Play audio:
On this episode of Spark: What the heck is my kid doing?
- Technology that parents just don’t understand
- High school students Rose and Brad from Spartan Youth Radio explain how they use technology
- Nora mentions Teensurance
- Barbara Coloroso on parenting in the age of surveillance (full interview)
- Emily Want on Anne’s Diary, a social networking site for girls
- Kids explain the technology their parents just don’t understand
- Tom Lucier isn’t a paper boy. He’s a paper man.
- Rose and Brad return with their teacher, Jayson Stewart
- Students from Spartan Youth Radio explain their relationship with technology
This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects:
- “Oslodum 2004” by DJ Dolores
- “Wataridori 2” by Cornelius
- “asdd” by adeel
- “airtone/sp2-tr3/”>sp2 tr3″ by airtone
- “airtone/transmission306/ “>transmission 306″ by airtone
- “grapescape” by grape
- “Bell Minor (WIP)” by rig
Download the MP3, or subscribe to the podcast.
OK, lest I come across as some cantankerous old fogey, let me disclaimer this comment by saying that I’m only 29, and I had my share of adolescent screw-ups.
This was another great show, Spark crew, and raised some interesting questions.
It was disappointing to hear how many of your guests perceive parental supervision (or even surveillance if you must use that word) as some kind of intrusion on the kid’s privacy.
The cars and GPS for example… if the parents are paying for the car, and paying for insurance on the car, they have every right to know exactly where (and how) the car is being driven.
As for the internet, and any other area where parents want to keep tabs on their kids… well, yes I agree with your guest Barbara that it’s more important to develop a trusting relationship. But how many times do we see news stories about the parents paying the price for something illegal or stupid done by their unsupervised kid?
My point is… parents pay the bills and parents cook the food. Moreover, parents are the ones who will shoulder the blame when Junior does something wrong. So why shouldn’t parents have the right to see what’s going on with their offspring?
Talk about trust all you want, but hardware and software like those discussed on today’s Spark exist because sometimes trust is misplaced.
To compare this to fascism, as Barbara (I believe it was Barbara?) did, is misguided and ignorant. These are minors we are talking about. Parents are legally responsible for everything they do.
Thanks for your comments, Denys, and I won’t accuse you of being cantankerous (that’s me! ;=)
Agreed on your point about parents bearing responsibility for minors, and even Barbara said she thought using the teensurance in the early going (as a “tool”) was a reasonable parenting approach..
I don’t actually know what I would do on a lot of these questions if I were a parent. I do sometimes worry, though, that kids may not have good moral reasoning skills if they grow up choosing do act right because they’ll get caught otherwise, vs because it’s the right thing to do… I don’t know…
Thanks for your thought-provoking, er, thoughts!
Nora and crew! Thanks for this incredible opportunity. My students learned so much from the process and are very proud of their work. If you ever want to throw us an assignment, we’d be up for the challenge!
Again, thanks!
wow, just finished listening to the podcast – interview bit with Barbara Coloroso.
You know, if you think about this wholistically (so to speak), it relates to the previous “techiquette” bit about outsourcing your life. People are so busy (or like to think they are) that they’re willing to let a machine monitor their kids’ activities instead of putting the time and effort into it themselves.
I actually thought there would be a lot more debate about the pros and cons of teensurance…more Denys vs Kirbys, so to speak. Like I say, I can sort of see it from both sides, but all opinions welcome and enjoyed!
I know what you mean, Nora. I expected more discourse as well.
It’s interesting that you mention a Denys vs. Kirby head-to-head, cause I actually agree with the message Kirby posted. It’s true, anybody looking to use monitoring technology as a substitute for real parenting has the wrong idea. It’s a tool to use along with parenting skills, an accessory if you will.
At the same time, I’m not sure I agree with the use of monitoring as a tool “in the early going,” as you say.
