child safety

 well, the "family meeting" yesterday seemed to go alright, but we've no way of knowing how much landed. at the very least, between yesterday evening and this morning, things are feeling much better between us.

in spite of mr smear dragging out his homework for hours (even with using google's translate to help him) when it could literally have taken him a few minutes. he spent orders of magnitude more time trying to get out of writing a couple of sentences and losing more screen-time privileges.

we've reversed ourselves on the "earning" screen-time thing. if we do that, we're left with precisely nothing in terms of leverage.

...

after much drama and finally getting him into bed last night, i drowned in a flood of angry messages from the class parents - they're starting to notice the kids engaging in inappropriately sexual banter, and apparently one of the boys showed somewhat pornographic images to one of the girls.

i quietly lurked until this morning, until i'd had a chance to discuss the situation with mr smear, and then posted the following opinion:

> but neither the teacher, nor the administration, nor the parents know how to handle them

100%. And in my opinion, that's the main thing - the whole world is going crazy, the children are absorbing terrible things from all directions, and even adults can't understand where the boundaries should be and how to set them.

but first of all, we need to be aware that we don't understand exactly what's going on, and exactly where it's coming from, and that this is less relevant than cooperation in trying to protect and vaccinate our children as much as possible.

i tried to understand from my son this morning what happened, but he didn't see/perceive events as documented above. on the other hand, he came home last week and repeated phrases he heard from other children (not necessarily children from the class) and really didn't understand their meanings, and i had to have an unpleasant conversation so that he would understand why it's wrong without conveying age-inappropriate things to him

i think we should have a conversation, maybe in person, and set norms between us and try to find a way to manage the identification and treatment of events when they arise.

let's see if anyone actually wants to do anything about this.

...

right after posting, gd and i watched "get your kids off roblox" - why is the world's largest children's game banning vigilantes? and i immediately felt even better about our decision to ban roblox a few months ago, and set about generating a hebrew video presentation with notebooklm: רובלוקס: שאלה של בטיחות

i hope that lands.

(if you also didn't know about 764? you're welcome)