As someone who grew up with the internet and rules like this I can tell you that the only thing it taught me was how to game the system and use electronics without getting caught. It gives me anxiety just to think about it honestly.
If you didn’t grow up with it you can’t understand how stressful it is to maintain friendships when your parents will randomly take away your phone. Its like being randomly grounded over and over for years.
The fact that people sometimes break rules doesn't necessarily make them ineffective.
Parents are not encouraged to give children unlimited access to alcohol or tobacco or hard drugs. Sure, they might find ways to break the rules, but are those rules then completely useless? Plenty of teenagers will claim that the rules just caused them to rebel, when in reality the rules were mostly effective and the teenagers are criticising a system from a sample size of 1 with no control.
This "rules are bad" is just silly. Kids aren't perfect and not every flaw is due to the parents making an egregious mistake - often the actions of parents are ones that make children into better people. It's also telling that the archetypal advocate progressive "child-centered" education (where natural consequences are good but authority is bad) was Rousseau, who never raised children himself.
My friend who is the dad of teenagers told me that his son's friend was caught waking up at 3am every morning, playing Fortnite until 5am and then going back to sleep before his parents woke up.
I ruined my college years playing video games 3 hrs a night in my dorm for the entire year. The addiction is real.
I went to both a very demanding college (after a transfer) and a very undemanding college. 3 hours at the easier school was nothing. I developed habits where I would spend the minimum amount of effort to get good grades, but the rest of my time was wasted.
Transferring, this wasn't maintainable, and it was honestly my saving grace for entering the workforce. I developed the self discipline necessary to meet the requirements, and 3 hours a day was way more "free time" than I had to actually network, expose myself to new ideas, and handle coursework.
At the easier school, I realize in retrospect that the extra time should've been used building things, making connections, or getting involved in extracurricular work.
Even now, a bit later in life with a family and a career, 3 hours is far more time than I have to waste on a game and still maintain connections with my family, handle household responsibilities, and develop interests that might help me grow as an engineer in the long term.
So you are a very responsible adult now, but do you really enjoy it? Your username implies otherwise ...
Maybe you just had fun, gaming?
Then I don't think it was wasted time. I would consider it only wasted, if you did it out of bad habit and no better plans.
Yeah, being a responsible adult with a good life outlook and interesting work is honestly pretty fun.
Having fun has diminishing returns. At some point, like with any addictive behavior, it becomes a matter of habit. Tons of people are in this rut and don't realize.
There are tons of other fun activities that come with positive side effects like physical fitness or an in-person social group
Depending on the level of work required by the college, it would get in the way of said work. 3 hours a night is a lot of time spent not doing homework and not being social.
College was useful (at least for me) for those two aspects, neither of which I would have been able to really do well with 3 hours a night of gaming.
Post-college? Do whatever you’d like. In-college, you’re paying for time you won’t get back. :)
As a parent, I’m still going to try to instill good habits and behavior even if my kids attempt to subvert them (similar to financial responsibility, manners, or safe sex). Once you’re an adult, how you behave is up to you, but before then it’s still my job to help them understand how to be decent, functioning humans.
Being a parent is hard, and mistakes are going to be made. Positive intent is important.
The point of the comment you are replying to is that plenty of parents, under the guise of "instilling good habits," simply issue a blanket ban and the threat of further punishment to discourage the use of whatever they are trying to teach their children to avoid rather than teaching their children responsible use, and that this is counter-productive, extremely damaging, and basically the opposite of good parenting.
In my experience my parents issued blanket bans and the threat of punishment for eating sugary foods, using the internet and watching TV. All this did was cause me to binge on all three whenever I had the opportunity at a friend's house, and that behavior extended into my adulthood until I was able to break free of my parents and seek the advice of reasonable adults to help curb my addictive behaviors.
When I discussed this with my parents they doubled down on their behavior, washed their hands of responsibility and blamed me. They used the same tired "how you behave when you are an adult is up to you" line. I hope you aren't doing the same to your children.
> simply issue a blanket ban and the threat of further punishment to discourage the use of whatever they are trying to teach their children to avoid rather than teaching their children responsible use
I take the somewhat contrarian view: kids (at some age) need to learn to cope with absolute limits that are strictly enforced. How else will they cope with living in real society? Not paying your rent will get you kicked out. Driving over the speed limit will get you a ticket, or worse. Not showing up to an exam in college means you fail the class.
