As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
> Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Yes, but no. I used to think the same, coming from the same background, and sometimes I still do but back in the day there was a big filter already (not everyone wanted or liked videogames or a PC), and we were not terminally online. Plus, for the average HNer there is a big survivorship bias on these topics because "I went earning 6 figures thanks to my experiences with computers back in the day".
Nowadays almost everyone has access to an Internet connected smartphone, owning it is not a feature in itself anymore and the vast majority are not entertained trying to hack it. So it becomes something just like any other thing relates to children/teenagers: use common sense, adapt to your kids behavior, strengths and weaknesses and don't stick to rigid rules proposed by someone else that doesn't know you, but keep those rules in mind as an inspiration.
I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article.
For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.
I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.
I agree. As a parent it feels hard to sympathize with someone who outsourced their child’s app usage selection to another company and didn’t even bother to check what apps were allowed first. I visited the Gabb site they linked to and “Communication with strangers” is clearly listed as one of the tags they put on apps allowed on the phone. You’re supposed to review them as a parent, not just assume that 100% of the nearly 1000 apps they allow are exactly to your preferences.
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.
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.
> 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.
The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends.
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong.
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
I should guess it is about liability more than anything else. They want to advertise and sell to children, but they don't want to be taken to court about it. Makes a tonne of sense from a profit perspective, especially as people under ~25 years of age are more susceptible to impulsivity and addiction due to the developing prefrontal cortex. From a sales perspective, the younger the better (as any parent can confirm).
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
And yet whenever the idea of changing this stuff at a societal level comes up, HN is filled with thought-deleting cries of "parents just need to be more responsible"
Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems. What we don't need is more bandaids that make it appear as if something is being done.
My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
> My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
My daughters are younger than that, but A lot of the neighbor girls in who are in that age range got apple watches before phones. Which kind of makes sense, because it allows them to text, but keeps them off of apps and such.
It's true, and it can definitely be a problem. But I wasn't getting invited to in-person events because I wasn't contactable. Kids don't ring doorbells in 2025, they text people if they want to meet up.
Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.
Yet in the broader sense online bullying targeting other teenagers is a commonly cited problem, including in incidents of teen suicide. "It didn't make it worse for me" doesn't counteract what we provably know is occurring[0][1][2].
Young Teen suicide (10 to 14) has increased from roughly 1 per 100K in the early 2000s to now nearly 3 per 100K in the last five years. Older teen suicide (15-19) has increased from 6 per 100K to 11 per 100K over the same time period[3].
This is going to show how naive I am. Because I am middle aged, do not have a cell phone, and still to this day just show up at people's houses unannounced if I want a social experience.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
16 is too late. You can’t teach your kids good maturity with communication devices through abstinence. You just have to watch what they do online. Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
A better way to frame this is supervised vs unsupervised access. And it depends on their age.
At 11 I wouldnt expect them to have unsupervised internet access. At 16 I might, but by the time they’re 16 I wouldn’t need to monitor their online activity so closely because they’ll have several years of trust and experience built up.
For us, it’s a system that’s worked well. So well, in fact, that our kids have felt comfortable coming to us when they see something concerning in a group chat rather than waiting for us to find it. And in return, we’ve learned to trust their judgement a lot more because they’ve demonstrated mature behaviour online.
Assuming you go down the path of allowing online anything, seems like, after doing your best with parental controls, the most effective thing is time boxing screen usage. Only so much can happen in, say, 2-3 30 minute sessions throughout the day, and the chances of a kid deciding to blow their precious minutes responding to some random person seems much lower than if bored and checking messages idly. Being nearby during a healthy sample of sessions to have a pulse on what's going on helps too - usually pretty obvious what they are doing.
But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).
I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop.
It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
Advice like this only works for specific age ranges.
When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking.
This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanagement was not good for their relationship or his personal development, to put it mildly.
