It was the same for me. I had access to computers for as long as I can remember, and they had internet access with no restrictions. For the first few years my d

It was the same for me. I had access to computers for as long as I can remember, and they had internet access with no restrictions. For the first few years my dad made me use some kind of sandbox so I didn't brick the PC if I downloaded malware on accident, and we would talk about what I was doing and interested in, etc. Time on the computer would be spent playing some learning or creative games we had, eventually discovering online communities and programming. Programming stuck as the most interesting thing to do, I moved from games to modding to learning C++ and reverse engineering and now quite successfully working remotely as a programmer. But consider: we had no idea what YouTube or Facebook were, there was no Twitter, no TikTok, no Instagram, no Discord, no Reddit, there were no phones with internet in schools. Times really have changed since then, and I feel like our experience is not that useful to compare with anymore. Every second activity you can do on the phone now is some kind of infinite algorithmic doom scrolling funnel optimized to make it as addictive as possible, to make you view as many stupid ads as possible while learning absolutely nothing. Worse, social media makes you always available to all your peers so if there is any kind of drama or bullying going on you have no escape anymore, not even at home. I don't have personal experience with it, but I've heard Instagram is particularly terrible at this for teenage girls - due to it showing everyone who interacted with any post, it generates an insane amount of pointless drama and group pressure along the lines of "you didn't like my post in 30 minutes wtf", "you liked that person's post wtf", almost like some cult. I imagine most people don't want to limit the kids access to technology and learning, but are trying (and likely failing) to protect them from the latter. Even as an adult I sometimes fall for it and chain watch pointless videos or scroll Twitter for hours on end... if that had been available back then, oof.