Elves on shelves and social media bans
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
13 min read
The article discusses Australia's new social media ban for under-16s and mentions the arbitrary age of 13 for social media accounts - this is directly tied to COPPA, the US law that established that threshold. Understanding COPPA's history and limitations provides crucial context for why age verification and child safety online remains so contested.
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Panopticon
17 min read
The author explicitly discusses sidestepping the 'Elf is watching you' surveillance narrative and later discusses social media platforms monitoring children. The panopticon concept - Bentham's prison design where inmates never know if they're being watched - is the foundational metaphor for understanding modern surveillance culture and its psychological effects on behavior.
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Operant conditioning
18 min read
The author notes from a 'behavioral science perspective' that Elf on the Shelf probably won't change kids' behavior meaningfully. This references operant conditioning - Skinner's framework of reinforcement and punishment - which explains why surveillance-based behavior modification (like the Elf watching) is less effective than the article's readers might assume.
Happy holidays, sapiens new and old!
Thank you so much for the support, well wishes, and compliments on my baby’s cheeks during my maternity leave. I, quite literally, could not do this without all of you.
I also want to thank everyone who reached out in light of the shooting at Brown University last week. My family and I are safe—I live and work remotely, so I was not near campus at the time. I am absolutely heartbroken for the students and families affected, and have been struggling with how to help. If you are in a similar boat, I found this page to be a useful starting place.
I want to keep things light today, but if that doesn’t feel right to you at the moment, please feel free to skip this one.
Thanks for being here, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming in the new year. ❤️
8 min read
A few days ago, I woke up abruptly to the sound of a crying baby. The clock read 4:55am.1 The next 90 minutes were filled with shushing and pacifiers and re-swaddling, a move from the crib in the nursery to the bassinet next to my bed, more shushing and rocking, until eventually, a waving white flag in the form of a feeding.
The feeding was interrupted by the desperate wailing of a sick toddler2 from the other side of the wall. I raced in to find him sitting upright in his crib. MOM! he cried, Need to wipe my nose! I set the baby down. She resumed crying. I grabbed a tissue. Ready, blow! I encouraged, holding the tissue to his nose. 1-2-...
The nose-wiping was interrupted by a new sound: this one a mysterious banging from my preschooler’s room next door. With a crying baby in one arm and a snotty toddler in the other, I flung open the door to find him sitting on the floor, his bookshelf empty, a sea of colorful pages strewn across the rug.
Let’s get ready for school! I offered, a bead of sweat forming on my back. The baby spit up. My toddler rubbed his nose on my pants. My preschooler walked into the bathroom, dropped to the floor, curled up on the bathmat, and looked up at me. I’m too tired.
And just when all hope was lost, when I was one sneeze away ...
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