Kids need access to the internet at a super young age these days for school. If you don’t have some sort of filter in place when they are in single digits or tweens you are just negligent. The internet has some dark corners.
thats not the kid, thats the parent, how do I know? My parents used filter Software when i was younger. And if i was myself, i wouldnt want any of my kids to have raw unfiltered access to the Internet and thats coming me; a teenager. A teen can very easily develop a porn addiction, sorry if I’m a religous zealot and I’m a horrible being for going to church. but I also check your post history and I think you need a therapist or something. Your not ok in the head
If the kid is old enough to purposely bypass the security, they’re probably around the right age to find some of the stuff on the other side. But you don’t want them accidentally stumbling into it because they searched something seemingly innocent.
I just wanted to look up blueberry waffles but I was derping hard and couldn’t remember the word for blueberries… I was an adult at that point but just imagine a kid doing that on accident iykyk 💀
If the kids old enough to figure out VPNs, dual booting, and all the other pretty simple workarounds then it is what it is. You can’t control everything. I am talking about the little guys. And this dudes kid is googling how to teach crabs to talk. If someone is searching that they probably aren’t ready to get completely unrestricted access because they are probably pretty young. Like I said, single digits or tweens.
If the parents still try to restrict, which most unreasonably will, then the kid will simply grow better at this
This leads to the kid growing up with confiding in random people more than their family(this might lead to said friends being a bad influence on them, since they didn’t learn how to differentiate good and bad people)
That or a general sense of distrust and surveillance
Parents can literally get sued by the state for letting their children watch inappropriate stuff (at least where I live). You are obligated as a parent to restrict the access of your children to inappropriate media.
There’s a HUGE difference between restrictions via blockers and surveillance. I can assure you that no one here is arguing in favour of letting kids watch porn…
And the proper way is to teach your kids about it and stop treating kids like super fragile glass beings.
Your city probably has some dark corners too, but you don’t set up geofenced tracking beacons to be alarmed if they stumble slightly off the path you intended them to go.
Children should feel comfortable enough to talk to you about bad stuff they encounter, not feel frightened, that they broke a rule.
By the time I was 17, at least on my windows PC, every search I made was reported. Every setting I touched was reported. Every app I use, and how long, reported. Every startup and shutdown reported. Games with chat features were banned. Online games were banned. Every week on Sunday, an email with all this went to my parents, and my dad would forward it to me as a kind of intimidation that “we know all”…
And yes, they used geofenced tracking too.
But I’m a geek, so my Linux laptop and phone were no longer bugged (my only access to other people at the time) by the time I figured it out (around age 16).
Still had to turn the tracker on so they wouldn’t ask why the location pings stopped though.
This kind of obsessive control ought to be illegal. I propose privacy rights at age 16, enforceable by fines, with a safe hotline for those with obsessive parents. They were emotionally abusive, control by external restrictions is often only part of the story in cases like mine.
I’m all for safety filters, but parental controls that can be classified as spyware have no place in a parent-child relationship after the age of 16…
If you use these trackers and barge in “hey I saw what you did on the internet, you’re in trouble.” then you’re doing it wrong. Kids need guidance. If you were negligent enough to let your kid roam the city without supervision, you SHOULD have a tracker on them. We’re talking about little kids not 16+. Many young kids get themselves killed or groomed or into some kind of cult online. When that happens to young kids, parents are negligent. When 12 year olds get addicted to porn, negligence. You can guide your children without being an asshole. I know a lot of us grew up either completely neglected or completely terrified to make a mistake, but there is an in-between.
Not every state in the US is the same so your comment is mostly based on smug ignorance anyway. It’s not paranoia if you live in a city with a lot of crime etc. You just wanted to try and feel superior. Giving me reddit vibes tbh.
The thing is, parents can get sued for not restricting access of their children to inappropriate media. When you think just talking to your children “the right way” and they will suddenly act wise and smart and good all the time you are incredibly naive.
Invasive reports of literally everything. Making it way too easy to control your child to the point of psychical damage, and with some parents a tool for abuse.
I disagree, do not let them use internet as they wish. The age of 12 is so vulnerable for porn addiction, video game addiction, gambling gacha addiction, meme consooming addiction and all the psychological damage that slot machine style colours and visuals can do permanently to a kid’s brain early on. The kid struggles until they are 30, due to this.
Edit: let me just say, hand them over a book called “Irresistible” by Adam Alter. It is not difficult to understand, easy to read.
Warning: Wall-o-Text incoming, please bear with me as I have a few points to make.
Maybe with modern phone games and social media, you might think so, but let me tell you this. At age 10 I played video games in my spare time, but had no other hobbies.
My parents didn’t willingly take away video games from me. The fucking government did.
“Sure, he has Asperger’s and no friends and no other hobbies, and has an anger issue. Take away video games because the fucking director of ‘Children and Families’ in [home town redacted] got his job by reading shit from that BS doctor who wrote that book in the 70s, and thinks video games like Kirby Super Star or Diddy Kong Racing are basically Mortal Kombat or Doom 64 or said director will have him forcibly removed from your home.”
