get too far removed from choices, risks, and consequences. Yes, we also need to make sure they stay alive, but survival can't be the only metric parents optimize for or they'll just produce confused old kids trying to live adult lives. (`Big`, but for real and without a magical fix in act 3.)
> And cars used to be safe even without seatbelts!
No, they weren't, which is why this is a poor analogy. We discovered that seatbelts could save an enormous number of lives with minimal impact on individuals, so we mandated them.
With child safety it's difficult to get comparable numbers (overall crime spiked in the 90s, so it's difficult to say whether kids were less safe because they had less tracking or just that overall crime was higher then), a big reason experts give for the reduction in crime affecting kids is they're simply inside a whole lot more.
They'd be even safer if we just put them in a plastic bubble I guess.
For better or for worse the ship has definitely sailed on the laissez-faire "be home before sunset" parenting of past generations. Assuming that, its probably a net positive if a product like this can give a parent who would otherwise be full helicopter enough assurance to let their kid have more freedom and independence. Especially if its in lieu of a smartphone.
> For better or for worse the ship has definitely sailed on the laissez-faire "be home before sunset" parenting of past generations.
It's only "sailed" because (some) parents demand to know where their kid is at all times. While I think it's difficult for any individual parent to, say, forbid social media for too long lest they ostracize their kid, saying "I won't track my kids" is a choice any parent can make.
I just pity the kids of these helicopter parents. The youth mental health crisis is no accident.
If only all social problems could be solved so easily. Theft? It only happens because (some) people keep stealing. They should just stop.
In the absence of people just doing what I think is right instantly and without question, I pity the child whose parents solve this anxiety by trapping them in the house 16 hours a day.
I don’t understand your example. Theft is complicated to solve because the one stealing gets a benefit from doing it. To solve that you need to change the cost/benefit balance for everyone.
To solve the over anxious parent problem you just need to get up to two people to chill out. It provides an immediate benefit for them (they will be chill) while it also provides them a long term benefit (a well adjusted offspring).
What is the supposed paralel here? Or what should be my takeaway from your comparision be?
helicopter parents believe they are getting the benefit of keeping their child safe, and convincing them otherwise is extremely nontrivial. To solve the over anxious parent problem (societally) we have to convince all of them, not just one set.
Gambling, alcoholism, or hard drugs might be a more apt comparison. Quitting obviously reaps huge benefits short and long term and yet we as a society still have not solved these problems by saying "just don't actually".
Once we acknowledge that, it becomes obvious that finding ways to reduce harm is good.
It's a choice a parent can make until someone calls the cops because your kid is unattended. I've had people give me you're an awful parent side eyes for not keeping my eyes on my kid 100% of the time in a fenced in park. Letting my kid walk to school like I did as a kid is just forever outside of my reach if I want to not have CPS called on me. At least if I geotag my kid with someone obvious people will be chill about her playing in front of the house.
There's entire TV channels dedicated to indoctrinating their viewers into a continuous mood of fear and anxiety, probably because it's easier to advertise to people in a febrile state.
I don't either, but that won't stop them from calling the cops.
It seems like kids have to be at least teenagers these days for people to assume they're OK to be out by themselves, and even then, some people are apparently wary before the kids are old enough to drive.
The first recorded use of the word "busybody" was in 1526, per Merriam Webster. Some people just feel like it's their duty to tell the world how to be. I think it's just human nature.
Exactly,I feel that some parents will be judged by their peers if they are not keeping a short leash on their children.
And because people are encouraged to look at any sign of child neglect (for some reason), dirty clothes or bruise that could be acquired during play, could be easily misconstrued as child abuse.
I have been often judged harshly for not subscribing to parental paranoia and refusing to breach trust with constant surveillance. I stand by my choice: surveillance harms trust, children need space and safety is good enough. I'm way too old to be sensitive to the opinion of other parents !
It's interesting that some parents seem to be more worried about what their peers think about them, than about giving their child the opportunity to grow to be well-adjusted and independent.
This is a really naive take. I tried literally what you’re advocating. And what happened was some busybody lady in my neighborhood kept calling CPS when my daughter would walk to play at a friend’s houses down the block. When I was her age (6) I ranged an entire town on my bike. But this lady just kept calling on us. She’d bring my daughter home whenever she saw her out. It was infuriating. Once we got the Apple Watch the calls and helicopter stuff stopped. Also, the GPS tracking on the cellular Apple Watch isn’t even super accurate, but I can call her to let her know it’s time to come home.
The other kids seemed to have followed suit, their parents relented (mostly, the Muslim families on our block seem to keep a very tight leash on their kids) and run around the neighborhood freely. But before our kid started going out nobody was going out.
If it weren’t her, it’d be another one. There are whole swaths of the populace convinced any child out alone is in mortal danger. They’ll post to the neighborhood Facebook group in panic if they see a child walking to the convenience store unattended.
The funny thing about this is that it's all about reinforcement and standing up for what you believe in. If more parents reported ridiculous busybodies like this woman for harassment, rather than caving in and changing their parenting style, then more potential busybodies would be on notice that their busybody behavior won't be tolerated by the community.
The problem is that the busybodies are usually well-meaning neighbors, trying to protect your kid from what they think is mortal danger. So throwing a fit about it is not a good look, if you care about getting along with your neighbors. The stakes are also very high: if someone gets mad enough, they might well report you to CPS, which is terrifying, especially when local laws in many places in fact allow CPS to decide that you were in fact neglectful. A more effective course of action is to work toward getting your state to pass laws protecting children’s independence.
Well, thank god I don’t live in the US. I can just send my kid to the convenience store and everyone will comment on how great it is they’re already able to do it by themselves, and how they’re helping out.
> There must be something you can do about that lady
No. Not a blessed thing. Most calls to CPS are anonymous and will never be investigated, no matter often or egregious.
My neighbor called CPS so often my kid would say "Oh. You again" when they showed up in school. I was designing a brochure for CPS agents to hang at the front door. It had all the schools and relatives with their contact info, along with a map to the fridge and bedrooms.
It’s a lot easier to get busybodies to leave you alone if you can call your mom on your watch. My kid also wanted to roam free at age 7, and he got the cops called on him. He’s in middle school now and still salty about it. If I could have gotten him a reasonably-priced phone in watch format, I’d have done it.
Here in the UK we don't have Japan-level super-younglings walking to school on their own etc, but you certainly wouldn't get any bother walking around at age 6 unless you looked obviously lost.
Hearing your experience is just so mindwarpingly boggling it's unreal..
It's any population center, city and metro area. They all have police and there's no shortage of cops who believe John Walsh's false stranger-danger narratives.
It's less about the children and more about the adults.
Most parents that I know are scared that their children will be victims of violent crime. They may trust their kids explicitly and implicitly, but do not trust the world.
Pretty much this, my mother would always say I'm not worried about you, I'm worried about others. This went for most things during childhood, walking home from school, driving a car etc
This has gone all the way back to around 2007 as a free roaming kid
The sad thing is that constantly tracking the child won't help with these problems. If someone wants to murder a child, a tracker watch isn't going to stop them. If someone wants to kidnap a child, a tracker watch is going to be ripped off and discarded (along with a smartphone, if they have one).
Kids don't need more tech, they need less of it (and FWIW, most adults, too).
There was a "looking back" piece of WGN-TV last week about a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old who rode their horses from Missouri to New York City to meet Roosevelt. Alone. All they had with them was canteens, and a map.
Then they bought a car with the money they raised along the way, and drove home to Missouri. Alone.
Today you can't get an adult to sit on a chair for 30 minutes without them using a phone, a water bottle, or both as a pacifier.
> using a phone, a water bottle, or both as a pacifier
I slowly put my phone down in shame after reading this. But I really love this sentence because of how true it is. Why is it always a phone and a water bottle?
All those recommendations about whatever crazy-high amount of water you’re supposed to have in a day. If you want to even get close, it’s either a few chug-sessions per day, or else carrying water to sip constantly.
… also, it probably helps replace cigarettes as an oral fixation, which is what everyone used to use.
Dry-mouth is a very common side effect for medications and it can even stick around after you stop taking the medications. It may be a personal bias due to medication use but I think it is 'need vs want' at that point. You may not suffer dehydration with dry mouth but it is uncomfortable.
I know that, but it’s by far the most common reason I hear for folks who carry water bottles everywhere, including office workers: they’re trying to get close to some very-high daily water intake recommendation.
To be fair, it's probably a good thing that people are hydrating.
But spot on with the rest of the stuff. And the stereotypical image of an adult sitting, buried in their phone, absently sipping from a water bottle is just too funny.
Having kids solely use a smart watch with some amount of connectedness (GPS, phone calls, a game or two) seems healthier and considerably "less tech" than a full on smartphone.
In principle I agree we don’t need to track our kids. But when I was I a free range kid in the 80s, there were pay phones at every corner, I carried coins and a calling card so could reach my parents.
Now they have to interact with an adult somewhere to use their personal phone. And the adult has to trust this isn’t a ruffian looking to swipe his phone for kicks.
But a cell capable watch for $200 is pretty compelling; the Apple SE is sync only right, so equivalent apple watch is $350+?
Yes but presumably this is a convenience for older kids and we're not expecting toddlers to roam about anywhere, gps or otherwise. They're capable of taking responsibility for a device.
There are a huge range of kids between toddlers and teenagers, and a huge range of variation in levels of responsibility between different children of the same age. Some kids are totally trustworthy when it comes to roaming but at the same time completely flaky when it comes to keeping track of expensive personal belongings.
And, needless to say, if you conscientiously avoid location tracking on the device then you can't use tracking to find it when it's inevitably misplaced.
There is a rather strong correlation between the type of kid who would most benefit from this device, and the type of kid who is most likely to irresponsibly lose a phone. I'm imagining a child with ADHD who compulsively elopes.
Any $$ hardware I give my kid will need device tracking, because they will likely misplace it more than once. And once you have device tracking… you have tracking.
And the other poster is right, wrist format is best for kids.
I grew up in europe, and I had two instances where I came close to being abducted as a kid.
You are naive if you think parents are overreacting. once you become the statistic the statistic is meaningless to you
I know crime exists, I just don’t think it is so prevalent that we should poison our lives with paranoia and lack of privacy. I’d rather my kids raised on freedom and self reliance.
But these are personal preferences, I’m not imposing this on anybody.
Sure there are trade offs, and your position is understandable.
Self reliance and freedom are important but I don't see the value in not being able to call for help when help is needed.
As a parent you can still make the decision to not pick your child up if they are tired and want to be picked up.
I don't see how a wristwatch tracker would have helped, though. Nowadays I'm sure potential kidnappers are well aware that kids often have some kind of tracking device on them (smartwatch, smartphone, AirTag, etc.), and will quickly get rid of any such devices before taking an abducted child with them.
It would have helped because I was walking home from my music lessons. My dad was supposed to pick me up but he was late. This was before cell phones were widely available and I was about 10 years old.
Predators don't just snatch you up like in some movie, they watch their targets first, or lure them away.
People/children have a gut feeling when something is not right and can call for help.
Will it be 100% effective, no, but it will drastically improve response times just by knowing the exact/last location.
> I don’t buy that tracking kids is necessary or increases their safety. This seems to be an American phenomenon.
I thought so too, but I listened to call-in radio show in Romania recently about tracking kids, and pretty much all the parents said they track their kids and those who don't are irresponsible parents.
I'm 35 and I don't recognize this world anymore. We played outside in mud when I was a kid.
Gave my 11 year old an apple watch, not so that I can track him, but just so that he can call me when he needs me ( there are times when he's at practice and am running late to pick him up or sometimes he just plain loses track of time because of his ADHD ).
And, he can set timers and alarms to keep track of his schedule.
My kids are pretty free-range, riding their bikes to/fro from school and hanging out at their friend's places.
I did not want a phone because it's way too distracting
Exactly this. It’s strapped to his arm. Airtags in the rest of his things also helps him find his lost items.
It’s an enabler! Smartwatch is better than dumb phone in nearly every way. Can phone? Check. Has GPS? Check. Can route public transport? Check. No tiktok? Check! Good battery life. No check :(
I work around that last one with a keychain battery charger.
This is not a substitute for teaching your kid what to do when lost (or watch is lost or nicked), but it gives them tremendous freedom. My son can navigate the world on his own now, all thanks to a bit of techno-magic on his wrist.
Asking an 11-year-old with ADHD to keep track of a dumb phone is just asking for trouble. The watch straps to their arm and can't be set down somewhere and forgotten.
I can only guess you (and most of the other naysayers in this thread) don't have young children.
My wife and I have been looking for something exactly like this for our 6yo. I lost him on a ski slope once over a year ago and I think he's still traumatized. He recently was afraid of going on a class trip because he was afraid of getting lost.
