I also guarantee you that a teen who is not in the loop is much more likely to be ostracized and bullied in the offline world.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.
Eh, that’s not necessarily true. Other kids might bully your child for having a healthy set of offline interests and for not being like them who are all plugged in online, but I don’t see how it’s not an option to teach your kids to have a strong sense of identity and not give in to peer pressure while also assuring them that you’ve always got their back.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids. And you’re supposed to be an adult who already knows what’s right and wrong. If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate? No, what you should do is show them the right way and to what’s good for them in the long term, even if it’s difficult for them to see it now because of their youth.
Surely being a good parent and having your kid's back is very important when the kid is being bullied.
I have been bullied by losers the whole school time, because of something as simple as my name and being smarter. I managed to develop a strong resistance to certain things and learned to go my own way, questioning the mainstream, including dealing with network effect and peer pressure to do things I do not want to participate in. For children in primary school it can be terrible.
However, I can easily imagine, what can happen, if a parent does not support their child as much as my parents did support me. I think except for exceptionally strong independent children, there needs to be a balance in children's lives. If almost everyone in their social circles is basically telling them, that they suck, because they are out of the loop, then it needs parents to support them and make them feel that they do not suck.
I had a strong sense of identity, I had good results, a good family life, my parents had my back, etc.. That didn't stop me from being bullied or pissed on while being held down by fucking assholes. So, I'd say, you either don't know what bullying is like or you're overly naive. And by the way, having my parents having my back and telling my teachers about the bullying just made things worse. It only improved when I changed school and punched the first guy who namecalled me.
Anyway, to respond to your points:
> What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure.
What I'm describing is knowing how society works and planning around it. It doesn't mean that I would give unrestricted access to social medias, it also doesn't mean that I would not be there to guide my child about how to use them, what the dangers are etc...
I'm saying that straight up abstinence is not a good idea and doesn't work if your child lives in a society that doesn't abstain. There are also perverse effects whereby preventing your child from completely accessing social medias, you end up with a child who just hides it from you.
> If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate?
I'd probably consider switching my child to a different school.
> you either don't know what bullying is like or you're overly naive
I was about to say teach your child self-defense and how to fight, and the last sentence of that same paragraph just proved my point.
Look, as a parent, your goal should not be to teach your child how to avoid bullying. That's not within your control, nor your child, and in the real world, even once your child is grown up, there's always some moron out there in the world who's going to bully you or want to beat you up, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for not being like them. That's not an excuse to teach your child to be like other children just for the sake of conformity because that is the wrong thing to teach. You teach them how to fight back when people beat them up for being the way that they are. None of your other points matter against that.
Fair point but I'd argue that self defense and knowing how to fight helps but I was a year younger than everyone else (skipped a grade) and was fairly small for my age until I hit a growth spurt (which coincided with when I changed school by graduating middle school and went to high school). I'm not sure I would have been half as successful when I first was bullied.
The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.
> Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
No, wrong again. It’s not necessary to function and there already are secure messaging apps through which kids and adults can communicate. You don’t have to have a Facebook page. You don’t need an IG profile of portraits where you pose like a model. You don’t need to make funny Tiktok videos.
This entire issue is being murkied by adults who are projecting their deep-seated bullying issues as value judgments on how to raise children when evidently they haven’t sorted themselves out and they are already having kids.
You're missing the point. This is not peer pressure over what brand of jeans or shoes your kids wear.
It's at the heart of socialization itself, which is an important part of growing up healthy.
The analogies with drugs and gambling are also misplaced, because these things are illegal and/or generally frowned upon by parents, the legal system, and society as a whole. In other words, the exact opposite of what's happening here.
And, those things are illegal/frowned-upon for reasons you respect enough to use them as examples. That fact should actually help you see the point?
So, thanks for the screengrab! I'm always a bit annoyed by people cleaning comments like this to move it to chat when stack exchange chat is so bad and somehow always has messed up timestamps.
Equally annoying to finding a search result on some forum and it's full of people complaining to use the search function instead of posting a new thread, but the thread I clicked on is by far the most popular and informative
Only diamond moderators can see deleted comments. You need 10K reputation to view deleted posts, so you have a long way to go if you are only in the hundreds.
I am not a developer and so don't use it much, but it's occasionally handy. I guess I need to try to score more points to make it a bit more interesting, huh.
My phone (a samsung s21 ultra) was snatched from my hand while I was using it to check google maps in Barcelona. I tried to remote wipe it 5 minutes later at my hotel but it had already been disconnected. So the thief was very quick at removing the sim card.
I checked online since and it seems that even with the advent activation lock, there's still a lot of phone thefts in some countries. They just sell the spare parts and can make 100 to 200 euros between the screen and battery.
I'd imagine with John Deere tractors, there's quite a few parts that could be resold so an activation lock wouldn't necessarily reduce the value by that much.
I'm not sure is the best analogy. Perhaps it wouldn't reduce the value, but I don't see how you move a tractor that wont start (unless you want the owner standing beside you while you hack).
Unfortunately commonplace in Barcelona. A thief that is caught will only get a small fine for thefts under 400€ even if it's the 1000th time. So the chance of a fine is just taken as the cost of doing 'business' by these professional pickpocketing gangs.
If there's violence involved it's another story but if a victim initiates it, they themselves can get into trouble. So these thieves are trained to be ultra passive.
That's probably the best time to steal it: the device is unlocked, giving access to the data and settings etc. Also the owner is distracted looking at the screen, and it's held in a position conducive to snatching. In short I'd expect this to be the main mode of phone theft directly from the owner.
It's a fairly common tactic in the UK. I've seen plenty of CCTV clips where kids cycle past people on their phones and snatch them. The thief is 10m away before the person's even reacted.