Every time I read HN comments from parents declaring their child will not have a phone until they turn 16 (another comment in this thread) or how they’ll lock their kids out of games and social media completely I think back to my friend whose mom was extremely controlling in the same way.
Young kids need tight controls, but this needs to be loosened as they age. Parenting discussions really need to come with age ranges because what’s appropriate changes so fast from year to year.
I agree, the point of making usage monitored early on is so that you can train your child in what to do when they encounter stuff online. As that training has occured then you can begin to loosen the restriction and give them more freedom. This is the job of parenting. You are teaching your child how to safely and productively engage with the world and the younger they are the more of your time and attention this requires. If you don't teach them someone else might and that lesson may haunt them for the rest of their life.
When I was a kid, my Sega Genesis was connected to the TV in my parents bedroom. It made it impossible to play without their knowledge or when they were asleep.
And then, we pretend we are surprised why the majority of adults don't care about privacy.
Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.
Privacy is a privilege granted relative to age and maturity.
Most 5-year olds should be allowed to close the bathroom door while doing their business, they should not be permitted to access the internet privately.
A five year old is not prepared to engage online with privacy. They have not had the necessary training yet. They will not get that training unless you are there to show them how to negotiate that world. They will not magically learn how to protect themselves if you just leave them to figure it out themselves.
I was never controlled in any way that may remotely violate my privacy. In fact, glad that nothing ever happened to me, because it could have. But for a long time I was not worried about my online visibility…
It's so bizarre to me that in "The Land of the Free", 18 year olds, who are considered old enough to go to war, are not allowed to drink. Especially because this isn't some archaic law from the 18th or 19th centuries but instead from 1984 and only came about after the federal government withheld funds to force the states' hands over a period of 4 years.
This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connection.
Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?
I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.
Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.
It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose
The issues with the Nintendo Switch are, I think, just Nintendo being perennially bad at anything involving the internet. Remember Friend Codes?
They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.
I do find it odd there's no option to just disable the internet, perhaps with the exception of simple software updates. Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.
> I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.
Seeing other Japanese companies account systems (Square Enix and Rakuten, for example), the only conclusion I can draw is that the Japanese dev industry does not consider clear account management to be important.
Nintendo really has no incentive to improve. They make money hand over fist selling half-baked titles to their combined market of actual undiscerning children, and rabid fanboy manchildren who will praise any first party Nintendo title as a 10/10 every single time.
Family Link is kind of funny like that as well. As a parent you can limit which apps your child can use, and even how long they can use them. My child is above the age we can monitor their every move, but they're below the age where we can trust they won't spend all day playing games when they need to study. So that feature is nice.
Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
Of all of the uses for AI/LLMs, setting parental controls feels like it would be such a massive net win for everyone involved.
Instead, LLMs are being used to replace support people at the larger platforms (e.g. X Box) with the clear goal of "make it HARDER to get support" (or as patio11 would say "their goal is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible ")
I'm stuck with my son not able to play minecraft from his nintendo account anymore though it used to work. I'm just getting an unhelpful error message and all permissions should be enough. Parental control is a joke. Deezer has kids accounts but you can just switch to another account. Spotify kids was a joke when I used it, poor discoverability, poor cataloge specifically if you care about childrens audio books.
Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.
So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.
Try the XBox app on your phone, I managed to find settings there once that unlocked Minecraft.
I'd like a flag for messaging apps called "turn off images and video". Sure, my kid might get called nasty names in plain text, but would not get beheading or bestiality videos or underage schoolmate pics.
The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect.
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
Reminds me when Facebook added “privacy” controls, that were virtually impossible to find, difficult to understand, and confusing to give a false sense of security.
I identify with so much of what's in this article - especially the rage that has the author giving serious, coldblooded thought to just destroying the Switch.
The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.
I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.
The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.
This was a tough read. On one end I want to hold this parent accountable...and he should be held accountable for any negligence on his part. As noted, Gabb does indicate that GroupMe facilitates communication with strangers. Because, well, it’s a messaging app like any other.