This isn't for teenagers. It's for kids that are still attached to mama/papa. It's not necessarily even for everyday. But field trips, amusement parks, big crowded events, hell even shopping malls? I remember many times as a kid having my parents call out on the PA system when I got lost in a department store.
Agreed- just because you have these devices on hand doesn’t make you a helicopter parent. It’s just like having food storage doesn’t make you paranoid. You’re just prepared.
I get this, I have an uncanny memory of my youth and have clear memories of the fear that ran through me when I realized I didn't know where Mom was.
However, I think this belief that humans evolved to be so sensitive to childhood trauma is incredibly over sensationalized. I'm no worse off in life despite getting lost a few times. Your kid will be fine.
Parents have a lot to contend with as it is. Making live easier by preventing the temporary loss of a child and the anxiety for both parties is a benefit.
If anything this gives kids more freedom, anyone not understand this should have a set of kids first.
Learning how to deal with anxiety in limited doses is an important part of childhood too.
> If anything this gives kids more freedom
I hope you're not too optimistic there. If it lets kids roam around outside more, than the upsides massively outweigh the downsides. But that's a very big "if".
I am speaking from experience as a father of two.
The watch teaches the kids to reach out when they feel overwhelmed.
They are fully in control of their own destiny. They don't always end up where they planned they were going and that is perfectly ok for me because they can reach me if there is an issue.
Should I just quote my adjacent reply that I guess you didn't see? "Even in that situation, at most you need some way to get a location at that moment when they chose to reach out to you, not tracking."
And the ability to get in contact is 90% of the benefit.
Well if you decide to create rules to remove freedom and then say "you can only get your freedom back with this device I'll force you to wear" and call that "more freedom", we have different definitions. You could let them go to the same places they will go with the watch already, you were the one limiting freedom, not the absence of a watch.
Thanks. Yeah, I agree - I'm not worried for him, he's going to be fine. But I think he would be willing to roam more freely if he had the security blanket of being able to reach out to mama & papa if he needs it. I'm sure he'll grow out of that like every other kid.
> However, I think this belief that humans evolved to be so sensitive to childhood trauma is incredibly over sensationalized. I'm no worse off in life despite getting lost a few times. Your kid will be fine.
If that is true, then you cannot say that tracking your child's every step will traumatize them permanently either.
I don't think people are saying it does. It doesn't cause trauma, just causes overdependence on "someone watching over me", as well as a diminished sense of the value of privacy.
Exactly what I came to say. I need something for my daughter to connect with and/or track her while playing with her friends outside. It is difficult to always be on her lookout, and any other watch tracks them more. I need control to see who they are talking to, chatting with, what apps they use, and controlling screen time. Few kids in her class are already on IG/Tiktok courtesy their elder siblings and I do not want my daughter to be exposed to such crap.
Edit: also to inform her in case I am running late to pick her up from school due to traffic or otherwise.
> I need control to see who they are talking to, chatting with, what apps they use, and controlling screen time.
Sure it's not my right to tell you how to parent. However I ask have you not sat down with your daughter and explained her the dangers and consequences?
Restrictions are what you want. Restrict her from downloading apps, ask her to show you her messages. Limit her screen time when she's done her chores.
Don't hide and sneak controlling her habits in the back scenes because if you loose her trust you won't get it back.
Unless by controlling you do mean restricting which changes the tone completely.
An 8 year old doesn't really have a fully developed mind. You can often talk with them that jumping out of the tree will likely break their arm, but chances are when you're not looking they're still going to jump.
Little kids often struggle understanding and remembering consequences, especially of really big complex ideas.
There's a reason why we don't just let 12 year olds drive.
Why do you feel like you “need” this, though? I think that’s exactly what GP is saying – not disagreeing that it might have utility, but that there is a cost associated as well. The world is just statistically not that scary, and it’s good to let our kids make mistakes and get lost and find their way and face adversity and survive.
Me and my wife differ in our perspectives on this. She is more of a “safety at any cost”, whereas I am more of a “free range kids”. I know the world has changed since I was a teenager, but our parents never knew where we were, who we were chatting with on the internet, and we turned out great.
no freedom is removed from the child. It's a failsafe they can chose to contact the parents when they feel overwhelmed and then the decision from the parent can still be made to not help.
If anything children will be given more latitude to be independent.
Safety at any cost is a very silly phrase.
If something happens to your child and $250 could have prevented it the cost seems very small and the statistics very personal
I don't think GP is talking about money when they say "cost". They're talking about the cost to a child's healthy development when it comes to independence, freedom, and learning how to deal with adverse situations without knowing that mom or dad is constantly looking over their shoulder (figuratively, in the tracking case) and can pluck them from said situation at a moment's notice.
The choice on how to act when your child is in trouble is still yours.
It's very obvious to me that a lot of people engaging here don't have children.
There is a lot of idealistic posturing.
Do you really think a child takes developmental damage by feeling cared for and protected?
Did we turn out great or did you turn out great?
There are many cases where unsupervised use of the internet or getting lost did not turn out well at all. Why view someone opting into this (my entire family has "find my" enabled on our phones.) Where is the negative? Kids can still be free range while allowing for the parent to know where they are.
I mean, when people bring up unsupervised use of internet, I always remember that my first exposure to porn in the 90s was a site called animal sex farm (there was a list with leaked credentials for porn site that I stumbled into and that was the first site on the list). I was rather shocked by what I saw and let's say it's not something I'd want my son to be exposed to at 12 years old.
"make mistakes, get lost and find their way" does not work for crowded and busy neighborhoods. No one would like their kid to be lost in new york. Add the risk of abduction in high risk communities.
Also, it depends on kids age. I want kids to be safe in elementary, make mistakes and learn in middle/high school.
> I need control to see who they are talking to, chatting with, what apps they use, and controlling screen time.
I'm just some random on the internet, but this rubs me the wrong way. Trust is important in relationships, and this doesn't show any trust. Some of this is perfectly fine, but tracking their chatting is an invasion of privacy unless you have a specific reason to be worried.
Presumably OP is talking about a younger kid, and not his 17 year old. It has nothing to do with trust of your child, and has everything to do with not trusting other people to do what is best for your child and not try to take advantage of them. To put it another way, I doubt OP is concerned that his kid is going to go hunt down a pedophile and then have sex with them. He is probably more concerned that a pedophile might try to hunt down his kid and then have sex with them.
I hope this question doesn't offend, but have you taught your son what to do when he gets lost? Explicitly teaching and practicing strategies like this can help a lot. I was always taught to 1) stay where you are, not try to walk around and 2) approach someone who works at the store and tell them you're lost, your name, and your parents name. I also memorized my address and home phone number. Obviously that doesn't work in every situation but I think it gave me more confidence that I could handle things as a kid.
That's what I was wondering. I got lost at a basketball game when I was 5. Went up to an officer and told them my parents were lost. Sure it was scary, but it wasn't some scarring incident...
This logic moves right into victim blaming territory real quick though. "Have you taught your child what to do if they get lost?" doesn't fix the fact that you don't know what they'll do till it happens, and then it might be too late.
I'd much rather have a backup system in case they don't do the right thing in case they panic.
I'll also point out that your advice here is statistically unsound: there's the baked in "stranger danger" element - "approach a police officer/approach someone who works at the store". See, no one wants to say "approach literally the first adult you see" because "stranger danger"...but statistically, there aren't a lot of predators around. The longer a child is unattended with no one helping them, the more time an active predator has to spot and isolate them.
But no one can put that extremely small risk that literally the first random adult in a major shopping center is actually going to be one, so we always qualify the advice with "find an authority figure preferentially" (increasing the time they're alone and obviously unattended).
My point was that if OP's son is still terrified of getting lost, it might help him to have concrete plans in advance that come from an authority figure, including a plan that doesn't rely on having a specific device, charge, and signal each time. The specifics of whom to approach are up to the parent and child - I'm just giving one example.
Also, I think "victim blaming" isn't an apt term in this case. Getting lost is almost never caused by someone being victimized, it's caused by lack of attention and then lack of a way to resolve the situation on your own.
> This logic moves right into victim blaming territory real quick though. "Have you taught your child what to do if they get lost?" doesn't fix the fact that you don't know what they'll do till it happens, and then it might be too late.
I think that's a bit of an uncharitable take. If the commenter upthread hasn't sat down with their kid and talked through a plan for if the kid gets lost (including having them memorize names, phone numbers, and addresses), then that's negligent on the part of the parent. But no one is saying "if you've done this, it will work 100% of the time, perfectly, and you'll never have anything to worry about".
Yes, it doesn't work in every situation. You know what works in more situations? A cell phone(or equivalent). And what works in even more situations? A blend of both strategies.
This is a bit of projection. I have a child younger than yours and I feel exactly like OP.
I’m really sorry about your son’s experience. Getting lost can be terrifying for a kid.
But being lost happens (eg I was lost in hunting woods at 8yo), and many commenters have shared their experiences. Being scared and eventually overcoming the fear is a quintessential growing experience.
Obviously there are countless caveats because each kid is different, and depends on the level of danger etc
That's the wonderful thing though, everyone is free to raise their kids as they see fit. Original comment about "I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline" is obviously ridiculous and attempting to shame parents that opt for this kind of device.
Regardless of the choice the parent makes, odds are the kid is going to grow up just fine. There was no need for OP to make an incendiary comment.
Your kids don't learn independence and how to be self sufficient. After all, the goal is to make your kids into self-sufficient adults who can survive and navigate a complex world without your help. Being over protective (which is a natural instinct) can lead to children being overly dependent and not learning to be (to put in the most HN way possible) generalist agents.
> Your kids don't learn independence and how to be self sufficient.
Doesn't this depend on how the tracking is used, not on whether the tracking is present at all?
My wife and I share our location with each other and I don't actually know if she uses my location at all. If she does, she doesn't mention it. I use it occasionally to get a sense for when to expect her back or to find her when we need to meet up for something.
When our kids are old enough to have phones I imagine that we'll add them to the location-sharing circle we have and continue to use it in much the same way. For us it won't be about monitoring them at all times, it's just a helpful convenience for running a household.
> Doesn't this depend on how the tracking is used, not on whether the tracking is present at all?
Of course. I think most people would agree that this would be an implicit assumption not worth explicitly mentioning. Do you think that's non-obvious? To me it seems rather obvious since in the extreme case if you bought the device and never actually used any of the features (but still put it on your kid) then clearly it'd have no effect. There's clearly a lot of gray area in between.
But I think it is quite common for these types of devices to be significantly more desirable and predominantly used by those who intend to use it for persistent tracking. Because the value/utility is significantly lower for those that don't (we can agree that these factors are significantly related, right?).
From your specific example, I don't think anyone arguing against this type of device would be worried about that type of usage. My partner and I often share locations with one another, but honestly we often forget we shared it and end up literally asking instead lol. But my experience has been that we are the abnormal ones and others use the feature much more.
"But my experience has been that we are the abnormal ones and others use the feature much more"
I think you would find that you are the normal ones. My family has had it turned on for over a year now. I don't know I have ever used it to find my wife and I use it ~ once a month on my oldest now that he is venturing out on his own to ensure he got to where he was going. I have discussed it with several friends / acquaintances and their use is similar to mine.
I think your assumption that everyone actively tracks each other and over uses it is assigning an edge case to the majority. Its a simple safety feature to most, there when its needed.
your assumption that "it is quite common for these types of devices to be significantly more desirable and predominantly used by those who intend to use it for persistent tracking" is flawed and I don't think based on most people experience.
I don’t care if my wife knows my location either. She’s my partner, not my parent. Thankfully, I’m not a teen trying to develop a sense of autonomy and self reliance independent of my wife’s supervision.
As other posters have pointed out, no one really knows anything about anyone else’s life from an HN post.
That said, the whole point of the panopticon is that if the prisoner doesn’t know when they’re being observed, they’re effectively always observed. It’s a concern that’s at least worth giving serious consideration, not dismissing out of hand because it happens to work for you and your wife.
Fair, but I think discussion has morphed into that of parental surveillance in general, regardless of age.
I'm sure there are plenty of parents who have given them smartphones and require their kids to always share their location with them, all the way through their teen years.
Yeah I think this is an important point and I think it is also worth adding that this is the same premise of 1984. Not that Winston (or anyone) is being specifically surveilled by a physical person at any given time, but rather that Big Brother __could__ be watching/listening at any time.
And it is important to also stress the difference in power dynamics between husband/wife and parent/child. These are apples and oranges; both round fruit but different categories at an important level. Like you said, the teen is learning who they are while a partner has already made significant strides in this direction and (hopefully) has already learned autonomy. Children must make mistakes, but the goal is to prevent large ones. Difference between getting a burn by touching the stove and catching oneself on fire.
