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Comment by 39896880 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the kids it’s the parents. They expect to be in constant contact with their kids. Note to the office won’t do.

i feel like parenting keeps regressing. at my kids school many parents walk their kids in. i get that for kindergarten, but 3rd grade? you live 3 blocks away. your kid could walk. and biking is out of the question, too dangerous. only 2 kids bike to school. and they wouldn’t let their kid walk home (probably a quarter mile) without a gps device. air tag is not enough because it’s not realtime and has no communication.

this isn’t an exaggeration. so many of my parent friends think this way. “they can’t bike to school because what if they fall and need help? they need a phone”

why as humans do we create more barriers and goalposts?

Humans evolved to constantly identify threats and ward them off.

A side-effect of this is that as real threats dwindle and disappear, brains will naturally fill the gap with progressively more paranoid and unfounded fears.

It’s because drivers are all on their phones and unless your 3rd grader is 5 ft tall, they will be easily unseen and plowed over.

You don't actually know that, and it depends drastically on the car and pedestrian infrastructure around the school, as well as the child himself.

It’s anecdotal, sure, but I don’t think you’re appreciating how bad this problem is.

Fair enough, though I do think I appreciate the problem. I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.

I was sort of imagining a neighborhood and school near me that does actually have great sidewalks with a single conflict-producing crossing that is managed by a guard in the mornings. I admit this is totally our of the ordinary though, especially for a public school in the SE USA.

I apologize for the assumption, that was quite rude of me.

That said, you’ve just described my neighborhood. We’re about 2 blocks from my son’s school. One major road, with a crossing guard at school time. The 2nd-to-last day of walking him home from school I come up to the guard who’s calling in a driver who blew past her.

As an aside, I’ve begun to notice cars leaving huge gaps between them and the car in front of them. In every case I see the driver looking down, oblivious to the 20+ feet between them and the next car.

>I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.

Ugh. Are you alright?

Yea. I live in a downtown area on one of the most popular streets in town and I was pushing my luck and essentially had to hop on the hood in both cases. A lot of situations where drivers are waiting to turn left against cross traffic and don’t then look to make sure the pedestrian crossing is clear. Appreciate the question.

The parents of Madeleine McCann were completely assraped in the media for not watching their 4-year old like a hawk 24/7. In various online discussions (including HN) I somewhat frequently see parents be blamed for all types of things, from a child committing a crime (or generally being "bad") to victim-blaming when something bad happens, like with McCann. I'm pretty sure you can see the horde of victim-blaming after something bad happens to a 11-year old "but he didn't have a phone".

Parents are the Tour de France cyclists: we expect them to do the impossible and are then surprised they're all doped up. Surprised Pikachu.

I think this is almost 100% born out of fear of liability. From the school side it’s fear that parents will sue them for neglect or injury or any other failure. Parents fear that the state will charge them with neglect and take away their children. Compounded by a generation of news over-coverage and fear-generating reporting, you end up with anxious parents desperate to protect their children from anything and everything.

As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid.

Same. This is the reason my daughter has one. Things are getting extremely hot out there and no one seems willing to do anything about it.

Maybe buy them a Nokia 1100 instead?

I give her my old iPhone that's already paid off when I upgrade (and that I can put parental controls on.)

What do you mean by things getting "hot" out there? Are you monitoring any signals or predictors of school shootings at your daughter's school?

Sorry, genuinely trying to understand your perspective here.

Oh great, this made me switch sides on this whole argument. Horrifying black swan events are very motivating.

In the cause of a school shooting (that’s statistically almost not bound to happen), phoning your child is a liability likely to get more people killed than an asset.

I think they'd want the kid to phone them

It's extremely unlikely that your kid will die in a school shooting.

> Address the root cause

It would still be the case that sometimes children die in freak ultra-low-probability events, even if there were zero school shootings.

We prepare for unlikely events all the time. Impact is another metric that we respond to. I simply multiply the two together.

> We prepare for unlikely events all the time. Impact is another metric that we respond to. I simply multiply the two together.

But we don't design our lives around those unlikely events. Nuclear war is extremely serious, but extremely unlikely in the short term. By you logic, we should all be living in fallout shelters basically all the time, just in case.

To reinforce your point, I think any given person is much, much more likely to die due to nuclear war than in a school shooting.

If you feel that the last number is infinite, then the outcome of this computation is not going to be surprising.

It’s extremely unlikely a given kid will be present at all during any kind of shooting at school, the vast majority of which aren’t indiscriminate killings and which may not involve students or staff at all (a shooting that just happens to take place with at least one involved party standing on school property)—over all 13 years of k-12 school.

I ran the numbers and it was firmly in “not even worth a thought” territory. I cast the net of the definition of “school shooting” as wide as remotely reasonable, and made the criterion present at the building for, not hurt or killed, and it was still not worth worrying about.

The odds are even better in the kinds of schools HNers are likely to send their kids to, since a ton of those shootings are drug- and/or gang-related.

Dumb phones and watches provide the communication ability without the potential for being sucked in.

Parents bend over backwards making excuses for why their kids need phones.

The real reason: Phones keep kids distracted so parents are then free to browse TikTok/IG/FB/etc themselves.

This is an unnecessary ad hominem. GP could give the phone to the kid only for the purpose of emergencies, for example.

> It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words.

Can someone put me in touch with Sam Altman? I just had a great idea for an application of ChatGPT.

> in event of a school shooting.

So it's not for their wellbeing, it's for parental anxiety.

This is a good opportunity to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

That's basically the only interpretation of what you said. What other interpretation is there?

People keep saying this but like, who wants to hear your kids last words like that?

I call bullshit on this one. I think it's something someone said because who is gonna push back on that one and then it caught on.

Don't accept that.

Braver of you to say it, but I agree. This seems like a trauma fantasy at best.

I had an immediate family member in a similar scenario. I think those closest to a problem are the best able to make decision about it.

People far from a problem deciding how you should solve is like a boss telling you how to solve a coding issue. They aren't close enough to understand important details that affect the decision.

You're suggesting that the solution to school shootings is to ensure that all children have smartphones, not that less people should have access to guns?

I would easily say yes to the offer of ban phones in schools in return for a ban on all guns. Unfortunately no one is willing to extend that offer.

It would be a win-win.

I think they will get used to it quickly. This is how it used to be and parents had far less anxiety. I think at first it will be a very jarring change, but once they are through the worst part society will adopt quickly.

> It’s not the kids it’s the parents.

The cause isn't some mutually exclusive binary like that. It can be both at the same time and the proportion can vary between families.

Well... it's some parents... and then from there it's peer pressure on the other kids, who then go beg their parents for one too.

Edit: replied to wrong person.

Looks like you responded to the wrong person

Did you mean to reply to this comment?

"As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40718741

It’s both. Some kids need it, some parents need it, sometimes there’s a codependency. It’s not always 0 or 1.

A smart watch can easily solve the contact problems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com