I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.
“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”
He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.
“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”
I suppose that’ll do.
“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.
What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”
Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.
I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.
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.
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.
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.
It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.
Not sure about Google but Apple has per-app time limits, per-app type time limits, overall screen time limits, time of day limits, parental review before app install, parental review before purchases can be made, etc. I've found it to be quite robust in managing my kids' access to the internet.
It says, on the Gabb app directory the author linked, "Communication with Strangers" in a warning bubble directly below the "GroupMe" listing title. Not to forget the giant box saying "However, some apps allow user-shared content or access to mature material. Apps enabling contact with strangers also pose risks. Families should discuss app usage regularly." right below the app search bar.
Regarding the games console, his problem seems to mainly be the two conflicting account systems offered by two separate vendors, not the parental controls themselves (although I agree the situation in that circumstance is unfortunate). A quick Google search also directed me to an easy step by step guide to doing many of the things (such as the restriction of purchases and free downloads on the Nintendo game store) that he claimed to be impossible.[2]
This is written in a very dramatic manner*, especially with the whole "You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer." paragraph, that it feels almost like it's purely written to goad legislation.
I don't mean to sound like the stereotypical "I did X and turned out fine" but...
I grew up with an internet access on my computer in my room without anybody watching over my back and without any restrictions and nothing bad really happened. Meanwhile these days some people around me with children around the 10-15 range seem think their children cannot be trusted and restrictions are absolutely essential.
Has the internet really changed that much in the last decade or two? Or are people and media just talking about the dangers more?
---
Also, what happens to these kids when they reach adulthood and the guard rails come off?
Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc? I have a feeling many people (including children) don't really learn unless they get hurt so the best we can do it making sure they do get hurt but only a little.
E.g. let them get scammed in a game instead of real life. Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?
The internet has changed incredibly in the last two decades, and has almost nothing in common with the internet of two decades ago. Predators of all varieties are everywhere; many of them are billion-dollar companies. Scams are everywhere.
Getting scammed in RuneScape is probably a good learning experience, but is RuneScape still the only game that's like the old experience of RuneScape? That and Minecraft I suppose, but you can't really filter out servers in Minecraft.
> ...It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.
Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.
People who decide to implement such bad tech are probably childless, or so much into their company, instead of their family, that they barely see their own children.
The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
When I grew up my parents literally had no understanding of what the internet was, nor what I was doing on it. That wasn't a problem because all the rest of the upbringing they did prepared me well to handle every situation I encountered there. There approach was to let me and my brothers learn early how to judge situations and risk ourselves and trusted us to set those boundaries ourselves.
This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.
If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.
If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?
When my child was three, he really liked to watch 'spidey and his amazing friends'. But unfortunately, when he watched it he would emulate some of the bad behaviors from the show, pretend to be one of the bad guys and act out. Easy solution right, we just won't watch the show anymore, we don't leave him alone to watch TV by himself anyways.
Well, on Disney plus, you can't simply hide the show. Even if you remove it from your "recently watched" or whatever, it will show up in preview cards and search results and I'm categories. It became a big friction point, whatever he would see it he would want to watch it. And when Grandma would come over and babysit him, he would ask for it and she'd put it on for him despite our wishes.
So, since then, I've spun up a jellyfin server and ditched Disney plus. If we don't like a show we just remove it, and then it's simply not an option.
It’s also extremely hard saying no to certain shows to my kids, and it would be much easier to just not have them there.
I’m pretty sure the politically oriented people at Disney want this to your kids watch as much of the content as possible, and especially the new ones.
Although it's a lot more effort, if you care a lot about specific things being shown to your children, you could set up your own media server.
You could digitize an existing BluRay or DVD collection and allow your kids to view films and TV using a streaming service-like interface. These days most of the solutions don't even require you to transcode the films, you just RIP them to an ISO and put them on an accessible Samba share and as long as you rename the files to something approximate to the title of the film it'll fetch the metadata for you.
