Parental Controls Aren't for Parents
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It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
Sounds barely realistic, when school are using iPads, education is one URL away from entertainment crack and parental controls on iOS are a joke.
1. Ask your school to change their policies. Coordinate with other parents. Make it clear to the school that if they don't start to enforce these policies then you will hold the school directly responsible for any harm that comes to your child in the environment they create.
2. Pick different schools. (Home School, Private school) if you can afford it. Charter schools may be an option.
Both of these require sacrifice on your part and neither are easy. But no one should ever think parenting is easy.
Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.
I do not agree at all with this conclusion.
Most 5-year olds should be allowed to close the bathroom door while doing their business, they should not be permitted to access the internet privately.
When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking.
This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanagement was not good for their relationship or his personal development, to put it mildly.
Also you have to consider the ramifications of such behavior if that gets public, I mean could possibly be the source of bullying and what not.
As a child we were de incentivized to playing games with the computer. The schema was:
A) computer you can have, because is useful beyond playing, consoles, no way. Forget it “that is stupidizing BS”
B) No money for games. Other SW would be bought, but rarely games.
That moved us to start spending time with other things in the computer, like programming our own games.
Of course today that is all difficult to impossible, by design, without ostracizing the kids.
In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
We also lock up our alcohol, as many parents have chosen to do for generations.
Frankly, these half-assed laws disenfranchise an already not-permitted-to-vote populace. But somehow these "kids" can be declared as adults if they are 16 and having sex or courts deem them 'adults', but simultaneously find them to be parental property.
Glad I dont have children. The situation is a toxic cesspool.
Sounds like either they’ve figured out these parental controls, and might have some tips for you. Or they trust their kids with fewer controls.
My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't grow up as nerds just don't see the problem. Among the class of people who spend their time on Substack or Hacker News the horror of the modern net and its affect on childhood are well understood at this point. Among "normal people" you will definitely get weird looks if you suggest that this stuff is terrible for your kids.
They also call or text aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents.
That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Just like it's hard for me to find the right balance of benefit to downside in technology for my kids, it's also hard to strike a balanced tone when discussing my feelings on this stuff. Every time I write something about this problem online I feel like I'm coming off as some authoritarian luddite - which I'm definitely not. I want my kids to get the benefits of technology. Any bright future for them is almost sure to include the need to engage with the net.
Instilling the values that allow for that is the hard part.
Yes, they aren’t allowed to watch youtube shorts at all (nor do either of the parents), but we’ll look up nature or physics videos, and if they want to watch a video on repeat, we use yt-dlp to download and they watch via infuse. But again, not of their own accord. When it’s time to play outside or elsewhere, it’s time to do that. And no devices at meal time, even if they see other kids at the same table with them.
I guess my point was that the devices are immensely powerful tools for learning and communication, so I try to teach them how. But they also play games with non gambling mechanics (thank god for Apple Arcade).
This is key, in my experience. I've told my kids that if they catch me scrolling shorts or reddit, they have the right to confiscate my phone. A big part of instilling the values I referenced above is embodying them myself. (obviously, but it bears repeating).
> But they also play games with non gambling mechanics
This is important too. There's so much genuinely great media out there - TV shows, video games, movies, books. It's not that I don't want my kids to experience that stuff - I just want them to learn how to focus on the stuff that's quality rather than the stuff that is slop.
That is, HN users see the costs, the difficulty, the privacy concerns, etc. But they're also dismissive of the harm, which in terms of the young Gen Z men that I know personally is real. I can't attribute online pornography 100% but the damage includes criminal convictions, falling victim to "blackpill" ideology and other false answers to gendered problems and frequently people giving up on work and love.
I collect ero images and restrictions would personally be a hassle for me, I can't say I am against pornography in general, but I've got some concerns about pornography today. I think advocates are stuck in the 1970s when it was tamer and much less prevalent than it is today -- it's entirely different for a teen to have a few issues of Penthouse or Hustler than it is today.
