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It baffles me that parents have become so lazy they don't even want to monitor what their kid does anymore online, and instead expect the government to do all t

It baffles me that parents have become so lazy they don't even want to monitor what their kid does anymore online, and instead expect the government to do all the work. I remember when my daughter wanted to play Roblox with some friends I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing. Same with just general internet monitoring. Whenever she wants to play some game or something I research it. I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.

CJefferson 10mo ago
The world doesn’t consider it reasonable for businesses to sell beer to kids, and expect us all to constantly follow our kids around to make sure they don’t get beer. Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”. And at this point, most kids, most people, spend more time online than outside walking around
- g-b-r 10mo ago
  > Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”. Because there's no whatsoever downside in requiring bars to not serve children (if we assume that it's just to not give alcohol to children); online age checks instead have very big negative consequences for the whole populace.
pram 10mo ago
TBF my boomer parents didn't monitor a single thing I did on the internet, so I kinda doubt it's some unique failure of contemporary parents.
- jen729w 10mo ago
  But was this in the late 90s/early 00s? I mean … it was kinda different then, no? I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.
  - pksebben 10mo ago
    don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise. My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on. Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.
  - pram 10mo ago
    Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol
  - Larrikin 10mo ago
    Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet. There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
  - datatrashfire 10mo ago
    every generation thinks they live in unique times. that there existed some idyllic lost time innocence. it’s a fantasy.
  - nechuchelo 10mo ago
    My parents didn’t monitor what I was doing on the internet when I was growing up in 00s. I saw a lot of shit and wasted a lot of money on GPRS and WAP portals. I learned from my mistakes and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t want to monitor everything my children do either.
  - the_af 10mo ago
    The internet was pretty fucked up in the 90s / early 00s. Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it. And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster). "Life, uh, finds a way."
- ls612 10mo ago
  My parents tried but they know about as much about technology as a typical boomer so by the time I was in high school it became totally ineffective.
ch2026 10mo ago
> I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing How much of that "horrible thing" is due to a handful of youtube videos you've seen as opposed to first-hand experiences? What if you found out that the very well-produced youtube videos which regularly attack Roblox have the exact same agenda as the US/UK laws you're opposing?
- octorian 10mo ago
  Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age. And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet. Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.
- Dusseldorf 10mo ago
  Within the past week the CEO described predatory behavior on the platform as "not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well". Not sure what YouTube videos have to do with that, regardless of production value.
  - ch2026 10mo ago
    CEO is an autistic dumbass who isn't good at conveying his thoughts. What he could have said: "While we have the best protection of any gaming or social media platform today, any amount of predatory behavior is an unacceptable problem. Roblox has increased from 20M DAUs to 150M DAUs over the last 5 years and the absolute number of these unfortunate incidents has remained flat: an 80% decline in incidence rate. In this way, we view it also as an opportunity: How can we can continue to scale the platform while getting the incidence rate to zero?"
    - frm88 10mo ago
      I agree with this interpretation. I watched the interview and - to me - it was very obvious that this was his intention. It was also very obvious that he has a lot of trouble verbally expressing himself precisely. I will admit, he completely lost it when he talked about including Polymarket in a children's gaming platform.
GaryBluto 10mo ago
> I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet. All that does is encourage her to lie and find work-arounds rather than fess-up and suffer consequences.
- ctheb 10mo ago
  What would a better approach look like?
  - iamnothere 10mo ago
    Explain why it was bad, show them how you caught them, and tell them they have to do better next time. Rinse and repeat until a young hacker is born.
  - tarsinge 10mo ago
    There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.
    - Hizonner 10mo ago
      Worked for me. I now have a secure young adult who's as well adapted as anybody I've seen. Come to think of it, I never got punished much as a kid myself, unless you count lectures. Did OK. Sorry about your cycle of authoritarianism there.
  - orwin 10mo ago
    Repetition. Then make them repeat, to see if they understood why (they _will_ roll their eyes, until they age enough). The only thing we were punished for in my childhood was lying. Not forgetting/not following on promises ('yes I will do it, don't worry '), that was fine, but saying 'i did it' when it wasn't done, that was getting harsh punishment. You didn't clean the toilet after use despite multiple warnings? As long as you admit it, no punishment, only a calm talk. I destroyed my little sister room and ran out for an hour during a teenager fit? Calm talk, asked to fix everything the best I can (and I did). Lying after the fact? Yeah, you've gained a curfew, and an unpaid job. The 'where were you' that most kid are asked in their late teenage years was always answered truthfully, even when it was doing illegal stuff (happened with my younger brother, in front of my even younger sister). Calm discussion, no punishments. A few year, my sister called my dad at 3 am, while inebriated and high, and afraid (I don't remember if it was because she didn't trust her friend to drive her or that she felt weirdly bad and was afraid of GHB). The trust built in the early years from this approach might have saved her life.
joseangel_sc 10mo ago
my teenager self finds this as a challenge and just a way to defy your authority
- mjevans 10mo ago
  I'd feel better about a kid smart enough to learn how to get around DNS block lists and other forms of mass surveillance and filtering than one who free ranges and isn't even trying to get out.
  - joseangel_sc 10mo ago
    me too, but i want my child to get around those authorities and i want them to defy them, but i don’t want too be one of those authorities
annoyingnoob 10mo ago
Kids need room to explore the boundaries and fail, it is part of growing up.
lisbbb 10mo ago
It's not about parents failing to do their jobs, it is about heavy handed big government wanting to step even further into our lives using our own technology.
justinator 10mo ago
Brutha when I was young my parents would ring a bell at dinnertime and if I ran to the dining room in 5 minutes I got to eat and that was basically the extent of their monitoring of me.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  But did you have unrestricted access to a device with a camera where pedophiles the world over tried to talk thirteen year old you into doing dances in your underwear for them?
  - justinator 10mo ago
    My dude if someone wanted 13 year old me to do undie dances for their pleasure, they'd just kidnap me off the street. Are you under the impression that crime was just invented 5 years ago?
    - Ferret7446 10mo ago
      That's kinda the point of online grooming. You get kids to trust you and then you tell them to go to some location where you can kidnap them off the street. It's the predator equivalent of door-to-door snake oil -> email phishing, the Internet allowed them to "upgrade".
  - anal_reactor 10mo ago
    I honestly think that pedophiles aren't half as bad as Facebook algorithm making you addicted to doomscrolling. I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends. Once I came across a guy who openly told me he's a pedophile. Nothing bad ever happened to me.
    - eskori 10mo ago
      I completely empathize with you on this: > I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends Plus I also agree in how harmful doomscrolling can be, specially for the young. Can't compare that with pedophiles though, sorry. I don't know your age, but I think we can both agree in the fact that the Internet has changed a lot in a short period of time, and still does. I met some of my best friends online: games, forums, group chats. However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff, the Internet is no longer the same either. Not only that, but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers. Of course we are talking about a large-scale issue and we can't just use personal experience to justify anything. But I wanted to point out that using "Nothing bad ever happened to me" is specially dangerous here because we are not even talking about the same scenario.
idiotsecant 10mo ago
If it's baffling it's because it's bullshit. Very few parents are calling for this. It's just 'Wont someone please think of the children' moral hand-wringing on its face and not very subtle creeping fascism underneath.
navigate8310 10mo ago
This kind of helicopter parenting encourages the child to break your trust even more. Instead of regulating what your child does online, be very transparent and talk about out all the perils of such services. Be ready to invest considerable time with them that encourages physical outdoor activities instead of being lazy and hoping internet will be their parent and then micro manage stuff.
- frizlab 10mo ago
  Do you have children?
  - navigate8310 10mo ago
    Does my point becomes invalid if I say I don't? I've been a child before.
    - mbirth 10mo ago
      Or as Hofstetter put it: “If I see a helicopter in a tree, I don’t have to be a pilot to know: Someone fucked up”
      - frizlab 10mo ago
        But it does not tell you how.
    - frizlab 10mo ago
      Oh boy, you’ve been a child?! Good for you, you must know what it is to raise one then. That is truly and desperately stupid, I hope you’re joking.
  - wryoak 10mo ago
    A: “it’s important to communicate honestly with your kids and spend time with them in a way that provides them alternatives to common yet inferior modes of living life” B: “To suggest such, you must not have kids yourself” Is someone feeling inadequate? Better to look into the mirror than to try to turn it on those who challenge you
fuzzythinker 10mo ago
How can such obtuse opinion be the top comment? A good parent builds trust with their kids, not monitor them. If that trust can not be obtained, then block sites in hosts or at the network level. If you believe Roblox is horrible for your kid, why allow them to use it at all?
slumberlust 10mo ago
Would you support removing age restrictions elsewhere under the guise of 'just parent?' Drinking age? Gambling? Driving?
port11 10mo ago
So we're blaming parents now? I don't know a single parent that understands what a VPN is or why the government needs to be on top of that. This is 100% a crusade against online anonymity and a bid for control. Children aren't using VPNs, adults are, and politicians are quite convinced that that's where dissidence and danger lies.