My 17 yo, and me, are still suffering for poor account choices I made when he was young. My 10 yo will only ever have to remember his birth year is the same as mine when asked in regards to any of his accounts created by me.
Dear All,
As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
> Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Yes, but no. I used to think the same, coming from the same background, and sometimes I still do but back in the day there was a big filter already (not everyone wanted or liked videogames or a PC), and we were not terminally online. Plus, for the average HNer there is a big survivorship bias on these topics because "I went earning 6 figures thanks to my experiences with computers back in the day".
Nowadays almost everyone has access to an Internet connected smartphone, owning it is not a feature in itself anymore and the vast majority are not entertained trying to hack it. So it becomes something just like any other thing relates to children/teenagers: use common sense, adapt to your kids behavior, strengths and weaknesses and don't stick to rigid rules proposed by someone else that doesn't know you, but keep those rules in mind as an inspiration.
I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article.
For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.
I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.
I agree. As a parent it feels hard to sympathize with someone who outsourced their child’s app usage selection to another company and didn’t even bother to check what apps were allowed first. I visited the Gabb site they linked to and “Communication with strangers” is clearly listed as one of the tags they put on apps allowed on the phone. You’re supposed to review them as a parent, not just assume that 100% of the nearly 1000 apps they allow are exactly to your preferences.
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.
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.
Thank you. I couldn’t have said it better.
> 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.
The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends.
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong.
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
If you don't want your kid to go online, don't buy them a Nintendo Switch Online membership. Or give them a handheld like a Miyoo Mini without WiFi.
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
I should guess it is about liability more than anything else. They want to advertise and sell to children, but they don't want to be taken to court about it. Makes a tonne of sense from a profit perspective, especially as people under ~25 years of age are more susceptible to impulsivity and addiction due to the developing prefrontal cortex. From a sales perspective, the younger the better (as any parent can confirm).
Exactly
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
> When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
Not sure if I want to call it by design.
It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
And yet whenever the idea of changing this stuff at a societal level comes up, HN is filled with thought-deleting cries of "parents just need to be more responsible"
Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems. What we don't need is more bandaids that make it appear as if something is being done.
My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
> My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
My daughters are younger than that, but A lot of the neighbor girls in who are in that age range got apple watches before phones. Which kind of makes sense, because it allows them to text, but keeps them off of apps and such.
My daughter is 14. Still no phone. You can make this work.
I had a cell phone before my parents. Paid cash for a TracFone when I was 16 or 17 and used that to sell weed. Where there's a will, there's a way.
My parents did the no phone until 16 rule, and it was awful. Completely cut me off socially.
The "socially" part is the problem though. A lot of bullying occurs via those social media platforms that teenagers are using.
It's true, and it can definitely be a problem. But I wasn't getting invited to in-person events because I wasn't contactable. Kids don't ring doorbells in 2025, they text people if they want to meet up.
A lot of bullying occurs in any environment teenagers exist en masse.
Right; which is why allowing teenagers to be safe at home instead of exposed to it 24/7 is a smart choice.
Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.
Yet in the broader sense online bullying targeting other teenagers is a commonly cited problem, including in incidents of teen suicide. "It didn't make it worse for me" doesn't counteract what we provably know is occurring[0][1][2].
Young Teen suicide (10 to 14) has increased from roughly 1 per 100K in the early 2000s to now nearly 3 per 100K in the last five years. Older teen suicide (15-19) has increased from 6 per 100K to 11 per 100K over the same time period[3].
[0] https://www.jmir.org/2018/4/e129/
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12230417/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32017089/
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db471.htm
This is going to show how naive I am. Because I am middle aged, do not have a cell phone, and still to this day just show up at people's houses unannounced if I want a social experience.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
16 is too late. You can’t teach your kids good maturity with communication devices through abstinence. You just have to watch what they do online. Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
Yeah I’m pretty sure invading your kids privacy like that is setting you up for worse trouble.
