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Comment by bspammer | Hacker News Reader

What age do you think is appropriate to introduce them to the internet? I'm sure at the moment you're pretty safe, but at some point your kids are gonna be introduced to it in IT classes at school, and by staying at friends' houses.

I'd want to get in first to teach responsible internet use (of course with a good ad blocker and whitelisting of domains). There's some really good educational stuff out there on YouTube and elsewhere. I think I would have loved to have watched a channel like Clickspring when I was younger.

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> What age do you think is appropriate to introduce them to the internet?

My personal stake on this is: they're just barely starting to learn how to count, read and write. It's way too much early to have them seat before a whiteboard and hearing me speaking and drawing schemas about TCP/IP, subnets masks, transport and routing protocols, HTTP, HTML/JS hosting and delivery and finally what's going on in that blackbox that we call "a browser".

But how will they get the 15 years of web development experience required for their first internship if they don’t start young?

Then I may have to reconsider my point of view, based on that new information I'm glad you made me aware of :)

Love this response. So many here are advocating building up a tolerance to the garbage of the internet instead of learning the important parts.

This is what it means to be computer literate, not snapchat experience, which will be another myspace in five years.

I think it's a terrible response. That is far beyond what it means to be computer literate. That just seems like he's forcing his kids to become programmers.

"No, Claire, no internet until you learn how BGP hijacks work!" Who does that? Half of human progress in computers has been hiding all of the technical stuff behind a magic curtain. It's cool if your kids want to take a peek behind it, but to force it on them is just so strange.

Hmm, it was a joke, actually.

> Who does that?

Appeal to authority/tradition as an argument for ignorance? Not very compelling.

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