Parental controls aren't for parents
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I cannot prevent the kid from seeing the marketplace.
I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature. It won't let them play it, but it lists all the games installed in the XBox.
I cannot prevent them from downloading free stuff.
It was frustrating and clear to me that this wasn't designed for the benefits of parents.
I just want it to act like a console with a fixed set of games installed and no marketplace access.
These are not implementation errors or miscommunication between different business units.
What you are witnessing is an intentional setting of a revenue dial to the maximum allowable setting that still permits the original sale.
I don't think the companies such as Google*, Microsoft, Valve or Nintendo** have a Child Safety business unit.
If they did, the software they produce would work and I would be able set some sane settings once when creating a group of users which contain children.
What I am experiencing is user hostility when trying to limit who can chat or influence my children. The UI is usually horrible and some devices have no way of limiting or whitelisting what games can be played by children.
* Fuck you for not requiring TVs to implement the features required to use child users on TVs.
** Fuck you for making the of doing anything on the switch related to child-profiles a horrible experience.
The fact that the US government is frozen in amber overall will be the downfall of the US.
From OP:
> the First Amendment (with an exception existing for pornography)
The text is not
> Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except for showing boobs on TV, which would be a heinous crime and worthy of deportation
There are many exceptions to "freedom of speech".
(This is sarcasm, just to be clear)
> I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature.
Here's another good one: "Are there any health studies about what exposure to violence or horror does to childhood development?"
There is a reason that rating systems exist and that we shelter children from these things.
The pre-rebuttal that you posted "this was common in my childhood" is no indicator that this was a healthy behavior for you or the masses.
Ratings are very criticized by artists, eg as being fueled by conservative moms. For example, in the USA, movies with guns and explosion can be shown to younger audiences than nudity - seems very illogical.
Also, some anecdotes: lots of my friends were into GTA as kids, ie early teens, and turned out fine. Comparing to kids who didn't do so well, I consider the most important factors to br family, education, and finances, not violent multimedia.
With that being said, I'm sympathetic to limiting internet access due to communication with strangers, and extreme content (eg violent rethorics that appeal to action, not fantasy violence).
That was it. My entire argument was (and I emphasize WAS) that I didn't like no gubment tell me what to do. If I wanted to be a damn fool and kill myself why would they care? It's a stupid act to try to outlaw stupidity.
Then I found out that seatbelt laws are actually about decreasing the financial burden of underinsured accident victims. The "gubment" doesn't care if you die, but they do care if they have to fund weeks of medical support before you die despite the treatment, or if you survive but are disabled and wind up on social security.
That realization made me give up.
It was always about saving money, not lives. With seatbelts and airbags you are more likely to either walk away uninjured or at least not so injured that you spend more than a few hours in the hospital.
Let me tell you about elements of games I'm thinking about:
A girl is bullied at school to the point of committing suicide. This isn't a game of vindication. Justice isn't served. Things aren't set right. It's just how things are.
Your brother committed suicide a year ago. As part of the game you have to deal with someone who blames you for it.
A couple has to deal with the grief of their baby drowning in the bathtub. It's not an abstract thing. You as the player have to ensure the baby drowns and set the conditions for it to happen, knowing full well this will be the outcome.
You're a scientist stuck in a weird dimension and trying to figure out how you got here. Well, you got here because you murdered your wife and kid and then killed yourself but before you did that you made a copy of yourself and your family in a virtual world. That plan didn't work out well.
Edit: Just in case anyone gets deceived, the games aren't about these things but they do explore them as part of the game. The point is a lot of modern mature games tackle very adult topics.
Reading these descriptions, I have only one comment:
What the *HELL*?!!?!!!
Games are a medium to tell stories. If you can conceive a TV show or movie tackling these themes there's no reason to think games should be exempt. In fact they are far superior in addressing these themes than movies are.
Two of the games are made by former Telltale employees.
One of them is What Remains of Edith Finch (not much of a spoiler - plenty of other great stuff in the game).
In reality I was 15 when they came out. The graphics in GTA weren't much different to Frogger. Doom and Quake involved blasting monsters, not people. Duke Nukem 3D, Halflife had very unrealistic looking people.
Todays games are very different in terms of visual quality, but even then, GTA is relatively mild compared to many games. You can hit a prostitute with a bat and kill her, but you can't drag a random person off the street and plunge their arm into a deep fat fryer.
But I will say the rating systems have not caught up to the reality of where the dangers of modern media are. I worry a LOT more about skinner-box mechanics, design choices that cultivate addictive personality traits, and communication systems that create openings for cyberbullying and grooming/sexual interactions with minors are much bigger problems that I feel the industry does basically nothing to even inform me about, let alone empower me to be able to manage it.
And because there are definitely benefits of Internet access. Saved games, for example.
But yeah, fair point. I should configure router to selectively enable/disable access to that device while the kid uses it to see how usable it is. It may just be good enough for his games
Too dumb
I'm far from a Spotify advocate but no need to be inflammatory and misinformed.
Because products need to see ads, check in and report usage and ad consumption.
A fact childless nerds have forgotten.
So, in a way, designing the world in a way that assumes childhood is a transitory thing that you’re just trying to usher kids through until they can get to the “real world” part of being an adult is just making everyone spend most of their experiential lives in a world not meant for them.
The sole reason this devide exists is to put marketplace before your kid's eyes. They won't let you disable it.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
> In 1965, mothers spent a daily average of 54 minutes on child care activities, while moms in 2012 averaged almost twice that at 104 minutes per day. Fathers’ time with children nearly quadrupled – 1965 dads spent a daily average of just 16 minutes with their kids, while today’s fathers spend about 59 minutes a day caring for them.
https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...
And yes, expectations on parents are sky high compared to before. From small stuff to large stuff.
Now in modern society that means that children NEED access to computers and the internet.
From HN you just get the usual "raise your child as Amish" bullshit. Not very useful.
Dunno. My generation grew up to be generally fine people, without parental control software crap (and the poor sods who had parents insisting on it only became better hackers for it). Back then, there was things such as rottencom, 4chan or its various predecessors... there were countless instructions on how to make explosives or whatever readily available, hoards of porn (ever been to a LAN party and came home with less porn on your HDD than before?). And yes there were also alll the creeps.
The only thing that wasn't anywhere near as prevalent as today is all the gambling/mtx crap and AI slop. Hell even brainrot was a thing, half of the chan boards consisted of utterly weird memes that make "skibidi toilet" blush in comparison.
[Look at current voters in the US]
Ya sure about that?
If there is one group of voters to blame for the current situation in the US, it is Boomers and older. This age bucket not only skews heavily towards Trump, but also hoards by far the most wealth [2].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...
[2] https://www.empower.com/the-currency/life/average-net-worth-...
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
Not sure if I want to call it by design.
It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
Seems to be a much larger amount of work to design, implement, and support a more-or-less dozen-step customer journey that does NOT work than just implementing a few switches. And that goes even if the switch must be designed-in from the beginning by designing operation for local-only operation.
Surely, implementing a simple block-all-strangers to send-to-bitbucket all communications attempts by accounts not already on the whitelist is easier than all these overlapping settings described?
Unless it is explained how building a much more complex system is easier and lower-cost than a simpler system with fewer controls, the default conclusion is it is intentional.
>>It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
Even if for the sake of discussion we treat it as laziness, a dark pattern created by accident is still a dark pattern. The customer is no less screwed into doing something they do not want and the company does want.
The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design. A single "local only" switch would (so long as that switch is enabled) lock out all manner of potential future revenue and recurring rents, which these companies very much want to see hit the balance sheet.
So the 29 separate confusing overlapping settings is designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue (via both of one time sales and recurring rents on rental sales).
>>The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design
>>designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue
And this explains why they are willing to do all the extra work to do it.
It is not even close to accidental or lazy — there is nothing accidental about the intention or going to the extra cost to build those dark patterns to screw the customers.
Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.
Let's start with this: Design the architecture so the core system works fine locally. Features requiring Internet connection are in separate modules, so they can be easily turned on/off, and designed so they are still primarily local.
