Retro-Tech Parenting(havenweb.org) |
Retro-Tech Parenting(havenweb.org) |
What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
It's hard to say how this'll go in the long run. I have two littler children right now, and a lot of the parents of much younger kids, at least in the area we live in, seem to be trying really hard to move in the "dumb phone/don't let them fall into these addictive layers" direction. Many of the parents we meet talk about eventually giving them dumb phones, or getting a landline at home so kids can call each other.
My hope is that with sustained effort from the community, this sort of concern falls by the wayside to a good degree. Who knows how it'll play out in the long-term given how much our culture has structured itself around this bullshit, but it's nice to see folk trying to push back in a more concerted way.
If we want our kids to thrive in the world without being hooked on this attention syphoning machines, we must get the socials out of those walled gardens.
This is a huge challenge, and no one but us will build it. It will require deliberate action in our community.
My daughter's sports teams, since moving up to 12U, have had group chats. She was absolutely getting left behind in the social interaction. It was painful to watch.
It's still a pain point because we've been limiting her SMS to known contacts. We're probably coming to have to capitulate on that because other parents don't seem to grok what we are trying to do and don't understand why we want to get their kids' phone numbers to add to my daughter's approved contact list. I guess we're the only people who have ever done this... >sigh<
There's team apps for the parents to use (which are universally terrible, but it is what it is), but not for the kids, because it's better to pretend it doesn't happen than acknowledge it does and deal with the necessary issues of abuse and privacy.
- lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years
- a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.).
- Lego Spike and Spike Prime robotics learning sets (with software on an iPad, no internet)
- an upright piano (originally for me, but now they're taking lessons; I got it for $700 at a closeout sale at a piano store)
- a MIDI keyboard connected to Pianoteq running on an iPad in single-app mode with a couple of self-powered studio monitors and headphones
- an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
- Each of them has their own CD player boombox, we have a large collection of CDs
- An iPad with Audible, disconnected from the internet, but with our audio book collection available (over the years, it's gotten into the hundreds of books)
- starting from when they were very young, I've been periodically loading up Cosmic Osmo (CD edition, from an un-stuffed .img file) running on an emulated Quadra 650 in System 7.5.3 on InfiniteMac.org and let them play for an hour or two at a time. This is such a good game for kids - literally black and white (dithered grays), not overstimulating, very thoughtfully built, sparks imagination and curiosity, full of easter eggs.
- some good play equipment and a hammock in the back yard :)
I hope it has been and will be enriching to them.
That sounds interesting, going to look into it. My son is old enough to be home alone but I don’t want to get him a cell phone yet, but I don’t want to leave him alone without a phone in case of an emergency. Traditional home phone plans from the usual telecoms are way more expensive than I thought they’d be.
What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box? Not even sure what to search for specifically,
one question for you; any plans on what you might do when the kids are 15, in highschool and all their friends have iphones?
Give her an iPhone SE (3rd generation). It's supervised via Apple Configurator, has a password-protected profile created with iMazing Profile Editor.
That profile disables a lot of things - primarily Safari and adding apps. I also have screen time blocking communication from people not in her contacts list - if she wants to add someone, she asks me. I haven't said "no" yet (not that I wouldn't ever).
The idea is less to be restrictive (although that's part of it) and more to give her plausible excuse not to join Instagram/TikTok/whatever. She hates social media, if only from having watched teenagers glued to their phones when she was younger.
I started it in extreme lockdown a couple years ago, and over the last year I've been lifting restrictions one at a time. I plan to finally arrive at "no restrictions" by the time she's 17 or so.
It's also helped that her mom has zero social media use - she texts, calls, and hangs out in person with people, that's it.
We aren't a fully screen free family. Our kiddo watches probably 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of TV a day and we aren't so naive as to think plane trips and long car rides will be screen free, so we bring an old iPad loaded up with shows and movies he likes. We review the list beforehand and make sure it has what he wants (subject to our approval). But the night and day difference between a moderated amount of screen time and his peers who are full on iPad kids is just astounding. I just hope we can keep up the low screen time for as long as possible.
- CDs moving to Mp3s moving to the ipod and finally streaming
- Games moving from 8bit to early 3d graphics to where they are today
- Family computer moving to laptops and eventually to ipads
- Landlines to early cell phones to the iphone today
All of these experiences helped ground the core principals behind this technology. And the pace of these transformations (while rapid) was still something you could keep up with. Everything was built on the same principals.
But today kids go from zero to iPad + AI generated tiktoks by time they turn 2. Sure parents can try to hide the tech, but it doesn't change the fact that it's out there and available as soon as they enter school.
Maybe I'm overindexing on my childhood, but I would love to recreate some abridged history of this for my kids. I think seeing the building blocks helps build a much more healthy relationship with technology.
The desktop that I grew up using was fundamentally a creative machine. It had games, but I mostly used it wrote fiction and make art-like stuff. When we got the internet it was AIM and movie trailers, so I could go to rent the movie in a store. Then someone introduced me to Webmonkey and the rest is, well, more making stuff.
It really ought to be possible to capture the creative aspects of technology without opening the door to endless toxic slime.
The other 99% who were into yoyo-ing back then are now into TikTok, that's all.
Hey dude, some of us were yo-yoing while waiting for Gentoo to build from stage 0. Compiling an OS on a single-core Athlon takes time.
