I feel the occidental states are not doing enough to protect people from game addiction and protect children from tablet addiction and bad contents.
These thing are slowly eroding our society and making people more miserable when they are not able to help themselves against all these forms of addiction.
Children’s usage of video games and tablets is their parents job, not the national government’s.
I don’t know what country you’re in, but the thought of whoever is in control of mine “protecting” anyone from bad contents, let alone children, is enough to send chills down one’s spine.
That is a blank check on info consumption and the sheer naivety required to entertain that idea for more than a second is bewildering.
Confucianism would disagree and most East-Asian countries have been running on some version of it for a few thousand years, so you might want to reevaluate why that idea is so bewildering to you.
Honestly I find the idea bewildering that parents are supposed to be the sole authority on these matters, because 1. works out pretty badly for people who don't have stable parents, which is quite a lot of them nowadays, 2. neglects virtually all institutional knowledge collected over long periods of time
I do think there is a place for state institutions to fund research and public-good marketing campaigns on these issues. Maybe to go so far as campaigns explaining these behaviors are unhealthy and potentially dangerous in optional school programs. In short, state intervention in child rearing, short of major abuse, should be limited to optional education.
Not saying I like the draconian levels that China is going to on this, but a lot of how your kid turns out is based on what they’re exposed to by their peers, and so some things are societal/population level problems. Parents can broadly try to affect this by controlling the school their kids go to, but that’s a very blunt instrument at best, generally much more expensive than less great schools, and a huge amount of work to redo. If they’re already struggling due to eg high housing costs relative to their wages (another one of our societal issues), then the parents are going to have a really uphill challenge trying to curate their children’s’ experience.
It takes a village, and if your village is not working well, you’re going to have a hard time as a parent. This whole idea of nuclear families as independent units was never true and needs to die.
Bastiat has a passage in the Law which touched on this, though he is specifically talking about socialists:
> Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.