E.g., store all current status locally and if requested another module sends it to the cloud, instead of cloud-first.
E.g.2, install updates by making a pull of all resources and then doing the update instead of requiring continuous communication.
Allow user control with options to completely shut off, whitelist, blacklist, etc.
Simple design decisions up front to make a software package meeting the user's local needs first, THEN allowing controlled access to the internet, under the USERS' control, instead of designing every feature to contact your servers first and compromising both usability and control at every step.
We are only talking about the architecture, setup, and options for each particular game.
Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.
The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.
Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.
This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.
Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.
What?
I didn’t realize Apple with in the habit of hiring people straight out of high school instead of after going through enough university education that ends up with candidates in their early to mid 20s
I personally know more than one person who has a background along those lines.
I was also under the impression that the faangs hired a larger % of post docs into their first industry job than most companies, so you’re also getting 27+ year olds as entry level engineers and scientists
Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world.
How many people do they hire without college degrees?
I am legitimately asking. I understand that was a thing in the tech world decades ago but my understanding was that big tech’s idea of “talent” has evolved to include mandatory education credentials like at least a bachelor’s degree if not further education.
18 is recently a kid
22 is someone whose been an adult for an entire Presidential term. I might be splitting hairs but I struggle to view that as “recent”
Edit: removed an unnecessarily aggressive paragraph that added nothing to the conversation
No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.
My PS5 has play time built in.
Yeah, like Microsoft requesting that Firefox shall be (parentally) reviewed, while Edge happilly could connect to internet. Fixed by creating a local account.
Nope, parental controls are fucked up since ages. And this is by design, and not because of some "b-list developers".
> If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
One axis is if they even want to make parental controls work, which they may well not want to but rather wish to just check some checkboxes.
But the company that builds Teams and Windows 11: I think it's entirely plausible they can't.
All the media is local to my house- I am the librarian who curates the selection of media based on my kids interests, maturity, and my comfort. It feels like the only way forward.
That said I feel YouTube Kids does a pretty good job IF you change to curate only mode: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids
[1]: https://zaparoo.org [2]: https://batocera.org
Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?
Online grooming happens on a gigantic scale in Europe. It just doesn't get the headlines it should. And parents don't care to protect their children. They're busy.
That is horrifying. Dictatorial takeovers feed on vulnerable and naive kids. Mao's Red Guard, Hitler Youth, the Bolsheviks, the Komsomol ... the spread of communism and other evil forms of government has always been fueled in large part by youth organizations and organizing efforts.
Businesses don't care for the careful minority when they know such advices will be shared, silencing those who really care.
Even the feature name "parental control" is chosen to induce guilt in parents.
The Internet and mobile phones are not a particularly American problem. They’re literally everywhere.
Rough analogies:
- Not letting kids buy unlimited candy ~ not giving them unlimited screen time
- Preventing your kid from interacting with “bad” kids or going into unsafe neighborhoods ~ blocking “bad” websites
- Not letting your kid watch adult shows or go to adult places ~ automatically hiding NSWF content
On the last point: if you’re not careful and your kid is unlucky, they may find shocking and traumatizing content accidentally. This is true in real life but the internet moreso (vs safe neighborhoods), even today. e.g. I regularly hear reports about Instagram recommending gore seemingly out of nowhere, such as https://www.cbsnews.com/news/instagram-violence/ (Instagram seems particularly notorious for some reason).
However, it doesn't work for families where both parents have to work 2-3 jobs just to keep food on the table and the heat on all winter.
And no; poor families neither do nor should "just keep the kids from getting cellphones" or something (not that you would necessarily make that argument, but I've seen its like too many times on HN...).
Poor parents can certainly still "take an earnest interest", but they're much less likely to be able to be there...and, frankly, due to the stresses and pressures of Living While Poor, they're less likely to have the emotional bandwidth to communicate clearly and productively about these things, too.
Now, what is the answer? ...hell if I know. Being poor sucks, and there aren't always good ways around that.
One day your kid might have the friend over that you suspect might be trouble. You check in a little more often. Online is harder. You see them with the device, and without controls, what's going on could be almost anything.
Not communicate.
Not buy stuff.
Just play (local) games.
Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.
And absolutely no reason to have all 3 bundled in one.
> Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Everything you just said is true for gun ownership as well!
> Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.
I agree, but I also see absolutely no reason why 5 years old children would have access to a gaming device. Pretty much any other activity I can imagine is better for them.
I suggest expanding your imagination skills. There are definitely worse activities, like watching TV.
And there's physical limit to how much physical activity one can be doing. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns there.
And the skills one can develop with carefully curated games are hard to reproduce in any entertaining manner.
I mean, sure, I could have him do math but it's a lot more boring.
Playing games is definitely an "and", not an "exclusive or" proposition.
I was given access to computer games at that age and I'm definitely appreciative for it. I only realized the value when I was well into my 30s.
Do you hang out with many 5 year olds? They're made of energy.
> I could have him do math but it's a lot more boring
I did Math all the time with my 5 year old and he loved it, but then I also love math, and it's easy to make fun.
I know plenty of people using the exact same arguments to argue that kids should not waste time with Lego. There are better physical activities.
I have 4 kids; two of them also found math fun at age 5, the other two did not. I do not believe my ability to make math fun differed significantly between the attempts.
Computer games aren't really needed for anything special at 5 years old.
Digital skills can be developed much later and they can be developed really fast, plus if the parents are very computer literate, their kids will be waaay ahead of the average kid in the world, so this isn't a real concern.
Or would you recommend that all toy guns have the ability to be dangerous and all parents should train them because of the prevalence of guns in society?
- Perhaps we have different ideas of the appropriate age to wean kids off of toys and teach them to use real (and sometimes dangerous) things. Today's discussion is about guns, but the same could be said for boats, motorcycles, woodworking equipment, etc. I would like my children to be well rounded and well equipped when they become adults. However, I acknowledge that this may not be normal anymore: Many families seem to be content with their teenagers playing games all day long (ironically, games with guns!)
- It sounds like you have the gun in a "toy" category. For my kids, guns are absolutely not in the toy category. They are tools, used for hunting and protection, and access to these tools comes with guard rails and significant responsibility. I would rather my kids never get used to guns as toys.
- This is bigger than just personal decisions: In my state, teenagers used to be allowed to work on construction sites in the summers. By the time they graduated, many of these guys had real skills they could support their family with. In our rush to protect kids, this kind of work is no longer taught in classes or available as summer work for young people. We have made it increasingly hard for young people to "grow up"!
The same is true for cars. Are you also against toy cars?
> By the time they graduated, many of these guys had real skills they could support their family with. In our rush to protect kids, this kind of work is no longer taught in classes or available as summer work for young people. We have made it increasingly hard for young people to "grow up"!
This is a totally different issue from access to games. Why couple the two? Are you implying one cannot be taught those skills if they have access to games?
Nah, I think games can be very valuable, especially communal, in-person games. I don't mind access to games at all... I think I look at the various forces around children and teens today, and it feels like we've taken away a lot of the things that were very valuable for development because they might be dangerous, and replaced them with replicas that are safe but lack some of the value and experience that came with the dangerous thing.
As an example, hunting games are safer than hunting, but hunting games do not teach you to be patient and still for hours, they do not teach gun safety, they do not teach you to stick it out when things get cold and uncomfortable. They do not teach you how to do something useful with the animal after you shot it, and there is no real cost to being sloppy and injuring but not killing an animal that is now suffering in the woods.
I'm sure you've heard people talk about the "infantilization" of young adults. What factors do you see behind this? How would you suggest we teach young people how to do hard things?
I've heard of it but haven't seen any kind of consensus on it - or even whether it exists.
If it does, though, games hardly seem relevant. People were addicted to TV long before they had access to video games.
Some commenters admonish parents for trying to use these parental controls at all. “Just be good parents and instruct your 6 year old not to use hollow point, 7.62mm, or fmj”
For example Nintendo:
The kids have access to the family car. It will allow anyone to drive it when they select a destination by speaking while sitting in the car. The car is unlocked by default.
