Maybe the internet is a different place now but if these restrictions were placed on me as a kid I never would have grown up to be who I am today.
In the same way people see "free speech" as being a good thing, "free parenting" is similar, both in concept and result.
Clearly, some people talk shit and some people parent shit. And the results are as per expectation.
But without the mixing pot of variation we wouldn't have the better ways either - and we try as a society to have education(for parents and kids, for speech and parenting) make up the difference.
And worse come to worse, there is the unfortunate need for Child Services, however that works out...
It's a preference for quality over quantity.
Yes - because every kid wants to program purely for the fun of it. There's never an end goal in mind - they just learn functional programming for the fun of it! They all enjoy finding ways to chain esoteric commands together in a terminal.
It's called "Outside".
I'm just the opposite. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 -- with no games! As far as I was concerned, all it could do was BASIC. It did come with a helpful instruction guide to teach you the rudiments of programming.
I got later systems and games for them later on, but my experience with the VIC-20 put this bias in my head that computers were meant for programming, like pencils were meant for writing with. If it is difficult or impossible to program a digital device, I have trouble considering it a computer at all (even though it technically may be).
https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...
Personally I had the most fun with the sentence generator, but I did find a game somewhere. Something like Missile Command. Had to type it in from a magazine I believe. It never worked quite right however. Had a few obvious bugs which I corrected, and a few I wasn't able to.
The manual is amazing from today's perspective. On the first few pages it has cartoons and teaches you how to use the shift key and such rudimentary things. A dozen pages later you are learning how to PEEK and POKE memory locations. It assumed you were intelligent. I miss that.
Recently I've read there was assembly language book and modem addon, that I never knew existed, a shame really.
I think I'll submit it.
2. More broadly, while children (and young adults) resent restrictions and rules, was Rousseau really right about nature being best? Rousseau was a guy who put his own children into a French orphanage (it's unknown whether any survived) rather than raise them himself, not sure if he's got a lot of real-world experience. And even cultures that have had time to get things right (unlike our rapidly developing society with lots of scary new risks that we aren't evolved to handle) generally seemed to have a lot of rules to avoid behaviour that was risky (either in the short term, or creating long-term bad habits).
3. The internet is a distributed race to create the most "engaging" content possible, powered by evolving AI. Letting kids play on it unrestricted these days is like letting them loose in a red light district with drug dealers on every corner giving them unlimited money and thinking it will end up well.
Turns out constant surveillance is not a necessity for learning.
Didn't you just make a post above this one about how much you surveil your households tech usage?
Besides, you know I'm talking about government and corporate actors. Although I have assigned screen-time to myself. ;-)