(Please note I learned to swear when I was in high school, the above angry cursing is entirely because I was not informed of any of the meddling done by people who had never even met me and never would, until 15 years later, not because I was one of those screeching spoiled brats on multi-player servers.)
“Oh, he took that poorly and gets upset because you can’t tell him the real reason he can’t play video games? We’re taking him away and putting him in a foster home.”
Yeah, I have issues, but taking away a kid’s biggest hobby does not take away addiction, it creates escapism addicts who will do anything to avoid reality because they were forced to deal with reality 24/7 during their childhood.
Maybe look up “Hikikomori” and the reasons they refuse to talk to parents or even leave their rooms because they were denied a balance between work and downtime; given the choice but not the option for balance, all humans choose the latter as their imbalance.
I know how this works because that’s my life. I am only an addict to video games because I was unfairly starved of them for 2 years at ages 11-13 and it didn’t even make my anger issues go away during that time. I know because it wasn’t just video games, it was TV and even having friends.
I had no friends for my entire childhood because I was taught 1-1 by a teacher’s aide in Elementary school just because of government interference with my entire life. The Ministry of Children and Families in BC, Canada was apparently corrupt from the top and leaking down in the period when I was 11-13, and while it wasn’t personal to them that they interfered with hundreds of already-damaged childhoods, it ended mine just before my 11th birthday.
I spent half of high school watching shows from the early 00s just after they went off the air (anyone remember tvlinks.cc?) because I had to play catchup with people 2 years ahead of me pop-culturally. I never made any friends because my peers viewed me as “the outcast who literally was made so by real adults” and decided that meant I should be completely alone for all of high school.
Compound that with my dislike of mid-00s gangsta rap and you have a recipe for someone who is too petrified of everyone to make friends. You know why I live with my parents? Because I don’t like being completely alone all the time and I don’t like being alone in public. At least my parents apologized and admitted they’d f-ed up all those years ago, and are and were otherwise the best parents I could have had.
I can’t say the same for the BC government who I was forced to be fed by (disability pension) because I can’t handle the stress of a normal job without flipping out at the first sign that a customer or co-worker is being a jerk and I’m not just talking verbally; I have so little patience for people being assholes that I have to actively avoid it.
Hopefully all that explains why I hate you for being one of those parents. Fuck you, you’re just like the goddamn foster parents who wouldn’t even let me watch TV of have friends, let alone use a computer, and people like you ruined my life without even having a good reason to.
Give your kid a freaking Switch or, if you want him to actually learn stuff, a Steam Deck and some simulation genre games and maybe a pair of replacement joysticks so you can show them how to replace them if the Steam Deck gets stick drift. Let them know that, even if you get upset about them having made a serious mistake online like being photographed by some creep, you’re worried for them and not wrathful.
I know that, even though I’d never be able to practice it, because that’s how my parents handled it when they were allowed to. It prevented further damage after they literally had to go to court to have me come back home from being taken away from them and shoved into a household I didn’t want to be in and wasn’t wanted in.
Do not hold your kids to any standard of perfection, yours or a religious one or even an objective one. The government of my province did exactly that last one and it destroyed the rest of my childhood and damaged me mentally. I’m lucky my parents did get me back home when they did.
I have a good understanding of the situation, I’m not saying gacha games or commercialized social media are good influences, but you are making a terrible mistake if your kid is being censored from games with minimal microtransactions or told not to use Lemmy. The internet isn’t perfect and your kids won’t be, but what ever is?
Please just show your kids where you recommend they go. Watching everything your kids do is creepy, but denying them access to computers entirely is draconian and cruel because kids who are forcibly left out of media consumption grow up to be kids who are up to 18 years behind their peers.
Fuck you too for ignoring the millions of young adults, who were once children like you, who are now many years ahead of you in terms of psychological damage that the capitalist slot machine world has done to their brains permanently. Fuck you for being insensitive to the effects on millions of people, just because you love your video games and do not want to be left out in “social teenager discussions”. Fuck you for wanting to become another cog of the rotten capitalist bingbingwahoo machine.
I can play the rant game the same way you do, since you choose to come up with the most bizarre irrational justifications to cope with the conditions you faced as a kid, where you were confined to this horrible place. The confinement is the problem, NOT confinement from video games. Video game was not the only missing puzzle piece of your childhood, let alone being the most important one.
If you are thinking that inventing rationalities makes you a rational person, then you are more irrational than the people you call irrational.
I may not be very mature, but legally I’m 32. I still struggle, but despite not even knowing what porn was until I was 15 and never being supervised online, I don’t have an addiction to porn and basically won’t play any game that has a gambling mechanic as the only means of getting something (even something cosmetic) for my character that I want.
