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Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

> My kid is 4 so ...

... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right?

Right.

Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.

I agree with this approach, especially teaching your kids that "what you put in your brain matters" (kinda like what you put in your mouth matters)

I anticipate my kid needing to live in a word with capitalism, it doesn't ncessarily mean that they need a Mastercard at 4 years old.

Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities.

I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?)

I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future.

Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube??

[0]: https://scratch.mit.edu/

It's more like giving them pocket money than a Mastercard. Given the dwindling number of ways to spend physical cash these days, a prepaid card might actually make sense, if you can monitor its usage.

The only place I would use physical money that doesn't take a form of digital payment, is public transportation (And that one is a matter of time)

While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc

Why does a child who isn't even in school yet need the internet?

Kids grow up in a world full of things that are not appropriate at a young age, but are perfectly fine later in life.

Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood.

Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.

There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.

There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.

That doesn’t makes sense to me:

Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?

I was allowed to try sips of alcohol as a young child (not that young, though). I think knowing what alcohol tastes like is a pretty useful thing to know, for example to detect a spiked drink.

Oh please, kids will detect alcohol as a foreign substance and will hate it, nobody has to teach them that. And spiked drinks are usually alcohol based drinks spiked with other substances. Good luck detecting that!!

Not sure why you get downvoted without any arguments but to add support for your position, I had a similar experience growing up.

I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that.

I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.

Why? My generation only got access to the internet in high school. I got my first smartphone in my mid twenties. Yet I'm able to navigate the modern world just fine.

This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.

Skills compound, so the logic of I didn’t do x until age y, and I was still competitive, doesn’t mean that your kid will be competitive with their peers if they wait until the same age, assuming others are not.

Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound.

There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out.

If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.

But your generation got access at the same time. You were on the same page as your peers. I don't have kids but my friends that do worry that if they block their kid from social media, their kid won't be able to relate to other kids.

That is a valid concern, but certainly not for pre-schoolers. Once they go to school, peer pressure will gradually kick in and I will need to make compromises. I just wanted to challenge the notion that a 5-year-old should be able to browse the internet, because that is completely ridiculous IMO.

True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.

I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage.

Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.

They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one)

My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.

Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.

But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).

Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.

If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?

I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.

Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.

I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know.

YMMV.

There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.

Do they need access to that information at the age of 4 though? Almost certainly not. They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Kindergarten is still mostly focused on phonics.

This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.

Yes, but still I would argue that books are the more appropriate reading material :)

Yeah, 100% with you on that.

> They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8.

Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case.

Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling.

(That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)

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