If you do you know that the main goal is to keep your kids safe and healthy. Everything else generally comes 2nd. Now there are of course extremes to this but for most the use of tracking technology is not intended as a crutch for the child but for the parent. So they know the kid is safe. Little Jimmy for the most part is not thinking if I get lost Mommy knows where I am. If they are out, they are free.
A kids ability to be self sufficient is very unlikely to be damaged by a nervous parent peaking at the location of their dot on their phone a block or 3 away.
> If you do you know that the main goal is to keep your kids safe and healthy. Everything else generally comes 2nd.
This type of reasoning is not sound, because you can draw the line literally wherever you want and still make that argument. "Kid isn't allowed to do anything alone without a parent present" satisfies that statement, but I wouldn't want to be a teenager living in a household like that.
> Little Jimmy for the most part is not thinking if I get lost Mommy knows where I am. If they are out, they are free.
I don't think I'd agree with that. Maybe when they're 4 years old, sure. But 8 years old? 10? 12? 15? At some point they will feel stifled, knowing that Mom and Dad can find out exactly where they are with a few taps on their phone. Maybe the parents will decide the tracking is no longer necessary before they get to that point. But maybe not.
Or hell, maybe they won't feel stifled, even by the time they're 15, because pervasive surveillance will be so normalized to them that it would feel strange not to be tracked. IMO that's the worst possible outcome.
> Or hell, maybe they won't feel stifled, even by the time they're 15, because pervasive surveillance will be so normalized to them that it would feel strange not to be tracked. IMO that's the worst possible outcome.
To play devil's advocate here - my wife and I, and several of friends that we frequently travel with, all cross-share each other's locations on google maps permanently. Doesn't really feel stifling, and it's come in handy quite a few times. Why is this a terrible outcome?
I think everyone imagines the overbearing parent micromanaging their kids' lives. Maybe the problem isn't the tracking, it's the overbearing parents. As an intellectual exercise, would you rather be a kid of overbearing parents who didn't have tracking technology, or permissive parents that always know where you are?
You don't have significant control over your wife and friends. At least hopefully. They're also adults who are self sufficient and you trust to be. That not the same for kids. Even if your kids trust you
If my kid, when he reaches a certain age of maturity (let's all agree this number is greater than 6), wants to separate from the group location share - then that's a reasonable conversation to have then?
The grandparent poster literally said that it's the worst possible outcome if the 15-year-old _wants_ to be part of a location sharing group. If they still want it, what's the issue?
I feel like people are bringing a lot of personal baggage from their upbringing into this conversation.
I don't know you, I don't know your kids. But I think you need to be aware of the implications and biases of "opt-out" vs "opt-in".
> I feel like people are bringing a lot of personal baggage from their upbringing into this conversation.
Of course? Are we not supposed to learn from the mistakes of our parents? And we're supposed to be aware of the nuances and subtleties that exist.
But I'm confused over your point. Is it "I know people will abuse this, but __I__ won't?" Because I do not think that is a great excuse. You instead need to argue about percentages and the harm. That's the ratio that matters. Because you, and your children, are not the only entities in the world. Of course people bring in their personal experiences. Why should we not be learning from others? Our experiences are limited and not all encompassing. Ignoring others experiences is naive and egotistical. I'm not ignoring yours, I just think the rate of abuse and the harm it does is not worth it. I do recognize there is utility, and I think most here do. It's a common discussion in anti-authoritarian groups about how surveillance becomes pervasive through mostly good intentions. After all, is that not what the path to hell is paved with? And this is why I'd refuse to call you bad, evil, or ill intentioned. In fact, I think you have good intentions. I just think the world is complex and there is more that we need to think about than our individual cases and people similar to us. If it was that easy, we would already be living in a much better world.
I think the question is: what is the threat model, and how would the information change your behaviour? If it's just peace of mind, then the false positives are super super stressful as I have had direct (not mine) experience of.
My view is tracking might have its place in certain situations, but almost certainly not in a blanket way, and always with an understanding of the threat model.
The spouse may have opted in, but the kids certainly didn't. Even if they say it's ok, they likely assume they have to agree, or they don't get to go anywhere alone, don't get to use the phone, etc. Or -- worse -- they just don't yet understand the awful implications of living in a society where everyone can be tracked. And so now they're conditioned from a young age to think this is normal, and then when they're in their 20s they don't bat an eye when the government passes a law requiring that the smartphone OS makers share real-time location data with the government at all times. That may sound sensational and hyperbolic, but I honestly don't see that as particularly farfetched, given the growth of government overreach over the past decades.
Why is that surprising? If something isn't possible, then it's not possible and we adapt. If something is possible, then then it's possible and we should consider it.
"Can I somehow put a tracking device on my young child?" is a question I've thought about for decades since before I had a young child, and now that I do I've been looking for something that will work for him when he's still little.
Obviously as he grows up the plan is to ramp off the updates - i.e. I don't need to know where he is at all times if he's old enough to know to text me if he'll be out late.
> if he's old enough to know to text me if he'll be out late
Kids certainly reach a stage where not texting you they’ll be out late is an important part of development. Teenage rebellion and all that. I loved telling my mom not to wait for me and staying out way past when she said she expects me to be back.
> "Can I somehow put a tracking device on my young child?" is a question I've thought about for decades
Good for you and those like you, it's nice when something long-awaited finally drops. I was speaking of the people who, if prompted 20y ago, would have said "that's creepy" but are now cool to track their kids, set up cameras around their house that are controlled by 3rd parties, and be cool with a firm tracking everything they watch, etc.
> In general I’m struck at how many people’s sense or “right” leans so hard on what’s available for sale.
I'm mostly confused how it seems there's pretty significant evidence that helicopter parenting[0] has resulted in poor outcomes for kids[1] but then we act as if the reason it fails is because we aren't paying __enough__ attention.
I am sympathetic to parents wanting to protect their kids, but if the objective is to turn children into adults that are independent and self-sufficient, then a parent also needs to learn to trust their kids (at different levels of course. Clearly there's a balance).
[1] To be clear, this metastudy concludes that there is insufficient statistical power due to scale, the evidence is in the direction of causing harm and of course, there is reason to believe this is a reasonable outcome. It's worth noting the part that says
Overprotective parenting and anxiety: No studies found reduced anxiety following overprotective parenting
I object to the idea that putting a smartwatch on your child is helicopter parenting. It can be exactly the opposite - if a little piece of technology allows kids to roam farther unsupervised, then it fosters independence.
I have never been accused of overparenting, yet I preordered one of these google watches. I expect to use it on outings like amusement parks and ski trips. We'll see how it goes.
> I object to the idea that putting a smartwatch on your child is helicopter parenting
> allows kids to roam farther unsupervised, then it fosters independence.
I think you understand then. It depends how the devices are used, obviously. I think no one is really objecting to the utility of being able to use such a device when there is a serious situation, but rather that the reality is that a very large number of parents use these types of devices to constantly surveil their children. There's a difference.
> I have never been accused of overparenting
I'm not accusing you of being one. In context this would depend on your actions and no one can realistically judge that without actually knowing you. But there is a clear general trend. No one knows if you're part of that, so don't be quick to assume you're being singled out.
And of course, I wouldn't use the "no one has accused me of" as a meaningful metric. People might not tell you (I mean every parent knows how common other parents gossip, right?), you might not hear, or it is quite common for these types of things to foster echo chambers as similar parenting styles naturally gravitate towards one another. But of course, no one is accusing you of anything, because this __cannot__ be known without significantly more information. This paragraph was only mentioned because it appears you feel like people are calling you out, so it notes a possibility of how the observations can be in perfect harmony.
> I think no one is really objecting to the utility of being able to use such a device when there is a serious situation, but rather that the reality is that a very large number of parents use these types of devices to constantly surveil their children. There's a difference.
The problem is that, from the child's perspective, there is no difference. The parent can -- genuinely and sincerely -- tell the child that they'll only use the tracking in an emergency, but the child still knows that ever-present tracking means they don't have the freedom to be where they want to be, absent their parents' knowledge and permission.
I was a relatively "good kid" growing up, and mostly did what my parents told me to do, and mostly asked permission for the things I wanted to do that (from my parents' perspective) required permission. But sometimes I did my own thing, went where I wanted, and didn't ask permission. And my parents would have punished me had they found out. I wouldn't want to grow up in a society where I would be too afraid to do those things, because my parents had the capability to track my every movement.
We already use air tags for those outings, and they work really well. Maybe when he is going more out in his own will we consider a true smart watch so he can really roam, but he is still only 7, and we are still more worried about busy traffic on the street than him getting lost.
Yeah, our friends use airtags skiing and that would probably meet our needs. However we're in the Android ecosystem and there isn't really an airtag equivalent.
AirTags have a huge network advantages in that a lot of people have iPhones. It’s not what you have, but what everyone else has that is important when finding things. That Google hasn’t bothered to compete, or the antitrust authorities haven’t out yet, is a complete mystery to me. Airtags alone have me firmly locked into owning an iPhone.
Right! I got the prompt to enable it a few days ago on my phone. :)
Also, the Samsung network of devices is quite comparable to Apple's, apparently a lot of people own Samsung phones, TV sets or other devices. So if you have a Samsung phone, give their tags a try, it's definitely a lot cheaper than switching everything to Apple.
Google is starting to roll out a Find My Device network, but it's been delayed so the trackers are just now shipping and there aren't yet reviews out on how good they are.
It's not the opposite because they can just roam further unsupervised already. That truly fosters independence. If they need help they can call for help. Saying that left is right and right is left is a bit strange.
> if a little piece of technology allows kids to roam farther unsupervised
I think we have a different definition of 'unsupervised'; I understand it to mean "no supervision/oversight" where I guess you mean "out of sight"?
Similarly, I'm not sure what you mean by "overparenting", and even if I did I don't know your situation so I wouldn't feel comfortable charging you with it. That said, if I were to put such a device on my kid I'd feel I was doing something wrong.
I'm not sure I follow your meaning, kids still die. I have lost a child and a tracker that ruins their confidence and privacy wouldn't have done anything. Not that much changes.
I'm sorry for your loss. What I meant was that it used to be so common that it was something majority of parents (or large enough fraction) expeirienced so those that didn't experience it might have been seen as not experiencing full range of parenthood. One might say that modern medicine that vastly reduced child mortality somehow keeps most of modern parents from "growing up" in that sense that they never experience full range of parenthood from 200 years ago.
Ah, I see. I guess that's possibly true. On the other hand, the loss of someone close to you is practically inevitable. Eventually almost everyone will experience a devastating death (unless the person is the devastating death).
In my observation, the inability to let a child off on their own without any form of supervision or in this case tracking, means that the parent is not ready to let go of that child when they are an adult and need to be given the freedom to succeed or fail on their own.
I am admittedly biased. My sister was tracked from about 12 until this day and she's now 26, I believe. She gets upset when my mother isn't checking in on her. Likewise, my mother can't go more than a few hours without calling my sister. She will regularly check her phone to see where my sister is and then comment on her whereabouts and call or text her to ask why she's where ever.
Likely there are parents who are going to be able to handle these tools responsibly, but I am not sure there is a responsible way to use these.
But I am also biased against them, hopefully I am wrong. I saw how my sister has turned out from having a late-blooming helicopter parent and my wife (one of a dozen kids, so very hands off parents) and I have tried to give our own kids age appropriate freedoms.
I have been amazed by historic accounts of children. One example that sticks out to me is a letter a man in Texas wrote to his brother. The man's wife had died and he had to take care of some affairs in Texas. The man's brother lived in Kansas and he was writing because he'd sent his two children (12 & 13) to Kansas with his herd of cattle to sell. I don't think I'd ever be there, but I do think children are more capable and trustworthy than we give them credit for and we don't give children enough room and as a result we have some extremely childish adults who have never been given the chance to fail and get back up.
I think you're asking a bit much from a 6yo. My kid is more afraid of getting lost than getting found. I suspect most very young children are. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and this watch seems to meet the need.
Every 12yo I know has a cellphone already. This watch is not aimed at them.
>I can only guess you (and most of the other naysayers in this thread) don't have young children.
or they don't hail from a culture where helicopter parenting has become the norm. Here in Germany tracking your kids like this would be widely seen as completely bizarre. There's a great Japanese TV show, called Old Enough, (that has been running for 30 years, long before smartphones existed), where kids as young as 2 and 4 run off and navigate public transport and do daily errands.
The show only exists because the parents accept that their kid is safe due to the camera crew. There's a reason they don't just strap a gopro to the 2 year old and plop them on a bus, and you will not see 2-4 year olds by themselves in Japan, or almost any nation.