It also depends on the region. Here in HK, Ikea is very expensive (about double the price I used to see in France), to the point where it's cheaper to get a wardrobe custom made in good quality plywood exactly according to our dimensions than to buy a wardrobe that's close to the dimensions we need in Ikea.
In Japan it was the only place I found with good reasonably priced furniture, especially for larger sofas and beds. Nitori was good quality but a bit more expensive and everything was low and small. Besides that, there seemed to be absolute junk for low prices and high end handmade stuff for very high prices. I simply wasn’t anywhere else with stuff in the midrange.
Now I love close to France and Ikea is definitely the best value for midrange. Some of the German chains are pretty good too (but still 30% more comparing similar quality).
Yup, lived in Japan before moving here and definitely matches my experience :) The one other store besides Nitori and Ikea was Muji. I bought a few furniture from them which was decent. Definitely more adapted to the Japanese market in term of dimensions.
Can you elaborate on getting planted with drugs by a deranged cop? what happened? How did you get out of that situation? Were you able to prove your innocence?
It happened 11 years ago when I was a minor living in a small, extraordinarily corrupt town. The officer had been stalking my friends and I for some time. She is a known meth manufacturer and distributor. She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal. I got the maximum allowed sentence despite no prior criminal history. Unfortunately I was 17 and homeless at the time just trying to graduate high school, unable to fight back.
The full story is much longer and so insane that I don't even want to open the full can of worms here at the moment, but I should do a write-up and talk to a lawyer now that I have the time/money, despite the statute of limitations which probably protects them.
I mean I've literally watched this officer with my own eyes procure meth ingredients, I have footage of her distributing, some people I know murdered her brother and there was a giant meth lab found at his house, it's just a total unbelievable shit show from start to finish. But I was the one who got railed. The FBI refuses to get involved despite numerous tips.
> She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal.
mistrial, in law, a trial that has been terminated and declared void before the tribunal can hand down a decision or render a verdict. The termination of a trial prematurely nullifies the preceding proceedings as if they had not taken place.
Other than that it’s a totally credible story about a meth-cooking police officer…
I have no need to convince you, a random person on hacker news. It's a small enough town that next to everyone knows her story. There has been more than one investigation but she's protected. She was stalking my friends and I due to disagreements between her son and some of my friends at school.
As for the mistrial, it's only in spirit because my public defender flat out refused to take my case seriously and refused to appeal on grounds that it would make her life difficult.
It's hard to make people believe or understand what small town corruption is like unless they've seen it for themselves. The mayor himself showed up at the place I was crashing at after I got arrested just to further make things more difficult for me... what kind of psychotic town allows for such behavior?
It's nuts. With my own two eyes I once watched this cop in question pull up to a grocery store in her patrol car in broad daylight with a near-toothless old woman in the passenger seat. That old woman proceeded to go into the store and buy a stack of Sudafed, got back in the patrol car and they rolled out. I guessed that she was having supplier issues and needed a fix, so she found a smurf.
I thought about calling the police and getting them to review the footage, but it was a crapshoot who showed up and if I would only get into more trouble.
Tangential to the above comment, you have to also remember that in the U.S. many police forces are also revenue drivers. For many small towns on highways, they have "speed traps" set up not really to keep roadways safe but to ticket people and get revenue for their municipality, ditto with other legal actions against people. There's a significant amount of civil forfeiture too that amounts to cops seizing assets with little to no cause. I mention this just because corruption isn't always as straightforward as what that absolutely insane situation sounds like, but the incentives in many U.S. jurisdictions are pretty misaligned and so can create pretty negative situations for the average American interacting with a cop.
Yes, our town was off a major highway and getting in and out of town is a blitz through multiple factions of police including the Sheriff's Office, town police, state troopers and extra enforcement from the nearby capitol city. They are especially active during what is known as Taskforce Thursdays. It's a racket from top to bottom. You feel like a criminal just going to get groceries, like a lamb watching for wolves.
My arresting officer has been kicked off of the local force before and reinstated. Until a few years ago, the father of the local district attorney was the the town's mayor. The same mayor was the town bail bondsman. When I was processed, the town's mayor himself visited the parents of the friend I was staying with at the time in a play to get me kicked out and back on the street.
It's an insane town and it's ruled by a few wealthy families. The corruption in that town was unimaginable and I myself was subject to an abusive power figure as my guardian while growing up, that same man is great friends with the same prosecutor who conspired to press charges and conduct a mistrial. I can't get away from it.
What do you mean by mistrial here? How did you get any sentence if there was a mistrial? Why would they conspire to commit one unless they were on trial and not you?
My first public defender was removed from me because he was trying to assist me.
My second lawyer didn't know my name after two years, prepared no defense and refused to file a motion to quash (the town dragged on proceedings for years and it turned out they'd never sent the "evidence" to the lab).
I had half a dozen cops approach the stand, sequestered, and each of them told a totally different story. My only witness then got slapped with a charge for "lying to the police", whatever that was in legalese, and the judge ignored all of the inconsistencies. I should also mention that my right to a trial by jury was taken away from me in an act of deceit, where I, a minor without a lawyer or guardian present, was made to sign a document upon bail which gave up that right. I was told at the time that they would not release me on bail unless I signed the document.
My lawyer then refused to file an appeal because it would, and I quote, "make [her] job miserable", because her de facto boss was the judge, who happened to be the only presiding judge across two parishes.
My original public defender, who had been removed from my case, was so upset by the outcome that he came to visit me in jail, promised me he'd fight for me... he had a private screaming match with the judge in his office, but the best he could do was get me a reduced sentence on good behavior. I still had to pay thousands in fees and endure all of the other issues that come with the state having a vice grip around you.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.