Well, this is the company that builds Teams.

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.

I should guess it is about liability more than anything else. They want to advertise and sell to children, but they don't want to be taken to court about it. Makes a tonne of sense from a profit perspective, especially as people under ~25 years of age are more susceptible to impulsivity and addiction due to the developing prefrontal cortex. From a sales perspective, the younger the better (as any parent can confirm).

I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister.

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.

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"

Exactly

>>"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.

These are not mistakes.

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.

Encourage voice chat, so you can hear what they are saying too :)

When I was a kid, my Sega Genesis was connected to the TV in my parents bedroom. It made it impossible to play without their knowledge or when they were asleep.

This is good advice.

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.

> I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.

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.

I agree with you so much. Great parenting is education, not restriction. I don't want my kid to not talk to strangers because I told him its something bad that you shouldn't do. He won't talk to strangers because he understands the implications and what can happen.

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.

You’re getting downvoted but I agree that this person has a communication problem with their child. And it isn’t because the kid figured out how to use the device.

> Hey Gemini, I don't want my kid to chat with strangers on the internet. He needs to be online to play Fortnite on his Switch. How do I do this?

Seems simple enough to me

Not sure about Google but Apple has per-app time limits, per-app type time limits, overall screen time limits, time of day limits, parental review before app install, parental review before purchases can be made, etc. I've found it to be quite robust in managing my kids' access to the internet.

"I'm a cute girl of your age. Here are some nudes. Wanna send me some too?"

Bam, lost.

I'm kind of with you on this one. 12yo is old enough to understand the rules (assuming they were clearly set) and if he/she was willingly communicating with a stranger, that phone should get the hammer with no replacement whatsoever. I've seen this done, it works.

I feel sorry for your daughter. 16 was very late to get one as far back as the late 90s - I was very glad to get one at 14 as it meant I wasn’t quite such a weirdo outcast.

To concur, the principle with guarding your children is the same as the principle of guarding your software systems.

Defense in depth. Multiple layers. Calender reminders to audit devices, usage, and look at router logs. Check in with your kids.

Parental controls and accessibility both suffer from the fact that they are good features to add but fundamentally do not drive revenue. They only exist in the average as much as is required by regulation.

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.

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

And then, we pretend we are surprised why the majority of adults don't care about privacy.

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.

That's essentially the rule in our house. No screens not visible to other members of the family.

In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.

Congratulations that you had that luxury.

Sounds barely realistic, when school are using iPads, education is one URL away from entertainment crack and parental controls on iOS are a joke.

Advice like this only works for specific age ranges.

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.

Try the XBox app on your phone, I managed to find settings there once that unlocked Minecraft.

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.

Nintendo really has no incentive to improve. They make money hand over fist selling half-baked titles to their combined market of actual undiscerning children, and rabid fanboy manchildren who will praise any first party Nintendo title as a 10/10 every single time.

Do you have kids? I'm guessing you don't, because the answer is pretty obvious to those of us who do - the vast majority of parents seem to give not one single fuck about what their kids do with technology. I've known families who have a cell phone - a dedicated device - for their four year old.

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.

A GameBoy would have been cheaper, offline and worked without an account. Yet the author chose to spend his money on the Switch2.

What's the market to learn from this? You're saying one thing but voting with your wallet.

Roblox is hostile to these controls - best not to even enter the ecosystem.

My parents did the no phone until 16 rule, and it was awful. Completely cut me off socially.

> My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.

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.

16 is too late. You can’t teach your kids good maturity with communication devices through abstinence. You just have to watch what they do online. Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.

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.

I would easily believe that Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., explicitly staff these teams with childless adults.

Beasthacker is a hilarious identity to assume for someone so keen on using tech that does the parenting for them.

Yes, this parent seems to assume that all parents want the same restrictions. The reason that managing this stuff is complicated is that you actually have to think about what restrictions you want (if any), understand the implications, and then set options to achieve those restrictions. A surprising number of people aren’t willing to do that! They would rather tell companies “parent my children correctly” and then sue as soon as the company’s vision of “safety” doesn’t line up with their own.

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.

Generally I worry about online gaming.

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.

Part of the point is that you cannot use it without it being online. This is a big difference between the Switch and Switch 2.

Not a child, but I have a Switch myself and I held off for a long time getting a membership. Of course you can do it, but the Switch will put up lots of passive aggressive roadblocks where it will let you know that you could use this additional feature in the game now if you just had a membership.