Sure, the tiniest kids are on the show because it's funny and adorable but it doesn't really change the general point. I've lived in Tokyo and you see elementary school aged kids 6, 7 years old alone all the damn time. When I was in elementary school I was off on my bike every day. This is normal in much of the world. And there weren't any trackers. And that's actually important, because being on your own without the safety net is what builds confidence.
Okay, and if American parents are too afraid to let their children do this, isn't a tracker watch a good thing, because it will open them up to the possibility of letting their kids go out without them?
Japan gets to have free-range children because they have functional public transit. We don't, so we don't.
For what it's worth I'd also point out that the last time I was in Japan all the train stations had ads for transit cards for kids that e-mailed parents whenever they were used. This is functionally identical to American helicopter parenting, IMO.
A few things to note on Japan and kids walking around. Usually you don't see children that are less than 5-6 years old walking around doing daily errands. When it's children that are younger it's usually with the parent walking a few meters behind to monitor what the child is doing.
And, Japan had special usage phones for children that would track their location even back in 2004. I lived there back then and I know a few parents who used that for their young children. So, yes children are allowed to freely roam around at an early age which is great but Japanese parents are not adverse to tracking.
There are a whole set of things we did differently when I was a kid. For example, we always had a plan for where we were going to meet up, because cell phones hadn’t been invented. We also had a lot more experience getting lost in low stakes settings, which helped build the needed skills and confidence to deal with getting lost in more complicated scenarios.
I got lost in Valletta on Malta during a family trip when I was probably around 7 or 8, and it's one of my proudest and most formative memories from that period of childhood, even if it was scary as hell.
Valletta occupies a tongue of land thrust into the ocean. I got lost in the middle of the city, and had to come up with a plan for how to get back to my parents. I realized I'd probably be able to find it from the promenade as we had walked it a fair bit.
I recalled my Dad showing me the city map and pointing out the streets were on a very regular grid pattern perpendicular to the shores. So I headed down a street until I hit the shore. Then I realized I was on the wrong side, so I decided to round the entire coastline to get to the right, opposing shore. This was foiled by some sort of fenced-off military installation or something (scary!), but I was eventually able to make it to the other side by circumnavigating it. I got pretty close to our hotel when I ran into my Mom who was desperately searching for me.
My backup plan was to hover around streetside cafés looking for non-scary looking tourists speaking my language and ask them for help if it got too late.
It's so seared into my mind, I almost want to believe I'd still recognize the landmarks. I was definitely very scared and agonizing. But I've always felt very good that my plan worked and that I was able to get out of my first little crisis.
I'm not sure what the lesson of this story is. It's probably not to get your kids lost on purpose. Showing them a map of where they are and studying it together is great for sense of place and navigation, though -- make sure they know where they are at least roughly, not just that you can track them.
A friend of mine with interesting parents had an experience like this, except it was planned by her father!
He told her they were going somewhere together, then dropped her off at a random metro station and told her if she couldn’t make it home in an hour she should call home with a pay phone, and here’s a quarter.
She brought it up in a pretty resentful way (understandably, because it’s basically abandonment?), but it was also a pretty formative experience in that she did pull it off and she’s a fiercely independent person.
Not giving parenting advice to be clear, just adding another colorful story! :)
That is fine to do, if you prepare the child. I mean, start by taking all the steps with them, gamify it, and at some point I'm sure most children would be proud to do it.
But just doing it with minimal preparation... That's bad parenting. I doubt that experience alone is the reason for being fiercely independent - that usually (and unfortunately) comes from the person being unable to rely on their care takes for their needs as children.
This reminds me of the wanderings I used to do in my home city as a 10 year old. The city is on the long arc of a pretty big river so once I got lost and realized that if I just keep going in the direction of the river, I would never get lost because once you reach the shore, you can easy walk back. That free'd me to walk into alleys I have never been to and explore my city. It also made me feel quite proud (even though that was admittedly a mundane epiphany).
Granted things were simple then and law and order was not a big issue for this to happen but I am grateful for my parents to not interfere too much in my exploring time.
I thought the same, Ski resorts are classic places for kids to get lost, from now on, my kid will always have an AirTag in their pocket when on the ski resort.
Good point. I won't buy these for my kids to wear every day when walking to school, but using them when traveling and going to the mall etc sounds very convenient.
The HN crowd won’t be sympathetic but I most certainly am. It’s not until you get lost skiing that you realize how difficult it might be to meet back up, particularly if you forgot where you parked in the sea of cars. A kid might not know to go wait at the front desk too (which one’s the front desk anyway?) and then you have to worry about exposure.
What I would like is not something that allows me to track my kids 24/7. But I would like a device my kids could have, when they are lost, or an emergency, or they need me to locate them, they can press it and it will then share their location for the duration of that event. Pretty much just an SoS device.
Addition: Even outside of just the kids. When my wife works a late shift at the hospital, she would like a device like this for the walk in darkness out to her car in the parking lot. Or similar situation where she had to do an emergency road trip to handle an emergency with her dad and would like to have a device that can alert me and temporarily give location if she needs top stop and get gas at 2 in the morning.
Children getting lost can also be in real danger, not only psychologically pain. It's just six month since a seven year old died in Norway after getting lost in the woods; he was hiking with his parents and wasn't off their sight for long, but a large search party was still unable to find him in time. It's rare, but we must also remember that all the "success stories" in this thread suffers from survivorship bias
> I lost him on a ski slope once over a year ago and I think he's still traumatized
I wonder if that has more to do with how you reacted to the situation when you found him, than what he felt while he was lost.
> I can only guess you (and most of the other naysayers in this thread) don't have young children.
Ah yes, this old saw. As if none of us remember what it was like to be a kid. As if none of us remembers getting separated from our parents and lost for a short time, and how that felt.
> This isn't for teenagers. It's for kids that are still attached to mama/papa.
Conditioning a small child to become used to pervasive real-time tracking won't just go away if you stop tracking once they're teenagers. And regardless, I'm sure there are plenty of parents of teens today who force their kids to turn on location sharing on their phones.
> It's not necessarily even for everyday. But field trips, amusement parks, big crowded events, hell even shopping malls? I remember many times as a kid having my parents call out on the PA system when I got lost in a department store.
So you do remember what it was like to get lost as a kid! Did becoming lost in a department store a bunch of times traumatize you? While that's not the same as getting lost on a ski slope, it's not that different.
The South Park episode Not Suitable for Children touches on this a lot too. Companies are foaming at the mouths to get advertising in front of kids and tracking them to understand what their habits are is really gross.
I remember the 80s when Saturday morning cartoons were a long series of toy commercials interspersed with shorter toy commercials. I got to be the target demographic. It was the best!
As my sibling comment points out, society is already pretty effective at advertising to children. I have strong doubts that Google (or others) would derive much useful-for-advertising data about “habits” of children from a smart watch. Especially not data that cannot be acquired elsewhere, easier. That’s to say nothing of the slowly growing body of laws that would prevent this.
I think it’s very plausible that Google thinks $230+$10/mo is already a great business opportunity. I’m guessing the better “prize” is keeping kids from getting their first iPhone in school - most teenagers greatly prefer iPhones.
> I’m guessing the better “prize” is keeping kids from getting their first iPhone in school - most teenagers greatly prefer iPhones.
This is what I was thinking -- get the kids into Google's ecosystem earlier, because maybe they'll stay there as they get older. That alone is worth a lot to them.
Its weird the types of sacrifices we expect kids to make with regards to survival. Like when a school shooting happens we wouldnt event consider banning assault rifles. Those kids dont survive. But if having a tracker on your kid marginally increases their chance for survival in the rarest of circumstances it’s totally out of the question to not have it.
Do you know what an 'assault' rifle is? I only heard that term used by people who want them banned, who usually think this means automatic weapons, like the other commonly misused term machine gun.
The correct term that 'assault' has become an umbrella for is semi-automatic. That means 1 bullet shot for every 1 time the trigger is pulled. There are technically other guns, like pump-action, that require literal pumping of bullets into the chamber between each shot, or even powder guns which are extremely dangerous due to their inaccuracy and jamming (read jamming as: higher probability to explode during use)
'Assault' is used to try to demonify 'bad' guns but really at that point you might as well ban all guns, because the few remaining are useless.
Just be anti-gun instead of anti 'assault' rifle so you aren't pretending to support 'good' guns
Not the person you're replying to, but I fully support repealing the 2nd amendment and strictly regulating gun ownership, up to and including total bans on certain classes of firearms, magazines, and ammunition. I would also personally have no problem with a total ban on any kind of firearm ownership, but I don't think the evidence supports that a total ban would make us meaningfully safer than more targeted restrictions and regulations. But for the guns we might allow in my fantasy of a US with sane gun laws, every gun owner should be required to take both a safety course and general training course, and complete a practical skills exam before being licensed (yes, licensed) to own a firearm. That training should have to be repeated (perhaps an abbreviated version) at some reasonable interval, such as every year or two.
Regarding your nitpicking of what "assault" means, that's irrelevant. But to discuss it anyway: "assault weapon" has not become an umbrella for any semi-auto weapon. Semi-auto pistols, for example, are not what people are talking about when they want "assault" weapons banned. For people who don't really know much about guns, "assault weapon" means "a type of gun that someone in the military on a TV show or movie might have slung across their chest". An imprecise definition, to be sure, but in general I'd agree that no random civilian has any need for such a weapon. And any civilian who believes they have an actual need for such a weapon probably should not be trusted with one.
I do know people who own some of these types of guns. They're responsible, train, and treat the weapons with the respect and care they are due. But I still don't think they should have them.
Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles). Sniper rifles require training. Shot guns have limited range and take long to reload. Handguns are hard to aim and not that lethal. Assault rifles are unique in that they allow an untrained teenager to shoot accurately and kill a lot of people very quickly. That’s why people want to restrict access to AR-15 type rifles.
I hesitate to wade into these kinds of conversations but a lot of what you wrote is inaccurate.
Shotguns have a limited range compared to rifles but it’s still at least 50 yards so it isn’t going to matter. People hunt deer with them, they aren’t like shotguns in video games. They can also use removable magazines and be as easy to reload as any other semi automatic firearm.
There is not a single difference between a “sniper rifle” and a hunting rifle.
Handguns are not meaningfully less lethal than rifles against unarmed targets at close range. The mass shooting at Virginia tech was one of the worst and was done with handguns.
> Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles)
Every type of firearm was designed for killing people. Today’s “hunting rifle” was the standard issue infantry weapon in WWI and WWII. Russia is still arming some soldiers with what you would call a hunting rifle in Ukraine right now.
Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Prime Minister Robert Fico got shot three (?) times with a handgun and it now looks like he'll survive. Of course he got the best medical care, but still, it serves to illustrate my point.
With an AK-47 I cannot hit anything at 50 yards. The combination of kickback, terrible sight, rough trigger make it pretty hard to use effectively. It's one of the most popular weapons in war zones (doesn't jam, easy to repair, etc) but in my hands it's useless.
I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
> Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Yeah I should have been more clear about my thoughts on this, my apologies.
Rifle rounds are unquestionably more deadly from a ballistic standpoint but at close range (25 yards or less, just for the sake of hypotheticals), before handgun round velocity falls off enough that they are ineffective, shot placement and how fast you can stop any bleeding matter much more than ballistics.
There aren’t many mass shooting events I can think off where it would have made a big difference if a pistol caliber had been used instead of a rifle caliber - it definitely would in cases like the Las Vegas concert though. That wasn’t an untrained teenager though so it might be outside of the scope of discussion anyways.
> I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
Agreed and thank you for your very reasonable response.
It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature. Mentally unwell people who attack schools will use other weapons if you somehow take all the "assault" rifles away and we've seen this in other countries who have tried it. When a school shooting happens we don't talk about psychiatric medication or prescribing practices for them.
The #3 cause of death is "accidental self inflicted injury." I'm not sure tracking children is the answer. You're just shifting the burden for risky behavior from the child to the parent through a radio with _zero_ redundancy. There's probably more useful ways to achieve this outcome.
> It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature.
We literally can. We built lane assistance and airbags and cars that sometimes self drive because humans naturally are bad drivers.
We created fire alarms and automatic sprinklers because sometimes people forget about the thing in the oven.
We invented medication for mental illness and obesity. We invented padded rooms and rehab and all sorts of stuff.
Hell, we invented locks on our front doors.
Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own. You can kill someone by pointing a metal tube and pressing a button. It’s very hard to stop once that button is pressed. Almost any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with. That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
Actually it's an extension ladder.
> any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with.
Where's your can do spirit now? We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
> That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
That's one possible explanation. It's very thin and there's much contrary evidence. You'd have to make a stronger case.
>> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
> Actually it's an extension ladder.
Fair point, but I think it's more useful to consider that an extension ladder is a tool designed for non-violent uses, and deaths involving extension ladders are (nearly?) all due to accidents.
