Is your child more moody than usual — especially toward their devices? Are they displaying more impatience, for example by complaining about sluggish performance, buggy interfaces and frequent crashes? Do they respond to civil requests to come down for dinner with “Just a {expletive} moment! Everything’s {expletive} broken and I’m about to lose all my {expletive} work!”?

Then they may be in the early stages Compulsive Early Adopter Syndrome, or CEAS. This disorder, which tragically does not have an intuitively-pronounced acronym, compels the sufferer to install the latest beta version of any software they use, regardless of warnings about bugs, missing features or incompatibilities.

Let’s look at a typical adult sufferer. We’ll call him “Ned,” although his actual name is Rob and he’s me. Ned installed the iOS 11 beta on his iPhone 6 purely on the strength of “a mildly more interesting Siri”, and immediately lost access to several apps he relied on. Even after the developers released updated versions of those apps, and Apple issued the public release version of the operating system, Rob’s— er, Ned’s phone has been almost unusably slow.

Has Ned learned anything? Not judging from the fact that he recently installed the beta Gutenberg editor (and, soon, way of life) on his blog. That’s despite the fact it gives Ned no new functionality he actually uses, and despite WordPress’s official warning to “treat this as a radioactive biohazard and under no circumstances should you install it on a site producing content that is ever to be seen by human eyes.”

Ned, sadly, has fallen victim to peers who tout Gutenberg as “cool” and “hip” and “the most amazing content editing experience since sex, and that’s recognizing that sex isn’t actually a content-editing experience.” If an adult like Ned is vulnerable to such alluring promises, imagine the impact on younger minds when they read a page like this on WordPress’s own site — a page freely available to teens and even children.

There is, sadly, no cure for CEAS — apparently not even bitter, bitter, bitter experience. But until science develops a way to keep young minds from succumbing to the temptation of pre-release software, our only hope is vigilance.

That, and this new app I picked up that monitors your kids’ use of beta software. It’s still in preview release, and it’s buggy as hell, but I’m using it right now and I can tell you it 6wQFAFLe@ynt4xMgPst(n3r.Lj;mZzdAusgNBVtxDxdCMy