1a. You don’t care about kids, you only care about enforcing your beliefs on them. You act just like someone I once knew, an asshole by the name of Mike Elliot, who was paranoid that I would turn out as a criminal or something because I “lived an unstructured life” and “was too defiant and needed to be disciplined”. Guess what? My life is unstructured but now I know enough about the world to decide for myself who to be defiant towards. I’m not a criminal. Yet as recently as when I was 26 Mike and his bitchy wife were apparently still claiming I was bound to end up in prison. Never been to prison, I had to move a long ways from my hometown to get away from my past.
1b. Being that I’m 32, that I am trying to argue in good faith here, and that I still have no friends 15 years after graduation because I was the only intelligent student at my high school to not get to go to university (see #2), I think you’re the one in the wrong here.
I have no job and am lucky I live in Canada; due to Autism Spectrum Disorder and the damage done to me psychologically, I can’t hold a job. Therefore, I make less than $10,000 USD a year and entirely on government support and support from my parents (money goes a lot further when you can do grocery shopping for a family instead of a retired couple and two independent bachelors).
Video games are not mindless entertainment, nor was I just “not allowed to play video games” and “forcibly confined”. I was, for two years, not even allowed to touch a video game console OR computer for any reason, and was banned from social contact with anyone younger than 18 (despite the fact that I was 11-13 when that rule was forced on me by random government bureaucrats) or any adult who wasn’t my foster parents or a government worker, yes that EXCLUDED MY BIOLOGICAL PARENTS AND MY SIBLING. This was in 2001 to 2003. It took me 6 years to catch up for having missed 2 years of pop-culture, which I had to do entirely online because I was now a pariah for having disappeared from all my classmate’s world for two years. I didn’t even know that I would have liked Y2K aesthetic and similar until it had all been replaced by McBling and Frutiger Aero, which themselves were replaced by newer styles. It’s not just the time or the pop-culture or the aesthetic or even the loss of social contacts, I had a seething hatred of the “gang thug or emo” lifestyle teenagers subscribed to circa 2002-2008. There were no actual teenage conversations I ever wanted to be part of, because I NEVER EVEN GOT TO EXPERIENCE THE PART OF MY LIFE I’M NOSTALGIC FOR. I have no childhood, it was reduced to nothing but school and reading books. I’m a writer and, because I’m a sci-fi writer, I hate the idea of restricting readers to being readers. Kids and even adults need to be allowed to experience the world without assholes like you telling them that Dr. Lipschitz said “oReO cReAm Is BaD f0r KiDs WiTh AuTiSm SpEcTrUm… but a-okay for normal kids, so make sure your autistic child is told they’re not allowed to be normal in every way you possibly can!”.
It’s not about the fucking oreos, it’s about the fact that I AM NOT PROPERTY OF WHOEVER IS RAISING ME. YOUR KID IS NOT YOUR FUCKING SLAVE, GET IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING HEAD AND GET THE OVERBLOWN FEAR OF ADDICTION OUT OF IT BECAUSE THEY DESERVE TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY WHAT THEY ENJOY AND NOT WHAT YOU SAY IS OKAY! YOU WARN THEM, AND THEN YOU FUCKING STEP BACK BECAUSE IF THEY WANT TO MAKE A MISTAKE THEN THAT’S A GODDAMN HUMAN RIGHT TO MAKE ONE. INTERVENTIONS EXIST FOR A REASON, YOU CAN’T PRECRIME ADDICTION OUT OF EXISTENCE.
This was never about pro-capitalism or being rational about my life, this was about rational parenting. No, I’m not a parent, but my parents would have raised me a hell of a lot better than you plan to raise your kid, and at least at this point of my life I know how to judge good parenting for myself. My parents were rational, and seeing you not be in such a blatantly arrogant way is the final straw. You want a lemmy posting war, you fucking monster?
Maybe go read 1984 first. You know, the GEORGE ORWELL book. Then read Neuromancer or watch Blade runner. See how both a capitalist and socialist dystopia don’t look so different? Now watch Escape from L.A. and realize a theocratic dystopia isn’t any different either. Then watch Mad Max and see how even anarchy is dystopian.
I’m not saying go with the popular choice or even let the child just do whatever. I’m saying check yourself you fucking hypocrite because right now the popular choices are all some form of extremism and I’m the guy saying “a balanced approach is often the best option”. Taking away video games entirely is not balanced, taking away internet is outright censorship, and taking away ANYTHING from an innocent person “for their own protection” or even “for everyone else’s protection” instead of “because you made a mistake” is unjust if it isn’t universally-applied. Punishments prepare kids for “if you commit a crime, there are consequences”. Censorship by parents like you on their own kids teaches them only that they are not the equal of their peers. It’s not your fucking choice to make for your children, it’s only your responsibility to make sure that if it goes wrong, they know why and why they should never do it again, and that does not include manipulative mind games like sabotaging things when they don’t do what you want.
I’m fucking done talking to you, you clearly don’t want to argue in good faith and there’s a block button for a reason.