No way exists to limit destinations to their friends or relatives. "Drugs" takes the kids to the nearest drug dealer. "Alcohol" drives the kid to the nearest store and allows the kid to buy alcohol without any ID check.
Turns out what was fun for you at age 5 will be fun for your kids at age 5. Just the same as The Cat In The Hat is still a beloved book.
I personally have found this to be the absolute winner of a solution.
It's really not unique. America might be high on the list and a bit weird about it, but it is most definitely not alone.
It mostly extends to interactions in the physical world though - restricting children's use of digital devices is socially acceptable and expected
I have absolutely no faith in German intuitions regarding what is appropriate or inappropriate about the care of children. Ask me again in a century and I will reevaluate my opinion.
More nights than not, I have random neighborhood kids playing in my yard and eating dinner with us. Their parents don't seem to care, and neither do I. But I don't live in SF or NY, either. I don't mean to insinuate those cities are worse, I don't know, but cannot figure out where else that trope would come from.
My daughter, when she was 6 or 7, was terrified by certain things she accidentally found on YouTube, and asked me to have them filtered out. At 13, she already didn't need that, of course, but the notion of "kids" includes "small kids", who definitely should not be exposed to everything the Internet has to offer, or let to go out unsupervised.
It's also parents who get them their first phone and choose what kind of a phone to get them (it's not all that unusual to see kids with dumbphones anymore).
Of course there should be a way to limit things like transactions and screen time but it doesn't have to be this whole surveillance tech with GPS tracking, granular permissions, and revealing what the kid texted his friends on a given day.
Correct, because the devices are powerful and cheap.
The devices that tend to be made for kids directly are normally extremely underpowered and expensive for their capabilities and anything you want to add to it is expensive. Most people have an extra phone that still works
It's fine and well to say the solution is to just be around more or take an interest in what they're doing, but that is hard to do with full time jobs, multiple kids, etc. Parental controls are supposed to exist to let the parents let their kids explore in a safe space. It's not about constant supervision or tracking, its more akin to hiring a babysitter rather than leave your children home alone.
It takes a village to raise a child. And it's about damn time that Silicon Valley takes some responsibility for this creature that they have created.
But still, there's going to be many who are not. I would rather good parental controls existed to make it easier for people to be better parents. Yes, maybe parental controls don't make the difference from bad to good, but they do make a positive difference for many.
I didn’t start by giving my kindergartener a lecture about the dangers of riptides and then let them navigate the risk of the ocean themselves as they learn to keep their head above water.
Granular parental controls are a way to create that kind of progression, allowing them gradually increasing autonomy within a managed environment.
For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.
I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.
The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. There were no ridiculous negligent standards/laws on the book when I was young about it being wrong for a kid to spend all day going up/down a creek so my dad showed me what all the venomous snakes looked like and how to use a compass and after that I was on my own.
I find disagreement with this new standard on parents. No, it's not the parents obligation to keep their child from ever making a horrible mistake. It's their obligation to educate them well and then set them loose with very few safeguards so they can actually slowly learn to be an adult. I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators.
I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.
"These are the rules, you are to follow the rules, breaking them would be foolish and breaking them in secret would be even more foolish, but they are always up for discussion, and if you do break them you can still come to me for advice without getting in trouble, and I'd much rather you tell me than that I find out on my own" is a principle that can be imparted to a child. You do actually have to tell it to them, though, in several different ways over a period of time, and you have to be consistent about it. Children aren't wise, but they are clever, they can spot patterns, and they'll tend to believe your actions over your words if the two conflict.
You do not want to set up a situation where a predator can blackmail a child using the threat of your punishment. Parent, yes, but parent consistently enough and well enough that such threats are an obvious bluff that the child knows to ignore (and report to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465829), and going online can be as safe for your child as playing in the local neighbourhood.
The rules for young children safely using the internet unsupervised would be extremely absurd for an adult: they include things like "do not use any search engines (ask me if you want a new website)" and "do not create accounts on services (without permission)". Young children must also be kept away from content aggregators, or anything with an automatic recommendation system (e.g. Pinterest, YouTube, modern news sites, Reddit, HN). But hyperlinks on proper webpages are perfectly safe: a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't by clicking on hyperlinks if they check the URLs first and avoid the places they aren't allowed, just like a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't, wandering the high street, if they know to avoid roads and building sites. You don't need to tell a 6-year-old "stay away from porn sites", just like you don't need to tell them "don't go in that sex shop", because (a) they won't find it; and (b) even if they do, there are more general rules ("never tell a computer system that you're over 13 if you're not, and ideally not even if you are") that'll prevent any harm from occurring.
And just as you'd have conversations with a child about "where have you been?", and have them show you their favourite spots occasionally, you should also do so with unsupervised internet activity. Unsupervised does not mean ignored, after all.
(Also rural Midwest, and a long time ago).
People used to have an insane amount of freedom and things generally went better.
That said, "the internet" is a large place, and I think parents would find more clarity thinking of it the way they think of a physical place. In my mind, letting my son loose on the internet is not like letting him run around the woods unsupervised (which he does). It is more like dropping him off in a large city every night.
As you said, guidance is imperative, and in the real world we would not give only verbal guidance. We would, if we lived in the city, walk our kid to the library, the museum, the coffee shop, the park. We would talk about what parts of town to avoid. We would talk about what "free" means and about not trusting strangers and not just going into any door.
That last part is tricky. On the internet, every link is a door into a neighborhood, and there are a lot of neighborhoods even adults are not well prepared for.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
In the real world, it’s the parents obligation to make an effort to protect their children. In extreme cases, parents can be found negligent if they don’t demonstrate that they’re taking reasonable steps to protect children and something bad happens as a result.
This doesn’t mean that extreme, draconian parenting is mandatory. It does, however, mean that some level of parental control is necessary on an age-adjusted basis. It’s not enough to say “I told them not to do that” and then wash your hands of the consequences when we’re talking about a pre-teen like in this article.
> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
Two obvious things complicate this:
- You weren't taught how to use a real gun at 6 months old, right?
- Would it not follow from what you said above that if you had accidentally shot and killed yourself at age 7, then it would be your own fault and nobody else's? That seems (to me, at least) like an absurd conclusion.
I think about it like this: as a parent, my jobs include identifying when my child is capable of learning about something new, providing the guidance they need to learn it (which is probably not all up front, but involves some supervision, since it's usually an iterative process), allowing them to make mistakes, accepting some acceptable risks of injury, and preventing catastrophe. I'll use cooking as an example. My kids got a "toddler knife" very young (basically a wooden wedge that's not very sharp). We showed them how to cut up avocados (already split) and other soft things. As they get older, we give them sharper knives and trickier tasks. We watch to see if they're understanding what we've told them. We give more guidance as needed. It's okay if they nick themselves along the way. But we haven't given them a sharpened chef's knife yet! And if they'd taken that toddler knife and repeatedly tried to jam it into their sibling's eye despite "educating" them several times, while I wouldn't regret having made the choice to see if they were ready, I would certainly conclude that they weren't yet ready. That's on me, not them.
You allude to this when you say:
> I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
Yes, the goal should be to teach kids how to operate safely, not keep them from all the dangerous things. But I'd say that devices and the internet are more like "the kitchen". There are lots of different risks there and it's going to take many years to become competent (or even safe). Giving them an ordinary device would be like teaching my 2-year-old their first knife skills next to a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen with chefs flying around with sharp knives and hot pots. By contrast, without doing any particular child-proofing, our home kitchen is a much more controlled environment where I can decide which risks they're exposed to when. This allows me to supervise without watching every moment to see if they're about to stab themselves -- which also gives them the autonomy they need to really learn. The OP, like other parents, wants something similar from their device and the internet: to gradually expose elements of these things as the parents are able to usefully guide the children, all while avoiding catastrophe.
