[heavygrit]

> Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school

The tracker sends a notification when they're not at school, that's the point. Plus, I can lock down social media apps only during school hours. Blanket statements like this are plain ignorant. Also, I'm glad Utah finally passed a similar ban. Phones in use in class are a tremendous distraction 99% of the time.

[array_key_first]

If you kid is not at school, you will know. Kids weren't able to get away with hooky 20 years ago, let alone now. If they do it enough you'll have a court date!

I think this mostly boils down to our ever-connected society producing unreasonable expectations of communications. It is a very, very recent phenomena that you can instantly contact whoever whenever you want. Previously, it was common place to be unreachable for most of the day.

Realistically, your kid will survive, and even thrive, if you are not able to contact them for 8 hours a day. There is a downside to this kind of tether. It's a new type of ever-present anxiety, like someone breathing down your neck. Half of raising kids is teaching them what to do. The other half is leaving them alone, so they can learn to be competent adults.

[jwcooper]

This is ridiculous. The school will notify you if the student is not at school, or the teachers will eventually (or their grades/missing assignments).

Also you don't need to track your kids to enable school time mode, if you want to lock down their phone during school.

What are you going to do when they go to college? Track them? Monitor them? Make sure they go to classes?

At some point, you just have to trust your kids to do the right thing. It's a part of them learning how to grow up and be independent. It's better to make mistakes the younger you are so you can learn from them when there is less on the line.

[heavygrit]

This is even more ridiculous, how about that?? My particular school will send a message at 5pm daily with any attendance issues, but I can be notified instantly through the app. Why would I ever choose to be less informed? Also, I appreciate your points about college, but have you noticed a large number of students disproportionately boys are disenchanted with the whole education system at large and opting out of college. I'm clinging on to a hope that mine will see the value, but there are lots of different developmental speeds and some students need more guidance than others. You do realize some high school students just become burnouts, right? Your one size fits all, hands off and trust mentality is naïve and if you happen to be a parent, hopefully you'll be able to avoid the situation of parenting a student in crisis. Cell phones are a major problem in schools and I'm glad to see efforts being made to address it

[godelski]

I don't agree with tracking kids but you're being silly. I ditched in high school and my parents didn't find out. This is true for plenty of people. Sure, it was 20 years ago but we had cellphones too. It's not like we were in the dark ages and schools couldn't call

[eloisant]

Your high school didn't call your parents to tell you you missed a class?

Where I live we get a phone call the same day if our kids miss a class without prior notice.

[godelski]

Usually no. If you missed multiple yeah, but mostly they didn't care.

Though they started to my senior year. You'd get detention or even suspension if you did it too much. It was especially problematic with us in the AP/IB programs. My older sibling's class (AP/IB) ditched so much it was messing with the state attendance records.

But maybe they didn't call because we were in the advanced programs. The people ditching the most were the ones getting good grades. The school still has a pretty good ranking in California (top 20%).

And frankly, if they called... just delete it off the answering machine before your parents got home.

Or the other thing, get your elder sibling to call you out. Or call in pretending to be the parent or elder sibling. People did that all the time. It's not like the school knows your parents' voice. And well, now that's easy to fake, right?

[heavygrit]

guess I'm glad you're not in charge of this shit. I can't even tell what lousy point you're trying to make under all this. Going to school doesn't matter? Skipping is easy, everybody should do it? it's good to pull the wool over your parent's eyes?

> messing with the state attendance records whut?

At a basic level parental controls exist for a reason. I didn't make these products. Using them isn't the same as tracking your kids. Calling attentive parents names on the internet is stupid as is allowing phones in K-12 schools which is the point of the thread. Congrats on successfully skipping high school classes so well, troll

[godelski]

I think you've really misinterpreted my comments. I was more pointing out that the parent's assumptions were not accurate. Something it seems we agree on!

I'm in no way suggesting people ditch school nor that school is useless. This is a gross misinterpretation of my comment.

Since you're new here I want to stress that part of the HN culture is to respond to people in good faith. If you think someone's comment sounds outlandish, there's a good chance you've misinterpreted. Please see the guidelines, several of your comments are out of line with the guidelines here. You don't have to agree, but you do need to treat everyone as acting in good faith and not make assumptions about trolling

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  > Calling attentive parents names on the internet is stupid

You will find that I have done no such thing