14 ms·

Parental controls aren't for parents

• GaryBluto 9mo ago
  It says, on the Gabb app directory the author linked, "Communication with Strangers" in a warning bubble directly below the "GroupMe" listing title. Not to forget the giant box saying "However, some apps allow user-shared content or access to mature material. Apps enabling contact with strangers also pose risks. Families should discuss app usage regularly." right below the app search bar. 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/ https://gabb.com/app-guide/ [2] https://industrywired.com/gaming/how-to-set-up-parental-controls-on-nintendo-switch-step-by-step-guide-9725306 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.
  • whythough1234 9mo ago
    Beasthacker is a hilarious identity to assume for someone so keen on using tech that does the parenting for them.
    • rolymath 9mo ago
      Hardly a comment worth singing up to HN to post.
      • whythough1234 9mo ago
        All of your comments are gold and worth signing up to post. You’re an intellectual no one can touch. Oooh look at you and your comment worthiness.
        • rolymath 9mo ago
          Womp womp
• whythough1234 9mo ago
  [dead]
• zaphar 9mo ago
  I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop. It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
  • GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
    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.
    • zaphar 9mo ago
      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.
  • miroljub 9mo ago
    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.
    • zaphar 9mo ago
      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.
• adeelk93 9mo ago
  Your son is talking to his friends in this book chat, and playing Minecraft with them. How do other parents go about governing this? 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.
  • whythough1234 9mo ago
    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.
  • epiccoleman 9mo ago
    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.
    • lotsofpulp 9mo ago
      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.
      • epiccoleman 9mo ago
• GuestFAUniverse 9mo ago
  People who decide to implement such bad tech are probably childless, or so much into their company, instead of their family, that they barely see their own children. The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
  • whythough1234 9mo ago
    You might be right they are distracted (mostly by capital). It’s a chicken and egg problem. You have to build the platform to stop the abuse on the platform. 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.
• zpeti 9mo ago
  Last time I checked disney plus doesn't have any option to hide specific shows. None. You either let your child watch everything, or nothing. At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...
  • GaryBluto 9mo ago
    You can block by age rating quite easily it seems. https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parental-controls 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?
    • juliangoldsmith 9mo ago
      Blocking by age rating takes out the majority of the classic Disney movies and shows. They only consider the newer CGI stuff "child-friendly".
    • zpeti 9mo ago
      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.
      • GaryBluto 9mo ago
        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.
    • 9mo ago
• jameskilton 9mo ago
  My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one. 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.
  • nicoburns 9mo ago
    My parents did the no phone until 16 rule, and it was awful. Completely cut me off socially.
    • Someone1234 9mo ago
      The "socially" part is the problem though. A lot of bullying occurs via those social media platforms that teenagers are using.
      • squigz 9mo ago
        A lot of bullying occurs in any environment teenagers exist en masse.
        • Someone1234 9mo ago
          Right; which is why allowing teenagers to be safe at home instead of exposed to it 24/7 is a smart choice.
          • squigz 9mo ago
            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.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• kotaKat 9mo ago
  > ...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. 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.
  • yunnpp 9mo ago
    And remember that this is the brand historically known for curating its game library.
• losthobbies 9mo ago
  The Roblox ones are a bit of a minefield too. 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
  • AdamN 9mo ago
    Roblox is hostile to these controls - best not to even enter the ecosystem.
    • f1shy 9mo ago
      Ideally (in the broad sense, meaning not realistic) is to not enter any “ecosystem”. But yeah… easier said than done.
    • hackable_sand 9mo ago
      It is strange to deny children this reality and then expect them to participate in capitalism.
• Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  The issues with the Nintendo Switch are, I think, just Nintendo being perennially bad at anything involving the internet. Remember Friend Codes? 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.
  • Macha 9mo ago
    > 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.
  • floundy 9mo ago
    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.
    • Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
      ...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.
      • floundy 9mo ago
        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.