Which may be fine, I don't know whether the tightened control of both parenting and kids nowadays is better. But we have to recognise the cost that comes with doing something like that. There is less risk-taking right now, and bad consequences seem to be taken harder, in a way human life is valued more, which imo part of the reason of the shift. The mentality "let kids make their own mistakes" can be fine, but that comes with accepting the possibilities of negative consequences these mistakes may cause, and I feel that the main issue is that we frown upon these consequences as society much more.
Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.
With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything.
This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.
Isn't there still a very simple one, hardware access. If the child doesn't have a smart phone of their own or computer in their bedroom then they cannot use them to get online unsupervised. This is about as simple on/off as you can get and very easy to moderate.
Or, if you do let them have a bike, it requires you to follow them around everywhere to be sure they don't go to a liquor store.
It's a completely over the top level of control. Yes it would work but also do as much harm as good.
Except kids from families without respectable parents would always be the ones to find access to alcohol, cigarettes, and porn. There were always a few kids in every class that had an older brother, uncle, or friend who would give them access to stuff they shouldn’t have.
It really wasn’t that different in the 80s in terms of parental responsibility.
> You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.
That’s still true now.
The new social is your neighbors don’t even know you have kids much less who they are talking too because they are on their phones and kids don’t have peer interactions because you don’t let them outdoors fearing people will report you are exposing them to a dangerous world.
Tech should absolutely have filled that void with a simple age appropriate pediatrician approved on/off with advanced controls available for those that want to tighten or loosen the reins.
I do not have kids, but would envision something like under 5 have no advertising and no network connection without a manual unlock, under 9 should only have access to content with heavy moderation and manual review of advertisements with only approved social contacts and parental alerts for potentially problem content, under 12 restrict unapproved contacts within local school district with problem content blocked with a manual unlock for a set duration, and for under 18 just do an machine learning scan on content and the kid can choose themselves if they want to reveal it with on device warnings about adult content, bullying, scams, and grooming with suggestions to discuss with parents.
That’s my point. Some Parents now expect technology to do their parenting for them in ways they were expecting to do themselves previously.
> I do not have kids,
I do have kids. So my opinions are based on what I’ve personally seen work with my kinds and my peers.
Parental controls shouldn’t be seen as a way to absolve the parents of their responsibility to monitor what their kids consume.
Yeah there will be occasions when things slip through, but that’s always been a risk even before smartphones and the web. What matters is you’re there, as a parent, to ensure leaks are not tidal waves, and to ensure children develop responsible use of technology.
This has always been something parents have had to manage. Both in the 80s and equally so now. Blaming technology is just another way of saying “I’m too lazy to keep tabs on my children”
Honestly, maybe the Gabb Phone marketing is lulling users into a false sense of security. If you still have to do the same legwork as the default Android experience, what's the point of their devices?
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
Clear how it could restrict to friends-only when connecting directly to another Nintendo Switch user, but a bit murky how it'd make that determination in cases like Minecraft where the client is connecting to a cross-platform user-hosted game server that is not associated with any Nintendo/Microsoft account.
Could work if you have the parents manually whitelist specific server IPs, as they could with router/firewall, though not sure if "could you whitelist 209.216.230.207 please?" would present a meaningful choice in most cases.
Users on the same network can access each others' worlds, at least between XBox and Android, so multi-device in the same building works too.
“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.
The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.
jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
There are also unreasonable restrictions, like not being able to play user-created maps in Mario Maker unless you have a membership.
I played a lot of Titanfall back in the day and had a lot of reservations about talking with other people's kids. Nothing really bad happened, and I had a lot of fun, but it was creepy.
I kinda enjoy that the matchmaker rooms in Beat Saber only allow you to emote with large body gestures and not say anything or even make hand gestures. I enjoy acting like a cartoon character to honor and recognize the other players (like choosing the song that I really hate because another player has asked for it five times in a row) and not getting involved in the mean bullshit you get in games like League of Legends. (It's fun to be in a private room with 2 or more players too where you can chat but then you are talking with people you picked which in my case are nice people)
My son and his friend created a new game called "the kick game" inside a certain online game where the real game was to trick the other players into kicking out other players that they didn't like or wanted to bully -- frequently the victims didn't understand the rules of this game at all. On Roblox they would find racist games where you cut down thousands of Zulu, just awful stuff.
Not to say I haven't had a good time with serious League players who communicate on Discord and have a positive team but I think communication features and UGC are often a disaster in games.
In a country where you have parents with wildly different ideas about what constitutes “safety”, I have no idea why anyone thinks it is possible to set a single standard for this.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
Young Teen suicide (10 to 14) has increased from roughly 1 per 100K in the early 2000s to now nearly 3 per 100K in the last five years. Older teen suicide (15-19) has increased from 6 per 100K to 11 per 100K over the same time period[3].
[0] https://www.jmir.org/2018/4/e129/
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12230417/
> Sensitivity analyses suggested that cybervictimization only and both cyber- and face-to-face victimization were associated with a higher risk of suicidal ideation/attempt compared to face-to-face victimization only and no victimization; however, analyses were based on small n. In prospective analyses, cybervictimization was not associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later after accounting for baseline suicidal ideation/attempt and other confounders. In contrast, face-to-face victimization was associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later in the fully adjusted model, including cybervictimization.
In fact, reading 3, it looks like the highest prevalence of cyberbullying capped out at a whopping.... 16% of 15 year olds, with a sharp drop down to 7% just 2 years later.
I have to say, there's lots of things to worry about with kids going online. I just don't think bullying in particular is one of them.
I can't imagine today with 24/7 social media apps on the phone.
A retreat into the online world seems like a comfort in difficult times but it is a retreat, and the longer you stay retreated, the less likely it is you'll regain the ground again.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
There are pros and cons to that goal.
I think there's a real generational divide here. What is normal in my parents generation (I'm in my early 30s) is not normal in roughly my generation downwards (which coincides both with mobile phone ownership amongst children/teens becoming common, and children/teens becoming much more restricted in how much freedom they had in terms of being allowed outside by themselves).
Even amongst people my age, people would consider weird and probably even rude if I turned up unannounced (a "What are you up to?" text message would probably be the norm). And I think that's more exaggerated amongst younger generations. Perhaps that's different if you live very close to your friends. But a lot of people don't.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.
For us, it’s a system that’s worked well. So well, in fact, that our kids have felt comfortable coming to us when they see something concerning in a group chat rather than waiting for us to find it. And in return, we’ve learned to trust their judgement a lot more because they’ve demonstrated mature behaviour online.
I trust my own children but you’re right that I cannot guarantee that they’re not bullying others and deleting those messages. However I’d hope other parents are monitoring their children’s phone usage and would tell either me or the school if my child was causing issues. That’s how a healthy community of parents are supposed to work.
Also your comment has a tone of “kids can find a way to bypass parental oversight so why bother parenting in the first place?” I don’t if that is intentional or not. But it’s an attitude I have seen other parents adopt and, unsurprisingly, their kids are usually the little shits that cause trouble because they know there are zero repercussions.
At 11 I wouldnt expect them to have unsupervised internet access. At 16 I might, but by the time they’re 16 I wouldn’t need to monitor their online activity so closely because they’ll have several years of trust and experience built up.
Obviously, this'll have to change at around 16, but those conversations need to happen anyway.
The child may also learn about making social effort to keep in touch rather than relying on a beacon to ping them about social events.
But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).
neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
Yes, but no. I used to think the same, coming from the same background, and sometimes I still do but back in the day there was a big filter already (not everyone wanted or liked videogames or a PC), and we were not terminally online. Plus, for the average HNer there is a big survivorship bias on these topics because "I went earning 6 figures thanks to my experiences with computers back in the day".
Nowadays almost everyone has access to an Internet connected smartphone, owning it is not a feature in itself anymore and the vast majority are not entertained trying to hack it. So it becomes something just like any other thing relates to children/teenagers: use common sense, adapt to your kids behavior, strengths and weaknesses and don't stick to rigid rules proposed by someone else that doesn't know you, but keep those rules in mind as an inspiration.
They miss out on the social group and then fade away from it and just become "that one guy in our class."