I think the story of how it relates to relationship satisfaction is nuanced. Personally I think OnlyFans is a cancer. I want to feel special in a fantasy, and not as the biggest simp in a room full of hundreds of simps. (And this is healthy narcissism [1], not pathological narcissism. In good sex or sex with love, somebody thinks you are special)
I'm not sure what the answer is but I can see it both ways and that seems rare on HN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_narcissism
I would never actually do this, but there's a part of me that would like to just give my kids a magazine to hide under their bed, or even some sort of curated private video site on the LAN, just to allow for some expression of natural puberty urges in a way that is ... if not "healthy," per se, then at least "harm reduced?" Obviously that idea in practice would be way too weird to consider, lol.
But this comes back to the balance thing I was talking about on my other post in this topic. Full abstinence is probably practically impossible and I'm not sure it's even the right approach. The other end of the spectrum - throwing the kids into the waters of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and whatever the TikTok equivalent of porn is (surely that exists, right?) - that seems pretty fraught too. The taboo nature of this discussion makes things harder - but I have tried to overcome the weird feeling and have fairly frank discussions about these sorts of things with my oldest.
At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...
https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parenta...
If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?
It’s also extremely hard saying no to certain shows to my kids, and it would be much easier to just not have them there.
I’m pretty sure the politically oriented people at Disney want this to your kids watch as much of the content as possible, and especially the new ones.
When my child was three, he really liked to watch 'spidey and his amazing friends'. But unfortunately, when he watched it he would emulate some of the bad behaviors from the show, pretend to be one of the bad guys and act out. Easy solution right, we just won't watch the show anymore, we don't leave him alone to watch TV by himself anyways.
Well, on Disney plus, you can't simply hide the show. Even if you remove it from your "recently watched" or whatever, it will show up in preview cards and search results and I'm categories. It became a big friction point, whatever he would see it he would want to watch it. And when Grandma would come over and babysit him, he would ask for it and she'd put it on for him despite our wishes.
So, since then, I've spun up a jellyfin server and ditched Disney plus. If we don't like a show we just remove it, and then it's simply not an option.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
[0] https://www.jmir.org/2018/4/e129/
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12230417/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32017089/
> Sensitivity analyses suggested that cybervictimization only and both cyber- and face-to-face victimization were associated with a higher risk of suicidal ideation/attempt compared to face-to-face victimization only and no victimization; however, analyses were based on small n. In prospective analyses, cybervictimization was not associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later after accounting for baseline suicidal ideation/attempt and other confounders. In contrast, face-to-face victimization was associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later in the fully adjusted model, including cybervictimization.
In fact, reading 3, it looks like the highest prevalence of cyberbullying capped out at a whopping.... 16% of 15 year olds, with a sharp drop down to 7% just 2 years later.
I have to say, there's lots of things to worry about with kids going online. I just don't think bullying in particular is one of them.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
Now consider someone who instead just freely hands over a phone without making their kid scrounge for it.
I'm of the opinion a 16 year old can get about anything they want, short of a nuclear bomb, if they only put their mind to it. If they want something like a gun all they need do is buy an angle grinder and break into whoever they know has a safe. But that doesn't mean I would just hand over a gun to a 16 year old for free reign with it.
The whole point is to subsidize the good and deter the bad. You'll never stop a 16 year old who wants to mess around with a little weed from doing it, and you'll never stop a 16 year old from getting a phone.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.
Obviously, this'll have to change at around 16, but those conversations need to happen anyway.
I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.
Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.
It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose
But yeah… easier said than done.
They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.
I do find it odd there's no option to just disable the internet, perhaps with the exception of simple software updates. Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.
TOTK was the final nail for me, I vowed to never purchase another Nintendo game or piece of hardware and I haven't. I just couldn't square my actual player experience of a janky, boring game with the rabid fanboys crowing about Nintendo doing it again.
