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Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

I wish parents blocked such sites on their children's devices, so we didn't have to expand the censorship & surveillance state to protect them.

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I didn't realize how backwards and unhelpful the way we talk about this was until I became a parent.

In general, we talk about "iPad kids" and blame the tablets and phones themselves. Slightly more sophisticated people will blame the apps like YouTube or Roblox.

That stopped making sense to me once I saw the problem first hand with my peers and my own children. The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.

Devices and Apps give parents the ability to zonk their kid into outer space for extended periods of time with unlimited videos or games that never end. But that isn't an inherent quality of the device. Like if you block all the apps and just let the kid use the iPad for drawing. Or if you do the YouTube kids thing where they can only watch videos you add to an allowlist.

The app makers do hold a lot of responsibility for the defaults on their apps, but the real issue is parents who are choosing to blackhole their kids for extended periods of time. (I am agreeing with you btw)

Many of the big tech companies, especially Meta / X / Reddit, are the modern day equivalent of tobacco companies. I was a former smoker. Yes my mom should have done a better job preventing me from becoming one. But they were in fact designed to get my young self addicted, and that's a problem. Once we regulated them, it stopped happening nearly as much. I think a very constructive way to converse about this problem, is to focus less on who has the most fault or blame, and focus entirely on: Can policy help, and if so, how? Example:

    - Require age verification only for apps with algorithmic feed (obv. definition requires some nuance)
    - Substantial tax on companies utilizing algorithmic feeds
    - Require (regular) disclaimers and time monitors that are automatically shared with users on the platforms
    - Ban usage rewards (e.g. Reddit tries to reward me for daily usage with stickers and such, why?)

Those are some of my current ideas.

I basically agree with you but I see your point as downstream of my basic point, because a 4 year old isn't going to get exposed to any of these companies tactics without the parent's consent

> The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.

100% this.

Many parents are so addicted to their own phones/social media that they need to give their kids iPads and other infinite distraction machines so that they don't have to deal with them and they can spend more time themselves endlessly browsing Instagram/TikTok/etc.

But it's not only that. I think modern society has failed parents and kids in a lot of ways. Many public spaces have become so kid-hostile that as a parent you feel like the MOMENT your kid starts acting out you need to break out the iPad just to shut them up and survive dinner or whatever. Guess what? Kids are loud and often crazy and they are LEARNING how to behave. Part of the learning is doing things poorly.

> The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.

A good question to ask is why these people are making the decision to have children in the first place if this is how they treat them.

Maybe an order of magnitude or so less people should have children. People who want to have their cake and eat it too, raising their children largely passively, shouldn't be having kids at all. It's not something you "need" to do or should do without a very good reason and high confidence in your ability to do so effectively. Society should be strongly discouraging these kinds of people from having kids, but it's currently encouraging them.

One reason is society has largely restructured itself to make raising children much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be "it takes a village", now that village is atomic families that don't talk to each other and traffic that makes playing outside deadly, and instead of living in multi-generational homes where grandparents can help with raising children, parents live on their own.

So the burden is much higher, and parents cope with it in unhealthy ways.

Good luck, we can't even reach a consensus that teenage girls that decidedly don't want children should have the agency to make that decision.

I would like to put the emphasis on the difficulty that what can work for children (only access to a desktop PC in the living room for instance) cannot work for teenagers (at some point, years before they become adults, you have to let them use an eventually fully personal laptop and even a smartphone, and maybe soon augmented reality glasses).

It would be good to make this as easy as possible for parents - user-friendly, easy-to-install filtering programs, with good defaults. There is of course the danger whoever controls those defaults will abuse them for (unwanted) censorship, like the Comics Code Authority, but that's a lesser danger than giving those defaults the force of law.

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