Comment by phatfish

I understand being a parent is scary and stressful. I wish I could tell you that goes away, but it doesn’t. However, your children, I hope, will spend far more of their lives as adults than as children and I think you should worry a lot more about what type of world you’re helping to create for them.

Raising children is not a risk free activity. Parents shouldn’t follow their children 24/7, even if they could. Your children, by accident AND through their own curiousity are going to be exposed to things you don’t think they are ready for. You can’t stop that, even in a perfect world. Prevent and delay it as best you can, sure, but the best protection is internal. Instill in them the ability to make good choices, build trust and confidence and be someone they can talk to about it when it happens.

There’s nothing new here. Nothing special about the internet. Parents were saying the same thing about us when we were children and none of their controls were effective. We were still exposed to some things before we were ready. Those kids with shitty parents (and even the ones with good ones) are going to get around any such restrictions and expose your kids to things and your kids might expose them to things as well.

Stop denigrating non-parents’ opinions. Not only do they have a stake in the situation but you seem to forget they were also children too. And before you write off my opinion the same way, my children are adults.

Are you sure it's not you, a parent, whose opinion might be irrelevant? I mean out of you and non-parents, you are the one who has an extremely deep and instinctive emotional attachment that might cloud your judgement and affect your ability to think rationally or objectively on such a topic.

Does that argument work in other cases? "Sure it's insert bad thing, but if you were a parent, you'd understand. I'd do _anything_ to protect my lil one"

No, being a parent doesn't make your opinion more relevant really.

Sounds like offloading bad parenting onto others, you're supposed to communicate with your kids about safety, there are solutions to restrict their devices to make the impulse control barrier higher.

If your kid goes out of their way to use a third party device without age restriction you can't stop them if they're determined either way, and no matter how right you think you are it still doesn't warrant destroying privacy for EVERYONE.

Well I'm a parent and I disagree with you and agree with the other comments, what now?

Nice assumption! Unfortunately, your mind reading skills aren't the most perspicacious. I actually have five kids. How many do you have? And how old?

Turns out that just being a minor doesn't make you technologically incapable. My 16 year old learned how to use VPNs and torrents when he was 12. Unless you're prepared to force everyone on the planet to use government or big tech controlled everything and ban terrifying technologies like open source, it's not going to be hard for them to work around them. Maybe we should have government cameras in all of our homes with AI constantly observing, transcribing, and recording everything we do or say. We could even hook up an MCP server to law enforcement so the cops can be sent ASAP upon any violations. A robo-car could show up within minutes and the cameras could announce that you must get in. We could start with forced re-education, and escalate to imprisonment on multiple offenses or if the severity of the violation exceeds some threshold. Might make sense to just have all the kids taken from home at birth and raised in a safe government run rearing house. Then we could make sure they're getting well educated in the manner that our rulers at the time desire. Trump would make a great father figure and example right? No? Why don't you want to protect the children? Is there anything not worth doing to protect the children? Won't somebody please think of the children?