Foisting the parenting onto the government sucks for everyone.
Car seats? Seat belts? Curfews? Hospital reporting laws? Child safety standards? Mandatory smoke detectors? Curriculum standards? Mandatory education?
All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?
On that note, the US government states in their own papers in the SCOTUS case that parental control filtering is so niche, that it is at the level of complete irrelevancy in fulfilling the government’s interest in preventing children from viewing porn. One SCOTUS judge with children has already said that in her experience, it’s impossibly complex even for a devoted parent.
Tech can’t point to parental controls when they failed miserably in their implementation.
most, if not all of those things, are necessary because a parent is unable to make any changes to stop the danger. Good parenting cannot stop a car accident (unless you're claiming that you have perfect driving skills). Ditto with the other examples.
The difference between age verification and those is that verification puts an undue harm onto the entire population, for which they derive zero benefit, just so that a few parents who cannot be bothered to monitor their child could continue their lack of responsibility.
This also hoists undue harm across a population - children and teenagers. As the SCOTUS case is going forward, Texas is (correctly) pointing out that this is very different than 90s dial up, and the porn is far more intense, violent, graphic, and accessible. Because we’ve already had porn filters, and even the opposition concedes they’ve been uselessly ineffective, therefore…
That’s the argument. It’s a good argument. You don’t have to like the conclusion. However, I have seen firsthand that filtering, and talking to children, absolutely is not, and never will be, effective.
Weird, I have seen firsthand that absolutely can be! I guess we're at an impasse.
If so, it was not effective.
And even if it was, according to the US government, >90% of parents can’t pull it off, and they’ve had over 20 years to try (tech companies included). That’s law-changing time.
As one legal analogy put it: Imagine if there was a law mandating public transportation from City A to City B. There’s a bus line, but it’s people 6 feet or taller only. Don’t come into the courtroom defending it by saying crawling is always an option, and some people have been crawling, so therefore the law is upheld.
Parents can't stop it any more than they can stop kids from watching violent movies or renouncing their faith. Quit arguing with this slippery-slope logic, your comment history reads like Pagliacci's personal diary.
No... Parent's can't reasonably mitigate what a car seat or seat belt mitigates.
Besides that, the benefits vs. harms needs to be weighed before you shove your parenting responsibilities off to the government. Age verification laws have the potential to do a lot of harm to a lot of people. Seat belt laws do not do a lot of harm to a lot of people.
The safety mechanisms you point to are not a result of parents failing, it’s a result of a common agreement that society as a whole benefits from certain guardrails. Seatbelts were very controversial! But after you realize that a seatbelt is a small inconvenience that can prevent you or your children from being violently ejected from the vehicle and splatting on the pavement in the event of a car crash, we agreed as a society that the public health good outweighed the slight inconvenience of wearing a seatbelt. Nothing to do with the failings of parents. Parents already feel like failures most of the time already as it is.
We're on a "Hacker News", and you want me to explain what parental controls are? Do you have some specific questions that you genuinely want help with? Because this smells like a bad faith question.
Physical controls like... Gosh, I don't know. Choosing what devices your kids have access to, and what time their allowed to use them? Taking devices away when rules are broken? Putting devices in common rooms instead of bedrooms?
>If your kid is taught to be responsible why would you need them?
Ah, I see your edit confirms that this is a bad faith line of questioning.
Have you tried to restrict devices against a determined child? Especially one that has to use a device to complete school homework? Because you make it sound easy. I can assure you, it is not. Just because a device is allowed at a time of day doesn’t mean he’s using it for the stated purpose. I sit with him as much as possible while he’s doing homework, but I may have to step away to cook dinner, wash dishes, drive a kid somewhere, help one of my other kids - and guess what, I come back and it’s more YouTube. So how does “time of day” restrictions help?
I may come off snide and annoyed, and truly this topic does make me annoyed as there is no simple solution. Yet people who are not in this position are so quick to point out how simple it is - yet never can back up their claims with actual facts.
Edit- before I’m accused of being too lenient, I have a fairly strict screens policy for my kids, and I still struggle. When I go out, it’s insane how many parents just let their kids sit and watch videos while the parents talk. The kids will have iPads basically chained to them while in line, at the table, in the car, it’s absolutely sick. Hell, I have my own problems with screen addiction.
Here’s some mitigations and how they’ve failed:
There are no devices allowed in bedrooms. Work is to be done in common rooms, but unlike when we were kids, there is no desktop. Only laptops. So they’re easily portable. I have had a recently wiped iPhone swiped from my office because it was unlocked - it took me a few days to realize that, and by then he had watched 22 hours of YouTube. Internet is locked out on their devices but turning it on and off is a bit of a pain so sometimes I’ll forget. Even with no internet, he will pull out the laptop while in the car driving home from school and play a cached web game. They tricked my wife into thinking the rear screen in the car was unlocked, so she toggles it- not realizing that actually unlocked the screen. Their Nintendo switches have ok parental controls once I realized you can actually set it to zero time if you do it on a day-by-day basis (otherwise the minimum is 5 minutes). I have a house wide pihole, but once he gets a cellphone that will be trivial to bypass unless I go through the effort of forcing an always on vpn. One time my wife shared the password to her laptop with my daughter (who is responsible) but my son was within earshot, so he was able to unlock it while we weren’t looking. Shall I go on?
I believe I’m doing the best I can yet I am fighting upstream the entire way.
>Yet people who are not in this position are so quick to point out how simple it is - yet never can back up their claims with actual facts.
I don't know what actual facts you want from me. I don't have a study published in Nature or whatever that I can cite. I just have my experiences with my three kids (ages ranging from young to almost moving out) and the experiences of my friends, family, and colleagues that have kids.
I'd be happy to share my experiences, and what worked with my kids (and what didn't), but it's hard to believe someone wants a genuine conversation when they hit you with a "If your kid is taught to be responsible why would you need them?" off the top. (Or equate age verification laws to seat belt laws, like the other commenter).