I love how you demonised me in the earlier comment, and now this one, treating me like a “fucking” “monster” “slave” owner or whatever mental image you form in your head, as you continue to passionately rant, doused in your traumatic past, hurt by it and thinking that attacking me is going to do anything about it. Then you even claim I am the one who does not want to argue in good faith within the span of 1 exchange, where you write 2 thesis long comments.
Your perspective is irrational and purely one sided. You not having been addicted to porn and games does not mean millions of kids have not gotten addicted. You are less important than the millions of other kids for a society, going by a simple logical analysis of the society’s current condition.
You have claimed how you missed out on “catching up” with pop culture, wanting to live a video gamer childhood and so on, and want to force that onto other kids because your creativity urge desires that. You are the one who is wrong to want other kids’ brains to get rotten, just because of your fictional creative desires. The abuse of human psychology in advertising, gaming, porn and media industry in general is a more important concern than your personal bickering, and I am okay with being rude about it. I will be an asshole to you, since you first chose to be one.
I have watched Blade Runner, and I know about 1984 pretty well. George Orwell was a fascist who sold out communists to the police, and I do not consider his fearmongering picturisation fully valid, even if it lays out one of the possibilities of a future world. There are many, many wrong claims and assumptions you make to formulate the conclusion, and it is heavily tainted by your traumatic childhood and your anger largely based in FOMO.
There is not much rationality in your emotionally loaded rant, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to help you and address this. Generally I am known to help people, but I do not have the energy required to help you, and in life I am getting tired of helping people when almost nobody reciprocates with helping/protecting me. I despise one sided transactional relationships, simply put.
Seek professional therapy and meditation sessions. You need A LOT of healing. A LOT. I cannot emphasise enough.
I’d like to go against the stream and say that if you let your kids use the internet, spy the fuck out of everything they do in there. At least until they’re something like 16yrs old.
Not giving your kids access to the internet at all is insane. You’re setting them up for failure by not actively teaching them how to navigate the Internet and what bs to look out for. Anyone that does this is just trying to indoctrinate their kid and prevent them from being exposed to any other ideas. The ego on parents that think they know enough to entirely prepare their kids for the world is ridiculous. Especially these days. You’re just setting them up to be behind when they’re older and they’ll resent you while they struggle to catch up.
Anyone that does this is just trying to indoctrinate their kid and prevent them from being exposed to any other ideas.
Books, magazines and libraries still exist, though.
Nevertheless, I won’t probably be as radical as to completely ban Internet from my two younger kids. But the idea is interesting after seeing via my older kids what an unrestricted access led to.
I’m curious of this as a thought experiment: what do you think the children will miss if they don’t access the Internet before the age of 16? What did the hundreds of generations of children before the invention and spread of Internet lack?
The thing is, the internet does exist now. And it is part of the world kids grow up in. So the question is not what someone thinks what the children will miss. They will not miss anything because they will have friends who will show them what the internet is. The question is: who do you want your kids to learn from what the internet is and can do?
The thing is, the internet does exist now. And it is part of the world kids grow up in.
I wouldn’t be so defeatist. Things can be changed if enough people want to change them. Children have been and are being protected from various things right now. There’s no reason why new things couldn’t be added to that.
‘Monitoring’ if anything is worse. After puberty a human needs some degree of privacy and autonomy. By all means use blockers, but reading their every google search, and especially making them aware of that, is only hurtful.
My parents used this as part of their obsessive-control emotional / psychological abuse. Mostly to try to indoctrinate me into their cult, and their extremist right-wing ideology. There is a place for filters, and even search reports - but search reports ought to end around 14 years, and by 16 there needs to be some form of legal recognition of privacy rights as a human being for cases of isolating abuse as a part of indoctrination. P*rn blockers etc on the router are fine though, the network legally belongs to the parents. But human being, at least after puberty, requires privacy for proper psychological development. Complete surveillance after that time is psychologically and emotionally harmful to both the child and the relationship.
If there’s a reliable way to only be alerted to specific activity, then the parents aren’t really actively spying, in the sense that the kids still have privacy when they aren’t transgressing into prohibited space. As long as that prohibited space is reasonable (huge debate possible there of course) and the kids know about the restrictions. imo
this post is about a child being blocked then reported to their parents for ‘teaching crabs to read’
I don’t think you can defend it as a reasonable prohibited space
Stop spying on your kid… Jesus.
Kids need access to the internet at a super young age these days for school. If you don’t have some sort of filter in place when they are in single digits or tweens you are just negligent. The internet has some dark corners.
I don’t mind just filters, but reporting it to the parent doesn’t sit right with me. It probably depends on the parent though
Its to make sure the kid isnt searching those topics
Yeah can you imagine a world where crabs could read?