The last time I mentioned this several people argued that, "true friends would stick together" or some such. Well, if you already have those friends. But if you're in high school and finding yourself, you probably haven't met all of them yet.
A lot of both communication and organizing of social events happen through the phone. Kids without a phone (or some online method) will just be forgotten. This is just the reality.
Unrestricted access? That depends on the kid. We had them charge in the living room (no overnight use), and their computers were actual desktops in a single office in the house.
We never used filtering or tracking software. The one exception was blocking youtube (through /etc/hosts) for my youngest during covid when it was too big a distraction.
We must have very different views of the world. I would never let a child for whom I am responsible have a smartphone. They are not required, despite what you may have been told.
I’m an adult and I’ve been experimenting with leaving mine behind when I go out. It’s more than fine.
I literally addressed the problems of missing out for high schoolers. The social event they'll miss on its own may not be a big deal. But the missed opportunities to make and deepen friendships is a big deal.
As an adult, you have your friend/peer group already. You and your friends are far less likely to do things spontaneously and far more likely to be courteous and thoughtful to invite someone along. A high school teen has middle school friends and is probably discovering their peer group. A huge portion of that discovery becomes unavailable without a phone.
Say they just finished up with band and everyone chats online, "hey meet up at the pizza place." Your kid will be left out. That's the firm reality. They won't know about it. It's the opportunity cost of meeting and learning other kids which will be missed, not the riveting conversations themselves.
> They are not required, despite what you may have been told.
Required? no. Central to the social fabric that binds them, unfortunately yes.
I'm fairly confident in my methods as I'm 2 for 2 graduating conscientious adults from college.
They MIGHT be one of the few hyper-social ones that thrives despite being left out of online circles but they are the exception.
(IMHO, once a kid has figured out how to do this, they have earned the privilege. It’s part of growing up.)
A responsible and forward-thinking parent could provide a Graphene OS smartphone if the kid absolutely insists on having one, to limit the privacy damage.
The story outlined, one of a child prodigy solo-navigating the gritty online world of pre-2000's, is old and tired. An active parent can support a child at all ages safely in these "hacker" moments that are described without giving them un-reined access to tools. A parent should be able to ask "how was your day today?" and get a truthful answer about online activity, just like the same question being asked at the end of the school day. It's out of curiosity and protection, and from a nurtured relationship.
You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place in order to mitigate a risk that is very scary but less likely to kill them than drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
People are freaking out over stranger danger not because it is by the numbers prevalent but because they feel like they can control it then find out the controls suck.
What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
What if you read again and again that it didn't work because of how many accidents are caused by drivers or momentary mistakes.
Would you feel only as unsafe as before or worse?
> drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
These are false equivalences-- when has a pool try to groom a child over the span of 3 years?
> What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
This is wholesale the wrong approach. This is the parent absconding responsibility, which is my driving point of the problem.
Now to the main point:
> You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place ...
I'm not expecting anything from my devices because machines cannot be held accountable for human choices; a gun cannot be held accountable for being misused. The internet is a powerful tool and users should understand the ramifications of certain actions.
> If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.
That's a parenting moment that one should relish retrospectively. To teach them good morals and values, to remind them that you love them, and that lying about safety processes can be very dangerous.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/...
93% of victims under 18 know their abuser.
Sure there's 7% thats not, but a significant supermajority is family/friends. 59% were acquaintances, and 34% are family.
Edit: seriously, -1 cause I link to actual facts, rather than shitty emotional outbursts? Family and friends of family have always been the major list of suspects for child sex abuse. They're the ones who have time and access.
But somehow linking to cited facts is -1 central. Sigh.
Second, even if the statistic wasn't obsolete, a groomed kid knows their abuser by definition.
I understand what you're trying to get at and suspect you're right, but the comment does not make your case well.
Internet has opened up an entire world of virtual sexual abuse.
My wife and I disagreed about letting my son have my old desktop replacement laptop at a young age. Of course I said yes, based on my own experience, but my wife turned out to be right in the end. He got into some pretty dark places and the toxic relationships he developed with other people his age were bad enough and the trouble he got into was real and not hypothetical.
He's turned it around and is getting the support to do well relative to his Gen Z peers, but it took some harrowing experiences to get there.
The Internet, Internet access, and apps have changed since I was a kid. Despite their time on digital devices along with my efforts to teach them, my kids have no idea how computers work or how to use them very effectively. The skills they have developed to gain access to them were largely social engineering and lying. They exclusively waste time and brain cells when they're on screens.
One of my kids essentially can't have access to devices because he'll burn hours into the night playing really, really stupid games and watching porn. This is ALL he wants to do on phones or computers. Sometimes he will window shop.
You might think this is largely due to my failure to have insight into what my kids are doing and limiting access correctly, but that isn't the case. At first we were somewhat lenient and figured if they accessed things they shouldn't, we'd see it and have conversations. That was very early on. The conversations did nothing. I began putting severe restrictions on devices quite quickly because problems became evident quickly. I was a bit naive about it at first, my wife was not. We clashed a bit, but then device theft and social engineering started and I quickly aligned with her. Since then, many years ago, very little access has been on account of us not protecting devices properly. He is extremely good at gaining access when he's not supposed to, and extremely good at hiding it. It's like having an addict in the house.
He has no future in computers. He doesn't care about computers at all. He is incredibly compulsive, self-harming, and freely harms his relationships to get what he wants. This has been going on for about 5 years; he's 16 now, and I'm pretty scared for when he's out on his own and doesn't have anyone to protect him from himself. I think there will be some brutal lessons. Lost jobs, lost relationships, lost confidence and self esteem. I'm not looking forward to it.
I have no idea why I turned sneaking onto computers into a career rather than rotted away like they do. I wanted to learn to program. I was curious. My kids want to play NBA 2k and watch porn. That's about it.
What specifically do you mean by 'stealing'?
> lied and deceived extensively to gain access to devices, and repeatedly sacrificed relationships and trust for more screen time
It’s not about truth, it’s about lying to gain access to devices. Lying to gain access is a type of theft therefore stealing.
As that entire structure is illegitimate, the actions of the child are understandable.
Also,
> He is incredibly compulsive, self-harming, and freely harms his relationships to get what he wants.
This probably indicates deeper psychological issues that aren't solely related to Internet addiction.
HN: No no no let me stop you right there
We know that children and teenagers are vulnerable to all sorts of filth that the internet makes available very easily, and indeed even inflicts without consent onto users. Porn, for example, was something that was more difficult to encounter before the internet, and when you did encounter it, it was in smaller amounts. Today, you are a URL away from an unlimited sea of it, and the ubiquity of mobile devices means restricting access is difficult. This makes parenting more challenging. And that's a more pernicious even if common problem. Social media and SFV cause all sorts of developmental harm without suffering the same stigmas as pornography or violence, and so its use continue with the full approval of the social environment.
(And age range here is not so important to discuss; pornography consumption and social media/SFV use is bad for everyone, including adults.)
> Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
A corollary of what I wrote about is that you have to understand what matters. Becoming a "hacker" isn't the priority of childhood, and it's odd to prioritize that. It isn't worth anything if you are left screwed up by consuming bad content. (Nor does most of the most fruitful experimentation require constant and unfettered internet access. Without maturity and discipline, the internet easily becomes an enabler of shallow and superficial engagement. Deeper exploration is often best facilitated by disconnecting.) It's also senseless to appeal to exceptions.
However, I do think that the most important factor isn't parental controls, but the family environment, what parents teach their children, and the social groups your family and your children move around in. If parents are relying on technology as a substitute for their job as parents, then children will easily fall prey to all sorts of trash. But if children have parents who communicate clearly what they should and should not be doing, maintain a healthy and active family life, and model good behavior by example while penalizing bad behavior, then children will generally stick to good behaviors.