Seeing other Japanese companies account systems (Square Enix and Rakuten, for example), the only conclusion I can draw is that the Japanese dev industry does not consider clear account management to be important.
Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.
So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.
I'd like a flag for messaging apps called "turn off images and video". Sure, my kid might get called nasty names in plain text, but would not get beheading or bestiality videos or underage schoolmate pics.
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok shoveling haphazardly into the app.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.
I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.
The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. There were no ridiculous negligent standards/laws on the book when I was young about it being wrong for a kid to spend all day going up/down a creek so my dad showed me what all the venomous snakes looked like and how to use a compass and after that I was on my own.
I find disagreement with this new standard on parents. No, it's not the parents obligation to keep their child from ever making a horrible mistake. It's their obligation to educate them well and then set them loose with very few safeguards so they can actually slowly learn to be an adult. I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators.
I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.
"These are the rules, you are to follow the rules, breaking them would be foolish and breaking them in secret would be even more foolish, but they are always up for discussion, and if you do break them you can still come to me for advice without getting in trouble" is a principle that can be imparted to a child. You do actually have to tell it to them, though, in several different ways over a period of time, and you have to be consistent about it. Children aren't wise, but they are clever, they can spot patterns, and they'll tend to believe your actions over your words if the two conflict.
You do not want to set up a situation where a predator can blackmail a child using the threat of your punishment. Parent, yes, but parent consistently enough and well enough that such threats are an obvious bluff, and going online can be as safe for your child as playing in the local neighbourhood.
(Also rural Midwest, and a long time ago).
People used to have an insane amount of freedom and things generally went better.
> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
Two obvious things complicate this:
- You weren't taught how to use a real gun at 6 months old, right?
- Would it not follow from what you said above that if you had accidentally shot and killed yourself at age 7, then it would be your own fault and nobody else's? That seems (to me, at least) like an absurd conclusion.
I think about it like this: as a parent, my jobs include identifying when my child is capable of learning about something new, providing the guidance they need to learn it (which is probably not all up front, but involves some supervision, since it's usually an iterative process), allowing them to make mistakes, accepting some acceptable risks of injury, and preventing catastrophe. I'll use cooking as an example. My kids got a "toddler knife" very young (basically a wooden wedge that's not very sharp). We showed them how to cut up avocados (already split) and other soft things. As they get older, we give them sharper knives and trickier tasks. We watch to see if they're understanding what we've told them. We give more guidance as needed. It's okay if they nick themselves along the way. But we haven't given them a sharpened chef's knife yet! And if they'd taken that toddler knife and repeatedly tried to jam it into their sibling's eye despite "educating" them several times, while I wouldn't regret having made the choice to see if they were ready, I would certainly conclude that they weren't yet ready. That's on me, not them.
You allude to this when you say:
> I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
Yes, the goal should be to teach kids how to operate safely, not keep them from all the dangerous things. But I'd say that devices and the internet are more like "the kitchen". There are lots of different risks there and it's going to take many years to become competent (or even safe). Giving them an ordinary device would be like teaching my 2-year-old their first knife skills next to a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen with chefs flying around with sharp knives and hot pots. By contrast, without doing any particular child-proofing, our home kitchen is a much more controlled environment where I can decide which risks they're exposed to when. This allows me to supervise without watching every moment to see if they're about to stab themselves -- which also gives them the autonomy they need to really learn. The OP, like other parents, wants something similar from their device and the internet: to gradually expose elements of these things as the parents are able to usefully guide the children, all while avoiding catastrophe.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
In the real world, it’s the parents obligation to make an effort to protect their children. In extreme cases, parents can be found negligent if they don’t demonstrate that they’re taking reasonable steps to protect children and something bad happens as a result.
This doesn’t mean that extreme, draconian parenting is mandatory. It does, however, mean that some level of parental control is necessary on an age-adjusted basis. It’s not enough to say “I told them not to do that” and then wash your hands of the consequences when we’re talking about a pre-teen like in this article.
