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Comment by jahsome | Hacker News Reader

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Terribly sorry that giving a shit about raising our kids is offensive to you.

I'd invite you to spend some time considering the difference between legacy childrens entertainment media and an algorithmically driven platform that has, at best, meagre ex-post-facto content moderation.

Given the trends, YouTube is probably the mildest thing your kids will experience in their lifetime. Their lives will be shaped by crisis after crisis and their peers will be kids raised on YouTube. The best you can do is keep your kids as out of touch with environment they will lead their lives in as you are.

Kids are going to be exposed to alcohol eventually so let's dose them with increasing amounts of alcohol as they grow up so they'll build up a resistance.

I mean, I figure that you are being sarcastic, but it's absolutely a thing(not the physical resistance to alcohol, obviously, rather a psychological one) - in countries where kids are allowed(and it's socially acceptable) to have a little bit of alcohol with dinner there isn't suddenly a shock when they turn 18 and they can drink so they go on a binge because no one taught them responsibility with the drink. Look at the drinking culture in UK vs France for instance - it's a completely different approach.

Internet is not optional for adults and it's not all bad as alcohol is at every age.

If you really want to get your mind blown: We've never used a tablet just because a kid is bored.

Children need to be able to handle boredom. If you need to hand over your phone to your toddler just to keep them calm, you've got some work to do.

The amount of kids in strollers with a parent's phone in hand is just staggering. Or a tablet in the headrest for watching shows on any car trip over 15 minutes.

Handing the phone to children all the time to pacify them has some costs down the line, their reward circuitry gets altered and not saying impossible to repair but not easy either. Kids and parents may suffer for it later on in their lives

> for not daring to allow their precious children to hear the words you and tube

The original commenter added more info in a reply in this thread that might've taken some of the steam out of this remark:

> I haven't banned the kid from Youtube, just didn't specifically direct them there. Except for a few times. I think we looked up sign language tutorials (that was a big deal 3-4 years ago) and some drawing tutorials for watercolours.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639799

One can be right and pretentious at the same time.

HN's motto right there

If they have school age children and their children are unaware of these things (or at least the parents believe that to be true) then either the parents are dumb or their children are incredible at deceiving their parents and possibly showing early signs of being psychopaths.

According to the logs the only devices that have accessed Youtube in the last week is the living room Apple TV and my laptop.

If my kid, at 10 years old, has hacked my router and keeps actively deleting the relevant access and DNS logs, they have a future career in information security :D

https://www.techdetoxbox.com/kids-bypass-parental-controls/

Some of the suggestions there are a bit dystopian - like locking your kids devices in a safe ... You are probably fairly safe at 10, for a year or two!

"The poll, posted on Facebook by internet security vendor SmoothWall, found almost half (49 per cent) of 13-17 year olds admitted to using illicit tools to access blocked websites in school."

https://www.itpro.co.uk/607677/kids-bypass-school-internet-s... (2008 - guessing that number is a little higher now that it was then)

Or just the kids learned parents react negatively when saying certain words and do not say them. That is not a sign of being psychopath, that is sign of being neurotypical.

That sounds more like a parent that is totally disconnected from the reality of their child than a particularly deceptive child.

FWIW, if my memory is in any way accurate, 10 y.o. is about the age I stopped discussing a class of topics with my parent, after one too many times of me wanting to share something important and feeling ignored. My parents lost a window into a chunk of my life then, and honestly, never really regained to this day.

It sounds stupid even to me now, but it's really not easy to fix such things at the age of 30+. Those emotional wounds were deep, even if in retrospect silly and unintentional. Deep enough to change how the 10 y.o. me saw himself in relation to the world. And I only first realized what happened around 18-20 y.o., by which time I was well used to never fully opening up in front of my family. It's like a "default setting" burned into the wetware at this point - something I have to consciously struggle to overcome even to this day.

So yeah, it's likely a disconnected parent, not deceptive child. But "disconnected" tends to imply the parent doesn't care, which I don't think is the case either. Rather, like in my experience, the parent may care very much, but not achieve anything, because the connection has been severed, possibly accidentally, and neither the parent nor the kid are fully aware they've lost that link.

I also kinda feel like that something like that might be normal part of growing up. I dont mean the deep emotional wound you talk about, but the fact that the kid has some own internal life the parent does not have access to. As in, even absent emotional wounds, a kid not reporting every thing schoolmates do, a kid having fantasies and interests the kid keeps for itself might just be part of growing up into adult.

It is not being deceptive on the side of the kids. That framing implies adult are entitled to complete overbearing control and kid is not entitled to have private thoughts. It might be parent being untrustworthy or checked out or oblivious, but if not combined with emotional wounds it might be the kid becoming own person.

Yes that is perfectly normal part of going through pre-adolescence and adolescence. Kids natually try to become/feel more independent and get advices and opinions from other sources.

As a parent you have to accept that from 12y old you will know very little of your kids thoughts and dirty secrets.

There is a reasonable probability that your parents were entirely aware of that chunk of your life, if not in detail at least the broad themes etc - but sensibly allowed it to be a healthy part of your independence and identity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com