A better way to frame this is supervised vs unsupervised access. And it depends on their age.
At 11 I wouldnt expect them to have unsupervised internet access. At 16 I might, but by the time they’re 16 I wouldn’t need to monitor their online activity so closely because they’ll have several years of trust and experience built up.
> Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.
Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.
Of course they do. You should be open and honest.
For us, it’s a system that’s worked well. So well, in fact, that our kids have felt comfortable coming to us when they see something concerning in a group chat rather than waiting for us to find it. And in return, we’ve learned to trust their judgement a lot more because they’ve demonstrated mature behaviour online.
Assuming you go down the path of allowing online anything, seems like, after doing your best with parental controls, the most effective thing is time boxing screen usage. Only so much can happen in, say, 2-3 30 minute sessions throughout the day, and the chances of a kid deciding to blow their precious minutes responding to some random person seems much lower than if bored and checking messages idly. Being nearby during a healthy sample of sessions to have a pulse on what's going on helps too - usually pretty obvious what they are doing.
But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).
neil.fun is porn ads
neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop.
It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
Advice like this only works for specific age ranges.
When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking.
This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanagement was not good for their relationship or his personal development, to put it mildly.
Every time I read HN comments from parents declaring their child will not have a phone until they turn 16 (another comment in this thread) or how they’ll lock their kids out of games and social media completely I think back to my friend whose mom was extremely controlling in the same way.
Young kids need tight controls, but this needs to be loosened as they age. Parenting discussions really need to come with age ranges because what’s appropriate changes so fast from year to year.
I agree, the point of making usage monitored early on is so that you can train your child in what to do when they encounter stuff online. As that training has occured then you can begin to loosen the restriction and give them more freedom. This is the job of parenting. You are teaching your child how to safely and productively engage with the world and the younger they are the more of your time and attention this requires. If you don't teach them someone else might and that lesson may haunt them for the rest of their life.
I frankly would prefer just not gaming at all, than being ashamed in front of all my friends.
Also you have to consider the ramifications of such behavior if that gets public, I mean could possibly be the source of bullying and what not.
As a child we were de incentivized to playing games with the computer. The schema was:
A) computer you can have, because is useful beyond playing, consoles, no way. Forget it “that is stupidizing BS”
B) No money for games. Other SW would be bought, but rarely games.
That moved us to start spending time with other things in the computer, like programming our own games.
Of course today that is all difficult to impossible, by design, without ostracizing the kids.
Congratulations that you had that luxury.
Sounds barely realistic, when school are using iPads, education is one URL away from entertainment crack and parental controls on iOS are a joke.
When I was a kid, my Sega Genesis was connected to the TV in my parents bedroom. It made it impossible to play without their knowledge or when they were asleep.
And then, we pretend we are surprised why the majority of adults don't care about privacy.
Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.
Privacy is a privilege granted relative to age and maturity.
Most 5-year olds should be allowed to close the bathroom door while doing their business, they should not be permitted to access the internet privately.
A five year old is not prepared to engage online with privacy. They have not had the necessary training yet. They will not get that training unless you are there to show them how to negotiate that world. They will not magically learn how to protect themselves if you just leave them to figure it out themselves.
I was never controlled in any way that may remotely violate my privacy. In fact, glad that nothing ever happened to me, because it could have. But for a long time I was not worried about my online visibility…
I do not agree at all with this conclusion.
Encourage voice chat, so you can hear what they are saying too :)
That's essentially the rule in our house. No screens not visible to other members of the family.
In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
It's so bizarre to me that in "The Land of the Free", 18 year olds, who are considered old enough to go to war, are not allowed to drink. Especially because this isn't some archaic law from the 18th or 19th centuries but instead from 1984 and only came about after the federal government withheld funds to force the states' hands over a period of 4 years.
So no smartphones?
Neutered smartphone with zero internet access and apps locked down like North Korea.
