Yesterday, Google announced updates to their “Family Link” system—a suite of parental controls designed to help parents remotely set limits on their children’s tech usage. The features are similar to the “Screen Time” features on iOS, and certainly could be used to positive effect by some families. That being said, the way the system is set up and its parent-focused approach goes against widely-accepted theories of child development and psychology.
I came across the news of Google’s updated controls while reading a Smarter Living piece released last week by the New York Times titled “How to Help Your Child Succeed at School.” The piece is excellent and mirrors much of my thinking on helping children and teenagers succeed—especially in the way that it focuses, not on what a child’s goals should be and how parents should control their behavior to ensure those goals are met, but on how to guide children through the process of setting goals for themselves and figuring out what steps are necessary to achieve them.
One of the most pervasive and damaging myths about children is that they “don’t know what’s best for them.” If only students fully realized that going to sleep a bit earlier, spending less time on their phones, and studying a bit more would help them in the long run, then they’d be sure to do those things. And if they can’t be convinced, then the only solution is to control them until they’re old enough to know better.
As a private education consultant, I am often the go-between in these parent-child power struggles. Sometimes, the controls are entirely reasonable (one parent struggled to implement a 3 am curfew with a troubled teenager), sometimes they can be more misguided (another wanted to veto a class field trip so her son wouldn’t miss a day of SAT studying, even though he was doing well on practice tests and the test wasn’t for another three weeks). Most, however, fall somewhere in between.
A common example is parents worrying that their teenager stays up too late, and the teenager insisting they don’t feel tired. Attempts by parents to control the teenager’s behavior will likely fall flat—but in reality, both parties tend to agree that the teenager’s life would improve with increased sleep. Unfortunately, the vast majority of American teenagers are trapped by systems beyond their control. The first part of the problem: teenagers have different biological sleep needs and patterns than adults do—they need about an hour more sleep (8-10 hours) and start producing melatonin and feeling sleepy about an hour later (11pm vs. 10pm). Combined, that means that “prying a teenager out of bed at 6 a.m. to get to school is the equivalent of waking an adult at 4 a.m.”—and with 86% of schools starting before 8:30 am and many extracurricular activities (band practice, etc) happening before school, that 4-am-equivalent-wakeup-time is being inflicted (not by parents, but by reality) on teenagers across the country on a far-too-regular basis.
In this situation, you may not be shocked to hear that both the student and the parent would prefer if the student got more sleep. But the same is often true for screen time and other things parents often feel they must control ‘for their own good’. It’s true that teenagers are a little less good at thinking long-term than full-grown adults are—but the answer is not to impose controls on them, but work with them to find, and agree on, a balance. Unlike iOS’s Screen Time feature, which exists on the device being restricted but allows for a separate “Screen Time password” that the owner of the device may not know, Google’s Family Link allows parents to adjust settings remotely, on a minute-to-minute basis. Neither parents nor students want this—one complains that “per-app limits will require a lot of manual labor on parents’ part.” Instead, that labor should be part of a conversation between parent and child (even better, between child and nonparental mentor), and although this conversation is possible while setting up Google’s Family Link, the system is not designed to encourage or facilitate it.