Guns are tools designed to inflict injury and death. While many gun deaths are accidental, the guns in those instances are performing to purpose.
> We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
I don't particularly want to live in a world where we have to have metal detectors and dogs present at the entrance to any decent-sized building. That sounds pretty dystopian.
This is absolutely not the case unless you believe what happened in China, Russia and Cambodia in the 20th century, governments murdering hundreds of millions of their own people, somehow magically cannot happen again. Orders of magnitudes more people have been killed by their own government when they lacked any means to defend themselves than have been killed by school shooters or armed criminals.
1. We're not talking about those places in those times that you reference. We're talking about today, presumably in the US, since we're talking about a "stupid law thought of 200 years ago" aka the 2nd amendment to the US constitution.
2. It is hilarious that some people believe that owning a gun is going to protect them in any meaningful way from organized, sanctioned government violence toward them. Maybe that was a reasonable thing to believe 200 years ago, but not today.
Regular people have zero need for assault/military-style firearms. This is the clearest of clear cases of something that does so much more harm than good that it's absurd that half the country has been propagandized into believing this is some sort of "freedom issue". It's sickening.
What is a military style firearm in this context? Because of the NFA, Americans already cannot own pretty much any fully automatic weapon the military employs.
Chilling effects, for example. Children know they are under permanent surveillance, and will act accordingly - like not doing something in anticipation of admonition.
The parents on the other hand have an always-available magic mirror to show them what their children are doing. Depending on your desire for control, this may very easily lead to checking in ever-shorter time intervals.
Pop psychology has not exactly had a great track record, and I don't see why we should give credence to Haidt just because his "research" aligns with our priors...
He's a psychologist proper at NYU, not some random journalist.
Psychology as a whole has suffered a reputational crisis.
You should listen to his claims and evaluate them independently, since they directly address your request for evidence.
Finally, the knocking of "pop science" books really grinds my gears. They are not inherently bad just because they are geared for a mass market. Technical subjects have layers of depth, and there is value in a high-level overview of some field.
> He's a psychologist proper at NYU, not some random journalist.
> Psychology as a whole has suffered a reputational crisis.
Given the latter I don't see how the former makes his claims more credible?
> You should listen to his claims and evaluate them independently, since they directly address your request for evidence.
I am familiar with his work, and find the quality of his evidence indistinguishable for the myriad of other pop psych just-so-stories that this forum generally shits on.
> Finally, the knocking of "pop science" books really grinds my gears. They are not inherently bad just because they are geared for a mass market. Technical subjects have layers of depth, and there is value in a high-level overview of some field.
To be clear, I knocked "Pop psychology" not "pop science". Most pop science books are distillations of research for mass audiences. Most "Pop psychology" books are philosophy disguised as science.
EDIT: And to be clear, I have no reason to be particularly skeptical of Haidt. I just think that the incentives for a psychologist who is writing for a mass audience lead them to choose the most simple and attention grabbing narrative possible, and map any evidence they can find back to that narrative and disregard the rest.
I was about 3 years ahead of my peers in spatial reasoning and behind them socially. When I was a kid leaving me alone meant I was likely to wander long distances end up in a pool and drown.
If anything I see this as enabling parents to keep their kids on a longer leash so to speak.
So... how is a GPS-tracker watch going to save you from drowning? It's not like your parents are going to be able to cover that distance quickly enough to save you.
Tracking can give kids more freedom, because you can let them roam where they could get lost. For example, you can take them on vacation in a safe but unfamiliar place and let them do as they want. If they get lost, just use the tracker to find them. You don't even need to go for them immediately, you can let them try to figure it out by themselves and only go if it becomes really problematic. What would have been an unacceptable risk without a tracker becomes possible.
When I was a kid, my parents would have given a lot for such a tracker as I had the uncanny ability to lose them in the most remote places. highlights include central London (not my country, didn't speak English) and in a forest on a mountain with a thunderstorm approaching. I survived, but maybe a tracker could have saved my parents some sanity, they still talk to me about it, more than 30 years later.
As a kid my parents put me in Boy Scouts. Guess what was a frequent occurrence? Sending pairs of kids out to go do tasks like collecting firewood. Every once in awhile kids would get "lost" (not know where they are but not actually far away or in any reasonable danger). This even happened to me more than once. But being lost and figuring it out was necessary to learn the skills of how to navigate. today I have a very good sense of direction and this is not common among my peers.
I think while this sounds like a good idea, it actually hinders the learning process. Struggling is necessary in the learning experience, but you just don't want too much struggle (there's a balance). I think if your kids are old enough that you're comfortable letting them navigate an area on their own, they are old enough to "fend for themselves" in this way. Just make sure they have your phone number and know the name of the hotel or some clear landmark (even in a foreign land you can often stumble about your confusion and say a landmark and people will be able to give you directions. Most of the time).
I think it is better for both the kids and parents. Kids need to learn independence, parents need to learn to trust their kids and that they can be independent (that is the goal after all, right?). I know it is hard as a parent but that is something that needs to be learned too, for the betterment of kids.
Boy scouts can afford to lose kids because there is a group of people who know the place very well and are trained to deal with such a situation. Which is I think not only common but expected.
A tracker can reproduce this experience without the help of an boy scout camp. It is just about how the tracker is used. It can be used for constant, intrusive monitoring, or it can be used for emergencies only. It is just a tool, it also doesn't have to be used 24/7.
> who know the place very well and are trained to deal with such a situation
This comment surprises me and I suggests to me that you were not in Boy Scouts (I even worked at a camp for several summers when I was 18/19). Tbh, most of the people in charge of groups are just figuring it out themselves (camps/OOTA/Varsity tend to be a bit better, but I mean camps are run by teenagers and people in their early 20's). The danger isn't actually that high, though it may appear that way to those with no experience.
IME I had more issues with adults than the scouts. As an example, I had several adults point an (unloaded![0]) shotgun in the direction of people, but never had a scout do this. Often because they wanted pictures...
Of course, if someone gets seriously lost, there are means to get help. But that's most likely the forestry service.
[0] We only load a single round and only when the person is ready to fire. So there is only one weapon loaded at any given time but weapons are __strictly__ treated as if loaded at all times. Weapons must also strictly be pointed down range (and not at the ground and not at the sky). Breaking these rules results in an immediate ejection from the range, and unfortunately has lead to troops being ejected because their leaders were (age requirements).
> It can be used for constant, intrusive monitoring, or it can be used for emergencies only.
When the child is very young, this is maybe (maybe) fine, but as the child gets older -- likely before their teen years -- there's really no difference between the two from the kid's perspective. They know that, regardless of their parents' stated intentions (the latter, hopefully), they are just a few taps away from knowing the kid is not quite exactly where they're supposed to be. It's stifling.
I frankly feel so lucky that I grew up when I did, in the 80s and 90s, when technology was just starting to get really cool, but not quite into this dystopian panopticon 1984 nightmare that we seem to be getting into today.
> Tracking can give kids more freedom, because you can let them roam where they could get lost. For example, you can take them on vacation in a safe but unfamiliar place and let them do as they want. If they get lost, just use the tracker to find them. You don't even need to go for them immediately, you can let them try to figure it out by themselves and only go if it becomes really problematic. What would have been an unacceptable risk without a tracker becomes possible.
Is the fear of getting lost really what's responsible for kids having less freedom? It seems to me that the fear is inspired by the remnants of the stranger danger panic and the very real threat of cars everywhere. Watches don't really help alleviate any of those fears, nor replace the video games and other digital activities that would keep them in the house to begin with. Most of the rest of the world can't afford tracking, and yet their kids tend to have more freedom (though I doubt this correlation has any meaning).
I'm not a parent though so I'm genuinely asking out of ignorance.
I'm sorry, but these are life experiences. You can't depend on technology in any situation, it's better to know how to inherently learn from and handle it. This is when and how you learn as a child.
I took a motorized avalanche course in Canada the end of this last winter season. One of the most surprising things in the class was how easy it was to get in. I talked to the instructor (world renowned in the space of motorized avalanche training) about it and asked why there weren't more students. He said that people buy the tools (avy beacon, probe, shovel, air bag, etc) but they no longer feel the need to learn how to use them. Over the weekend we did about a half dozen real world scenarios and it was shocking to see how the theory was hard to execute the first few times. The thing about an avalanche is that it doesn't matter how good I am with my tools when I'm buried. The last thing he mentioned in that part of our conversation was that people had recently started buying satellite communicators and that his theory was that it was enough of a security blanket for a lot of people who would have taken his classes like wilderness first aid.
The back country isn't much different than a kid in a busy metro. If someone is going to take the child the watch isn't going to do anything. That's the first thing the assailant will get rid of. At that point it's up to your kid to know what move to make next.
Technology is continually being used as a crutch, especially with regard to our kids. There's no other way to describe it other than absolutely disgusting.
> Tracking can give kids more freedom, because you can let them roam where they could get lost.
I'm not sure this is a good thing. This is similar to the observation that cyclists who wear helmets engage in more risky behavior. But helmets are meant to be a fail-safe, not a primary line of defense. Maybe the same should go for tracking...
What is the danger of having an information source available to you, versus not having one available to you?
Are you imagining a scenario where, maybe, a kid is walking by a house, but the tracking shows the kid IN the house. And then the parent who is watching every minute of their 10 year old's walk down the street takes their gun and kills the "pedos" and tries to rescue their kids?
Maybe that seems hyperbolic, but I really cannot imagine how this is dangerous. Or is it the idea that parents will let their kids do more dangerous stuff since they think if they can track them, then it's okay?
No, cars didn't have seat belts for a long time - generations of people drove without them. When they introduced them a lot of people complained. Now you would have to be an idiot to argue against seat belts.
"Kids" is a very broad term - I don't think tracking older teenagers is appropriate but tracking a toddler (prob too young for this) through to teens is perfectly reasonable. Many people track their partners, family, etc via Apple and Google sharing locations.
It's not that kids need less tech, it's that they need less screen time. Arguably this watch isn't screen time.
> This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
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.
I think the important part is whether the children are affected by the tracking. Is it a big deal if they don’t have service and you can’t Find them for a couple hours?
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 think the important part is whether the children are affected by the tracking
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.
No TV, no video games, no smart watches, no vaccines, no doctor visits, no stored food, no radio, no refrigerators, no nothing. You came from 1000 generations who survived just fine without them. Everything must stay the same.
I either a) find that very hard to believe, or b) am horrified at the environment children are growing up in these days that the prospect of 24/7 parental location tracking is something they'd agree to without question.
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.
This particular thread has missed an important part of the equation: what are the consequences of NOT taking the trackable phone along, or turning off the tracking? If you’ve proven to them it is of little consequence, and they can trust that, then they’re less likely to develop issues.
However, if the consequences are dire, you encourage them to feel oppressed.
> 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?"
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.
Thinking about what I was as a child, I truly wouldn't care if parents knew where I was until the first question "why you are/were at X". After that I would always think what my parents think about where I go. If asked I would not say it's a problem for me, it would just be a fact of life.
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 find it difficult to imagine ubiquitous surveillance not shaping behavior and thought.
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 find it difficult to imagine ubiquitous surveillance not shaping behavior and thought.
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.
> my parents were in reach if I was in reach of a [wired] phone
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.
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.
Kids that know their parent has their back or will help them often tend to use that freedom more.
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.
Good lord. As I recall, a big part of growing up was spending time and doing things my parents didn’t want me to do. The idea of them tracking me is super creepy, as is tracking one’s spouse for that matter.
“Tracking” is a scare word. The ability to see where my spouse is, when needed, without having to call or send a text, is a convenience. There’s nothing wrong with not sharing your location with your spouse if you don’t want to, but there’s also nothing weird about doing so. Neither of us “cares” one bit where the other is, but it’s frequently useful to know.
Yes, because spouses are adults. But kids being constantly tracked is absolutely scary. Do you really think it's healthy that kids grow up always being watched, constantly monitored by their primary authority figures?
I don't think that distinction is as stark as you make it. Spouses can be overly, annoyingly controlling - and it can happen gradually. I'm sure that for every person who doesn't mind their partner knowing where they are, there's another who has been pressured into it - perhaps by it being insinuated that their not wanting to be trackable means that they have something to hide.
This is wild. Parents decide where and when their kid eats and sleeps and, what they eat and wear and thousand other very intrusive things, but suddenly when electronic device is involved, consent is required.
Parents decide that for babies. Kids going through puberty that let their parents continue to decide every decision can be an actual abusive relationship. You need to be influencing good behavior, not forcing it at a certain point.
Kinds going through puberty are already tracked through their phones, if not by their parents then by uncle Google. I thought we were talking about younger kids.