We also lock up our alcohol, as many parents have chosen to do for generations.
Nope. More people should be like this.
This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connection.
Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?
Europeans have trouble understanding in part because social trust is still high in many parts of Europe due to regional monoculturalism.
The Roblox ones are a bit of a minefield too.
I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.
Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.
It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose
Roblox is hostile to these controls - best not to even enter the ecosystem.
Ideally (in the broad sense, meaning not realistic) is to not enter any “ecosystem”.
But yeah… easier said than done.
Controls can never replace parenting, no matter how good they make them.
The issues with the Nintendo Switch are, I think, just Nintendo being perennially bad at anything involving the internet. Remember Friend Codes?
They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.
I do find it odd there's no option to just disable the internet, perhaps with the exception of simple software updates. Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.
> I'm not sure why a company full of hardware and software engineers still can't figure this out.
Seeing other Japanese companies account systems (Square Enix and Rakuten, for example), the only conclusion I can draw is that the Japanese dev industry does not consider clear account management to be important.
Nintendo really has no incentive to improve. They make money hand over fist selling half-baked titles to their combined market of actual undiscerning children, and rabid fanboy manchildren who will praise any first party Nintendo title as a 10/10 every single time.
Family Link is kind of funny like that as well. As a parent you can limit which apps your child can use, and even how long they can use them. My child is above the age we can monitor their every move, but they're below the age where we can trust they won't spend all day playing games when they need to study. So that feature is nice.
Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
Of all of the uses for AI/LLMs, setting parental controls feels like it would be such a massive net win for everyone involved.
Instead, LLMs are being used to replace support people at the larger platforms (e.g. X Box) with the clear goal of "make it HARDER to get support" (or as patio11 would say "their goal is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible ")
> " and no easy way to make this thing function like an old-school Game Boy and just let a kid have fun with a game cartridge"
Have you considered buying them an old-school gameboy?
I'm stuck with my son not able to play minecraft from his nintendo account anymore though it used to work. I'm just getting an unhelpful error message and all permissions should be enough. Parental control is a joke. Deezer has kids accounts but you can just switch to another account. Spotify kids was a joke when I used it, poor discoverability, poor cataloge specifically if you care about childrens audio books.
Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.
So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.
Try the XBox app on your phone, I managed to find settings there once that unlocked Minecraft.
I'd like a flag for messaging apps called "turn off images and video". Sure, my kid might get called nasty names in plain text, but would not get beheading or bestiality videos or underage schoolmate pics.
God that would be sweet. Especially if it was controlled at the OS level.
The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect.
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
Reminds me when Facebook added “privacy” controls, that were virtually impossible to find, difficult to understand, and confusing to give a false sense of security.
I identify with so much of what's in this article - especially the rage that has the author giving serious, coldblooded thought to just destroying the Switch.
The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.
I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.
The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.
This was a tough read. On one end I want to hold this parent accountable...and he should be held accountable for any negligence on his part. As noted, Gabb does indicate that GroupMe facilitates communication with strangers. Because, well, it’s a messaging app like any other.
I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.
“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”
He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.
“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”
I suppose that’ll do.
“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.
What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”
Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.
I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.
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.
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.
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.
This is such a sore spot for me.
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.
It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.
Not sure about Google but Apple has per-app time limits, per-app type time limits, overall screen time limits, time of day limits, parental review before app install, parental review before purchases can be made, etc. I've found it to be quite robust in managing my kids' access to the internet.
It says, on the Gabb app directory the author linked, "Communication with Strangers" in a warning bubble directly below the "GroupMe" listing title. Not to forget the giant box saying "However, some apps allow user-shared content or access to mature material. Apps enabling contact with strangers also pose risks. Families should discuss app usage regularly." right below the app search bar.
