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by mschuster91 1236 days ago
> It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate.

Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany.

The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...

2 comments

> We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot.

Since then, though, multi-hundred-billion dollar corporations have arisen that employ vast quantities of employees (including psychologists) tasked with obtaining and keeping your attention on their content and the surrounding advertising empires.

It's not quite the same setup we had to deal with.

Yeah but "parental control" crap doesn't deal with any of that. It's all about preventing porn and LGBT content.
Modern "parental control" is highly customizable. We use it in our household to limit things like Reddit during homework time, set per-game limits so no one's sitting on Bejeweled for eight hours, etc. Not one of our restrictions covers LBGTQ+ content.
Time spent on screens is strongly correlated with worse mental health.

So limiting access is investing in mental health.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214874/

> After 1 h/day of use, more hours of daily screen time were associated with lower psychological well-being, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.