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Comment by throwawayvibes | Hacker News Reader

Why do you monitor your kids?

Very helpful to control their apps and give them a daily screen time allowance (1 hour on weekdays, 2 hours in weekend). I don't like the idea of my 11 year old spending days and nights on e.g. TikTok, not to mention browsing for porn. Also useful to have the ability to see where they are, although I don't use this feature too much.

Literally every feature you just described is built into iOS without the need for Russian spyware.

or you could just talk to your kids about it, spend time with them and help them find something more worthwhile to do

Why do that when you can make sure to undermine their trust in you :)

Are you guys even parents? Because you sure make yourselves sound like experts.

The truth is I know my kids will make absolutely terrible choices if I leave everything up to them. I myself made a lot of bad choices growing up with unsupervised internet access. And on todays web it seems the pitfalls for a curious young person are even deeper and more plentiful. I'm simply trying to spare my kids some of the same problems I suffered by providing some guardrails until they are older and more mature.

> The truth is I know my kids will make absolutely terrible choices if I leave everything up to them.

Yeah, so what? How the fuck else are they supposed to grow up?

Ok next let them try heroin so they make sure it's a bad thing.

If they do that then the GP's rearing of them has failed already. If one hasn't managed to instill at least that minimum of sense into them by the time they're old enough to even contemplate that, then they'll just do it anyway, as soon as their parents unlock the shackles and let them out into the daylight on their 18th or 21st birthday.

Did your parents restrict or monitor you to that extend when you grew up?

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