Comment by sschueller

You mean ‘safe devices’ that don't let hostile actors know everything I'm doing, right?

Where has a few decades of "safety" culture catering to the greater moron really brought us?

> we can and should both have good parents

but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.

Kids are not property of the parents. Because with property rights comes responsibility.

And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.

It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.

These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.

Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.

I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.

It helped that, at the time, most video was broadcast over the air and thus subject to FCC regulations relating to content, and that advertisers would pull funds from stations and networks that aired content that was too controversial. Other, non-regulated or less regulated (“adult”) content was for pay and the systems had child lockouts.

It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.

I agree with you, it takes a small friendly village (or at least a largeish multigenerational close family nearby at the lowest minimum).

But we are in western 21st century, people leave their places of birth for myriad of reasons, some better than others but all equally good for them, given its almost never easy to lose one's roots and just move on one's own.

I am in this category, we have 2 small kids and any family is at least 1000km away, the actually helpful good one more like 1500km (and no its not just a hop on some local planes, rather full day ordeal at minimum). No nanny. We see how kids and grandparents enjoy each other, grandparents have more... mental capacity? to teach them after our long day at work and so on.

But there are reasons we moved, its complex mix of leaving poor corrupted place with higher criminality where kids would struggle to achieve a good life via moral legal work and just good efforts. Not everybody has the luxury to come from background where the only difference is amount of money earned. So you give kids a better start and environment, while giving them much smaller set of role models and people who have time for them outside school.

At the end its our choices and our responsibility to raise them. No phones for a loooong time, and even after that some dumb nokia. They can screw up their lives on their own once adults, we won't contribute there even if it would be tremendously easier lifestyle.

I think this is the real problem, providers have no accountability. Rather than forcing everyone to give up their privacy we should force the providers to use a few basic labels, pornography, educational, etc, let parents actually choose what their kids see, and most importantly make them liable for crossing the line.

It’s ridiculous that schools are forcing young children to carry devices for educational work that will also happily serve up brainrot, video games, and porn — with the supposed solution that the parent needs to be watching over their shoulder 24/7. Let’s just give all the kids loaded guns too, and say if anything goes wrong it’s just bad parenting.

Can happen sometimes. I down voted the comment after reading only the first sentence but then corrected it to an upvote after reading the rest. Not sure if many people have an attention span long enough to do something like this.