• datajanko 9mo ago
  I'm stuck with my son not able to play minecraft from his nintendo account anymore though it used to work. I'm just getting an unhelpful error message and all permissions should be enough. Parental control is a joke. Deezer has kids accounts but you can just switch to another account. Spotify kids was a joke when I used it, poor discoverability, poor cataloge specifically if you care about childrens audio books. 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.
  • alasdairking 9mo ago
    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.
    • awakeasleep 9mo ago
      God that would be sweet. Especially if it was controlled at the OS level.
    • datajanko 9mo ago
      Thanks for the hint, but wasn't able to make it work yet.
• spicyusername 9mo ago
  This is such a sore spot for me. 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.
  • veonik 9mo ago
    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.
    • spicyusername 9mo ago
      I'll have to look into that, thanks
    • junto 9mo ago
      I’m continually impressed by my 12 year old son’s ability to get around those restrictions. He recently got around his time limit with Brawl Stars by having his friends sending him Brawl Stars view links via WhatsApp. This opens links using Safari’s underlying engine (SFSafariViewController), which does not get considered by the safari app time block.
  • jopsen 9mo ago
    As a kid I always hated it when parents/schools locked things down. Getting free of the parental controls becomes a game. 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.
• hnlmorg 9mo ago
  I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article. 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.
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    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.
    • mjg2 9mo ago
      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.
      • mothballed 9mo ago
        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.
• dosman33 9mo ago
  It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents. 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.
  • immibis 9mo ago
    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"
    • squigz 9mo ago
      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.
      • cindyllm 9mo ago
        [dead]
      • watwut 9mo ago
        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.
        • istjohn 9mo ago
          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-time-with-their-kids-than-moms-and-dads-did-50-years-ago/ https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...
• epiccoleman 9mo ago
  I identify with so much of what's in this article - especially the rage that has the author giving serious, coldblooded thought to just destroying the Switch. 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.
• 123sereusername 9mo ago
  [dead]
• krosaen 9mo ago
  Assuming you go down the path of allowing online anything, seems like, after doing your best with parental controls, the most effective thing is time boxing screen usage. Only so much can happen in, say, 2-3 30 minute sessions throughout the day, and the chances of a kid deciding to blow their precious minutes responding to some random person seems much lower than if bored and checking messages idly. Being nearby during a healthy sample of sessions to have a pulse on what's going on helps too - usually pretty obvious what they are doing. 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).
  • Descon 9mo ago
    neil.fun is porn ads neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
    • antonymoose 9mo ago
      Well that’s a bit ironic in regards to the pro-Parental Controls argument. Pornography is just a typo away…
    • krosaen 9mo ago
      Ha whoops. But yes, the ads on the neal site I meant to link to had the aforementioned problem
• jonathaneunice 9mo ago
  The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect. > 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!
  • f1shy 9mo ago
    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.
• atoav 9mo ago
  When I grew up my parents literally had no understanding of what the internet was, nor what I was doing on it. That wasn't a problem because all the rest of the upbringing they did prepared me well to handle every situation I encountered there. There approach was to let me and my brothers learn early how to judge situations and risk ourselves and trusted us to set those boundaries ourselves. 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.
  • weli 9mo ago
    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.
• kgwxd 9mo ago
  My 17 yo, and me, are still suffering for poor account choices I made when he was young. My 10 yo will only ever have to remember his birth year is the same as mine when asked in regards to any of his accounts created by me.
• lucumo 9mo ago
  Family Link is kind of funny like that as well. As a parent you can limit which apps your child can use, and even how long they can use them. My child is above the age we can monitor their every move, but they're below the age where we can trust they won't spend all day playing games when they need to study. So that feature is nice. 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.
  • mfld 9mo ago
    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.
• fn-mote 9mo ago
  Dear All, 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.
  • darkwater 9mo ago
    > 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.
  • sneak 9mo ago
    Why would a 15 year old warrant a mobile phone, much less an unrestricted one?
