emmeetslawschool:

rad-roach:

ptenterprises:

lady-feral:

lokispriestess:

wilwheaton:

brucesterling:

Hey! He’s watching

HEY KIDS! WANT TO LIVE IN A PANOPTICON?! YOU SURE DO!!

HEY PARENTS! WANT TO NORMALIZE INTRUSIVE SURVEILLANCE AND MINIMIZE PRIVACY RIGHTS?

WELL YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS!!

CW/TW for under the cut:

abuse, child emotional abuse, mental health,

I feel like vomiting.

Its like someone took all the toxic, disgusting, vile, broken aspects of capitalist society and *distilled* them into one product.

Maybe I’m a bit sensitive to this in particular. But I was an intensely anxious child. My parents consistently and grossly invaded my privacy as a child to the point where I started to suffer from delusions that people around me could read my mind.

When I was out of the house mum would occasionally go through my room, my draws, cupboards, bags, school books, and pockets.

I never knew when it was coming. I wouldn’t know until I got home and she presented the “evidence” of wrongdoing and demanded explanation (anything from unfinished schoolwork to empty food packets).

To this day I start to feel severely I’ll if I stay away from home for more than one night. Even though I no longer live with parents.

So I think I probably feel more strongly than most about the necessity of privacy and agency for children.

But this right here feels like it was custom *designed* to induce paranoia.

Fuck. I am so angry and sad and sick.

Gods protect these kids. ❤

There’s plenty of similar products and the reviews just get worse.

Please please don’t do this sort of thing to your kids. I cannot stress just how damaging creating this atmosphere in your home is.

It might seem like a funny joke or a great parenting tool, but believe me your kid will deeply feel that lack of trust.

Teach your kid good morals, teach them compassion and empathy, teach them to be “good” purely because its the best way to be.

Kids need room to make mistakes. They need room to fuck up, realise their own fuckup, and fix it *without* authority figures finding out and taking control.

Otherwise all they’ll ever learn is that rules must be followed blindly, and authority figures must be feared and obeyed rather than respected.

And for the love of god don’t teach your kid that their privacy can justifiably be violated by authority figures based on the suspicion of “bad” behaviour.

Don’t teach them that the constant threat of punishment is the only reason to be good.

This is what these “toys” do.

Please don’t buy them.

As someone who was denied privacy growing up… Yeah. Don’t do this shit.

I’ve talked about Elf On The Shelf in this context before, but it’s still aggravating to see the subtext becoming text.

So the concept of Elf On The Shelf wasn’t creepy enough already, they had to go out and make a straight up fake security camera to terrorize children with? For fuck’s sake.

In addition to all of the above, which is entirely valid, using crap like this to try to get your kids to behave won’t *actually* get your kids to behave… it will just teach them that it only matters if they’re following rules (or acting good/moral/ethical/choose your phrasing as you wish) if someone or something is monitoring them, or in the case of the elf on the shelf generally, that it only matters so long as so someone is monitoring them and there is a reward that is dependent on them seeing you behave. As a practical matter, if you’re a parent who can’t get their kid to reasonably behave during the holidays without these things (or the fucking elf on a shelf), what are you going to do come January?

This is, at best, lazy and ineffectual parenting that is ultimately not going to help you shape kids that care about the importance of good behavior. And, at worst, as more eloquent people above have explained, it’s a tailor-made tool to further child abuse.