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Kids These Days
Oct. 21st, 2023 10:29 amWSJ has an article about phone tracking, kids, parents, etc.
There is a _wild_ paragraph in it.
“Modern parenting—with its emphasis on coddling and its lack of unstructured playtime—can also contribute to kids’ anxiety, says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist who has written several books about kids and parenting and is a spokeswoman for Life360.” ““These kids have been helicoptered, snowplowed and bubble-wrapped,” she says.”
I find it wildly astonishing that someone who produced the quoted language would be hired by Life360. I took a look around her LinkedIn and the Life360 website to try to figure out whether I could find a connection there, and nothing immediately popped. Perhaps there was an editorial error at WSJ.
(Just because I subscribe to WSJ does not mean that I believe anything they say, much less agree with any of their opinions. I subscribe primarily because Matt Levine over at Bloomberg links to a lot of WSJ articles both in the main text and in the linkage paragraph and I want to know what he’s talking about. WSJ’s paywall is vigorous, and I was unable to get what I wanted via an Apple News subscription so here we are. I’m probably going to give in and subscribe to FT for the same reason, altho I was able to get around their paywall for a really long time.)
FWIW, I just find it amazing that people point to “coddling and … lack of unstructured playtime” as contributing to anxiety in a world with ALICE drills and Covid. Coddling just feels … low priority as a contributor to anxiety.
Further, WaPo some years ago did a piece on Life360 as a vector for emotional abuse (controlling spouses / *Friends, etc.). And this year, there was a big thing about Life360 selling location data. Life360 also did a feature called “Bubbles” which was an effort to compromise between ensuring safety and preserving privacy. The WSJ piece mentions none of this (the failure to mention the data selling in particular is odd). Perhaps an effective way to market to conservatives is to make fun of the thing you want to sell them and the kind of people who want to buy it and to rely upon mismatch between what humans are like and how they present themselves to find your audience/customers that way.
There is a _wild_ paragraph in it.
“Modern parenting—with its emphasis on coddling and its lack of unstructured playtime—can also contribute to kids’ anxiety, says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist who has written several books about kids and parenting and is a spokeswoman for Life360.” ““These kids have been helicoptered, snowplowed and bubble-wrapped,” she says.”
I find it wildly astonishing that someone who produced the quoted language would be hired by Life360. I took a look around her LinkedIn and the Life360 website to try to figure out whether I could find a connection there, and nothing immediately popped. Perhaps there was an editorial error at WSJ.
(Just because I subscribe to WSJ does not mean that I believe anything they say, much less agree with any of their opinions. I subscribe primarily because Matt Levine over at Bloomberg links to a lot of WSJ articles both in the main text and in the linkage paragraph and I want to know what he’s talking about. WSJ’s paywall is vigorous, and I was unable to get what I wanted via an Apple News subscription so here we are. I’m probably going to give in and subscribe to FT for the same reason, altho I was able to get around their paywall for a really long time.)
FWIW, I just find it amazing that people point to “coddling and … lack of unstructured playtime” as contributing to anxiety in a world with ALICE drills and Covid. Coddling just feels … low priority as a contributor to anxiety.
Further, WaPo some years ago did a piece on Life360 as a vector for emotional abuse (controlling spouses / *Friends, etc.). And this year, there was a big thing about Life360 selling location data. Life360 also did a feature called “Bubbles” which was an effort to compromise between ensuring safety and preserving privacy. The WSJ piece mentions none of this (the failure to mention the data selling in particular is odd). Perhaps an effective way to market to conservatives is to make fun of the thing you want to sell them and the kind of people who want to buy it and to rely upon mismatch between what humans are like and how they present themselves to find your audience/customers that way.