There are also unreasonable restrictions, like not being able to play user-created maps in Mario Maker unless you have a membership.

I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong.

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.

Similarly, the Play Store cannot be limited and so for a kid it's easy to spend time on promotional app videos there. So the app limits are mostly useless, since you have to fully lock the phone to disable this.

Parent: All I want is an off switch!

HN: No no no let me stop you right there

The main point of childhood is to develop a solid basic humanity with good habits and a good moral compass. That means moral, intellectual, spiritual, and physical development. Good parenting and a good social environment support these. As such, these goods should be prioritized.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.

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.

and I was groomed and raped at age 13 because I had unfettered access to AOL chat rooms

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.

Why are you addressing HN like a headmaster addressing schoolchildren?

You shouldn't constantly be hovering over your kids. Still, you don't want them to get in serious trouble. As a parent, you can curate the options they have without knowing exactly what they are doing. You can fill bookshelves with appropriate books, and if you see them reading on the couch, you don't need to know exactly what they're reading. Some people also are able to control where they live, what schools their kids go to, what friends you invite over to your house, etc.

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.

Because the situation is not symmetrical. The corporations and strangers have direct access to the child’s online presence and are constantly monitoring and hovering over them. If the corporations don’t want to lose that constant access then the parents react by being vigilant on their end. It _is_ the social contract set by the corporations.

While this is a sound theoritical advice, the real world has changed a lot. Parents and elder siblings are not the only people kids interact with. For every parent mindful of dangers of unsupervised internet access, there are many parents who give unrestricted access to tiktok (and rest of the internet) because everyone other person does that, and then kids share.

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.

Meanwhile in the EU: growing effort to simply outright ban social media for under-16s.

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.

> to a particularly American problem

The Internet and mobile phones are not a particularly American problem. They’re literally everywhere.

Particularly American? What does that mean? That parents in other countries are better than us? That they have more time, more know how, more wisdom? Sorry but that's stupid and insulting, which I suspect was your intent.

Some kids only need the honor system, but others, especially younger ones, need hard restrictions. If the parent is reasonable and the kid grows up smart, they’ll be thankful later, which is why kids also get restricted offline.

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).

Reminds me when Facebook added “privacy” controls, that were virtually impossible to find, difficult to understand, and confusing to give a false sense of security.

I think the difference is that the parents of today are _you_. _They_ grew up with unrestricted internet access, because their parents didn't.

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.

> Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

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.

The internet has changed incredibly in the last two decades, and has almost nothing in common with the internet of two decades ago. Predators of all varieties are everywhere; many of them are billion-dollar companies. Scams are everywhere.

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.

Well, the sale was to me. The kid came later. :-)

neil.fun is porn ads

neal.fun is what I think you meant to link

I agree. As a parent it feels hard to sympathize with someone who outsourced their child’s app usage selection to another company and didn’t even bother to check what apps were allowed first. I visited the Gabb site they linked to and “Communication with strangers” is clearly listed as one of the tags they put on apps allowed on the phone. You’re supposed to review them as a parent, not just assume that 100% of the nearly 1000 apps they allow are exactly to your preferences.

The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends.

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.

With due respect, this comment conveys a position of privilege and surviver's bias. I, like you, eschewed online rules as a minor and I luckily benefitted from this time in my expertise. I was lucky. I didn't run into predators when using TF2, Runescape, or MySpace, but that doesn't mean the threat wasn't validated on with persons (children at the time) that fell through the cracks.

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.

Why would a 15 year old warrant a mobile phone, much less an unrestricted one?

Because I want a device for my kids to play games.

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!

Europeans have trouble understanding in part because social trust is still high in many parts of Europe due to regional monoculturalism.

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.

> When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.

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?"

You can block by age rating quite easily it seems.

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?

Privacy is a privilege granted relative to age and maturity.

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.

A five year old is not prepared to engage online with privacy. They have not had the necessary training yet. They will not get that training unless you are there to show them how to negotiate that world. They will not magically learn how to protect themselves if you just leave them to figure it out themselves.

I was never controlled in any way that may remotely violate my privacy. In fact, glad that nothing ever happened to me, because it could have. But for a long time I was not worried about my online visibility…

I do not agree at all with this conclusion.

