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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things I'm okay with being broken. It feels like every time this discussion comes up, HNers white-knight about being a parent and how much it means to shelter their child. I sympathize with those people, but surely they remember being a kid at the library working around their timer so they can play more Commander Keen. Surely they understand what it's like to rebel against some arbitrary limit intended to annoy you.

So... let these controls be broken. We all know this battle boils down to kids listening to Spotify over their emergency dialer to a Twilio lambda server, so let's not let it go there.

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I don’t think we realize just how much damage an online incident can affect children because we’re no longer ten years old. While I’d love to trust companies to have the best interest in all audiences in mind, my child went down a YouTube rabbit hole of Minecraft, Scratch, and innocent kid videos before being suggested Slenderman, spooky ghost stories, and inevitably a rebirthing video where the participant died.

Several years of behavioral therapy fixed the night terrors and ticks (he is a spectrum child tbh) but the anxiety attacks in certain situations hasn’t. Neither has my ability to unblock YouTube on our DNS because the recommendation engine is clearly predatory.

My child is old enough now to circumvent arbitrary restrictions. Whether it’s friends, VPN, or coding up some clever solution. But that effort comes from maturity and reasoning. Not some corp serving ads and clicks.

> don't let personal insecurity dictate how you raise your children.

I’m sorry, it’s my personal insecurity that I don’t want my 8-year-old to potentially see anal sex online?

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is a possibility anywhere that they have personal agency.

Do you follow them to school and listen to them on the playground? Do you check their friend's phones to make sure they are sufficiently controlled too? Do you take away their Chromebooks when they visit each other for a playdate? Did you remember to block Brazzers on your DirecTV account?

When I was in elementary school, I went to my friend's house after class so we could watch Mario explode into red paint and gore on Newgrounds for hours on-end. Your child will inevitably do something similar.

A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be effective for the majority.

Many parents do make sure to get to know the parents of their kids' friends, and the household rules. If kids are showing each other explicit stuff in school there are usually policies and even laws to address that.

All that said, Apple markets their solutions as things that "just work". So it's fair to criticize them for gaps that can be reasonably addressed, especially when they have such a huge war chest.

> When I was in elementary school, I went to my friend's house after class so we could watch Mario explode into red paint and gore on Newgrounds for hours on-end. Your child will inevitably do something similar.

the point of progress is to make active efforts towards making these things happen less and less in the future

pretending like it was ok just because they happened to you is how cycles of abuse continue to perpetuate through the generations

it's hard but we have to be stronger than that

I want to point out that everywhere except online it's absolutely illegal to allow children to see pornography.

Online you can drop a link on a forum just to shock people but try that in a park and you'll be arrested.

My friend and I were delighted to find a copy of Penthouse at age 11, which was very much in its hardcore era. Oh no, how terrible.

If your kid is old enough to want to poke around and explore the internet on their own, I really doubt they're going to be traumatized by seeing porn.

If it’s at a school, I can get the school involved.

If it was at the library, I can sue the library for not implementing the legally mandatory internet filters.

If it was another adult, I can slap him with a misdemeanor, at a minimum, for exposing pornography to children.

If it was a childhood friend, I can stop allowing my child to visit that friend.

But it’s my own “personal insecurity” if I don’t do something about my own home. By that logic what is the point of Speed Limits on Highways? “Unless a law is 100% effective it is pointless” is not a stance you would apply anywhere else.

> But it’s my own “personal insecurity” if I don’t do something about my own home.

Yes.

You could address this healthily. You could sit down and talk to your child about the scary websites and give them a primer on stranger danger and the like. My parents did the same thing before I turned 10. Instead you're prolonging the last vestiges of their innocence and making them less-aware as a result. By making unknown things a reward for them, how do you think they will react in the future?

It's your choice, at the end of the day. Maybe I was just raised wrong or something, but I think you're doing more harm than good.

> Instead you're prolonging the last vestiges of their innocence and making them less-aware as a result. By making unknown things a reward for them, how do you think they will react in the future?

My parents had parental controls on everything as I grew up. We played on Nintendo systems since they're mostly family friendly. We had "dumb" phones until I was able to buy my own smart phone.

My "innocence" wasn't prolonged as a result and I also wasn't a "less aware" child. Instead, I went outside and played with friends in the real world. I'm very appreciative that my parents limited screen time and blocked pornography on all our devices. It didn't work 100% effectively, but the 99% effectiveness definitely impacted how I grew up in a positive way.

If you weren't raised this way, maybe it's not a great idea to assume this method causes more harm than good? My experience is definitely anecdotal, but I'm sure that it's not an isolated experience.

> Enterprising kids have been known to find ways around parental controls. Baker and other parents I interviewed say their kids aren’t hacking the system.

To provide a service that doesn’t work is poor engineering.

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