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thats not the kid, thats the parent, how do I know? My parents used filter Software when i was younger. And if i was myself, i wouldnt want any of my kids to have raw unfiltered access to the Internet and thats coming me; a teenager. A teen can very easily develop a porn addiction, sorry if I’m a religous zealot and I’m a horrible being for going to church. but I also check your post history and I think you need a therapist or something. Your not ok in the head
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Harder the surveillance, harder the kid works to bypass them
Kids are smart, good on OOP to teach their kids to use a VPN, about dual booting, and more
If the kid is old enough to purposely bypass the security, they’re probably around the right age to find some of the stuff on the other side. But you don’t want them accidentally stumbling into it because they searched something seemingly innocent.
This brought a memory rushing back of me and a family friend in the mid 90s using the family computer to find funny websites.
Us: “Let’s search butt.com!”
My godfather: “NOOOOO!!!”
I just wanted to look up blueberry waffles but I was derping hard and couldn’t remember the word for blueberries… I was an adult at that point but just imagine a kid doing that on accident iykyk 💀
😭
If the kids old enough to figure out VPNs, dual booting, and all the other pretty simple workarounds then it is what it is. You can’t control everything. I am talking about the little guys. And this dudes kid is googling how to teach crabs to talk. If someone is searching that they probably aren’t ready to get completely unrestricted access because they are probably pretty young. Like I said, single digits or tweens.
It is what it is
If the parents still try to restrict, which most unreasonably will, then the kid will simply grow better at this
This leads to the kid growing up with confiding in random people more than their family(this might lead to said friends being a bad influence on them, since they didn’t learn how to differentiate good and bad people)
That or a general sense of distrust and surveillance
Parents can literally get sued by the state for letting their children watch inappropriate stuff (at least where I live). You are obligated as a parent to restrict the access of your children to inappropriate media.
There’s a HUGE difference between restrictions via blockers and surveillance. I can assure you that no one here is arguing in favour of letting kids watch porn…
So many privacy zealots here with absolutely zero clue what it means to raise a kid.
Bold of you to assume us privacy zealots aren’t successfully raising kids
It’s possible to block without spying on though.
And the proper way is to teach your kids about it and stop treating kids like super fragile glass beings.
Your city probably has some dark corners too, but you don’t set up geofenced tracking beacons to be alarmed if they stumble slightly off the path you intended them to go.
Children should feel comfortable enough to talk to you about bad stuff they encounter, not feel frightened, that they broke a rule.
By the time I was 17, at least on my windows PC, every search I made was reported. Every setting I touched was reported. Every app I use, and how long, reported. Every startup and shutdown reported. Games with chat features were banned. Online games were banned. Every week on Sunday, an email with all this went to my parents, and my dad would forward it to me as a kind of intimidation that “we know all”…
And yes, they used geofenced tracking too.
But I’m a geek, so my Linux laptop and phone were no longer bugged (my only access to other people at the time) by the time I figured it out (around age 16).
Still had to turn the tracker on so they wouldn’t ask why the location pings stopped though.
This kind of obsessive control ought to be illegal. I propose privacy rights at age 16, enforceable by fines, with a safe hotline for those with obsessive parents. They were emotionally abusive, control by external restrictions is often only part of the story in cases like mine.
I’m all for safety filters, but parental controls that can be classified as spyware have no place in a parent-child relationship after the age of 16…
If you use these trackers and barge in “hey I saw what you did on the internet, you’re in trouble.” then you’re doing it wrong. Kids need guidance. If you were negligent enough to let your kid roam the city without supervision, you SHOULD have a tracker on them. We’re talking about little kids not 16+. Many young kids get themselves killed or groomed or into some kind of cult online. When that happens to young kids, parents are negligent. When 12 year olds get addicted to porn, negligence. You can guide your children without being an asshole. I know a lot of us grew up either completely neglected or completely terrified to make a mistake, but there is an in-between.
When I look outside, there are 5 year olds playing without supervision. They get along just fine.
Not every country is a paranoid dystopia.
Not every state in the US is the same so your comment is mostly based on smug ignorance anyway. It’s not paranoia if you live in a city with a lot of crime etc. You just wanted to try and feel superior. Giving me reddit vibes tbh.
The thing is, parents can get sued for not restricting access of their children to inappropriate media. When you think just talking to your children “the right way” and they will suddenly act wise and smart and good all the time you are incredibly naive.
thinking about my p history and that one video
Wasn’t quite different back then, it is easier now, and full of advertisements and stuff that make the happy chemicals go brrrr
Even worse using kaspersky…
How?
Invasive reports of literally everything. Making it way too easy to control your child to the point of psychical damage, and with some parents a tool for abuse.
Kaspersky is part of Big C and actively tries to suppress knowledge of Rust.
I disagree, do not let them use internet as they wish. The age of 12 is so vulnerable for porn addiction, video game addiction, gambling gacha addiction, meme consooming addiction and all the psychological damage that slot machine style colours and visuals can do permanently to a kid’s brain early on. The kid struggles until they are 30, due to this.
Edit: let me just say, hand them over a book called “Irresistible” by Adam Alter. It is not difficult to understand, easy to read.
Teach them the old ways of flash games (or html5 nowadays) and they will have no time for drugs.