    • LanceH 9mo ago
• tolerance 9mo ago
  This was a tough read. On one end I want to hold this parent accountable...and he should be held accountable for any negligence on his part. As noted, Gabb does indicate that GroupMe facilitates communication with strangers. Because, well, it’s a messaging app like any other. 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.
• martin-t 9mo ago
  I don't mean to sound like the stereotypical "I did X and turned out fine" but... 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? --- 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?
  • immibis 9mo ago
    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.
  • eYrKEC2 9mo ago
    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.
  • 9mo ago
• alembic_fumes 9mo ago
  This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connection. 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?
  • TimTheTinker 9mo ago
    Europeans have trouble understanding in part because social trust is still high in many parts of Europe due to regional monoculturalism.
    • logicchains 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • krapp 9mo ago
        Why did you edit out the part about being "as racist as they come?" Come now, stand behind your principles.
        • jjulius 9mo ago
          >Come now, stand behind your principles. Are we 100% sure that the edit wasn't a result of a reevaluation of "principles"?
        • 9mo ago
• alexpotato 9mo ago
  Of all of the uses for AI/LLMs, setting parental controls feels like it would be such a massive net win for everyone involved. 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 ")
  • knallfrosch 9mo ago
    > 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
• voidUpdate 9mo ago
  > " and no easy way to make this thing function like an old-school Game Boy and just let a kid have fun with a game cartridge" Have you considered buying them an old-school gameboy?
• singpolyma3 9mo ago
  Controls can never replace parenting, no matter how good they make them.
• jdlyga 9mo ago
  If you don't want your kid to go online, don't buy them a Nintendo Switch Online membership. Or give them a handheld like a Miyoo Mini without WiFi.
• sneak 9mo ago
  This post makes it clear to me that you should not be giving devices such as the Switch to children.
• 1970-01-01 9mo ago
  The issue is, and always will be, 3rd party trust. You cannot assume your child is safe using XYZ until you thoroughly audit the app/game/device and enumerate all their loopholes, plug-ins, and rushed updates. The sensical method would be a device-wide deny all firewall rule, where no TCP connection is allowed in or out without explicit parental consent. E.g. Alice wants to chat with Bob via chatmonkey. Approve this one time connection? Good luck finding anything on the market that supports and enforces this very sane level of parental control.
  • eYrKEC2 9mo ago
    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.
• petermcneeley 9mo ago
  What was the punishment for the 12 year old? This will tell us everything we need to know about this story.
  • artyom 9mo ago
    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.
    • polotics 9mo ago
      Kids make mistakes. You do not want predators to use the threat of your punishment as a lever on your kid.
      • petermcneeley 9mo ago
        If you apply this concept broadly you will see this isnt a great philosophy.
      • artyom 9mo ago
        You can't control or decide what predators will do. And very likely won't be able to imagine the extent of every single of their convoluted predatory practices by yourself. 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.
    • ceayo 9mo ago
      What I believe the author did was instead of teaching their child that they may not talk to strangers, they believed there just is a magic button to have these strangers not exist.
      • artyom 9mo ago
• mystraline 9mo ago
  Or instead of turning parental controls on, instead teach your children how to identify bad stuff online. That way, they can catch people (peers OR adults) doing or asking really bad stuff. And teaching also has great benefits of lasting a lifetime. 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.
  • knallfrosch 9mo ago
    "I'm a cute girl of your age. Here are some nudes. Wanna send me some too?" Bam, lost.
  • GaryBluto 9mo ago
    > 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. 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!"
• bryan_w 9mo ago
  One thing you can do: glue the device into a dock, hook it up to the family TV then set the expectations that they can only use it when an adult is around (or take the power adaptor when you leave if you need to be strict about it). But the author is right, it should be easy to set appropriate limits out of the box.
• mjg2 9mo ago
  This HN post fits into the category of "Pithy blog title with casually anecdotal content." 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."