Regarding the games console, his problem seems to mainly be the two conflicting account systems offered by two separate vendors, not the parental controls themselves (although I agree the situation in that circumstance is unfortunate). A quick Google search also directed me to an easy step by step guide to doing many of the things (such as the restriction of purchases and free downloads on the Nintendo game store) that he claimed to be impossible.[2]
This is written in a very dramatic manner*, especially with the whole "You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer." paragraph, that it feels almost like it's purely written to goad legislation.
[1] https://gabb.com/app-guide/
[2] https://industrywired.com/gaming/how-to-set-up-parental-cont...
* I do empathize with his situation, but much of it seems to be brought upon by his own ignorance and unwillingness to research.
Beasthacker is a hilarious identity to assume for someone so keen on using tech that does the parenting for them.
I don't mean to sound like the stereotypical "I did X and turned out fine" but...
I grew up with an internet access on my computer in my room without anybody watching over my back and without any restrictions and nothing bad really happened. Meanwhile these days some people around me with children around the 10-15 range seem think their children cannot be trusted and restrictions are absolutely essential.
Has the internet really changed that much in the last decade or two? Or are people and media just talking about the dangers more?
---
Also, what happens to these kids when they reach adulthood and the guard rails come off?
Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc? I have a feeling many people (including children) don't really learn unless they get hurt so the best we can do it making sure they do get hurt but only a little.
E.g. let them get scammed in a game instead of real life. Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?
The internet has changed incredibly in the last two decades, and has almost nothing in common with the internet of two decades ago. Predators of all varieties are everywhere; many of them are billion-dollar companies. Scams are everywhere.
Getting scammed in RuneScape is probably a good learning experience, but is RuneScape still the only game that's like the old experience of RuneScape? That and Minecraft I suppose, but you can't really filter out servers in Minecraft.
> ...It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.
Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.
People who decide to implement such bad tech are probably childless, or so much into their company, instead of their family, that they barely see their own children.
The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
When I grew up my parents literally had no understanding of what the internet was, nor what I was doing on it. That wasn't a problem because all the rest of the upbringing they did prepared me well to handle every situation I encountered there. There approach was to let me and my brothers learn early how to judge situations and risk ourselves and trusted us to set those boundaries ourselves.
This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.
If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.
Last time I checked disney plus doesn't have any option to hide specific shows. None. You either let your child watch everything, or nothing.
At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...
You can block by age rating quite easily it seems.
https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parenta...
If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?
Allow me to give my anecdotal experience.
When my child was three, he really liked to watch 'spidey and his amazing friends'. But unfortunately, when he watched it he would emulate some of the bad behaviors from the show, pretend to be one of the bad guys and act out. Easy solution right, we just won't watch the show anymore, we don't leave him alone to watch TV by himself anyways.
Well, on Disney plus, you can't simply hide the show. Even if you remove it from your "recently watched" or whatever, it will show up in preview cards and search results and I'm categories. It became a big friction point, whatever he would see it he would want to watch it. And when Grandma would come over and babysit him, he would ask for it and she'd put it on for him despite our wishes.
So, since then, I've spun up a jellyfin server and ditched Disney plus. If we don't like a show we just remove it, and then it's simply not an option.
Blocking by age rating takes out the majority of the classic Disney movies and shows. They only consider the newer CGI stuff "child-friendly".
age rating is not how I would categorise shows.
It’s also extremely hard saying no to certain shows to my kids, and it would be much easier to just not have them there.
I’m pretty sure the politically oriented people at Disney want this to your kids watch as much of the content as possible, and especially the new ones.
Although it's a lot more effort, if you care a lot about specific things being shown to your children, you could set up your own media server.
You could digitize an existing BluRay or DVD collection and allow your kids to view films and TV using a streaming service-like interface. These days most of the solutions don't even require you to transcode the films, you just RIP them to an ISO and put them on an accessible Samba share and as long as you rename the files to something approximate to the title of the film it'll fetch the metadata for you.
My 17 yo, and me, are still suffering for poor account choices I made when he was young. My 10 yo will only ever have to remember his birth year is the same as mine when asked in regards to any of his accounts created by me.