Not saying you should have draconian rules on everything. But some rules need to be enforced with (reasonable) consequences. Otherwise you are doing your children a disservice, IMHO.
Driving over the speed limit will usually get you nothing. Failing to show up to an exam in college got me an opportunity to retake it with no penalty. Failing to pay your rent - maybe, but if you just paid it late, or if you were moving out anyway and make things enough of a pain for the landlord...
> Once you’re an adult, how you behave is up to you
This is not binary. As they grow older, kids should be able to take control of their lives more and more. Probably much more than the average parent thinks they should.
Edit: To clarify, I don't mean kids should become more skillful in controlling themselves according to their parents wishes. I mean the parents should gradually micromanage their kids less and less as they get older.
This is not binary. As they grow older, kids should be able to take control of their lives more and more.
Indeed. It's strange to me that people try to do things any other way. At the start, you have a tiny person who has no idea how to function in the world and is entirely dependent on others. Somewhere around two decades later, you have someone who needs to be ready to go out into the world on their own and operate independently. How else could you possibly get them from one to the other effectively if not by introducing more freedom and more responsibility over time as they become mature enough to handle them?
Probably the biggest complaint when I've spoken about childhoods with friends of my own generation, and the thing we pretty much all agree we want to avoid with our own generation of children, is strict and arbitrary-seeming rules that remain in place for far too long. Obviously no five-year-old is ready to make their own fully informed decisions about everything. But a fifteen-year-old? Hopefully by then they'll be making most decisions for themselves and relying on their parents more as advisers and a safety net than as figures of authority.
I'm not entirely sure what your point is here. Yes, some parents did that. Did it wreck their kids lives? Or did those kids go over to a friends house and listen to it anyway?
Random rules or enforcement or punishment or whatever sounds very stressful. I had such a situation growing up pre-internet. It’s not really a rule then, it’s the whim of the authority figure.
Yeah, I played that game with my parents when I was a kid. It was exhilarating and made me enjoy my time on the computer even more. It's very rewarding to be denied something but find a way to get it anyway.
Also the question I have is what are we fighting against? This is the world we created and we want our lids to live in a different world? Without online games, social networks etc?
Counterpoint: I played tons of games in my adolescence and I cherish every second I did and I regret nothing. I loved video games and I got a lot of joy out of them. I also made great friendships. I am very glad I spent that time on games back when I had time, and I am sad I can no longer play like this and be part of these communities as it is too time consuming.
My parents took away my computer when I was young and locked it in their office. They found me at 2am in the morning having broken into the office using a screw driver to take the door knob off and pull the bolt lock back manually.
Hah! I remember my father had split the TV cable and could only enable it with a connector. He'd done it to make sure our (the kids) TV time was limited to after he got home from work. I learned that I could get a signal if I fashioned a connector out of tin foil. Not a great one but good enough to get a snowy analogue signal.
I turned the router off earlier (continuing online play at mealtime ...), I forgot to switch it on again and was upset that the older kids didn't "fix" it. At least you showed some initiative.
Oh man, the pointless challenge of setting up rules and then unpredictably being OK with them being broken or not. Not considered to be best practice for any position of authority, including parenting, but widely modeled I guess.
Because, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." ... Sometimes teenagers do know where their own limits should be better than parents. In real life, there are times you break the rules, sometimes its' okay, sometimes it isn't. It's an important lesson to learn.
In the end, totalitarian views are what got us into the current political climate. Being able to negotiate, and sometimes push boundaries and break rules are important life skills.
FWIW I wouldn't be OK with them breaking the rules, but I'd appreciate the character trait that leads to someone who when challenged will look for a workaround.
In this situation the rule had been fulfilled, the meal was finished, and so finding a way to get back online was perfectly "lawful".
I'm pretty legalistic in a rational way with domestic rules for my kids - they can't flout the rules but they can provide a logical challenge and change the rules.
This situation was poor time management on my child's behalf.
My mom took the keyboard and hid it in her room. I found one in a dumpster, and used it when she wasn't home. I kept my keyboard hidden in my room as well.
If you didn’t grow up with it you can’t understand how stressful it is to maintain friendships when your parents will randomly take away your phone. Its like being randomly grounded over and over for years.