That said, "the internet" is a large place, and I think parents would find more clarity thinking of it the way they think of a physical place. In my mind, letting my son loose on the internet is not like letting him run around the woods unsupervised (which he does). It is more like dropping him off in a large city every night.
As you said, guidance is imperative, and in the real world we would not give only verbal guidance. We would, if we lived in the city, walk our kid to the library, the museum, the coffee shop, the park. We would talk about what parts of town to avoid. We would talk about what "free" means and about not trusting strangers and not just going into any door.
That last part is tricky. On the internet, every link is a door into a neighborhood, and there are a lot of neighborhoods even adults are not well prepared for.
Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.
With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything.
This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.
Isn't there still a very simple one, hardware access. If the child doesn't have a smart phone of their own or computer in their bedroom then they cannot use them to get online unsupervised. This is about as simple on/off as you can get and very easy to moderate.
Or, if you do let them have a bike, it requires you to follow them around everywhere to be sure they don't go to a liquor store.
It's a completely over the top level of control. Yes it would work but also do as much harm as good.
Honestly, maybe the Gabb marketing is lulling users into a false sense of security. If you still have to do the same legwork as the default Android experience, what's the point of their devices?
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
Clear how it could allow friends-only when connecting directly to another Nintendo Switch user, but a bit murky how it'd make that determination in cases like Minecraft where the client is connecting to a cross-platform user-hosted game server that is not associated with any Nintendo/Microsoft account.
Could work if you have the parents whitelist specific server IPs, as they could with router/firewall, though not sure if "could you whitelist 209.216.230.207 please?" would be a meaningful choice in most cases.
Users on the same network can access each others' worlds, at least between XBox and Android, so multi-device in the same building works too.
“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is scoped online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.
The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.
jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547
There are also unreasonable restrictions, like not being able to play user-created maps in Mario Maker unless you have a membership.
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
I played a lot of Titanfall back in the day and had a lot of reservations about talking with other people's kids. Nothing really bad happened, and I had a lot of fun, but it was creepy.
I kinda enjoy that the matchmaker rooms in Beat Saber only allow you to emote with large body gestures and not say anything or even make hand gestures. I enjoy acting like a cartoon character to honor and recognize the other players (like choosing the song that I really hate because another player has asked for it five times in a row) and not getting involved in the mean bullshit you get in games like League of Legends. (It's fun to be in a private room with 2 or more players too where you can chat but then you are talking with people you picked which in my case are nice people)
My son and his friend created a new game called "the kick game" inside a certain online game where the real game was to trick the other players into kicking out other players that they didn't like or wanted to bully -- frequently the victims didn't understand the rules of this game at all. On Roblox they would find racist games where you cut down thousands of Zulu, just awful stuff.
Not to say I haven't had a good time with serious League players who communicate on Discord and have a positive team but I think communication features and UGC are often a disaster in games.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
Not sure if I want to call it by design.
It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
Seems to be a much larger amount of work to design, implement, and support a more-or-less dozen-step customer journey that does NOT work than just implementing a few switches. And that goes even if the switch must be designed-in from the beginning by designing operation for local-only operation.
Surely, implementing a simple block-all-strangers to send-to-bitbucket all communications attempts by accounts not already on the whitelist is easier than all these overlapping settings described?
Unless it is explained how building a much more complex system is easier and lower-cost than a simpler system with fewer controls, the default conclusion is it is intentional.
>>It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
Even if for the sake of discussion we treat it as laziness, a dark pattern created by accident is still a dark pattern. The customer is no less screwed into doing something they do not want and the company does want.
Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.
The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.
Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.
This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.
Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.
No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.
One axis is if they even want to make parental controls work, which they may well not want to but rather wish to just check some checkboxes.
But the company that builds Teams and Windows 11: I think it's entirely plausible they can't.