For the 3 days it takes to build all the way up to KDE, you have no computer. Hope you didn’t forget something
BASIC is just plain approachable - turn on the computer and it's there. Also I had the paper manuals manuals that came with the computer and all the old BASIC books that my school library never threw away to learn from. When you're young enough that "install software" or "download" look like scary words that will get you in trouble for "messing up the computer", an old computer with BASIC (which your parents wanted to throw away anyways) is fair game to explore. More of a thing when households only had one main computer, I suppose.
By the time I was old enough to start learning hardware, the Arduino had already come out. I learned some things on that, but as soon as you have to go below all the abstractions it does for you things get cryptic. I actually didn't get into Z80 stuff until a few years later, but only after that did I actually feel I understood what was going on with the Arduino. Being able to poke at things with a scope which aren't embedded inside a tiny plastic brick goes a long way.
I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.
So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.
Until Python, technically.
Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.
A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.
That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.
The Walkman D-E220 is kind of close though, so not completely far away, but their CD players weren't so toy-y and rounded it seems.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/trackball_history_2.html
There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.
There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.
Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.
My boys have their own walk-man cassette players, and I've made a bunch of mix tapes both for them and myself to play in the car.
My daughter had my ancient JVC receiver that I got from my parents as a stereo - handed down to one her brothers.
We pick out DVDs, VHS and Laser discs to watch sometimes, sometimes on old CRT TVs as well.
I have all my game consoles in good working order so there's a ton of options for stuff to play that isn't cutting edge.
My daughter loves that there is a CD player in her car, so she learned how to burn mix CDs.
This is all mixed in with modern tech so they get a good mix. Hopefully it gives them a bit of perspective.
Did the parents of 30 years ago, think the tech you’re giving today had gone too far?
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the whims of big Internet companies. Because I think that there's a lot of value in having physical possession of your bits and bytes and control over how you access it, along with nobody else having access to it. My kids are still young enough that they prefer the playground over the computer (and maybe there's a generational thing where at least the 5 year old will actually decline screen time so he can go plant seeds or paint or something), but I want to build actual tech skills and knowledge of how the digital world is put together in them, rather than just having stuff fed to them.
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
I have gone to VHS for movies - you can still get all the classics at your local thrift store.
I think this direction https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li... using physical NFC cards is also a fun way to go.
We also got an old VCR for free, and pulled out all the VHS tapes from the parents' attics. Another great system for the kiddo. We have an assortment of tapes that she can choose from, and we let her pick the tape and insert it herself. I think the tactile feeling of selecting and starting it up is very satisfying.
Somewhere along the way we forgot the importance of touch in interfacing with technology. We are definitely starved for that sensation in the modern world.
super stuff
If I had kids, they're getting a cassette player. Bonus: it'll double as data storage for the C64 I'd buy them.
As an Child and Adolescent Psychiatric, expert in screen time and soon to be father. I found myself thinking more and more about this.
I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world.
The long loading times, no auto-save, no in game purchases... I think It Will help him develop a healthier relationship with the machine in his more vulnerable youth.
But my opinion will change with the ongoing and future scientific proof.
It pretty cute watching her get excited when it rings and sweet that she gets to talk to her friends any time she likes… from the living room.
VHS tapes are so cheap. Every thrift store has hundreds for like half a buck each. All your friends have a box in their basement they want to get rid of.
For a family, these are so much better.
One note: you can authorize regular phone numbers for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscription ($10/month I think? We didn't do this...)
I know I could build the same thing out of esp32's but it would be a big hassle, and I'd have to build one for all their friends too!
Btw, do you know any website where we can legally download mp3 ?
1. I sympathise a lot with the impulse here, as I do also feel personally that the way I grew up had the right balance of convenience and dangers, but I suspect all generations feel the same, and I'd be afraid that this is just imposing my nostalgia on my kids. I know, I know, kids seem scarily hypnotized by screens and social media, and trashy online content, but... My parents were also alarmed that when I was growing up that unchecked I could spend an entire weekend on the computer, with only reluctant breaks for food and sleep. Yet I think I grew up to be a reasonably well adjusted adult. I'd be also wary here that by imposing "my nostalgia" on my kids, I'd robbing them of building meaningful shared cultural bagage with their peers.
2. I'm afraid that by sheltering kids from the current state of technology, they will be poorly equipped to deal with it when they leave this protective bubble. No matter how much genie bottling we try, it's never going back in. The only way to a healthy relationship with technology, internet, etc... is through, not around or backwards. Create healthy tech, online habits, not by creating an environment where they cannot see the issues, but through good old parenting: setting a boundary when they're young, explaining it, and when you relax it as they get older confirm that they understood the reason for the boundaries and are placing healthy ones on their own.
probably the -worst- thing I ever did as a kid was take my parents' (mostly ripped) collection of VHS tapes and drop them into the 80 gallon fish tank to raise the fish up so I CoUlD ToUCh the FiBsCH. ah, then i blamed my brother... yup that memory still hurts!
i soo can't wait for my karmic come-uppance with my... exceedingly large retro video game collection.
That is probably the most important factor.
Like having your own managed digital media server and some personal MDM would give you the ability to continue to use and engage with the current zeitgeist but with controls.
We use CDs at home, thanks to my wife resisting getting rid of her huge collection years ago. Mine got stolen :(
I was hoping it was a display of some of the mix tapes or other peripherals they were using.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
"Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"
"Ok, I'll come get you then"
There was no way of letting anyone know that you were running late once they were already underway to pick you up.
I found out how to do it consistently in 2010 and its like black magic knowing how to target a real OS at BS hardware.