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Comment by Hugsbox | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.

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My 7 year old came home crying the other day because every single person in her class has a phone except her.

I can't imagine taking it away from my older kids (14,11). They use it to chat with friends and play games with them, do homework together, make plans and share common experiences and videos.

It's not as simple as you think. You have no idea how shitty screentime is how much of a cat and mouse game it is. It's pretty easy with a two year old, you just wait and see though...

I'm reminded of a statistic I read. 75% of the time you will spend with your child happens by age 12. I think I would eschew the phones until 13, purely because I'd never get that time back. Once they're adolecents and "too cool" to hang out with parents anymore, then fine, here's your phone, don't kill yourself.

Anyway, let's not assume everyone is a parent and ruin the whole online world with rules to "protect the children" made by the same people that never arrested any Epstein clients. We know they're not doing it to protect children. Let's not even pretend they are.

That only works if the rest of the parents in your neighborhood also do it. Otherwise your kid won't be in group chats, will miss events.

I live in Israel where kids are given a phone at an extremely young age (partially because of the security situation). Teachers give homework over WhatsApp, schools announce changes to the schedule, etc.

What I'm saying is it's almost not just up to you anymore, it really depends on your circumstances.

Co-working space coworker went once to a school to teach kids about online safety and such.

One of the exercises was to check out what you can and can't do with a locked-down smartphone. Several minutes later the kids figured out how to bypass parental controls using ChatGPT and the method spread like wildfire.

I recall defying my father's orders regularly. Teenagers who set their mind to something can be amazingly persistent. Most parents don't have the sort of resources required to control every aspect of their child's life like that. It's also harmful in the long run.

"If I see you on social media, I'm grounding you for two weeks with no phone."

You can't fix a behavior issue with tech, just like you can't fix your computer by being good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444567

Not just teens. If you are overly strict, this stuff will begin in elementary school.

Uh-huh. For me, that meant that I didn't do something At Home, and was pretty much unsupervised other places. My mother was strict at a time when a lot of kids had freedom. I couldn't do much that other kids did. When I could, I had to jump through hoops.

I lied to my mother a lot. My mother still isn't in the loop with my life - I'm in my late 40s now. It would have been much better to have been able to talk to my parents honestly about stuff I went through. It would have been much better to talk to me about things and get honest information about dangers.

I relate to this quite a lot, to be honest. There has to be some happy medium somewhere, though.

The happy middle is you not using social media, or smartphones for that matter, in front of them. Kids scrutinize everything you say and do and will notice the discrepancy.

My parents didn't watch scary movies, eat hard candy, have sex, wander the area cornfields without supervision, or smoke pot in front of me, yet I still did it. (these were at different ages, of course)

Not doing something isn't enough. If your kids know about something, it isn't always going to matter what you do. If I were smart enough to know different folks did different things, I'm guessing other children are as well.

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