I'm sorry you feel like it's out of reach of so many. We definitely had to sacrifice a number of things to make it happen. It's not like it was necessarily easy. Unless you are in the unfortunate position of being an only parent this can be an area where you have choice. You can:

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.

God that would be sweet. Especially if it was controlled at the OS level.

I agree, the point of making usage monitored early on is so that you can train your child in what to do when they encounter stuff online. As that training has occured then you can begin to loosen the restriction and give them more freedom. This is the job of parenting. You are teaching your child how to safely and productively engage with the world and the younger they are the more of your time and attention this requires. If you don't teach them someone else might and that lesson may haunt them for the rest of their life.

I frankly would prefer just not gaming at all, than being ashamed in front of all my friends.

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.

I agree with you but you can't just go out and buy a Gameboy anymore. And gaming is more of a social activity now where you'll need internet access.

Ideally (in the broad sense, meaning not realistic) is to not enter any “ecosystem”.

But yeah… easier said than done.

This is going to show how naive I am. Because I am middle aged, do not have a cell phone, and still to this day just show up at people's houses unannounced if I want a social experience.

This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.

My daughters are younger than that, but A lot of the neighbor girls in who are in that age range got apple watches before phones. Which kind of makes sense, because it allows them to text, but keeps them off of apps and such.

It's so bizarre to me that in "The Land of the Free", 18 year olds, who are considered old enough to go to war, are not allowed to drink. Especially because this isn't some archaic law from the 18th or 19th centuries but instead from 1984 and only came about after the federal government withheld funds to force the states' hands over a period of 4 years.

So no smartphones?

...I mean. I would argue the reason they make money hand over fist is because (most!) of their games aren't half baked, at all.

There is enough general public concern about minors having access to online pornography that jurisdictions all over the world are passing age restrictions but I think the HN discussion is one sided.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_narcissism

The "socially" part is the problem though. A lot of bullying occurs via those social media platforms that teenagers are using.

My kids (4 and 6) have a "dedictated" iPhone, a iPad with the pencil, and a MacBook Air. But they were just hand me downs. They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.

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.

Yeah I’m pretty sure invading your kids privacy like that is setting you up for worse trouble.

> Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.

Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.

Given how easy it is for my 13yo daughter to get around screen time restrictions on iOS in ways I wouldn't believe are possible I'm not sure these people are even adults.

Hardly a comment worth singing up to HN to post.

Well that’s a bit ironic in regards to the pro-Parental Controls argument. Pornography is just a typo away…

Yes, this is exactly the distinction I was struggling to articulate.

“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

My daughter has always used a normal low end Android phone with the default parental controls. She only installs what I whitelist. It's really not that much effort.

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?

Ha whoops. But yes, the ads on the neal site I meant to link to had the aforementioned problem

While I agree that being this age doesn’t automatically warrant having a smartphone, any kid who has an allowance can buy a bargain-basement Android phone to use over wifi. And smartphones are very concealable.

(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.

Cause practically speaking, school requires that. They will pointificate about devices, but simultaneously create rules that make them necessary.

Not having a phone will most likely make your child a social pariah.

They MIGHT be one of the few hyper-social ones that thrives despite being left out of online circles but they are the exception.

"Horrific betrayal..."

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.

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.

Allow me to give my anecdotal experience.

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.

Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

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.

Blocking by age rating takes out the majority of the classic Disney movies and shows. They only consider the newer CGI stuff "child-friendly".

I was one of those kids. I got a 300 baud modem the year after Wargames came out. It was a whole different world.

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.

I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes.

The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.

> The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends [...] 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.

In reality, the whole "stranger danger" is way overblown and always has been. Most of the time, sexual predators are going to be either family or friends.

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.

By high school there is definitely an expectation that everyone has a phone. They will literally miss out on a normal method of communication between friends and classmates.

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.

If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.

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?

On a certain level, it’s also a question of different parenting philosophy.

> 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.

Gun ownership isn't a terrible example honestly. I would have been probably 8 or so when I was allowed to traipse around in the woods near my dad's house with a BB gun, following extensive safety teaching of course. We would go out in the yard and shoot a shotgun and a rifle around that same age. People are probably not careful enough with guns right now in America given the stats, but it's not at all unreasonable in a rural context for a relatively young kid to be trusted with use of a firearm, even for short unsupervised periods. The real thing that a parent has to do (beyond still waiting until an appropriate age) is to extensively drill in the safety habits and proper use and know their kid well enough to determine whether they're ready for that responsibility.

