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When I was coming up in the early 2000's, I met a girl at a concert that I liked. We started talking online, and she told me at the beginning that her parents h

• existencebox 9y ago
  Nearly identical experience. Met a girl at a Rocky Horror, we were maybe 17 at the time. I didn't even show her how to break her parental controls, only found out that her parents were monitoring everything she did when they called my cell phone and threatened to call the police on me if I ever talked to her again. I was still close with some other friends of hers, so over the next few years I could say with conviction "this didn't turn out well/the way her parents want." My own parents were oddly contradictory as well. Huge amounts of parental controls at home, despite being very supportive in getting me into novel social experiences. I got into computers largely to find ways around the "AOL for Kids", and got my first tastes of "social engineering" by working around the passwords they'd set on anything from the TV to the PC to cell phone apps. Given TFA (and all research I've seen about porn blocking outcomes in the past) aligning with my own experiences, the most surprising thing about this thread is the amount of "yes, BUT <I still severely monitor and limit my kids>" responses. I'd go so far as to say that from among my (very large public highschool) peergroup, over the last 20~ years, the correlation has been _stark_ between those who grew up more sheltered vs those with less, that the former group often gained some very strange pathologies with respect to social interactions or "adult" content (even as an adult later in life). I honestly wonder if my experiences were unique, and others saw large numbers of kids "heavily impacted" by lack-of-oversight? (To try and explain how many parents support more restrictive parenting) Or if parents "forget" or "Reassess" the rebellion they may have felt as a kid when it becomes their turn to parent? Obviously I can't judge, since I haven't had a child yet, but having had long conversations about the hypothetical with the wife, both of us still have our stances well-crystallized from our own upbringings, after a good handful of decades. Restriction made porn fascinating to me. Restriction made video games so much more valuable(So much that I'd sell contraband at school and bike to an inner-city target to re-buy the ones my parents confiscated). Restriction only meant that I binged harder when I was finally could, or went through more risky channels to circumvent it.
  • moate 9y ago
    I understand why parental controls exist (8 year-olds think that butts are funny, but I really do not want them searching for butts on the internet) but treating teenagers like stupid babies is...stupid. We, the people on HN, represent a uniquely tech-savy segment of the population, and can (probably? usually?) say that we're better with software than our kids so we actually COULD put restrictions in place that they wouldn't be able to circumvent. But why? You're going to creating a security battle with your kids. Isn't one possible, logical conclusion that your smart and annoyed teenager who hates you (justly or unjustly) just SWATS you at work? Or finds a way to cancel your internet entirely so NOBODY can search for things? You're going to have plenty of conflicts with your kids already. They're going to think you're stupid and annoying and trying to make their decisions for them based on your stupid old brain that doesn't understand their life. Don't you think it's better to build a relationship of trust where they're willing to listen to you is better than trying to build a relationship where they're FORCED to listen to you in the long term?
    • Zak 9y ago
      It seems to me that parental controls might be useful for preventing young kids from encountering content they're not ready to handle by accident, but become useless at the point where the child actively wants to bypass them.
      • moate 9y ago
        100% this.