[mjg2]

I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes.

The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.

[SoftTalker]

No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.

Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.

With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything.

This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.

[hnlmorg]

> Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring.

Except kids from families without respectable parents would always be the ones to find access to alcohol, cigarettes, and porn. There were always a few kids in every class that had an older brother, uncle, or friend who would give them access to stuff they shouldn’t have.

It really wasn’t that different in the 80s in terms of parental responsibility.

> You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.

That’s still true now.

[eikenberry]

> No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.

Isn't there still a very simple one, hardware access. If the child doesn't have a smart phone of their own or computer in their bedroom then they cannot use them to get online unsupervised. This is about as simple on/off as you can get and very easy to moderate.

[soperj]

and then they reset the settings regularly and you have to redo it.

[mothballed]

It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. There were no ridiculous negligent standards/laws on the book when I was young about it being wrong for a kid to spend all day going up/down a creek so my dad showed me what all the venomous snakes looked like and how to use a compass and after that I was on my own.

I find disagreement with this new standard on parents. No, it's not the parents obligation to keep their child from ever making a horrible mistake. It's their obligation to educate them well and then set them loose with very few safeguards so they can actually slowly learn to be an adult. I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.

[sojsurf]

Well written, and I agree with you on everything you wrote.

That said, "the internet" is a large place, and I think parents would find more clarity thinking of it the way they think of a physical place. In my mind, letting my son loose on the internet is not like letting him run around the woods unsupervised (which he does). It is more like dropping him off in a large city every night.

As you said, guidance is imperative, and in the real world we would not give only verbal guidance. We would, if we lived in the city, walk our kid to the library, the museum, the coffee shop, the park. We would talk about what parts of town to avoid. We would talk about what "free" means and about not trusting strangers and not just going into any door.

That last part is tricky. On the internet, every link is a door into a neighborhood, and there are a lot of neighborhoods even adults are not well prepared for.

[throwway120385]

I would add that it's society's responsibility to handle a child's transgressions with grace and humility, and to try to remember what it means to be "tried as an adult." Forgiveness isn't easy.

[freehorse]

There is a survivor bias here. It ignores cases where parents or kids failed to be 100% wise. When we are talking about a whole population, we are gonna have unwise or unluck cases when we "set kids loose".

Which may be fine, I don't know whether the tightened control of both parenting and kids nowadays is better. But we have to recognise the cost that comes with doing something like that. There is less risk-taking right now, and bad consequences seem to be taken harder, in a way human life is valued more, which imo part of the reason of the shift. The mentality "let kids make their own mistakes" can be fine, but that comes with accepting the possibilities of negative consequences these mistakes may cause, and I feel that the main issue is that we frown upon these consequences as society much more.

[xg15]

Ah yeah, it's the parent's responsibility, the child's and probably the pet's as well, the only one who has no responsibility is the tech industry.

[mjg2]

> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators.

I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.

[baq]

Laws disagree. Parents are at least in some cases legally and financially responsible for their children doings. Parental controls are necessary for children who don't want to or cannot control themselves regardless of the level of education they receive.

[ipython]

Thank you. I couldn’t have said it better.

[cevn]

You were loose with a gun at age 7?!

[Aurornis]

> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

In the real world, it’s the parents obligation to make an effort to protect their children. In extreme cases, parents can be found negligent if they don’t demonstrate that they’re taking reasonable steps to protect children and something bad happens as a result.

This doesn’t mean that extreme, draconian parenting is mandatory. It does, however, mean that some level of parental control is necessary on an age-adjusted basis. It’s not enough to say “I told them not to do that” and then wash your hands of the consequences when we’re talking about a pre-teen like in this article.

[dap]

There is important truth in your post, yet you seem to miss the really important pieces that make this hard.

> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.

> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

Two obvious things complicate this:

- You weren't taught how to use a real gun at 6 months old, right?

- Would it not follow from what you said above that if you had accidentally shot and killed yourself at age 7, then it would be your own fault and nobody else's? That seems (to me, at least) like an absurd conclusion.

I think about it like this: as a parent, my jobs include identifying when my child is capable of learning about something new, providing the guidance they need to learn it (which is probably not all up front, but involves some supervision, since it's usually an iterative process), allowing them to make mistakes, accepting some acceptable risks of injury, and preventing catastrophe. I'll use cooking as an example. My kids got a "toddler knife" very young (basically a wooden wedge that's not very sharp). We showed them how to cut up avocados (already split) and other soft things. As they get older, we give them sharper knives and trickier tasks. We watch to see if they're understanding what we've told them. We give more guidance as needed. It's okay if they nick themselves along the way. But we haven't given them a sharpened chef's knife yet! And if they'd taken that toddler knife and repeatedly tried to jam it into their sibling's eye despite "educating" them several times, while I wouldn't regret having made the choice to see if they were ready, I would certainly conclude that they weren't yet ready. That's on me, not them.

You allude to this when you say:

> I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.

Yes, the goal should be to teach kids how to operate safely, not keep them from all the dangerous things. But I'd say that devices and the internet are more like "the kitchen". There are lots of different risks there and it's going to take many years to become competent (or even safe). Giving them an ordinary device would be like teaching my 2-year-old their first knife skills next to a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen with chefs flying around with sharp knives and hot pots. By contrast, without doing any particular child-proofing, our home kitchen is a much more controlled environment where I can decide which risks they're exposed to when. This allows me to supervise without watching every moment to see if they're about to stab themselves -- which also gives them the autonomy they need to really learn. The OP, like other parents, wants something similar from their device and the internet: to gradually expose elements of these things as the parents are able to usefully guide the children, all while avoiding catastrophe.