How can you so casually equate mass tracking by Google and direct surveillance by family member? that's not even whataboutism, completely different situation
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
You are right, those are two completely different things. Some people are more concerned by one than then other. Some the other way around. However the technology exists. Children are living and will be living in the world in which that technology exists. They need to figure out how to live in this world. The same way kids of previous generations figured out how to live in the worlds they were born into.
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.
I'm not going to say that consent doesn't exist - but it's sufficiently ill-defined as a concept that it is somewhat meaningless. What constitutes consent?
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.
It's totally vague. Some decisions are considered okay for parents to make for their children without consent but others aren't.
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:)
Right, exactly. So if it's not ok to pressure a spouse into tracking them when they don't want to be tracked, why is it ok to force a child to be tracked? Obviously parents have a lot of -- necessary -- leeway in what they decide their child must and must not do, regardless of the child's wishes. But I don't think it's healthy to get children used to the idea that the norm is that they'll be tracked 24/7. Even if the intent is to stop the tracking at, say, 12 years old, that's some powerful conditioning that they've been exposed to in their formative years.
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.
I do personally think it's weird, but if other's are fine and comfortable with it, what two consenting adult decide about tracking each other is none of my business.
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.
Only if you both are mature enough though. If you are constantly looking at the location of your spouse to see of they are cheating or something, and then question every unexpected movement they do, you won't benefit from it.
kids today will also remember in 30yrs from now how's they had so much freedom... they just had to leave their watch (btw, apple have had kid mode on their watches for a while now) in the school locker and they could roam around, heck maybe even get an uber to some place
Don't worry, if it doesn't have it then I'm sure a future model of this watch will have a "I'm not on a wrist" logging/alerting function.
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.
If you worry about your parent knowing your exact location, then maybe it’s not a healthy parent-child relationship to begin with.
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.
> If you worry about your parent knowing your exact location, then maybe it’s not a healthy parent-child relationship to begin with.
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.)
"Google Fit isn't reporting your heart rate in the last 5 minutes and your accelerometer isn't detecting any movement so I called 911 to check on you since you likely had a heart attack".
It’s also possible to be more liberal than your parents were with respect to expecting teenage experimentation but still want to know why your kid/spouse isn’t home within an hour of when you expected them and they aren’t responding to texts. Parents are still adults with lives and have better things to do than sit around watching a dot on a map.
“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.
This. And also, the problem is people want to have too much control. You should build your society in such a way that if you lose control (a bit), its no problem.
That is the real problem with tracking of parents and -for that matter- the security agencies.
You should raise your children to be resilient. If they get lost, teach them how to get unlost. They should recognize danger by the stories we tell them and the experiences they had. Sometimes this goes wrong, and that is super sad, but things go wrong in life. There is no real way of preventing things to go wrong.
We are now making sad human beings by putting our kids into a safe bubble.
If the main reason seems to be that you want to know where they are when they've decided not to answer the phone... maybe that's fine that you don't know. If you're expecting them for dinner, and they decide to do something else instead, they should learn that consequence: if they don't come home when they're expected for dinner, they don't get dinner with the family.
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.
What did you do that your parents didn't want you to do? Some concrete examples? I'm asking because I'm having a hard time coming up with examples of things that both my parents wouldn't have wanted me to do and would be obvious if they tracked me in real time.
Not that hard to come up with. Going to a friend’s house instead of going to any variety of scheduled things you usually do (sports, theater, whatever). Similarly, the classic sleepover at approved friend’s place but actually sneaking out to do something else that isn’t at their house. I can think of many more. Maybe you were a by the book kid lol
Ok, yeah as teen if I skipped any schedule things to go to a friend house, my parents wouldn't have batted an eye. Outside of school obligations, the rest was my own choice.
> a big part of parenting is making sure your kid actually is at school
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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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?
In the 80's/90's if I was somewhere I shouldn't be or doing something that I shouldn't there was a 70% chance that when I got home my mother would know. The neighbourhood network of eyes was more powerful than googles all seeing eyes.
are you under the impression that the same neighborhood network of eyes is in operation all over the place like it was then or?
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.
I share my location with my kids and ask them to do the same. They are aware that I can see their location. Since they never pick up their phone or respond to messages, it's the quickest way to check if they are already on their way home.
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.
Oh jeez. I'm so glad i had none of this goofy tracking gump growing up.
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.
To be fair: the only reason I want trackers for my kids is so that I can find them if (a) they run off and get lost; or, (b) they get nabbed.
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.
> 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.
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.
For years the government used cell phone data to track locations without it being known. Why wouldn't they use a more reliable way of doing it? Is there any reason to NOT suspect it?
Would you suspect a known burglar of wanting to rob your house? Well the NSA violated privacy of hundreds of millions of people. They deserve all the suspicion and no forgiveness.
My parent's number growing was initially 77099, though it later became 577099 when the numbering system was tinkered with to allow for growth and efficiency at the exchanges. This was only as far back as the 90s, and such short numbers still work for landline-to-landline calls today. I don't have a landline, and if I did I'm not home enough for it to be a useful way o get hold of me. My numbers now are 11 digits, not as easy to drum into the head of a kid I expect (I don't speak from direct experience: child-free and planning to stay that way, but I know many people with kids at various ages).
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.
We didn't need an area code for much of the time I was growing up in the 90s in the Atlanta area. It was a huge media thing when we got a new code and finally had to start thinking about it. We had an area code (404) but nobody used it until that pesky 770 (1995) complicated life for some, and 678 (1998) later messed it up for everyone.
When I was a kid, my parent's phone number was 6 digits long. You can memorise 11 digits of course, I did this aged 10 with digits of p, but also I'm a nerd.
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.
But how? My five year old knows his home address and his full name. If he ever gets lost he'll be safe. Actually getting lost at that age is really hard too, because a five year old is not often left unattended.
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.
> The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name
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.)
First, how often do your kids get nabbed? And if they get lost, they should hopefully have the skills to get unlost.
>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.
I have a toddler, and that has changed my view on it a bit, from the same starting point you are expressing.
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.
Why would her having a smartphone lead to an expectation of location sharing? I completely expect my five year old son to have the freedom to just not have his future gadgets on him if he so prefers when he gets to the age that a smartphone is unavoidable, and I certainly don't expect him to let us track him.
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.
> 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.
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.
I do not understand how anyone can be so categoric about this - it should not depend on peer pressure but also it should not be dictated by some ideologies. Phones (instant communication actually) is part of modern world and is here to stay and children should learn it as fast as they are able to handle it. Otherwise there is a danger of being left out for them. And at their age there is few other equal things that can make or break their future as being accepted by their peers.
And of course not all children are the same so you need to know yours and decide on case by case basis (my dauther got her first phone when she was 9, my son on the other hand will have to wait)
> And at their age there is few other equal things that can make or break their future as being accepted by their peers.
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.
I'm guessing you are in software dev or something auxiliary to it? And probably you were passable in STEM topics at school?
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.
I agree with you that tracking as a teenager is not ideal, although teenagers track each other's locations incessantly at least they should be free from their parents tracking. However this watch is aimed at younger children than teenagers.
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.
Where are you living? Asking because I think letting kids walk alone to/from school and friend's houses depends a lot on the culture of the city/country.
Suburban Scandinavia, so we live in a relatively safe bubble. It sounds like in some other countries we'd be reported to some kind of protective services for child abandonment or neglect.
We live in Stockholm city, and it's usually considered very safe for kids, and yet most people tend to worry about young kids wandering without adult supervision, which was ok in the small city where I grew up in France (I'm 48).
Yes, I'm absolutely against tracking for teenagers or adults but I could see it when my son is around 8 years old and I let him walk to a friend's house or go to a nearby playground. We live in Hong Kong, and it's very safe here once he's old enough to understand the rules of the road and be careful when crossing.
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.
There's also a really simple hack: they can just leave their phone/watch at home. And now even if you or they have an emergency, you can't reach them :)
Yes, that's why it's useful to set rules and consequences based on outcomes instead of effort sometimes it eliminates the possibility of making excuses. If they want to avoid the consequences they can learn to take more seriously double checking to avoid the relevant mistake.
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.
Yeah, what you call convenient is exactly what OP had in mind, and I have to strongly agree with him/her. No, thank you, there is absolutely 0 trust in what you describe, and kids realize this very 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.
> 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. […] I can see if my wife's still at Whole Foods and send her a message to pick up baru nuts.
No adult would share their location with uber 24/7 so pickups would get marginally more convenient. Living under constant surveillance is bad psychologically, even when the surveillance itself is benign. Being able to lie to your parents about your whereabouts gives children valuable freedom even if they never exercise it.
You might not freak out that you don't have to track your kids all the time.
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.
I completely agree. My wife and I have our locations shared with each other. I'm not "surveilling" her. I almost never remember that we have this feature until we need it for some reason, and even then its normally very benign (how far from home are you? should we wait before having dinner?)
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.
> 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'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.
Kids need to mess up, and do things outside of the sight of their parents to grow.
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.
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.
> Sex, meeting people outside of your social norms, attempting stupid stunts, and all that is part of growing
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.
In my opinion, part of that is how societies have made their societies less and less safe. If you look at a child the wrong way in the US people are ready to call the cops on you. It was a very odd experience to me, but then I realized that the US has one of the highest child abduction rates in the world.
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.
I do not know the ages of your children but i fear for them if/when they're teenagers. A small child does not care, a teenager _very much does and should_. Will you still track them when they're 25? Or 30? What if they ask you to stop, what will you do?
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?
To be perfectly clear here, you think that a parent that buys this smart watch and tracks their kid's location will "oh absolutely" track their child's location into their 30s when they are old enough to have their own career and family?
Can you explain why this completely abnormal behavior is an accurate prediction?
> 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.
> What are you saying exactly? This was about location tracking.
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.
keeping track of their child while the child was very young
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' ?
(Please keep this conversation about the topic and less about what you evidently consider some sort of personal conflict.)
> 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.
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 making up and hallucinating these vague scenarios
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.
You are using very combative and insulting language, which is not helping.
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".
I maintain that your usage of the word “hallucinating”, “nonsense”, and associated language is combative and insulting. Of course, I have no proof whatsoever for this claim.
> 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.
> So in this made up scenario, a parent is stealing their 30 year old child's phone and installing tracking software on it?
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.
I would assume that a parent is likely to do it again when the child is at 18, and beyond.
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.
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.
Me: You think someone keeping track of their small child means they will somehow track their location when the child is 30 years old?
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?
I originally said (paraphrased) ‘parents will’, and I reasoned that since I was convinced that parents will try, they will mostly succeed. But you have presented evidence against this, and therefore I was wrong in saying that “parents will”.
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.
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.
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 never meant to accuse you of a personal attack, only of not following this forum’s guidelines. I am guessing that you must have become accustomed to some really horrible forums, since you seem to read accusations and underhandedness into every post. But I assure you that this is not what I am doing, and it is not what this forum is supposed to be.
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.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice the number of parents who let their kids do things independently is vanishingly small, and the absence of other parents who let their kids roam is a real danger to those of us who do.
If a smart watch makes more parents comfortable letting their pre-teen kids outside of the house alone, that's a net win for everyone over the status quo where those kids are physically chaperoned 24/7.
I grew up pretty unsupervised to run round town since I was around 7 or 8 growing up and definitely want the same for my son. He's 8 now and I got him an apple watch as I don't want him to have a large screen to distract him from the world but still be able to call/text his friends or get in touch w us in an emergency. I do not ever monitor his location (and told him as much) unless he reaches out to me and allows me to for help.
As with all things it's a tool and will depend on how the parents use it. If I break his trust by spying on him, well, thats on me and of course a rather difficult one to rebuild. I also told him if he ever wants to turn off location services we can do that but he's okey with it for now.
I'm completely dependent on my phone to remind me of when it's time for a meeting, or sometimes even the route to get back home when I drove to the present location.
I once thought I should try harder to deal without these things. But where does it end? Should I shun electricity? I agree that should work to push the boundaries of what's comfortable/safe, but being disgusted at the idea of a kids wearing a smartwatch seems like an arbitrary point to draw the line, and even a bit hypocritical.
Seems to me that such devices could actually help give kids -more- freedom. Let's not act like kids are outside playing like they were in the 80s/90s. Helicopter parents sort of ruined that (along with neighborhoods no longer being bikeable/walkable.) So, this kinda seems like a device that could give kids a longer leash. Parents can know they are safe/where they are while also giving the kid more freedom to just be a kid.
If true, that's sad, because it just further exposes the irrationality of these sorts of parents. This sort of tracking is not going to save the kid from being kidnapped or getting hit by a car. A little pulsing blue dot on a map does not tell the parent that the kid is safe.
