[phatfish]

Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out.

But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.

[walkabout]

It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the world?) while basically every platform and vendor (of most any kind) except Apple’s and Nintendo’s stuff is somewhere between mediocre and annoying, and utter shit on this front (even, and in some ways especially, open source operating systems) and none of these goddamn things coordinate or communicate with one another (and of course SSO, basically a necessity for even starting to tackle that kind of problem, is an “enterprise” feature for almost every vendor)

Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t admin those to fix that dumbfuck oversight. To point out just one of many ways we get undermined. This is a whole bunch of stress and work that simply did not used to exist for parents and I absolutely get why a lot just stop trying.

[lanfeust6]

You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins.

Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.

[gquere]

AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.

[lanfeust6]

That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing with money they didn't put in themselves.

[mrguyorama]

It isn't a pittance.

It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.

[lanfeust6]

Unless they're using their own money with the blessing of their parents, this remains in the realm of tin-foil-hat paranoia. There's no reason to believe we're in child gambling crisis because of fake money.

[Giorgi]

My point exactly, you expect other institutions to take care of your children. This is your job as a parent (If you are a parent).