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Comment by heathrow83829 | Hacker News Reader

maybe it's a step in the right direction but you can't regulate away ALL parenting. I know kids in the 5th grade getting brand new Iphone 17s! i've even seen one kid at the age of 7, getting their own Ipad. some parents even force their kids to use play on their iphone, just so they don't have to keep an eye on their kid anymore. My jaw really dropped to the floor on that one.

at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that bad.

How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is just band-aid.

the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens" until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed device that just lets them get their homework done.

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The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.

If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.

The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.

The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.

If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.

I don’t have kids, but I can see how one parent banning their kid from social media could create issues when the others are on it. I was a quirky kid that already struggled to make friends and any additional imposed quirkiness would have been devastating.

That said, and I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but what about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the point where you have shared moments laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I’m a few multiples of the age in question and I haven’t used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the main issues is people only showing the doctored up highlight reel of their life. If that’s still the issue then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that’s also part of real life and a teachable moment. Granted I wasn’t bombarded with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI Edition”, but the concept of someone being ‘fake’ isn’t new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it and mentally deal with it. That is the world they’re going into, whether it’s a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex, or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.

i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?

in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.

is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?

it does help. i think this is a good step in the right direction.

but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).

Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the problem. They still see the exact same content shared by friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do damage.

We have had 10+ years of asking parents to solve the problem and the situation has only gotten worse. "Just parent better" is good advice at an individual level but it doesn't solve problems at a society level.

> you can't regulate away ALL parenting

This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then blame everything on parents.

Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad thing, even though they paid for all the public infrastructure we use every day.

As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the better.

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