Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t doubt that this is a good approach for some families, but as someone coming from a childhood that had a high degree of sheltering/control I would recommend that anybody looking to do something similar do so with great care.

Depending on execution there’s a significant risk of the child developing a deep-rooted parental resentment that may never dissipate, risk of them going wild the second they’re no longer subject to house rules, and risk of them not being able to handle the things they’ve been barred from in adulthood due to lack of experience. The tighter the parents’ grip the more these risks grow.

I have yet to become a parent so the only experience I can draw from is that of my childhood, but I believe what I would do if I were raising a family would be to put some limits in place, but also spend time discussing why the limits exist with my children and break down exactly how things like social media hijack your brain in effort to inoculate them against it. Every kid is different of course, but many are much more bright than they’re given credit for and can show surprising ability to self-regulate when they understand the reasoning behind rules. Mandate without supporting logic on the other hand is likely to inspire rebellion.

Well buy them beer and conveniently leave for weekends to compensate for the router censorship or something.

Much of the resentment comes from parents sabotaging social status among friends and class mates I think.

I’d expect social acceptance and access to tiktok/ig to go hand in hand. Was the same with access to tv programs and video games when growing up in the early 90s.

Just like in the 80's/90's this is not the case. I did not have access to those TV programs and only got a C64 (and with that, access to games) in the latter year of high school and had problems whatsoever with 'social acceptance' be dint of being among peers with similar attitudes. I formed a band with some friends, we played music, did 'boy stuff' (nick the car and drive it through the fields, make fires, blow things up, shoot air rifles, made a pulse jet engine, etc.) and got along just fine. The same is true now, my 14yo daughter gets along fine with some - but not all, just like I didn't back then - of her class mates, has some hobbies (drawing, singing, now in a 'pop choir') and has a lot of time compared to those who're glued to their phones 24/7. When she needs or wants more time she sends me a message through that XMPP server (right under the stairs here at the farm) and I usually grant it if it seems reasonable where 'reasonable' can mean 'waiting for a delayed train so I want to browse the web a bit', not just 'serious' things. She sometimes talks about friends who have unlimited access to phones but tends to put that in terms of unbelief and wonder, "how can her parents allow her to do that, it doesn't make sense, don't they know what she's doing all that time?" so she's either the world's best actor or she does not feel she's under 'a high degree of sheltering/control'.

She is 14 years old. Who ever though it a good idea to allow every lunatic out there on the Weird Wide Web to introduce her to his personal fetish?

FWIW, I didn’t realize how controlled the environment I was raised within was until I’d left home, which makes perfect sense as I had no point of comparison until then. Similar to your daughter I had friends whose environments were much less controlled, but they weren’t able to serve the same role as the personal experience I wound up spending a significant chunk of my 20s playing catch up on.

That’s not to advocate for unfiltered internet access or anything, just presenting my experience as a data point and food for thought.

> That’s not to advocate for unfiltered internet access or anything, just presenting my experience as a data point and food for thought.

This 'food for thought' stands to mental health as McDonalds stands to physical health. You're trying to make the case that limiting teenager access to controlled substances is 'creating a controlled environment of which the person only will become aware when he leaves home'. This is, to put it bluntly, abject nonsense. My 14yo daughter - the 20yo does her own things by now but has managed to evade being caught by the machine, most likely in no small part thanks to her upbringing - knows perfectly well that her access to these 'services' are being limited, she knows why, she knows what the 'services' have to offer having seen her friends and others around her drown in them. She is in no way living in some bubble which she'll only recognise and escape once she leaves home.

Stop apologising for inaction in the face of the 'social' disease, this is like that well-known cartoon of the dog sitting in a burning room while he says 'this is all fine' or something along those lines. Things are not all fine and it is up to parents like us to find a way though the quagmire of lures and incentives because our children are too young and inexperienced to decide for themselves whether these are good ideas. We don't allow children to use drugs like alcohol either before they've reached an appropriate age, we don't feed them porn (although it is quite unlikely for them to have missed than the 'net is full of it so they're probably already exposed), we don't put them behind the wheel of a large automobile (to paraphrase the Talking Heads) and now we don't allow them to feed their developing brains to the machine. This is just another part of parenting the denial or refusal of which is just as bad as the denial or refusal to keep your children from the aforementioned hazards. A time will come when they are free to choose whether they want to partake of this madness but that time is not when they're 14 years old.

Sorry, it wasn’t my intent to argue for inaction, but rather that children will eventually come in contact with these things at some point or another. Depending on what they decide to do it might even be a requirement. Personally, I feel that it’s better if that happens while the structure, support, and guardrails provided by parents are still in place rather than shortly after they’ve left the nest and have numerous other things to figure out too. Maybe it doesn’t happen at 14, but instead at 16 or 17, and in highly controlled doses with “less bad” services, and comes with the context of discussions of the pitfalls of such services.

I respect other opinions but it’s difficult to see myself taking a zero-exposure policy as a parent for the simple reason that such policies have made for stumbling blocks and thorns in my side that I’ve been dealing with for the better part of my adult life.

Not even discussed was the social isolation this would cause. Friend groups communicate via tiktok.

Right there, in the first paragraph I say Yes yes yes, I know all about the supposed ostracisation caused by teens not having a phone but if the alternative is to give up your child to the CCP and the tech moguls I'd choose the former and send her/him to a different school.

So yes, it is discussed and no, this is not a good reason to feed your children to the machine and yes, they're better off outside of that world. Yes, it takes effort. Yes, it is worth it. Stop making excuses for being passive in the face of this onslaught of brainwashing madness coming from these devices. Be honest and recognise that you'd put a halt to this development if you were there some decades ago and knew what it would lead to. Not to mobile computing, that has many positive aspects but to the 'social' networks which wreaked havoc on personal relations - a FB or IG or TT 'follower' is not a 'friend' and a 'like' is worth the electrons used to convey it, i.e. nothing at all - and attention spans. These devices can be great for communications with people with whom you already have a personal relationship but they're terrible in giving the idea that the whole world and his dog need to be catered to to gain social cred. Also, the idea that the shit posting crowd who gets off on pissing on everything posted by some hapless girl who thought she looked nice in that dress. Also on the mobbing magnifier these things are for the local bullies, weaklings who need to up their own self esteem by pushing down others.

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