  • knallfrosch 9mo ago
    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.
    • Rohansi 9mo ago
      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.
      • ndriscoll 9mo ago
        They're called retro handhelds and you can get them for ~$30-40 at the low end, which can apparently run up through Playstation 1. In the $200-300 range (so still less than a Switch 2), you can apparently run up through Switch and maybe PS3.
        • 9mo ago
• hosh 9mo ago
  The author of article seems under the impression that parental controls allows parents to stop having to assess risk for themselves.
  • sjducb 9mo ago
    The problem is that most parents are not competent to assess the risk. The environment is different to the one we grew up in.
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  > A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." 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.
• mrbluecoat 9mo ago
  I completely empathize with the author. I had that same reaction years ago when I discovered strangers were sending unsolicited pictures to my nine year old through DuoLingo! Made me sick.
• BeetleB 9mo ago
  Just recently did this with XBox. 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.
  • rsync 9mo ago
    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.
    • BeetleB 9mo ago
      Well, the sale was to me. The kid came later. :-)
    • like_any_other 9mo ago
      A console is a computer controlled by a corporation. No other result could be expected.
      • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        • cwillu 9mo ago
          A solution that works for nerd parents can be sold by those nerd parents to non-nerd parents if the platform wasn't specifically designed to prevent it. Open hardware and free software is not about nerds.
        • like_any_other 9mo ago
          > Let’s not make this into a nerd culture war thing about, what? I'm not making it into anything, I'm just identifying the root cause.
• lacoolj 9mo ago
  Reading this reminds me how much parenting must suck in 2026.
• pwarner 9mo ago
  Leaving a link to Common Sense Media which has been helpful for me to understand some of these new fangled things I don't use... https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ https://www.commonsensemedia.org/
• artyom 9mo ago
  The comment section seems to be divided between "don't police your children" and "absolutely police everything your children do". 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.
  • knallfrosch 9mo ago
    There's just no market for parental controls. > I want to limit time spent > I want to limit money spent > After 8 years it's an adult account anyway (10 -> 18)
    • artyom 9mo ago
      That's correct. The current state of parental controls is compliance (the option exists somewhere, good luck finding it, maybe it even works), not usefulness.
  • ceayo 9mo ago
    > yet for the remaining 20% you have to be there. Shouldn't you trust your children, to come to you in that 20%?
    • artyom 9mo ago
      How they will identify that 20% if the previous comment was referring to them actually not being able (yet) to understand it?
• badc0ffee 9mo ago
  I went through some of this myself. > 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).
• maerF0x0 9mo ago
  Parental controls aren't a good substitution for awareness, deep meaningful connection with your child, giving them a rich and fulfilling offline life, teaching them how to navigate dangers rather than isolating them from reality. 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/0375760288/ https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375...
• selectively 9mo ago
  The Gabb thing is the fault of the parent. 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?
• sowbug 9mo ago
  It's easy to say "oh, this is just enterprise controls, and your family is an enterprise." 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.
  • eddythompson80 9mo ago
    On the other hand it’s easy to say “just give me enterprise level controls but in an easy and intuitive interface” 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.
    • sowbug 9mo ago
      I agree. There was a while when I, the sweet summer child that I am, hoped that the late 90s-early 00s crop of founders would start families of their own and naturally steer their companies toward the family-as-enterprise-but-actually-usable model. I'm still waiting.
• squibonpig 9mo ago
  My overall response with this stuff is to think about the lax parenting typical in the 80s or so and compare it. Kids much younger were allowed to run amok outside, and crime rates are much lower today. Are the same instincts that perhaps rightly perhaps wrongly compel people to keep a closer eye on their kids in the real world being applied to the digital one?
• dizlexic 9mo ago
  It's almost like connected infrastructure is inherently unsafe. I stand by "your kid, your problem". I don't want any kid to be "unsafe", but commonsense went out the window when schools started to require the internet. 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.