My sister is in her twenties. About the time she was in high school these tracking apps became available. My mother used it to keep an eye on her. Fast forward almost a decade, she freaks out if my mother isn't checking in on her now. It's quite disgusting.
I am glad to be about 10 years older and have entirely missed this plague.
Watch out for HN commenters who cannot distinguish between the idea of
(a) a wrist watch that allows parents to track their children with no obligation to share this information with anyone, and
(b) a wrist watch than allows Google to track and collect data on peoples' children and share some but not all of the data with the childrens' parents.
I strongly disagree with your comment. First of all, ALL kids must survive, not most. Safety and safety of knowing are two different things. Lastly, this tech looks a lot less intrusive than the current another watch that everyone is getting for their kids — this one appears to have more activity-engaging features.
I don't think anyone would really want to live in a world where we've done what's necessary such that literally all kids survive the various accidents and perils they might face out in the world. Such a world would be sanitized into oblivion.
This is just a variation on the "security vs. freedom" stuff. You can have perfect security if you don't allow for any freedom. But hopefully we can agree that a world with no freedom isn't one we want to live in.
But sure, let's step back from the extreme that you introduced. Are the downsides of pervasive 24/7 tracking and surveillance worth the (possible and as-yet unproven) increase in good outcomes? I can see that many people here seem to think it is, but I don't agree.
I hate this. I have kids and many of their friends have Verizon watches where their parents can track their kids. My wife and I are not a fan of the constant tracking. Our kids go out and play and come back for regular check-ins if they're out for a while. I know where they are without knowing exactly where they are. Normally I'd be fine if some parents want to know their own kids every move, but now I'm afraid we're raising a new generation that is used to having zero privacy. This won't be good.
Basically every person i know in their mid-20s has a small group of people they have always on location sharing with. Usually a partner, a couple of close friends, and a parent or two. They don’t see it as any sort of problem to share this information.
I get the tech focused millennial paranoia about this but when it gets down to it you have nothing to fear if the people you share that with actually respect you and your privacy.
This is a great example that’s actually not a good thing. The lack of paranoia is going to allow many others to track you for their own purposes like companies and governments and just allow privacy erosion to happen passively.
“You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” os pretty similar to “you have nothing to fear if someone else chooses not to look”
And the reason this is the case is because pervasive tracking and privacy invasion has become normalized during the formative years of these people's lives. It's not just sad, but actively scary.
I subscribe to the "Taking Children Seriously" movement. My position is that there is no reason to track kids 100% of the times, however if the kids do not mind, I do not see why this can be a good watch.
> Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline.
I agree with your entire comment. And apart from the parents that feel they need to watch their kids every move, what always astounds me is how little consideration is given to exactly what tech they slap around their kids' wrist.
"Oh, look it is Google, our familiar cozy uncle, so all is hunky-dory".
No, it is not! Google is an advertisement company. The biggest on the planet. Ads are their raison d'etre, core business. And learning as much as possible from your kid at the youngest age is part of their business model. Not to protect them, but to turn them into mindless consumers that click the most ads. And to use all that juicy data about your kids life in any other shady way they can think of, where some cold hard cash may end up on their balance sheet. It is ridiculous.
This is exactly how I see it. And when kids grow up having their whole life being tracked, they'll have no problem as adults when Uncle Google or some other entity knows everything about them 24/7.
To be fair, Google's already achieved that with most adults.
> Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
Did they? The problem with this sort of claim is that it often turns out to be false. "We didn't have X and somehow we survived" often omits the fact that mortality in given demographics has dropped significantly since then. The people making this statement are survivors, and the ones who haven't survived don't speak up. Can someone back up this claim with data? My (very) quick search brought up only infant mortality rates.
The proof obligation is the other way around. You need to show that constant surveillance actually makes a difference, on a population level. Otherwise your claim is the empty one.
Unfortunately, I only had time to do a quick search, but it shows that mortality has dropped significantly in the last 20 years. I imagine it was only higher 40-60 years ago. This doesn't prove that more surveillance brings mortality down, but it shows that the "we survived just fine" argument is shaky at best.
I think parental supervision correlates with the survivability of offspring in general, not only in the human species. Also, the more present and engaged parents are, the better the children are. This is supported by research on children raised by single parents, parents working multiple jobs and shifts.
I was referring to the claim that "we haven't had X and we survived" in general. I wasn't trying to prove that higher levels of surveillance increase survivability. However, yes, that argument makes sense to me. It may mess up kids in other ways, but my gut feeling is that it does decrease child's chances of dying.
I wonder that too, but I think you are at least one generation too late with this. Your average phone already tracks where you go, with whom you interact, what you search for online. It asks you "how was this restaurant?" and reminds you what you did last year at this time.
There is a miniscule minority of folks who care and disable as much of that as they can, but the vast majority doesn't know how and doesn't care. I even know lots of people who work in the industry and just don't bother disabling any of this because they claim it's all unavoidable anyway, and they are probably right. Oh and they had that attitude already 10-15 years ago.
So, this is already a thing if the past. And we are at a point were even if your devices are not tracking you then everything around you is. Each Tesla parked on the roadside films you when you walk by. Each phone close by tracks that your phone is close by. And nobody cares. Heck, people argue it's for the better, imagine somebody getting raped, so good we have lots of cameras close by to find the bad guy! As if society is any safer for it than 30 years ago
Sorry but this is just fatalistic nonsense. A generation ago people did not have anything like the current evolution of surveillance technology. The small number of people who care about ubiquitous surveillance right now are early adopters, not a dying breed.
I asked my boomer mother about whether she'd have liked to have had a gps on me when I was a kid in the 80s. She said she would have loved it. she worked until 5 and there was no "after school care" in our small town... she kept our pantry full of chips and soda and our video games new so that we'd be home when she got home, rather than out somewhere else with our friends.
To her, the lack of near constant panic attacks would be a godsend, and she wouldn't have felt so bad about using video games as childcare.
As a parent, my concern isn't about my kid being abducted... an air tag in their pocket would be more discreet. It's about letting them explore with a safety net. Go for longer bike rides, knowing that if it gets too dark, I can pick them up... that's not risk averse.
The level of risk for every generation has been dramatically lower since the 1920s. Both of my parents lost an older sibling... loss happened at the family level in the 50s. in the 80s, I maybe had one or two kids in my class that had experienced loss... a tractor accident or gun accident... but now there's been one child that died in the past three years at my son's school.
Risk had bigger consequences 60 years ago. Our kids are better off for it.
I'm currently waiting for my kid to arrive on a bus that may or may not be running late. With regards to tracking, it would be really handy to be able to check their location to get a sense of how long I'll be waiting (and how late I'll be for my next appointment).
I mean, reliable public transport and a good bus tracker app would be better, but probably not realistic in my city.
You could just call or text to ask the kid, rather than require that they submit to 24/7 real-time surveillance. "Really handy" doesn't seem to justify that.
Maybe you shouldn't assume that GP is talking about niche cases such as your example, but is instead talking about the kind of helicopter parent that would love something like this. Maybe assume the more charitable explanation that nearly everyone knows that pretty much every "rule" has exceptions, and nothing is absolute.
Absolutely agreed. Google is by far the worst offender in my house, so I've blocked it completely outside of search and email. But those are next.
YouTube is where the real sinister stuff lay. I walked in one day to see my kid watching childish cartoons, but talking about abortion, child death, foster homes and divorce, etc. And not in like an educational way, but in a 'mommy doesn't love daddy anymore so got an abortion and now is going to send me to a foster home.'
Obviously I was mortified and angry, and asked why she searched this weird shit and she said it was recommended so just watched it. And she was right, it was recommended. It's completely full of garbage topics pretending to be child stuff. There's even one huge channel that appears to be Russian softcore porn making dubbed child content.
Sorry for the rant, but do not trust your children to Google or any other big tech company.
> Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
They did. Generations also survived without a polio vaccine. This isn't an argument.
> But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively affecting their development
I see it the other way round. My kid's a bit too young to go off on his own or with friends, but it's not far off. If anything I'd say a watch like this makes me think he can go off younger than without it. The main problem is it's a Google watch, so I don't know how long it'll work for. And I don't care about games or payments; just a simple phone call/SMS service (locked down to certain contacts) with GPS pings I can see on my phone. And push to talk with friends would be cool, and probably send it viral.
How will this work out with grade school kids' socialization, when some kids in a class have the neat smartwatches, but some don't?
I remember very much noticing as a young kid that I didn't have some things some other kids had. But most of the time that was at home, rather than visible every day. And I was also a bit aware that some other kids had less than I did. (Parochial school uniforms helped.)
I don't think it will change much, kids have been sorting themselves into pretend hierarchies based on the cool thing since the dawn of time.
We could send them all to school wearing a potato sack and some of the kids with the whole foods sack would make fun of the kids in the food lion sack.
This reminds me of an idea I've been noodling on for a bit about my kids. I want them to be able to take more risks and be more independent - but counterintuitively, I think this means putting them in a safer environment.
For example, I'd be waaaay more comfortable letting my young kids (6yrs old) roam around outside the house if will lived in a safe suburb rather than a city. I think the same is true for this type of watch, I'd let them do more stuff at a younger age if I knew I could always get a hold of them and knew where they were.
sure but you know what I mean, they can learn to be more independent if they can do more stuff on their own which i'd let them do if their was a min level of safety
My partner is on one of the teams responsible for red tape and cost-cutting at Alphabet. After having frequent conversations about past failed projects, I'm surprised this project got the green light. Personally, I don't see this product taking off. As a parent, I think it looks quite lame, and I don't think anyone at Google knows how to break into product areas for kids. I've seen quite a few headlines concerned about Nvidia being the next Cisco, but as someone who has had family at both Cisco and Google over the last 30 years, I really think Alphabet is more likely to become the next Cisco, where middle-aged engineers go to work for 30 hours a week to keep the internet's backbone afloat.
I worked on Android Wear many, many, years ago. 2016ish. This segment and use case was quietly huge, massive, in at least China, and I bet it still is. (Left google late 23)
I'd love to hear more about this team for cost cutting, it really messed things up*: external, or internal?
* You may imagine I am finding some humor in "my SO is on the google cost cutting team and I don't get why this team exists, why would anyone want a watch for their kid." I am, but I understand where you're coming from, and I'm sure your SO likely would have learned more about the watch market before making similar decisions
My partner's team works across all of Google's products (e.g., Cloud, Geo, not Verily or Waymo) and is part of the green light process for those launches. I don't want to get into more specifics than that, but let's say a product is not growing year-over-year as expected. This is one of the teams involved.
Tell her to look at the travel system. At least when I was there a decade ago, they gameified it so that we needed to come in below the average cost for a flight, otherwise we needed VP approval. But if we came in under the average, you could bank the savings and use it to upgrade to first class, etc.
This sounds great on paper: incentivizing employees to reduce travel costs and rewarding them for it! But in reality, you'd have engineers payed substantial fractions of a million dollars in total comp wasting hours booking travel, hoping to bank savings to use on later upgrades.
Travels been in VP-approval land since late 2022. Very different place - 2016-2023 here. You can always just have concur do it, and it's pretty streamlined and integrated with flights
To me, it looks just like another example of Googs missing the boat and attempting to play catch up in an attempt to stay relevant by imitating what someone else does. Maybe that's a gross oversimplification, but that's the way it comes across to me. This thing clearly chasing Apple's device. Googs+ clearly chasing Facebook. Of course, there's their rash attempt at an AI. Googs just comes across a company without any focus other than AdSense, but desperately want to not remembered as a tech company that became an ad company.
Sounds a bit different than what Google is offering. Google’s look more like imoo. Which is just a standalone device made for kids. So kids can pair their devices and use the restricted set of images (emoji-like but more restricted) and features. Everything in the watch is made geared towards kids (like classroom mode, for instance). That Apple Watch thing seems like an after thought and it seems a lot more expensive. I’m assuming that the iPhone doesn’t need to be near the watch for the kid to use, right?
Right. The watch has LTE and does its thing independently.
It does have kid features like schooltime. It's not priced cheap for kids - cheapest new is almost $500. (Hence giving our kid a two or three year old, used one. :-)
this is the risk, no matter how useful products are. Google just cuts products at a whim. and sends products to the graveyard.
even the one's that wouldn't cost 1 engineer - looking at you - Google Podcasts.
I'm biased here, but "at a whim" seems like a bit of a stretch. I've never been particularly surprised by product cuts – they're always the products that have no real traction or look clearly unprofitable. Now maybe this one won't get the traction, but Android and Pixel certainly do, and Google has committed to very long support timelines on Pixel, something I see as a win, and that I'd hold them to account on.
Even if it were brilliant, I have no faith in Google to support a product. I like Android, but so many Google products I early adopted got neglected or abandoned.