>social trust is still high in many parts of Europe due to regional monoculturalism

Online predators aren't a multiculturalism problem; an entirely white community is still capable of producing an abundance of paedophiles.

age rating is not how I would categorise shows.

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.

My daughter is 14. Still no phone. You can make this work.

Yep. Even 20 years ago, phones were basically necessary to have a social life in high school. It’s where everything got planned.

The issue isn't drinking; if the motor vehicle operator age was 21, then the drinking age could be 16. But it isn't.

I thought you could go into a store on post and buy alcohol at 18.

And they can have sex legally when they are 16. But oh noes if 2 16 year olds send nudes to each other. Then, somehow, is "child" sexual assault images.

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.

Neutered smartphone with zero internet access and apps locked down like North Korea.

We also lock up our alcohol, as many parents have chosen to do for generations.

Nope. More people should be like this.

Yeah, I think this is a sort of similar issue to the kind of thing I describe above, where parents of a certain generation / certain technical background might not be fully aware of the sorts of harm that can come in through technological channels.

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.

They're phoning it in, coasting on old IP and goodwill earned decades ago. Animal Crossing had less dialogue options than the Gamecube version that preceded it by two decades. Smash at mid-high levels is still plagued by lag switching cheaters. BOTW was okay, but clearly overrated by people who had never played any sort of open world game before. TOTK being lauded as a 10/10 (fine, 9.5/10 on MetaCritic) was laughable given how empty the game world was, how janky the construction mechanics were for those silly machines, and how boring and childish the puzzles were. I stopped playing Pokemon 15+ years ago but come on, the graphics of the Switch games looking worse than some of the DS editions...

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.

Social media is not the same thing as social communication.

It's true, and it can definitely be a problem. But I wasn't getting invited to in-person events because I wasn't contactable. Kids don't ring doorbells in 2025, they text people if they want to meet up.

If they're 10, tell them that literally anything they type into their device is being stored for parental review. No expectation of privacy.

Obviously, this'll have to change at around 16, but those conversations need to happen anyway.

A better way to frame this is supervised vs unsupervised access. And it depends on their age.

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.

Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.

Of course they do. You should be open and honest.

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 had a cell phone before my parents. Paid cash for a TracFone when I was 16 or 17 and used that to sell weed. Where there's a will, there's a way.

It's not a federal law, you can buy and drink alcohol at 18 in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico for instance, so definitely possible to drinking at 18 legally in the USA. I don't know if there is a federal drinking age but it's definitely not above 18.

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.

-------------

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...

A lot of bullying occurs in any environment teenagers exist en masse.

> They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.

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.

No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.

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.

My wife was right too. My kids ended up being unable to manage their device use at all, they developed seriously bad habits, lied and deceived extensively to gain access to devices, and repeatedly sacrificed relationships and trust for more screen time. There were years there where I thought surely they'd click with it and develop better habits, make better choices (with our guidance), and so on. Abstinence could be worse, right? Some exposure would be helpful and lead to useful conversations and so on.

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.

Specifically for Minecraft, Realms works for this: I subscribe, I allow my children and friends to access our instance via gamer tag.

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.

First, that statistic sources a study from 2000, a time when zero children had smartphones and approximately zero children played online games.

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.

Keep in mind, this study is only physical sexual abuse.

Internet has opened up an entire world of virtual sexual abuse.

This is just generally true even as an adult. A lot of social events used to start out on text threads in the early 2000's and then moved on to Facebook Calendar by the mid 2000's and then Instagram and I don't even know how it would work now. But if you wanted to be in any particular social group you probably had to deal with the icky features of all of these social media apps just to do that. We needed a public square for our little villages everywhere and instead we got a man screaming at clouds and occasionally handing out invitations.

First, I'm responding the more (politely) trivial remarks.

> 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.

Arguably this can increase the risk of death by suicide, quite a bit.

White covers a large varity of different cultures. Even something smaller like German covers many different cultures.

It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

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.

Sure, but do you understand that it's perfectly reasonable to be able to buy a toy gun and not have to explain gun safety to them?

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?

> 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.

Why did you edit out the part about being "as racist as they come?"

Come now, stand behind your principles.

