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Comment by _lffv | Hacker News Reader

I had parents sort of like you when I was younger, which is why I attempted suicide at 14.

Strict parenting puts weights on your kids' backs. Eventually they'll snap in half.

1 I’m sorry about your attempted suicide and I hope you’re ok now. 2 We are not that strict, my kids have limits but they are known and they know what happens if they break the rules. But you are right there is a balance and this parent seems to not be balanced at all and they’re blaming the phone. She said her daughter wore her down and she caved and allowed her TikTok—I’m sorry but as a parent that is on her. Limits do need to grow and change as the kid gets older but unfettered access to everything at 11 is not the phones fault.

Yes, but if you read the article you can see that much of the phone's interruption in their lives is their kid making videos. That kid is creating content. Children under the age of 13 certainly shouldn't be on TikTok but that's not the parent's fault, that's the platform's.

Preventing your children from accessing social media is taking away their support network. If you're as strict as you say - and refusing to let your son take his phone out of the house is strict - he's certainly not going to trust you because _you don't trust him_. Your job as a parent is to let your kids grow, not to put these kids of boundaries on them. Let them look up to you for advice, not look to you every five minutes to see if what they're doing is allowed. If you were parenting well you wouldn't need to put more than a couple rules on your kids because they'd be good people anyway. They won't have those kids of rules on them as adults.

There are two people I know in real life with parents more strict than mine (and my parents aren't as strict as you); one of them has grown to develop anger issues and the other has such little life experience that it's sometimes hard to talk to them ("what's X?", "what's Y?").

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