But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).
neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
A kid with no education and restricted access will just find a way to do whatever he wants to do. A kid with good education and unrestricted access will know to steer away from bad stuff and talk to adults when he finds something strange.
One of the proudest moments of my grandfather (in my household, he was the most tech savy) was when I found a way to "bypass" an restriction program around age 11. From then on he decided I "outgrew" this kind of limits and just gave me unlimited access to the family computer and the internet.
But years later he confessed, the "click" moment for him was not that I could bypass the restriction, but that I trusted him enough to show him and that I self-reported the situation. And this is pure education and nothing to do with restrictions.
Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
They miss out on the social group and then fade away from it and just become "that one guy in our class."
The last time I mentioned this several people argued that, "true friends would stick together" or some such. Well, if you already have those friends. But if you're in high school and finding yourself, you probably haven't met all of them yet.
A lot of both communication and organizing of social events happen through the phone. Kids without a phone (or some online method) will just be forgotten. This is just the reality.
Unrestricted access? That depends on the kid. We had them charge in the living room (no overnight use), and their computers were actual desktops in a single office in the house.
We never used filtering or tracking software. The one exception was blocking youtube (through /etc/hosts) for my youngest during covid when it was too big a distraction.
I can see how communication and organizing happens through the phone, but that doesn't mean you can't actually have a "irl" conversation. People are going to be talking about the exciting party coming up right? Your post makes it sound like it's taboo to talk about social events in person, and it can only be done through a phone.
(IMHO, once a kid has figured out how to do this, they have earned the privilege. It’s part of growing up.)
A responsible and forward-thinking parent could provide a Graphene OS smartphone if the kid absolutely insists on having one, to limit the privacy damage.
The story outlined, one of a child prodigy solo-navigating the gritty online world of pre-2000's, is old and tired. An active parent can support a child at all ages safely in these "hacker" moments that are described without giving them un-reined access to tools. A parent should be able to ask "how was your day today?" and get a truthful answer about online activity, just like the same question being asked at the end of the school day. It's out of curiosity and protection, and from a nurtured relationship.
You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place in order to mitigate a risk that is very scary but less likely to kill them than drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
People are freaking out over stranger danger not because it is by the numbers prevalent but because they feel like they can control it then find out the controls suck.
What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
What if you read again and again that it didn't work because of how many accidents are caused by drivers or momentary mistakes.
Would you feel only as unsafe as before or worse?
> drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
These are false equivalences-- when has a pool try to groom a child over the span of 3 years?
> What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
This is wholesale the wrong approach. This is the parent absconding responsibility, which is my driving point of the problem.
Now to the main point:
> You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place ...
I'm not expecting anything from my devices because machines cannot be held accountable for human choices; a gun cannot be held accountable for being misused. The internet is a powerful tool and users should understand the ramifications of certain actions.
> If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.
That's a parenting moment that one should relish retrospectively. To teach them good morals and values, to remind them that you love them, and that lying about safety processes can be very dangerous.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/...
93% of victims under 18 know their abuser.
Sure there's 7% thats not, but a significant supermajority is family/friends. 59% were acquaintances, and 34% are family.
Second, even if the statistic wasn't obsolete, a groomed kid knows their abuser.
Yes, but no. I used to think the same, coming from the same background, and sometimes I still do but back in the day there was a big filter already (not everyone wanted or liked videogames or a PC), and we were not terminally online. Plus, for the average HNer there is a big survivorship bias on these topics because "I went earning 6 figures thanks to my experiences with computers back in the day".
Nowadays almost everyone has access to an Internet connected smartphone, owning it is not a feature in itself anymore and the vast majority are not entertained trying to hack it. So it becomes something just like any other thing relates to children/teenagers: use common sense, adapt to your kids behavior, strengths and weaknesses and don't stick to rigid rules proposed by someone else that doesn't know you, but keep those rules in mind as an inspiration.
Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.
The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.
I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.
The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.
The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
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