I think law has an important role to play. The former should support the latter. And more fundamentally, this requires a certain backtracking from the anything goes/do what feels good ethos of the contemporary moral landscape. Moral confusion is the biggest factor. Law is effectively a determination of general moral principles within certain socially and culturally concrete circumstances. As the old expression goes, lex iniusta non est lex (an unjust law is not a law). The point of the law is to guard the common good (which is what makes a society) and help steer people away from the bad and toward the good. We all need these to live good lives, and we need to finally put to rest the pernicious notion that the law is not about moral guidance and that all it exists for is to secure our "rights" to whatever we want, where the understanding of rights entails a destructive do what thou wilt relativism. True freedom is not the ability to do whatever you damn well please. It is the ability to do what is good, and to be able to do the good, one must be virtuous - a proper formation - that enables you to be good. Vice cripples our ability to be. A legal system and a society that is supportive of virtue and the good is good for its individual members. One that embraces a bullshit "neutrality" is an easy target for predatory exploitation. There is a great deal of money to be made from vice and stupidity. We become morally defenseless in the face of the wolves. Might becomes right, and in a culture of moral relativism, we internalize this tyrannical false principle.
caution is necessary and kids can learn plenty without unrestricted access
I personally would have been better off without internet access, no knowledge of hex dumps would have been worth it. It's a little upsetting that you're using that as an example of why kids should have more permissive access.
there was plenty of "you need to get your kids on computers so they can get the jobs of the future" in the 90s that parents fell into, and information about online predation was almost non-existent at the time - I didn't even have to share my home address or name, I was encouraged to meet this person at their church
mind you my guardian at the time didn't even graduate high school
I shouldn't have been given access to tools my parent didn't understand, but corporations still pressure this constantly today
I doubt even a single digit % of parents know what they're doing when giving kids free access to youtube for example... and recently the CEO of roblox called pedophiles an "opportunity"
In the mid 90’s I got my first PC when I was 13 but my parents would not let me online. I ended up finding a way via nefarious means. I bought a 25’ telephone cord from Radio Shack and when my parents weren’t home I would unplug their bedroom phone. I discovered that if I ran the Prodigy installer it would connect to the Internet briefly to download the latest phone numbers in my area. I found that I could alt-tab out of the full screen installer and use the lnternet unfiltered for about 10 minutes or so before they kicked me off. This worked for about a year or so.
I then had to resort to stealing my parent’s credit card and signing up for free trials and cancelling them before the charges incurred. I eventually screwed up big time. I downloaded a “free porn” BBS dialer and it made an international call to South America and ran up the phone bill $300 or so. I lost my computer privileges for a couple of months. I guess the silver lining was when I turned 16, I immediately got a job and my drivers license so I could pay for my own phone line. I kept my grades up to maintain privileges and was a straight arrow since.
They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of software engineers can't figure this out.
I do find it odd there's no option to outright disable the internet (except for software updates). Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.
Seeing other Japanese companies account systems (Square Enix and Rakuten, for example), the only conclusion I can draw is that the Japanese dev industry does not consider clear account management to be important.
TOTK was the final nail for me, I vowed to never purchase another Nintendo game or piece of hardware and I haven't. I just couldn't square my actual player experience of a janky, boring game with the rabid fanboys crowing about Nintendo doing it again.
It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
Sounds barely realistic, when school are using iPads, education is one URL away from entertainment crack and parental controls on iOS are a joke.
1. Ask your school to change their policies. Coordinate with other parents. Make it clear to the school that if they don't start to enforce these policies then you will hold the school directly responsible for any harm that comes to your child in the environment they create.
2. Pick different schools. (Home School, Private school) if you can afford it. Charter schools may be an option.
Both of these require sacrifice on your part and neither are easy. But no one should ever think parenting is easy.
Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.
Your first comment didn't mention age, so they made a comment about a broader interpretation of the idea.
Most 5-year olds should be allowed to close the bathroom door while doing their business, they should not be permitted to access the internet privately.
I do not agree at all with this conclusion.
When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking.
This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanagement was not good for their relationship or his personal development, to put it mildly.
Every time I read HN comments from parents declaring their child will not have a phone until they turn 16 (another comment in this thread) or how they’ll lock their kids out of games and social media completely I think back to my friend whose mom was extremely controlling in the same way.
Young kids need tight controls, but this needs to be loosened as they age. Parenting discussions really need to come with age ranges because what’s appropriate changes so fast from year to year.
Also you have to consider the ramifications of such behavior if that gets public, I mean could possibly be the source of bullying and what not.
As a child we were de incentivized to playing games with the computer. The schema was:
A) computer you can have, because is useful beyond playing, consoles, no way. Forget it “that is stupidizing BS”
B) No money for games. Other SW would be bought, but rarely games.
That moved us to start spending time with other things in the computer, like programming our own games.
Of course today that is all difficult to impossible, by design, without ostracizing the kids.
In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
We also lock up our alcohol, as many parents have chosen to do for generations.
Also in I want to say about half the states (could be wrong here, but at least a few), it is legal to drink well below 18 in a private home.
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Example, wisconsin:
>Can an underage person possess and consume alcohol beverages on licensed premises? Yes. Persons under age 21 may possess and consume alcohol beverages if they are with their parents, guardians or spouses of legal drinking age; but this is at the discretion of the licensee. The licensed premises may choose to prohibit consumption and possession of alcohol beverages by underage persons. (Sec. 125.07(1), Wis. Stats.)
The drinking laws in at least ~half the USA are a lot looser than most people think. If the parents are ok with it the kid can generally drink somehow.
https://www.revenue.wi.gov/Pages/FAQS/ise-atundrg.aspx#undrg...
Frankly, these half-assed laws disenfranchise an already not-permitted-to-vote populace. But somehow these "kids" can be declared as adults if they are 16 and having sex or courts deem them 'adults', but simultaneously find them to be parental property.
Glad I dont have children. The situation is a toxic cesspool.
The fall in alcohol consumption is directly tied to a fall in socialization writ-large. That isn't a win, it's a tragedy.
This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.
If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.
A kid with no education and restricted access will just find a way to do whatever he wants to do. A kid with good education and unrestricted access will know to steer away from bad stuff and talk to adults when he finds something strange.
One of the proudest moments of my grandfather (in my household, he was the most tech savy) was when I found a way to "bypass" an restriction program around age 11. From then on he decided I "outgrew" this kind of limits and just gave me unlimited access to the family computer and the internet.
But years later he confessed, the "click" moment for him was not that I could bypass the restriction, but that I trusted him enough to show him and that I self-reported the situation. And this is pure education and has nothing to do with restrictions.
I read so many parents here that want to "educate" their children but want to offload that work to some service or program instead of putting the work in. You prefer spending 5 hours configuring your child's nintendo switch rather than sitting down with him for 1 hour to explain to him what he can encounter on the internet, how he should behave and react and building the bond needed for him to trust you enough to come to you when needed.
The lesson isn't the meaning of the words you say to your kids, the lesson is how what you say relates to them and what they observe you doing. And this isn't just about this example of traching them to make a sound judgement, this can be expanded to nearly every educational problem one could have with their kid.
E.g. extremely commonly you will find kids who develop bad behavior despite their parents "telling them not to" will not only witness the bad behavior by their parents, but will be ignored, ridiculed, disrespected or mistrusted whenever they do in fact behave well.
And it all boils down to the simple notion that you can't just tell your kid a thing and expect that to be the lesson.
Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.
Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.
It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose
But yeah… easier said than done.
But then I remember every time I've had to delve into actual enterprise administration, and yeah that's its own full-time job.
Side rant: when will businesses acknowledge that an account might be owned by two people (spouses, for example) and allow separate logins for the same account? Their terms of service almost always prohibit sharing passwords, and because the lost password flow would require sharing an email address, you didn't want to do that anyway.
I’m not saying that’s not possible, but if you have somehow figured the “right” abstractions and interface to achieve this in an incredible simple and sensible yet just as powerful and complete way that any parent can manage it, then you’d make a killing in enterprise sales. It’s not like enterprise IT admins love Group Policy or any random Joe can be a Linux sysadmin.
Parental controls are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. Payment systems are really robust but there's still fraud. If there's prey, there will be predators.