Although it's a lot more effort, if you care a lot about specific things being shown to your children, you could set up your own media server.

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.

Heh. When I was in high school, cell phones and pagers were banned based on the assumption that only drug dealers could afford them.

It’s essentially a federal law - if a state wants to get full federal funding for highways, they have to have a law restricting alcohol purchase and public consumption to 21+. It’s from the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984.

and then they reset the settings regularly and you have to redo it.

Well written, and I agree with you on everything you wrote.

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.

Ah yeah, it's the parent's responsibility, the child's and probably the pet's as well, the only one who has no responsibility is the tech industry.

Laws disagree. Parents are at least in some cases legally and financially responsible for their children doings. Parental controls are necessary for children who don't want to or cannot control themselves regardless of the level of education they receive.

I would add that it's society's responsibility to handle a child's transgressions with grace and humility, and to try to remember what it means to be "tried as an adult." Forgiveness isn't easy.

> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

> 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.

Thank you. I couldn’t have said it better.

There is important truth in your post, yet you seem to miss the really important pieces that make this hard.

> 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.

A few thoughts:

- 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"!

>Come now, stand behind your principles.

Are we 100% sure that the edit wasn't a result of a reevaluation of "principles"?

> And there's physical limit to how much physical activity one can be doing

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 realised that I didn't need my racism credentials to argue that white people have no shortage of paedophiles.

Fun fact: in spite of only comprising about 60% of the US population, whites account for over 80% of federal child pornography offenders.

Right; which is why allowing teenagers to be safe at home instead of exposed to it 24/7 is a smart choice.

> 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.

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).

> No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.

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.

You were born in an era where the internet wasn't as addictive as it is nowadays.

> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

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.

You were loose with a gun at age 7?!

> (nor do either of the parents)

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.

Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.

Heroin is addictive. Physical compulsion is addiction. What you are talking about is not addiction. It shares some elements, but no one is breaking into cars so they can scroll Instagram.

Until the school assigns online homework, homework that takes 3 hours a night

Some kids grow up in families who hunt. It’s not super common but also isn’t unheard of.

Children are not wise compared to online predators, but they will notice when things are getting fishy. Maybe that's after they've made their first few silly mistakes (maybe they've given the predator their home address, several photographs, all their friends' contact details, and the one password they use for everything), but they will notice before anything seriously bad happens. But just because they'll notice, that doesn't mean they'll take an appropriate action; and it doesn't mean they won't be convinced that actually, it's fine. The child needs to know that they can come to you for advice, and that there will be no repercussions if the situation is benign, even if they've broken the rules: the concrete threat of (even mild) parental punishment for rule-breaking will be more salient than a mild situational suspicion.

"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.

Absolutely, I would also walk down the public roads also to get from one field to another, nobody said anything. It was quite normal in the rural Midwest. You'll probably find lots of true stories online as well about kids arriving to school and checking their rifle with the principal at the beginning of class and then getting them back at the end of the day.

One of my uncles was asked to stop bringing his rifle to highschool because him and one of the teachers kept talking about hunting in the parking lot and getting to class late. The principle felt they were likely to at least make it in the building on time if they weren't chatting in the parking lot about their rifles/hunts/etc.

People used to have an insane amount of freedom and things generally went better.

Yet in the broader sense online bullying targeting other teenagers is a commonly cited problem, including in incidents of teen suicide. "It didn't make it worse for me" doesn't counteract what we provably know is occurring[0][1][2].

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/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32017089/

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db471.htm

We did that stuff too in rural Washington. The vast vast majority of people don't mess with anyone, let alone children.

Check the gun with the principal?! No, you leave it on the gun rack in the back of the pickup, and lock the truck door like normal people at my high school. :-)

(Also rural Midwest, and a long time ago).

I was in Cub Scouts in the early 90s and got a Swiss Army knife. I thought it would be cool to show it off to the kids on the bus. It got confiscated by the principal and I was suspended for one day. I think I got off light. I can’t imagine what would happen these days.

Dang, seems like a completely different world than the one I live in. Honestly I would prefer it if we were able to teach our kids personal responsibility to this level, I actually believe people can be that mature by age 7 and you know whether a kid is a rule breaker or not by that point.

1 and 2 do not seem to suggest that cyberbullying is more harmful in this regard than other forms of bullying - and in fact only 3 seems to contrast these concepts at all.

> 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.