Maybe they think the average consumer doesn't care about what Google did with Wear, Chromecast, Daydream etc. But the early adopters are the ones who try these things first and I think they have gotten burned by Google too many times.
The 5% of the world that makes most of the decisions has an active interest in creating a labor force that will passively and diligently maintain order.
The subconscious drive to give young children technology is no different in its psychohistorical origins than the Hitler Youth. One could ask for what purpose does somebody want to "monitor" themselves.
Is it for any great works or for the prolongation of bare life through the min-maxing of REM cycles.
Do you mind explaining why you think so? I'm missing what is negative about it. To me it doesn't seem an unusual phrase - often a reference to Where the Wild Things Are.
And I've just found from the Wikipedia page that "wild thing" in that book was inspired by the Yiddish expression "vilde chaya" ("wild animals"), used to refer to boisterous children.
$230 is a bit high up-front cost for a kids watch. Compare this to something like TickTalk and it seems that TickTalk has more features. https://www.myticktalk.com/. The design of the Google kids watch does look nicer though. TickTalk is pretty bulky and the UI is not great.
Spending $300 already on a watch is already expensive (in addition to a $500-$100 phone), and it is a relatively small market, especially for watch OS watches. $230 on a kid's watch -- potentially more than one if you have more than one kid -- is definitely for parents who have money to spare.
I mean, that's fair, but phones don't need to cost that much. I can buy a current-gen basic Moto for $60 in the Fi store today. Who buys current flagship phones for kids? Most families I know upgrade one device at a time and the kids get old hand-me-down devices.
It's a rich privileged family that is buying kids either new smartwatches or $500 - $1000 phones.
As a parent, my main value from watches like this are:
* GPS, I can see where my kid is at (not always super accurate)
* I can contact my child and my child can contact me (contacts are whitelisted)
* School time lock helps avoid distraction (locks most watch functions when at school)
* Knowing I can locate and contact my child helps me allow more personal freedom to my child. Within reason.
I hear you that spending that kind of cash is not for everyone. For me, those features make it worth it.
I am planning a prototype for an alternative to smart watches that will use LoRa Meshtastic as a platform. The main upside of this would lower upfront costs, and no recurring cellular provider bill. I think it would be cool to have a system where trusted contacts and kids friends could message each other. My goal is to build a management system parents could use to quickly set up a LoRa node for their child.
It says GPS location, but does it do mapping? That and calling are like the two most valuable features (only 20 contacts, so no group chats with his class?)
This is an interesting move by Google. The watch market for kids is huge and growing. Look at the major companies sales here. Also look at the amount of kid's smart watches available on Amazon and number of reviews (I know, i'm sure some of those are fake yada yada).
The detractors here say "let the kids be free" and "no new tech for kids", but I wonder if those people have kids today? Parents WANT to give their kid's more outdoor freedom in this f'd up world. Tracking products like this give them more peace of mind.
At $10/month (or $5/mo with annual buy), this is competitive and possibly a new recurring revenue stream for Google's consumer products group.
Doesn't even have to be about tracking - we got a limited watch for our kid when she was 9 or 10 so she could call and text us if anything came up, and used that as the basis for letting her do her own thing even more. Was fantastic. I'm pretty anti-device for kids (said 11yo is still grumpy I won't get her a phone), but watches with cellular are quite great.
Ankles are usually only slightly larger in circumference than wrists, my Garmin even does OK at picking up my heart rate when I'm working in the machine shop and wearing it on my ankle.
This product was conceived by parents who want an alternative to giving their kids a phone. It's good to be suspicious, but what you're saying sounds more like FUD. Parents are the ones who want to do the tracking.
Smart watches for kids are great compared to alternatives. My kids have Apple Watches and aren't asking me for phones/tablets (and the related evils like IG, TT, etc). Love to see this from Google (and Apple).
> Fitbit Ace LTE has been tested with hundreds of families and is designed to get 16+ hours of use from a full battery.
Fail. Adults struggle to recharge their devices every day and my kids certainly won't remember to. Garmin Kids watches, while drastically different in functionality and connectivity, last 12 months before a battery replacement is needed and are wildly more suitable for young kids.
Garmin Bounce[0] for kids, which is the watch which directly competes with this, has a 12-24hr battery life on LTE, although Garmin claims 2day battery.
You are absolutely right. I'm certainly not pro-Garmin here. Just anti-12 hour battery life for kids watches. It's just not compatible with the way young kids work.
Reading the comments to dcrainmaker's review, his kids' Bounces were getting 36 hours of charge whereas several commenters state they were barely getting 10 hours, certainly less than 24 hours of charge.
Seems like the energy used to keep the LTE connection up is the main problem, if all the users have the similar settings to minimize battery used by the Garmin Bounce.
If Google/Fitbit says the ACE LTE only lasts 16 hours, I'd hope their estimate is much more conservative than Garmin's and has a lot less variance. Otherwise, I can't see the ACE LTE lasting until end of school day.
I only have to charge my kid's bounce every 2 days, 2.5 days usually. I do not turn on the "Live Tracking" very often but location updates, boundary fence notifications, voice/canned messages work great.
> Every Ace Band unlocks a themed Bit Valley mini store that levels up the eejie’s house. Get wacky decor for the room and cool outfits for their eejie. There are new themes to collect with each band.
Scummy ass shit. Incredibly direct tell about their true nature here.
I rather like the general notion, alas. The $120/yr annual plan seems not great but $60/yr offer for connectivity seems decent. Albeit it seems quite expensive compared to the expensive data-consumption a watch is going to have. I wonder if it works with other plans?
I was at one point head of security and infratructure at Pebble and the only person standing in the way of personally identifiable biometric data being directly accessible on employee workstations. I know such practices end with data leaked or sold.
I believed Pebble users could enjoy rich data-driven features without fear as long as someone like me had their back. That sense of mission was part of why I stayed on to the end.
Once Pebble and I were integrated into Fitbit I got to see up close that they are not a wearables company, but a surveillance capitalism firm that will profit from all available data, even not-technically-hipaa protected medical data in any way legally possible. No one there had any mission but share-price-go-up.
I quit 3 months before my golden handcuffs came off, because I realized I no longer wanted to be part of an organization so deeply negligent with security and unethical with data usage.
I then got to watch from a distance as Pebble user trust and user data was then gobbled up again, this time by Google.
Now firms like Google have fully saturated the adult market and seek to parasitically cause behavior changes in children while extracting highly profitable biometric data from them too.
A ratified-and-strengthened American Privacy Rights Act cannot come soon enough.
We have to convince our legislators to stop these predators.
My kids main demand is the following features, and this watch doesn't deliver on any of them:
1. Whitelist contacts for calling and text call - installing an app is a pain for older ppl / friends.
2. Music: Why not Google? This already has headphone support and the Pixel watch hardware which support musics.
3. Maps: in case they need to go A to B. WearOS has google maps, so this should be an easy add. School bus is on google maps for e.g, so being able to check time to leave would be great.
4. Battery: 16hrs at launch is not going to age well...
Overall, despite being in the market for this, would not buy.
Features kids didn't ask for and I don't want:
Gaming: There is a market for gamification, but it seems to me the product team went overboard and spent way too much time here at the cost of making a better kids watch. I have no doubt it can and will make some kids more active, but...
Kids have never needed a watch to be active, run around and imagine creative games. Although, sure, we did spend hours during breaks all surrounding the one kid with a gameboy.
It's a similar LTE-enabled smart watch with GPS for parental tracking and two-way text/voice messaging within the app, but from Garmin, which has a much better reputation for privacy - including a very positive review from the Mozilla Foundation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/garmin-.... I would trust Garmin with my son's data. He's 7, and has been wearing the plain digital Timex I got him for almost a year; when he's 8 or 9 we'll get him a Bounce.
If you really want the bare minimum, look at the Vivofit Junior:
which doesn't have GPS or LTE, just an accelerometer and Bluetooth that it uses to gamify fitness and activity tracking and (with parental management through the linked app).
I don't doubt your claim, but you didn't provide any examples or evidence. What positive effects did limiting device access from your kids have on them?
Chicago huh? Are you talking Naperville or did your kids grow up in an apartment on Lakeshore? The context here means a lot. Surely you wouldn't begrudge a parent in Detroit (outside of safe downtown) having a device to communicate/locate their child.
The last thing I want is my kids playing on a tiny screen instead of with their friends, which is exactly what would happen if you give this to a 7-10 year old.
I remember running a lemonaide stand as a kid back in the late 90s with my friend, we were 11-12ish small town in the PNW. We were at the end of his driveway along the main road that went out of town. Noone got abducted or molested; we were just fine and didn't have cellphones. The obsession with not letting kids play or be in the real world is going to come back to bite society hard in 10-20yrs when generation alpha will need to navigate the real world.
Having kids inside gaming and not going outside is going to do more physical damage (childhood diabetes/obesity/metabolic syndrome) when compared to the very unlikely event of a child obduction.
This HN discussion flares one clear thing.
While it's a debatable topic,
Google did their homework and there are enough potential customers for this product.
I really don't get it: paying a couple hundred so you can spend 2 seconds reaching for your wrist instead of 5 seconds pulling your phone out of your pocket
Like is the watch supposed to replace the phone? Or if not, why bother? If you need heart rate monitoring, why does it need an internet connection?
kids pockets are small, and they lose things a lot.
my middle schooler is on their 3rd phone -- thankfully they were all cheapo, basic models. i'd love the idea to strap it to them, i'm just not crazy about a biometric monitor + something following them uber-closely all day.
Where I live, "smart watches" have been a thing for about 5 years now. The reality is that they have a one year life span before the social aspect catches up to them. We wanted to get our son a smart watch, so that he could call us if he needed something, or we could call him to come home; no tracking.
The problem is cohort. Friends have phones. Friends COORDINATE over WhatsApp (not communicate). This means, that in order for him to know that he can hang out with others, he needs a way to be part of that.
> Meet Fitbit Ace LTE, the first-of-its-kind smartwatch that makes movement fun for kids.
You know what also makes movement fun for kids? Being able to go outside. Not having helicopter parents. A bicycle. A football. Something is very wrong if kids don't even want to run around unless they're filling up rings on a screen.
A smartwatch for kids could be so good if it was designed in a way to be educational, but most importantly, which respects a child’s privacy utmost, even from their parents in terms of tracking.
For example, a maps app, to always get the kid home if they’re lost. Medication reminders. Fitness tracking. Emergency SOS. A calendar to remind them about family birthdays and upcoming holidays. School timetables. Medical ID. Payment cards or passes for travel (in Western Europe a lot of schoolchildren commute by themselves, especially on public transport) and spending their allowance. Let the kid choose to notify their family of their location as and when they want to. Empower them to use tech to their advantage but put their privacy first.
Children are going to end up as adults in this world regardless of whether we teach them, so we should be teaching them the benefits and warning them of the many bad actors. We should be teaching our children the skills they need to navigate the modern world. This includes technology and abusive/controlling relationships.
I believe a good responsible smartwatch for kids can exist. Alas, this is Google and helicopter parents exist, so this product is not it.
Damn that's expensive for something that's meant for kids.
Don't forget Google refuses to repair their watches. Break the screen? Go buy a new one. Ifixit found that it's actually not hard to replace the screen/glass module but with one issue: Google won't sell you one.
Having gone through 5 different fitbit watches and them all breaking within a year or two, as well as two different fitbit scales and them breaking too, i have moved on and will NEVER look back.
Fitbit is CRAP. let me reiterate. crap. C-R-A-P. crap. Lets use that in a sentence.
Mark grumbled, "My Fitbit is such crap—it breaks down faster than I can count my steps!"
And for those wondering, I moved onto Garmin watches. I mean if you're going to pay it might as well be a nice one and most importantly one that is reliable.
Having gone through just 2 Garmin watches over the last 10 years (though the upgrade from the FR220 was only to get optical heart rate, it's still perfectly serviceable), how did it possibly take you that long to learn that?
Think about it from the parent’s perspective: the safety of your toddler while you’re at a crowded amusement park is of high value.
Losing a young child must be terrifying, even if they’re found shortly after. I think the value proposition justifies the price, at least for a reasonable amount of parents.
same cost as a mid-tier smartphone, and 10/mo is for the networking features aka cellphone plan.
kid can't lose it like a cellphone since it's strapped to them, and sill gives them some basic call / text / tracking but without giving them access to the Play store, Tiktok, YT, etc.
the more i think about it the more i'm okay with the idea -- i've done the custom side-loaded android ROM for a kids phone strictly for the purposes of locking it down and it was a PITA.
OTOH now google gets to snoop on your kid 24/7 which i don't love...
There are some things that a smart watch simply can't do, due to limited screen size and resources. And if you're going to need to carry around a regular smart phone to handle those cases, why bother carrying both?
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
reply