Love the Flashpoint project, I am going to buy a 4 TB HDD for that 1.6 TB pack.
Warning: Wall-o-Text incoming, please bear with me as I have a few points to make.
Maybe with modern phone games and social media, you might think so, but let me tell you this. At age 10 I played video games in my spare time, but had no other hobbies.
My parents didn’t willingly take away video games from me. The fucking government did.
“Sure, he has Asperger’s and no friends and no other hobbies, and has an anger issue. Take away video games because the fucking director of ‘Children and Families’ in [home town redacted] got his job by reading shit from that BS doctor who wrote that book in the 70s, and thinks video games like Kirby Super Star or Diddy Kong Racing are basically Mortal Kombat or Doom 64 or said director will have him forcibly removed from your home.”
(Please note I learned to swear when I was in high school, the above angry cursing is entirely because I was not informed of any of the meddling done by people who had never even met me and never would, until 15 years later, not because I was one of those screeching spoiled brats on multi-player servers.)
“Oh, he took that poorly and gets upset because you can’t tell him the real reason he can’t play video games? We’re taking him away and putting him in a foster home.”
Yeah, I have issues, but taking away a kid’s biggest hobby does not take away addiction, it creates escapism addicts who will do anything to avoid reality because they were forced to deal with reality 24/7 during their childhood.
Maybe look up “Hikikomori” and the reasons they refuse to talk to parents or even leave their rooms because they were denied a balance between work and downtime; given the choice but not the option for balance, all humans choose the latter as their imbalance.
I know how this works because that’s my life. I am only an addict to video games because I was unfairly starved of them for 2 years at ages 11-13 and it didn’t even make my anger issues go away during that time. I know because it wasn’t just video games, it was TV and even having friends.
I had no friends for my entire childhood because I was taught 1-1 by a teacher’s aide in Elementary school just because of government interference with my entire life. The Ministry of Children and Families in BC, Canada was apparently corrupt from the top and leaking down in the period when I was 11-13, and while it wasn’t personal to them that they interfered with hundreds of already-damaged childhoods, it ended mine just before my 11th birthday.
I spent half of high school watching shows from the early 00s just after they went off the air (anyone remember tvlinks.cc?) because I had to play catchup with people 2 years ahead of me pop-culturally. I never made any friends because my peers viewed me as “the outcast who literally was made so by real adults” and decided that meant I should be completely alone for all of high school.
Compound that with my dislike of mid-00s gangsta rap and you have a recipe for someone who is too petrified of everyone to make friends. You know why I live with my parents? Because I don’t like being completely alone all the time and I don’t like being alone in public. At least my parents apologized and admitted they’d f-ed up all those years ago, and are and were otherwise the best parents I could have had.
I can’t say the same for the BC government who I was forced to be fed by (disability pension) because I can’t handle the stress of a normal job without flipping out at the first sign that a customer or co-worker is being a jerk and I’m not just talking verbally; I have so little patience for people being assholes that I have to actively avoid it.
Hopefully all that explains why I hate you for being one of those parents. Fuck you, you’re just like the goddamn foster parents who wouldn’t even let me watch TV of have friends, let alone use a computer, and people like you ruined my life without even having a good reason to.
Give your kid a freaking Switch or, if you want him to actually learn stuff, a Steam Deck and some simulation genre games and maybe a pair of replacement joysticks so you can show them how to replace them if the Steam Deck gets stick drift. Let them know that, even if you get upset about them having made a serious mistake online like being photographed by some creep, you’re worried for them and not wrathful.
I know that, even though I’d never be able to practice it, because that’s how my parents handled it when they were allowed to. It prevented further damage after they literally had to go to court to have me come back home from being taken away from them and shoved into a household I didn’t want to be in and wasn’t wanted in.
Do not hold your kids to any standard of perfection, yours or a religious one or even an objective one. The government of my province did exactly that last one and it destroyed the rest of my childhood and damaged me mentally. I’m lucky my parents did get me back home when they did.
I have a good understanding of the situation, I’m not saying gacha games or commercialized social media are good influences, but you are making a terrible mistake if your kid is being censored from games with minimal microtransactions or told not to use Lemmy. The internet isn’t perfect and your kids won’t be, but what ever is?
Please just show your kids where you recommend they go. Watching everything your kids do is creepy, but denying them access to computers entirely is draconian and cruel because kids who are forcibly left out of media consumption grow up to be kids who are up to 18 years behind their peers.
Fuck you too for ignoring the millions of young adults, who were once children like you, who are now many years ahead of you in terms of psychological damage that the capitalist slot machine world has done to their brains permanently. Fuck you for being insensitive to the effects on millions of people, just because you love your video games and do not want to be left out in “social teenager discussions”. Fuck you for wanting to become another cog of the rotten capitalist bingbingwahoo machine.
I can play the rant game the same way you do, since you choose to come up with the most bizarre irrational justifications to cope with the conditions you faced as a kid, where you were confined to this horrible place. The confinement is the problem, NOT confinement from video games. Video game was not the only missing puzzle piece of your childhood, let alone being the most important one.
