[iteria]

Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.

My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.

[akho]

Your kid has that private device because you gave it to them.

[HaZeust]

I left this [1] comment a few weeks ago, and I already knew people like you would have dogged on GP for giving their child this level of access and autonomy, just like I knew the HN thread from the other day about homeschooling was going to dog on people who allow their child to go to public school - because teaching children self-sufficiency, self-assurance, and confidence to deal with bad influences is a relic of a time gone by.

Parents would rather justify to themselves the act of building, end-to-end, what their child is exposed to and around - even when that's not how the world works, rather than building a child that knows how to handle themselves when exposed to, and around, anything - because that's ACTUALLY how adult life works.

There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety; but it's still a lot more fruitful than just hand-picking a child's exposure to any and all things during their most formative years - when they're SUPPOSED to be learning how to deal with exposure to as many things as possible, good and bad for them.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852694