Ideally, I think any relationship should start with trust. This would be especially true in a parent-child relationship, since ostensibly the child’s values should be similar to your values if you’ve done your job right as a mom or pop.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” goes the saying. And I would be more inclined to use monitoring hardware and software AFTER there was a breach of trust. There would be a talk, of course. I wouldn’t just press the “on” button and outsource my parenting job. I’d sit with Junior and explain that he/she had disappointed me, explain the trust I had in him/her and explain the reasons why what he/she did was wrong, dangerous, etc. Then I would let it be known that I’d be keeping tabs on him/her for a while until that trust was earned back again.
While you do raise a valid point about the reasoning behind the kid’s “compliance”, I wonder if it would matter so much in the long run.
If my hypothetical kid was going to do something wrong, but then stopped before doing it, does it really matter whether they stopped because they reasoned it out or if they stopped for fear I’d catch them in the act? Either way, they’re safe today. Hopefully, they’ll come to realize the wisdom of their decision through the consequences of their peers’ mistakes.
When I was a kid, most of the times I avoided doing something forbidden was to avoid getting caught, not due to my moral reasoning skills. But those skills did develop over the course of my adolescent years, sometimes just from trying to figure out why my parents were imposing these “stupid rules” in the first place. Once I grew up enough to know they weren’t just trying to make me miserable, but had valid reasons for trying to protect me, it all made sense.
There’s my 2 cents for now. Would love to read others’ opinions on this.
That’s an interesting point, Denys. It’s true that when I reflect back on adolescence, most of my actions were to avoid getting caught (and when I think of the stupid things I did anyway….yikes).
I was initially making a veiled comment about how so many things are interconnected. We often look only at one small aspect of something at any given moment w/out regarding the big picture. I listened to this and thought “wow, that’s another example of outsourcing your life that Nora was talking about a few weeks ago.”
But, I have to say that I think the kind of thinking from Denys seems to me to parallel that which led to widespread random drug testing in the US. The sort of “if you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t be worried about it” thinking. Squeezing tighter just means they’ll figure out a way to wriggle out of it, if it’s something that their “moral compass” doesn’t tell them is really going too far.
Remember Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? they took Cameron’s dad’s car and joy rode all day, then put it up on blocks and ran it in reverse to roll back the odometer, because they knew his dad wrote down the mileage. (Granted, the car fell off the blocs and crashed through a window, but that’s beside the point).
Nora, was it really fear of getting caught, or was it because this little voice was telling you that you were stepping over the line and would feel guilty about it afterward? I bet there are things you did get away with that you still fill a little guilty about, even after all these years.
Anyway, coming back to my wholistic theme
, this will all be irrelevant by the time my kids are old enough to drive because the cost of our rapidly depleting gas reserves means it’ll be 6 or 8 dollars a litre for gas…
Believe me, Kirby, I am queen of the guilty conscience ;=)
You’re right, though, I didn’t think of the ‘outsourcing your life’ link. On the holistic tip, I wonder if we can get the topic of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the show?
Certainly, although the reference to Ferris Bueller is related more to the concept of how kids always have and always will figure out ways around rules that they think parents are arbitrarily imposing on them than it was to the “holistic” idea.
maybe there’s a show somewhere in there on the interconnectedness of things. Not sure how you’d put a technological angle on it, and if you dig too deeply, oil becomes the basis for pretty much all of it (I’m reading “The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler right now, so it’s got me on this theme.)
I think the biggest problem here is the issue of virtuality replacing reality. Meaning, as Beaudrillard noted in the 80s that with the progressing consumerist society we live in, commodities are bringing us further away from real life experiences, face-to-face interaction and acquiring real life skills as the virtual world meshes into the real world. Children and teens are evolving into beings that value virtual socializing and gaming over traditional activities and in the process parents are left to monitor in a simulated way- through technology. I am unsettled that parents are believing that technological surveillance will encourage youth to behave properly. Like traditional discipline, surveillance still will encourage children to find ways to escape the watchful eye- but unlike rebellion parents know of where a child simply sneaks around and lies, children can simply change their identity online making their true identity's imperceivable. Now you can see an entire new slew of issues.
What ever happened to trust and communication?