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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

And yet whenever the idea of changing this stuff at a societal level comes up, HN is filled with thought-deleting cries of "parents just need to be more responsible"

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Yeah -- alongside cries of "why isn't anyone having children anymore?"

Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems. What we don't need is more bandaids that make it appear as if something is being done.

Parents are already plenty responsible. Societal expectation on parents are sky high and ever increasing. Meanwhile, the same people refuse to accept anything that would make parental responsibility easier.

A supporting citation:

> 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...

1-2 hours a day? That does seem sky-high...

It is double of what they spent in 1965 for moms. It is actually quite a huge chunk of a day, enough to make parents isolated and overworked.

And yes, expectations on parents are sky high compared to before. From small stuff to large stuff.

The thing is that parents need to raise functioning adults.

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.

> Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems.

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.

>My generation grew up to be generally fine people,

[Look at current voters in the US]

Ya sure about that?

Yes. Even Harris, as unpopular as it gets with the youth (the whole being a cop thing), still got 13% more than Trump did [1].

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-...

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