Loving Children: A Design Problem (2002)

Abstract

The Sky Mall catalogue, conveniently available as an anes-thetic for irritated airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars, parents could order a device that could be attached to a television set that would control access to the television. Each child would be given a kind of credit card, programmed to limit the hours he or she could watch TV. The child so disciplined would presumably benefit by imbibing fewer hours of mind-numbing junk. He or she might also benefit from the perverse challenge to discover the many exciting and ingenious ways to subvert the technology and the intention behind it, including a flank attack on parental rules and public decency via the Internet.