• swivelmaster 9mo ago
  Here's what I think is happening: 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.
  • stackskipton 9mo ago
    No, I think CEO mandate goes "Build parental controls" and PMs all shake their heads and go "No problem". It hits the developers, they go Too long to do it properly and PM goes "Nah, we just prefer MVP only so we can say we have it and move on". it's also never really touched again so as features get added on, Parental Controls is poorly thought about last minute implementation. To fix this, it's going to have to be legislation so financial incentives are present.
• Bratmon 9mo ago
  > And when I finally—finally—tried to test online play, Minecraft told me I would need to loosen the parental controls (it did not say which) and create a Nintendo Switch Online account for my son. 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
• chaostheory 9mo ago
  Going on a tangent, didn’t realize until recently that Quora has publicly accessible porn aka adult content that anyone can view without an account.
• hollow-moe 9mo ago
  When the fix is to buy a SteamDeck and emulate switch
• kdkirsch 9mo ago
  Seems like a trusted non-profit should spearhead a working group to come up with clear requirements and recommendations. This parental control spec would be clear for developers to implement instead of each team guessing what should and should not be allowed. This could then be 3rd party verified and parents could rest a little easier. (All of the above has probably been tried in previous instantiations of the Matrix.)
• Mathnerd314 9mo ago
  I'm wondering if a firewall is a solution here. Don't mess around with the stupid device settings. Just block the Xbox store, and then presumably Minecraft uses different server IPs, so you can let those through.
• camhart 9mo ago
  The biggest trap parents fall into is they buy devices assuming there will be ways to enforce parental controls on them. The reality is it's impossible to do on many devices, and extremely difficult to get right on the remaining ones. Many of the platforms offering "parental controls" just do lip service and provide a false sense of security.
• bmandale 9mo ago
  You could, I dunno, trust your son, communicate with him, and let him make decisions for himself? If instead of wasting all your time on scam products trying to isolate him from the world, you'd spent the same time teaching him to navigate the world, you wouldn't have had any problems, and he would be better prepared for adult life when he doesn't have someone breathing down his shoulder. Just my 2c.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• rsanek 9mo ago
  I see folks saying no access to phones until 16, and others arguing how that will absolutely crush a kid's ability to do stuff socially. Why not just have a 'home' phone? you can use the phone in shared spaces at home, but cannot take it into your room or go to school with it.
  • pzo 9mo ago
    unless you send your child to private school where all parents enforce such rule, your kid (that is 12+ year old) is going to be ostracize by majority of peers that have such phone. This is completely different environment comparing to times when we were growing up.
    • hackable_sand 9mo ago
      It's the same environment
      • pzo 9mo ago
        by environment I mean back then we didn't have smartphones, social media, internet.
        • hackable_sand 9mo ago
          It's the same environment without the tech.
  • missizii 9mo ago
    We are a “low screen” homeschooling family. We have a babysitting phone for my daughters to take to babysitting jobs and a landline. At our local pool in the summer, my kids meet neighborhood kids, exchange numbers, but my kids say, “it’s a landline, no texting.” The response: “You just have a landline?!? You can’t text?!?” in a tone of disgust. Every time. Fortunately, we have a community of homeschooling & religious community friends who are raising their kids similarly. But every time a kid’s friend gets a cellphone, texting becomes the medium of socialization, and they drop us. My kids will be the 1% of their generation who can talk on the phone.
• grugagag 9mo ago
  I got my son a Miyoo mini, a cheap but decent emulator. I had zero headaches and was able to curate the game list as I thought fit. There’s no online (even thouh the device has wifi) for now and worked as expected, kid plays, gets bored and lets the device down. I will not let my kid play games online because that’s a too big of a risk to addiction or priming for this later. Minecraft has potential for addiction. 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.
  • philips 9mo ago
    Me too! I used the "Five Game Handheld" setup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2rMB5z9dQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2rMB5z9dQw
    • grugagag 9mo ago
      Sounds good. I have about 250 favourite games though.
