[alistairSH]

Yep, the only sure way to keep a kid off a screen is to physically remove the screen. My son is grown and out of the house, but when he was a kid, he was eventually able to defeat just about anything I installed on our PC. With friends younger kids, removing iPads and suchlike is much easier than maintaining software limits.

[hinkley]

We keep asking for wireless charging but if we ever actually get it then we are going to discover all the ways we made a liability into an asset. This being prime amongst them.

I could also see a black market of kids selling each other their old phones so that the kid can have a 'prison phone' they use at night.

[jagraff]

Yep - when I was a kid, I had to put all my electronics in the kitchen at night, so I bought an old used smartphone that my parents didn't know about. Kids are crafty

[quacked]

I've been reading some of your comments elsewhere in the thread--I think you're one of the few people commenting that has some serious respect for how kids actually think and behave. I'm curious for my own sake if you've ever read a certain pseudonymous psychiatry blog--you will immediately know what I'm talking about if you have, and if you haven't I'd like to ask how you learned what you did about child behavior and consistent parenting.

[hinkley]

I have not.

I could say that I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life doing root cause analysis, how you can steer people away from self-sabotage, how you can empower people to help themselves instead of being reliant on you for everything, but that's only the book jacket version of the real story.

The real story is sadder and I'm still actively dealing with the consequences of feeling like I needed to become an autodidact at the age of 8 to ever have any success at anything. Which necessitated spending a lot of time thinking about thinking. Self-teaching morphed into self-mentoring, self-doctoring, and self-parenting. Me, me, me (what could go wrong?) I watched my parents (from my perspective) abandon Discipline almost entirely with my kid brother, who has struggled his entire adult life, and even at 14 I could see this road ahead of him. I wish I had been like some stories where the eldest child takes care of the younger ones, but unfortunately he spent most of his childhood finding ways to push my buttons and we were never close (something my mother has pointed out as a mistake that is playing out now between his own kids, to which I responded, "Tell him this is why I never call.")

That story about my friend's kid reminds me a lot of my little brother and as you can imagine by the length of that reply, was a little triggering.

[alistairSH]

I could also see a black market of kids selling each other their old phones so that the kid can have a 'prison phone' they use at night.

Sneaky little devils. I can totally see it, especially pre-teens and older.

[quacked]

It's quite common among communities that have heavy phone restrictions (religious kids that go to public schools, etc.) They're as clever as adults are, just more monitored.

[hinkley]

They are also less encumbered by thoughts of consequences.

I worked on a contract one time where they were trying to alerts for college sports, and I insisted on adding some security to the system. The manager reasoned that the cost/benefit analysis for someone deciding to hack a sport score feed did not add up and so nobody would think to try that.

I pointed out that college students have poor risk assessment. I pointed out MIT/Stanford. I pointed out it was already written. They made me rip it all out. And then the customer cancelled the project because 'we' had given them exactly the system they already had and why should he pay for it again. I just stared at the manager, who avoided eye contact. (If I'd been a bigger and braver person I would have jumped in here with a counterproposal that amounted to restoring all of my changes, but I did not think of it)

Which is just as well because there totally would be fake messages sent out during the last timeout stating that <our team> won by 6 points just for the lulz. Because of course they would.