Ideas Worth Your Time

There is far more good writing online than any sane person has time to read. So, every so often, I’ll share a few pieces that connect to the central concerns of Setting the Bar: raising children well, understanding the institutions shaping them, building a family culture that resists unhealthy modern defaults, and helping you thrive.

Here are six worth your time. (#6 is absolutely essential for anyone who is in education, has kids in education, or is interested in understanding the current educational paradigm).

Jean Twenge offers a practical walkthrough of Apple’s Screen Time controls, including downtime, app restrictions, web filters, and some of the loopholes parents may miss. It is useful for families that already have an iPhone in a teenager’s hands—and a good argument for delaying that moment. Twenge literally wrote the book iGen. She’d been researching and planning for this day for years. She expected setting up parent controls would be simple; it took her roughly two hours. Apparently, protecting children from a device designed for frictionless use requires a minor in systems administration.

Researchers created Snapchat accounts posing as 13-year-olds (something younger kids do every day) and watched what the platform served them. The accounts encountered sexual material, graphic violence, drug and self-harm content, and contact from unknown adults—often without searching for any of it. You quickly learn that Snapchat is not simply a messaging tool children use with friends. It is also an algorithmic media environment capable of normalizing things no child should encounter.

For years, social-science research suggested that parenthood reduced happiness (temporarily). Roy Baumeister looks at newer evidence that may complicate—or even reverse—that familiar story. The findings remain preliminary, but the larger point is worth considering: children can make life harder without making it worse. Parenthood reduces convenience while adding love, belonging, laughter, responsibility, and meaning—the very goods our measures of happiness often struggle to capture.

George Mack reminds us that “normal” is merely the collection of practices a culture has stopped questioning. Constant screens, sedentary living, overscheduled children, chronic debt, processed food, and endless input may be common without being wise. This is a natural companion to the Re-Norming Series. The crowd does not have a thoughtful plan for your family. It is mostly copying itself. Your children may benefit enormously from watching you choose a few deliberate forms of weirdness.

I love this very short post. Cal Newport explores novelist Brandon Sanderson’s argument that the value of creating art is not limited to the finished product. The difficult process of writing, drawing, composing, and revising changes the creator. That question should guide how parents and schools approach AI. It is not enough to ask whether a machine can complete the assignment. We must ask what intellectual or human capacity a child fails to develop by handing the work over.

Every citizen should read this as it speaks to the misguided agenda that is driving so many out of education. Freddie deBoer argues that we have given schools a historically unprecedented assignment: educate virtually every child to a college-ready standard, erase disparities rooted far beyond the classroom, and serve as the primary route into economic security. You do not have to accept every part of his argument to appreciate the question it raises: are we asking schools to do their proper work well, or assigning them every unresolved social problem and then condemning them for falling short?

Required reading.

That is enough for one sitting. I’ll return periodically with another short collection of ideas worth carrying into your home, school, or community.

Thank you for reading and sharing!

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Carry the fire!

Shane