• SOTGO 9mo ago
  Not to avoid the point of the article, but GroupMe is sometimes used for academic purposes. In the 2010s I used it in school for clubs, sports, and group activities, so that may be why it wasn't blocked.
• ceayo 9mo ago
  I am opposed to the whole concept of these "parental controls". Instead of a bond of trust, between a parent and their child, the surveillance economy has gave us the ability to experience the top of the surveillance pyramid ourselves. As Google and Meta spy on the world, we spy on little Timmy. In fact, you are a bad parent if you don't spy on little Timmy. I really can't wrap my head around how asking "how was your day" has evolved into "I saw on your GPS tracker you walked a different route to school today... Do you have something to tell me?" If you look at everyone who is now joining the work force and all, the coming generations, you'll see the thing they lack most is independence.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • a_shoeboy 9mo ago
    You obviously don't have kids. You can't trust a child's judgement because they don't have the experience to exercise good judgement. Your job as a parent is to look out for them while helping them develop.
    • ceayo 9mo ago
      > You can't trust a child's judgement because they don't have the experience to exercise good judgement. How can a child get any experience, if they are only ever exposed to perfect make-believe fairyland?
• philips 9mo ago
  I have been using (and contributing to) on an open source project called Zaparoo[1] that lets my kids (5-8) play retro games, watch videos, and listen to music using NFC cards. The whole thing runs on a Raspberry Pi running Batocera[2]. I program the cards using the mobile app and my kids like cutting and pasting the cover art on the cards. 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 https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids [1]: https://zaparoo.org https://zaparoo.org [2]: https://batocera.org https://batocera.org
  • sjducb 9mo ago
    I’ve set up a gaming raspberry pi for mine too. I suspect it only works for little kids. Someday they’ll realise that supertux isn’t cool
• MarkusWandel 9mo ago
  But profits!
• alphazard 9mo ago
  It seems like the industry is going to be forced to rediscover and implement capability based security models and process isolation by consumer demand. 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.
• theoriginaldave 9mo ago
  I think it's an abdication of parental responsibility to let a child use Internet-connected devices without adult supervision. 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.
• Desafinado 9mo ago
  Welcome to parenthood in 2026. I can't walk into a Chapters or book fair with my kid without the tentacles of the game industry reaching him. That academics are failing worldwide due to overexposure to screens is the least surprising thing I can imagine.
• aidenn0 9mo ago
  Another issue is how many apps now seem to have "chat with strangers" features built in to them.
• faitswulff 9mo ago
  While we're on the topic, our school-issued Chromebooks allow unfettered access to YouTube. Yes, some of it is educational, but the kids can just click on the next video until they get what they want. Very convenient for you, Google Ads.
• Thorentis 9mo ago
  Im also coming to the conclusion that video game consoles (and smartphones, and ipads,...) are not for children.
• PufPufPuf 9mo ago
  What if we teach children how to navigate the real world, instead of the digital equivalent of "baby proofing the house"? You don't lock away the kitchen knives from a 12 year old, you teach them how to use them safely.
• vintermann 9mo ago
  Yes, parental controls are probably for corporations. So they can say they did something and it's not their fault. 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.
• up-n-atom 9mo ago
  I have a wonderful collection of retro consoles and games that I let my nephews play when I babysit without much worry or trouble. Sure some of it is considered obscene, offensive, gory for today’s standard, but I can definitively say the internet and connected games are far worse but let the modern parent be fooled. 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.
• mmmBacon 9mo ago
  Parental controls are all about illusion of control. In reality the kids all know how to get around them. Try just try to block Gmail. It’s impossible. Gmail is the gateway to kids getting on services they aren’t supposed to be on. 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.
• chrisked 8mo ago
  No problem in giving a kid access to technology early. The trick is keep a ratio of 10:1 for produce/create vs consume.