Education and clear rules are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. There's people that's very evil and also very clever. You can educate and trust your 12yo to understand 80% of it, yet for the remaining 20% you have to be there.
And, oh boy, the issue about parental controls being incredibly complicated is 100% by design. Simple and sensible parental controls would make exploitative business models like Roblox go bankrupt overnight.
Shouldn't you trust your children, to come to you in that 20%?
> I want to limit time spent > I want to limit money spent > After 8 years it's an adult account anyway (10 -> 18)
Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.
I grew up with an internet access on my computer in my room without anybody watching over my back and without any restrictions and nothing bad really happened. Meanwhile these days some people around me with children around the 10-15 range seem think their children cannot be trusted and restrictions are absolutely essential.
Has the internet really changed that much in the last decade or two? Or are people and media just talking about the dangers more?
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Also, what happens to these kids when they reach adulthood and the guard rails come off?
Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc? I have a feeling many people (including children) don't really learn unless they get hurt so the best we can do it making sure they do get hurt but only a little.
E.g. let them get scammed in a game instead of real life. Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?
Getting scammed in RuneScape is probably a good learning experience, but is RuneScape still the only game that's like the old experience of RuneScape? That and Minecraft I suppose, but you can't really filter out servers in Minecraft.
I think that pornography is poison and my parents didn't know that I had access to it. "Not my kid!", they said. But my generation says, "It's every. single. kid."
> Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc?
Another poison is alcohol. Some people think that letting their kids access alcohol in their house is reasonable. I think it is better to wait until your brain is more developed before trying alcohol. First experiences with alcohol at a later age tends to enable people to have a less worse relationship with alcohol.
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems...
Lots of people are in this thread saying "ah, just tell your children not to get groomed / not to watch disturbing content". They're kids. They are going to disobey their parents. There's no one here arguing we don't need to teach kids these things. But, like how when you're learning to drive you start in a parking lot with a crappy car, we need a way to make a relatively safe place for them to learn. Parental controls are currently failing to do that.
Furthermore, where you and I and median commenter on HN might be an engaged, attentive parent, there's lots of parents out there who are not. Having a good, easy-to-setup version of these controls that a less engaged parent will actually turn on would make a positive impact on those children who aren't receiving the teaching you suggest.
That seems like a great way to destroy any trust in you your child might have.
Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.
So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.
I'd like a flag for messaging apps called "turn off images and video". Sure, my kid might get called nasty names in plain text, but would not get beheading or bestiality videos or underage schoolmate pics.
But the author is right, it should be easy to set appropriate limits out of the box.
Market research says "Parents want control."
In the journey from CEO mandate "build a product that gives parents control" to developer implementation, "parents want control" somehow turns into "What parents want is extremely fine-grained controls," which isn't the same thing.
So a bunch of product managers brainstorm a huge list of ways that parents might want "control," hand that off to some developers, and voila: Everything becomes way too complicated for everybody and the company is able to say they offer "control" while abdicating their stated obligation of giving parents the "safe" product that the parents expect.
To fix this, it's going to have to be legislation so financial incentives are present.
By the way, I got one miyoo mini for myself and enjoy pico-8 quite a bit that I started making games myself, together with my kid and chatgpt assistance. Call me old school but I know what’s good for my own kid.
The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
The otherside is hands off parenting. I think after about 2 children, parents tend to get tired of being so restrictive there for the youngest gets what they want and other stereotypes.
In the end it’s probably not about the tightness so much as remaining involved and honest and open with your child.
I prevented a lot of IRL fighting over the holidays. I tell them, if they want to fight each other that they can only do so in game (their preferred fighting game is primal rage) and it gets their aggression and hyperactive tendency out. Beyond fighting games they love to battle out in racing simulators like Daytona USA or controller swap Crash Bandicoot and Sonic. They have Switch 2 at home and can play it here as well but it’s not sick as Neo Geo, Sega Genesis/Saturn, NES, GameCube, PlayStation, Virtual Boy, and many others. 67
The biggest benefit of offline gaming is that friends interact IRL. You either get invited or invite friends and have real interaction, share snacks, etc. which often leads to outdoor activities when gaming is a bore or over. We need to bring that back. If the companies are unwilling it’s time to hack the offline switch or speak with our wallet.
At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...
https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parenta...
If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?
It’s also extremely hard saying no to certain shows to my kids, and it would be much easier to just not have them there.
I’m pretty sure the politically oriented people at Disney want this to your kids watch as much of the content as possible, and especially the new ones.
You could digitize an existing BluRay or DVD collection and allow your kids to view films and TV using a streaming service-like interface. These days most of the solutions don't even require you to transcode the films, you just RIP them to an ISO and put them on an accessible Samba share and as long as you rename the files to something approximate to the title of the film it'll fetch the metadata for you.
When my child was three, he really liked to watch 'spidey and his amazing friends'. But unfortunately, when he watched it he would emulate some of the bad behaviors from the show, pretend to be one of the bad guys and act out. Easy solution right, we just won't watch the show anymore, we don't leave him alone to watch TV by himself anyways.
Well, on Disney plus, you can't simply hide the show. Even if you remove it from your "recently watched" or whatever, it will show up in preview cards and search results and I'm categories. It became a big friction point, whatever he would see it he would want to watch it. And when Grandma would come over and babysit him, he would ask for it and she'd put it on for him despite our wishes.
So, since then, I've spun up a jellyfin server and ditched Disney plus. If we don't like a show we just remove it, and then it's simply not an option.
Have you considered buying them an old-school gameboy?
Nothing connected to the Internet can protect children from seeing information they couldn't see (as determined by culture/familial mores), meeting potentially exploitative strangers, being exposed to a highly curated stream of marketing content and targeted AI messaging (including social media feeds).
I believe that Internet sites and apps should not have age controls.
I believe that physical Internet access (computer, phone, TV, etc) should require an adult ID to purchase (but not logged, like cigarettes, alcohol, etc) l and the the owner of the device is responsible for its use.
If they hand it over to a minor and they are harmed, then the original adult is liable (like alcohol).
This holds someone with material motive accountable. And it becomes jurisdiction-specific accountability (location of the device).
And in the case of parents, if they allow their kids to use one of the parent's devices then they are responsible for how the kid uses it. And directly responsible for how it's used, what's allowed and what's not.
You can't trust a mega+corp with protecting your kids.
> Nintendo Switch Online (not really another account, mind you, but a membership) involves a recurring fee. It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.
You don't need to pay for Nintendo Switch Online to get access to the eShop, you just need a Nintendo Account. I made one for myself and one for my son, and neither stays logged in. My wife and I have the passwords for both, and will not give him his password until he's older. Meaning one of us needs to be there for any purchases, free or otherwise.
He has access to the Minecraft marketplace, but can't add funds to it without us. We did not use our MS accounts, and didn't make one for him, so he can't play Minecraft online. But you know what, I'm totally ok with that. He can still invite a friend over and play together in person (which he does do).
Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.
If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."
What's the market to learn from this? You're saying one thing but voting with your wallet.
In the $200-300 range (so still less than a Switch 2), you can apparently run up through Switch and maybe PS3.
The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.
I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.
The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
Regarding the games console, his problem seems to mainly be the two conflicting account systems offered by two separate vendors, not the parental controls themselves (although I agree the situation in that circumstance is unfortunate). A quick Google search also directed me to an easy step by step guide to doing many of the things (such as the restriction of purchases and free downloads on the Nintendo game store) that he claimed to be impossible.[2]
This is written in a very dramatic manner*, especially with the whole "You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer." paragraph, that it feels almost like it's purely written to goad legislation.
[1] https://gabb.com/app-guide/
[2] https://industrywired.com/gaming/how-to-set-up-parental-cont...
* I do empathize with his situation, but much of it seems to be brought upon by his own ignorance and unwillingness to research.
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.
It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.
So I've never imagined myself wanting to do parental controls. But I might change my mind when my kid is old enough to play with screens.
Hold on to your kids[1] and instead of having to spy on them you will know them.