If you are thinking that inventing rationalities makes you a rational person, then you are more irrational than the people you call irrational.
I may not be very mature, but legally I’m 32. I still struggle, but despite not even knowing what porn was until I was 15 and never being supervised online, I don’t have an addiction to porn and basically won’t play any game that has a gambling mechanic as the only means of getting something (even something cosmetic) for my character that I want. 1a. You don’t care about kids, you only care about enforcing your beliefs on them. You act just like someone I once knew, an asshole by the name of Mike Elliot, who was paranoid that I would turn out as a criminal or something because I “lived an unstructured life” and “was too defiant and needed to be disciplined”. Guess what? My life is unstructured but now I know enough about the world to decide for myself who to be defiant towards. I’m not a criminal. Yet as recently as when I was 26 Mike and his bitchy wife were apparently still claiming I was bound to end up in prison. Never been to prison, I had to move a long ways from my hometown to get away from my past. 1b. Being that I’m 32, that I am trying to argue in good faith here, and that I still have no friends 15 years after graduation because I was the only intelligent student at my high school to not get to go to university (see #2), I think you’re the one in the wrong here.
I have no job and am lucky I live in Canada; due to Autism Spectrum Disorder and the damage done to me psychologically, I can’t hold a job. Therefore, I make less than $10,000 USD a year and entirely on government support and support from my parents (money goes a lot further when you can do grocery shopping for a family instead of a retired couple and two independent bachelors).
Video games are not mindless entertainment, nor was I just “not allowed to play video games” and “forcibly confined”. I was, for two years, not even allowed to touch a video game console OR computer for any reason, and was banned from social contact with anyone younger than 18 (despite the fact that I was 11-13 when that rule was forced on me by random government bureaucrats) or any adult who wasn’t my foster parents or a government worker, yes that EXCLUDED MY BIOLOGICAL PARENTS AND MY SIBLING. This was in 2001 to 2003. It took me 6 years to catch up for having missed 2 years of pop-culture, which I had to do entirely online because I was now a pariah for having disappeared from all my classmate’s world for two years. I didn’t even know that I would have liked Y2K aesthetic and similar until it had all been replaced by McBling and Frutiger Aero, which themselves were replaced by newer styles. It’s not just the time or the pop-culture or the aesthetic or even the loss of social contacts, I had a seething hatred of the “gang thug or emo” lifestyle teenagers subscribed to circa 2002-2008. There were no actual teenage conversations I ever wanted to be part of, because I NEVER EVEN GOT TO EXPERIENCE THE PART OF MY LIFE I’M NOSTALGIC FOR. I have no childhood, it was reduced to nothing but school and reading books. I’m a writer and, because I’m a sci-fi writer, I hate the idea of restricting readers to being readers. Kids and even adults need to be allowed to experience the world without assholes like you telling them that Dr. Lipschitz said “oReO cReAm Is BaD f0r KiDs WiTh AuTiSm SpEcTrUm… but a-okay for normal kids, so make sure your autistic child is told they’re not allowed to be normal in every way you possibly can!”.
It’s not about the fucking oreos, it’s about the fact that I AM NOT PROPERTY OF WHOEVER IS RAISING ME. YOUR KID IS NOT YOUR FUCKING SLAVE, GET IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING HEAD AND GET THE OVERBLOWN FEAR OF ADDICTION OUT OF IT BECAUSE THEY DESERVE TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY WHAT THEY ENJOY AND NOT WHAT YOU SAY IS OKAY! YOU WARN THEM, AND THEN YOU FUCKING STEP BACK BECAUSE IF THEY WANT TO MAKE A MISTAKE THEN THAT’S A GODDAMN HUMAN RIGHT TO MAKE ONE. INTERVENTIONS EXIST FOR A REASON, YOU CAN’T PRECRIME ADDICTION OUT OF EXISTENCE.
Maybe go read 1984 first. You know, the GEORGE ORWELL book. Then read Neuromancer or watch Blade runner. See how both a capitalist and socialist dystopia don’t look so different? Now watch Escape from L.A. and realize a theocratic dystopia isn’t any different either. Then watch Mad Max and see how even anarchy is dystopian.
I’m not saying go with the popular choice or even let the child just do whatever. I’m saying check yourself you fucking hypocrite because right now the popular choices are all some form of extremism and I’m the guy saying “a balanced approach is often the best option”. Taking away video games entirely is not balanced, taking away internet is outright censorship, and taking away ANYTHING from an innocent person “for their own protection” or even “for everyone else’s protection” instead of “because you made a mistake” is unjust if it isn’t universally-applied. Punishments prepare kids for “if you commit a crime, there are consequences”. Censorship by parents like you on their own kids teaches them only that they are not the equal of their peers. It’s not your fucking choice to make for your children, it’s only your responsibility to make sure that if it goes wrong, they know why and why they should never do it again, and that does not include manipulative mind games like sabotaging things when they don’t do what you want.
