Hacker News Reader

Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

It’s rarely quite that simple and I would try being a little more charitable towards people.

Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids.

Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily hard by commercial interest show a lack of understand and respect for the situations. These also aren't bad parents, they try, but it's an uphill battle for many.

People give this excuse but somehow I feel like they would be less charitable if it was any othet addictive thing. "Oh, Timmy had a drinking problem at 13? Well we can't blame the parents. They don't have the mental or emotional strength to keep their kid out of the liquor cabinet. How ever could they know about locks?" That's what this feels like to me. As someone who is watching this happen in real time with my kid's peers, a lot parents just don't want to be bothered. And that's their right, but setting up the parental controls baked into all these devices is dead simple. They could, but they don't want to deal with whining or the exception moments. That's their right as a parent, but I don't subscribe to the "poor exhausted parents" theory when they had enough energy to buy these devices and set them up for the kid to use in the first place. It's a couple more minutes to enable the parent controls.

You can have a healthy relationship with screens at 13. You can’t have a healthy relationship with alcohol at 13.

True, but that doesn't invalidate the GP's point.

If that example is supposed to illustrate his point then yes it does on some level. It’s a major flaw. That’s why I pointed it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com