Yes, Parental controls could, in theory, provide many many more protections. But given the trajectory of tech, capitalism, and the USA at large (and the culture it exports), I do not see that pragmatically happening to a relevant degree by the time I have children.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375...
I wonder if kids aren't safer in online spaces where there's very little expectation that the person on the other end is a child. Like here.
Sounds like either they’ve figured out these parental controls, and might have some tips for you. Or they trust their kids with fewer controls.
My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't grow up as nerds just don't see the problem. Among the class of people who spend their time on Substack or Hacker News the horror of the modern net and its affect on childhood are well understood at this point. Among "normal people" you will definitely get weird looks if you suggest that this stuff is terrible for your kids.
They also call or text aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents. I feel like it has helped them with reading and just the exercise of trial and error to figure out how it works is beneficial.
Haven’t needed to delve into parental controls yet though.
That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Just like it's hard for me to find the right balance of benefit to downside in technology for my kids, it's also hard to strike a balanced tone when discussing my feelings on this stuff. Every time I write something about this problem online I feel like I'm coming off as some authoritarian luddite - which I'm definitely not. I want my kids to get the benefits of technology. Any bright future for them is almost sure to include the need to engage with the net.
Instilling the values that allow for that is the hard part.
Yes, they aren’t allowed to watch youtube shorts at all (nor do either of the parents), but we’ll look up nature or physics videos, and if they want to watch a video on repeat, we use yt-dlp to download and they watch via infuse. But again, not of their own accord. When it’s time to play outside or elsewhere, it’s time to do that. And no devices at meal time, even if they see other kids at the same table with them.
I guess my point was that the devices are immensely powerful tools for learning and communication, so I try to teach them how. But they also play games with non gambling mechanics (thank god for Apple Arcade).
This is key, in my experience. I've told my kids that if they catch me scrolling shorts or reddit, they have the right to confiscate my phone. A big part of instilling the values I referenced above is embodying them myself. (obviously, but it bears repeating).
> But they also play games with non gambling mechanics
This is important too. There's so much genuinely great media out there - TV shows, video games, movies, books. It's not that I don't want my kids to experience that stuff - I just want them to learn how to focus on the stuff that's quality rather than the stuff that is slop.
That is, HN users see the costs, the difficulty, the privacy concerns, etc. But they're also dismissive of the harm, which in terms of the young Gen Z men that I know personally is real. I can't attribute online pornography 100% but the damage includes criminal convictions, falling victim to "blackpill" ideology and other false answers to gendered problems and frequently people giving up on work and love.
I collect ero images and restrictions would personally be a hassle for me, I can't say I am against pornography in general, but I've got some concerns about pornography today. I think advocates are stuck in the 1970s when it was tamer and much less prevalent than it is today -- it's entirely different for a teen to have a few issues of Penthouse or Hustler than it is today.
I think the story of how it relates to relationship satisfaction is nuanced. Personally I think OnlyFans is a cancer. I want to feel special in a fantasy, and not as the biggest simp in a room full of hundreds of simps. (And this is healthy narcissism [1], not pathological narcissism. In good sex or sex with love, somebody thinks you are special)
I'm not sure what the answer is but I can see it both ways and that seems rare on HN.
I would never actually do this, but there's a part of me that would like to just give my kids a magazine to hide under their bed, or even some sort of curated private video site on the LAN, just to allow for some expression of natural puberty urges in a way that is ... if not "healthy," per se, then at least "harm reduced?" Obviously that idea in practice would be way too weird to consider, lol.
But this comes back to the balance thing I was talking about on my other post in this topic. Full abstinence is probably practically impossible and I'm not sure it's even the right approach. The other end of the spectrum - throwing the kids into the waters of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and whatever the TikTok equivalent of porn is (surely that exists, right?) - that seems pretty fraught too. The taboo nature of this discussion makes things harder - but I have tried to overcome the weird feeling and have fairly frank discussions about these sorts of things with my oldest.
I'm a bit confused by this section. It seems to me that the author
1. Turned off online.
2. Bought a game that could be played in single-player or online
3. Got mad that online didn't work because it was turned off
4. Turned online back on
5. Got mad that online was turned on.
6. Dealt with this anger by yelling at his children
I actually don't understand what the author was trying to accomplish here
How can a child get any experience, if they are only ever exposed to perfect make-believe fairyland?
It is impossible for the average user to reason about a different security model for each app, the only way for anyone to be confident about what a program is not doing is to move to a world where apps don't work by default, and a list of boxes need to be checked which enable network or file access and cause features to work. Apple is the closest to the right answer here, but enabled-by-default and opt-out has to go away.
By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.
By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.
This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.
Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?
How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?
So instead of trying to cover every possible theoretical danger, setting clear rules and boundaries with your kid sounds like a way more sensible and pragmatic approach.
And nobody said kids should be punished or held fully accountable on their first mistake.
Trying to scare children into following rules does not and will not end well.
> I've seen this done, it works.
You think it works because the child has realized that they will need to be better at hiding their actions in the future.
I believe in discipline but smashing a device violently in front of a child is not the way to go about things.
Anyway I tend to agree for the most part anyway. I was just making a guess about your age irl based on what you said. However some other data actually indicates you are likely gen-x.
Instead, LLMs are being used to replace support people at the larger platforms (e.g. X Box) with the clear goal of "make it HARDER to get support" (or as patio11 would say "their goal is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible ")
Seems simple enough to me
I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.
“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”
He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.
“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”
I suppose that’ll do.
“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.
What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”
Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.
I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.
I understand the problem domain - some people try to exploit and take advantage of kids. That's a problem, I get it.
At the same time, I still think children should not be assumed to be idiots. I remember we oldschool people, when we were young, we played Quake at university campus (we could only play on holidays because one friend had the key to the room, it was a side room though; on saturday other students were not there, so we had a full room with about 30 computers in the 1990s era). We were about 15 years old, so granted, no more young kids. And the technology wasn't quite as advanced, so I am not saying this is 1:1 comparable. But young kids today often have smartphones. They have the internet non-stop. I don't think parental censorship works as a model here. Again, I get it that too young kids are too trusting, and there are creeps - but there is not really an alternative to having kids go through thought processes and understand the issues here. In warcraft 3, young gamers were quite competitive and good. So if they can learn to be better than older people, they will have no real difficulty understanding predators. (Again, it depends on the age; but if your kid is 6 years old, why can there only be games that are played online? Plus it is just chatting right? I remember playing games at the yahoo website, we chatted too. I don't think that was a problem per se. The website makes it sound as if everyone and everything has that problem. I don't think this is the case.)
Edit: Others pointed out the age range problem. I agree. So, which age range are we talking about? Is the age even mentioned on the website?
Edit2: Ah yes, 12 years old. Sorry but at 12 years old, I am having a hard time buying into the "predators exploit him every time". That seems to be ... strange. His son would probably object to the claim he made on the website here aka slandering - perhaps.
Gmail can circumvent almost any security feature even if you set up a profile on iPhone (which is not documented and good luck with that). This is definitely not an accident.
Don’t mean to pick on Google; Apple is also bad, iPhone parental controls are very leaky. My son found a way to jailbreak his phone to completely unlock screen time and disable all parental controls.
Any of the consoles are also bad, PS4, etc… although it is possible to block stuff that PS4 can do via a firewall.
Defense in depth. Multiple layers. Calender reminders to audit devices, usage, and look at router logs. Check in with your kids.
The true "safe" option is not allowing any of this until your child is old enough to understand the risks... so 18? 25?
All I'm saying is there is no route to prevent all bad things (or even most) and people who say otherwise are generally selling you something.
That academics are failing worldwide due to overexposure to screens is the least surprising thing I can imagine.
Well, except for doing parental controls on your boomer parents TV, blocking Fox news. Thats a good usage of it. You're not going to defeat propaganda believability with boomers. So blocking is best bet.
Bam, lost.
What an odd viewpoint. "It's bad to use limit your children's access to the internet in any way, but trying to stop other adults from accessing things I deem to be wrong are good!"