I’m fucking done talking to you, you clearly don’t want to argue in good faith and there’s a block button for a reason.
I love how you demonised me in the earlier comment, and now this one, treating me like a “fucking” “monster” “slave” owner or whatever mental image you form in your head, as you continue to passionately rant, doused in your traumatic past, hurt by it and thinking that attacking me is going to do anything about it. Then you even claim I am the one who does not want to argue in good faith within the span of 1 exchange, where you write 2 thesis long comments.
Your perspective is irrational and purely one sided. You not having been addicted to porn and games does not mean millions of kids have not gotten addicted. You are less important than the millions of other kids for a society, going by a simple logical analysis of the society’s current condition.
You have claimed how you missed out on “catching up” with pop culture, wanting to live a video gamer childhood and so on, and want to force that onto other kids because your creativity urge desires that. You are the one who is wrong to want other kids’ brains to get rotten, just because of your fictional creative desires. The abuse of human psychology in advertising, gaming, porn and media industry in general is a more important concern than your personal bickering, and I am okay with being rude about it. I will be an asshole to you, since you first chose to be one.
I have watched Blade Runner, and I know about 1984 pretty well. George Orwell was a fascist who sold out communists to the police, and I do not consider his fearmongering picturisation fully valid, even if it lays out one of the possibilities of a future world. There are many, many wrong claims and assumptions you make to formulate the conclusion, and it is heavily tainted by your traumatic childhood and your anger largely based in FOMO.
There is not much rationality in your emotionally loaded rant, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to help you and address this. Generally I am known to help people, but I do not have the energy required to help you, and in life I am getting tired of helping people when almost nobody reciprocates with helping/protecting me. I despise one sided transactional relationships, simply put.
Seek professional therapy and meditation sessions. You need A LOT of healing. A LOT. I cannot emphasise enough.
I’d like to go against the stream and say that if you let your kids use the internet, spy the fuck out of everything they do in there. At least until they’re something like 16yrs old.
Better yet, don’t let them use the internet.
Not giving your kids access to the internet at all is insane. You’re setting them up for failure by not actively teaching them how to navigate the Internet and what bs to look out for. Anyone that does this is just trying to indoctrinate their kid and prevent them from being exposed to any other ideas. The ego on parents that think they know enough to entirely prepare their kids for the world is ridiculous. Especially these days. You’re just setting them up to be behind when they’re older and they’ll resent you while they struggle to catch up.
Books, magazines and libraries still exist, though.
Nevertheless, I won’t probably be as radical as to completely ban Internet from my two younger kids. But the idea is interesting after seeing via my older kids what an unrestricted access led to.
I’m curious of this as a thought experiment: what do you think the children will miss if they don’t access the Internet before the age of 16? What did the hundreds of generations of children before the invention and spread of Internet lack?
The thing is, the internet does exist now. And it is part of the world kids grow up in. So the question is not what someone thinks what the children will miss. They will not miss anything because they will have friends who will show them what the internet is. The question is: who do you want your kids to learn from what the internet is and can do?
From you or from their peers
I wouldn’t be so defeatist. Things can be changed if enough people want to change them. Children have been and are being protected from various things right now. There’s no reason why new things couldn’t be added to that.
Good luck with that. And also spying is the best way to lose your kid’s trust.
Well of course tell them that you’re gonna do it. I guess “spying” isn’t the best word then?
‘Monitoring’ if anything is worse. After puberty a human needs some degree of privacy and autonomy. By all means use blockers, but reading their every google search, and especially making them aware of that, is only hurtful.
monitor*
My parents used this as part of their obsessive-control emotional / psychological abuse. Mostly to try to indoctrinate me into their cult, and their extremist right-wing ideology. There is a place for filters, and even search reports - but search reports ought to end around 14 years, and by 16 there needs to be some form of legal recognition of privacy rights as a human being for cases of isolating abuse as a part of indoctrination. P*rn blockers etc on the router are fine though, the network legally belongs to the parents. But human being, at least after puberty, requires privacy for proper psychological development. Complete surveillance after that time is psychologically and emotionally harmful to both the child and the relationship.
I’m reminiscing the days in school where we’d use proxy sites to get around the school blocklist/monitoring to play dolphin olympics
I remember busting out an ssh tunnel and blowing everyone’s mind
Reduce it gradually to 0 until 16.
Spare them the embarassement with their peers.
Gives them a good reason to hang around with friends, if they can get to the internet via them, right? :)
If there’s a reliable way to only be alerted to specific activity, then the parents aren’t really actively spying, in the sense that the kids still have privacy when they aren’t transgressing into prohibited space. As long as that prohibited space is reasonable (huge debate possible there of course) and the kids know about the restrictions. imo
this post is about a child being blocked then reported to their parents for ‘teaching crabs to read’
I don’t think you can defend it as a reasonable prohibited space
True. But the comment I was replying to was referencing the monitoring itself, not the outcome.