[adeelk93]

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.

[epiccoleman]

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]

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]

> 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.

[lotsofpulp]

> 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).

[epiccoleman]

> (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.

[PaulHoule]

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

[epiccoleman]

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.

[aebtebeten]

Might this be an example of healthy narcissism? https://theonion.com/monk-gloats-over-yoga-championship-1819...

[whythough1234]

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.