Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. The idea being that the parents should monitor their movement 24×7. I really don’t get this mindset where instead of talking to the kids and setting boundaries about what they are allowed to do and what they are not, parents put in more and more surveillance systems on the kids to monitor and control their actions and behavior.
Before anyone starts, I know I don’t have any kids but I have enough nieces & nephews that I am tangentially aware of what goes into caring for a kid. When I was a kid, the rule we had to follow was that we had to be home before dark and tell parents where we were going to play. If we shifted locations, one of the the parents was notified so that they could keep the rest of the parents in the loop if required/asked. This was with the expectation that if we abused the trust and broke the rules we would no longer be given such freedom. Almost the same rules are in effect for Vir & Sara as well and they work great. This isn’t to say that there aren’t random checks being made to ensure the kids are not doing something they should not be doing. But the idea is that they are being allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them.
The more we try to control kids the more they will figure out ways to get around the restrictions. It is better to let them have some freedom (with limited restrictions) than for them to go behind your back completely. I am a supporter of Parental controls on devices (in a limited manner) so that we can block access to certain sites/media etc that is age inappropriate like violent movies or horror etc. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t sit with the kids and explain to them why certain content is blocked till they are older. If you do it without explaining then the kids will find a way around it (I would…) and you won’t even know about it.
I used to watch movies with my elder cousins and watched a movie called ‘100 Days’ when I was about 12-13 years old. It is a thriller where one of the characters finds a skeleton of a murder victim in the wall. The movie scared me so much that I went around the house tapping the walls to see if there were any hollow areas in the wall. Then my mom sat me down and explained how a skeleton is nothing to be scared about as it was just like the pit inside the mango that allowed us to keep shape and stand-up. Then they explained why I shouldn’t watch such movies till I was older and guess what I understood and didn’t try to bypass.
If something is forbidden without explanation then people will try it when they are away from supervision. I saw it a lot during college where folks who came from conservative or restrictive backgrounds went crazy with their new found freedom outside their parents control and I still see it in our new hires from colleges. The allure of the forbidden is quite strong unless you explain why it is forbidden…
The more self reliant you make your kids the better off they will be later in their lives (doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything for them and let them figure out everything themselves…) Excess of anything is bad and that includes freedom as well. I traveled from Delhi to Muzaffarnagar (about 150 kms) by bus alone when I was around 15 years years old. That gave me confidence that I have till now about traveling alone… This is not to say that there weren’t any guardrails around me at that time, both the driver and the conductor in the bus were told to keep an eye on my during the trip (and they were known to my grandparents). Similarly, Vir & Sara have flown from Bangalore to Delhi alone (after being registered with the airline as child travelers) and they both are quite confident as well.
I do want to make it absolutely clear that I am not advocating for complete freedom without any controls or limits. Obviously there needs to be some limits and controls for the kids otherwise they will be too spoilt. But like all things there needs to be a balance and putting a hidden tracker on them is way off from being a balanced approach.
– Suramya