CJefferson 10mo ago

The world doesn’t consider it reasonable for businesses to sell beer to kids, and expect us all to constantly follow our kids around to make sure they don’t get beer. Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”. And at this point, most kids, most people, spend more time online than outside walking around

g-b-r 10mo ago
> Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”. Because there's no whatsoever downside in requiring bars to not serve children (if we assume that it's just to not give alcohol to children); online age checks instead have very big negative consequences for the whole populace.

pram 10mo ago

TBF my boomer parents didn't monitor a single thing I did on the internet, so I kinda doubt it's some unique failure of contemporary parents.

jen729w 10mo ago
But was this in the late 90s/early 00s? I mean … it was kinda different then, no? I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.
- pksebben 10mo ago
  don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise. My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on. Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.
- pram 10mo ago
  Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol
- Larrikin 10mo ago
  Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet. There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
- datatrashfire 10mo ago
  every generation thinks they live in unique times. that there existed some idyllic lost time innocence. it’s a fantasy.
- nechuchelo 10mo ago
  My parents didn’t monitor what I was doing on the internet when I was growing up in 00s. I saw a lot of shit and wasted a lot of money on GPRS and WAP portals. I learned from my mistakes and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t want to monitor everything my children do either.
- the_af 10mo ago
  The internet was pretty fucked up in the 90s / early 00s. Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it. And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster). "Life, uh, finds a way."
ls612 10mo ago
My parents tried but they know about as much about technology as a typical boomer so by the time I was in high school it became totally ineffective.

ch2026 10mo ago

> I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing How much of that "horrible thing" is due to a handful of youtube videos you've seen as opposed to first-hand experiences? What if you found out that the very well-produced youtube videos which regularly attack Roblox have the exact same agenda as the US/UK laws you're opposing?

octorian 10mo ago
Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age. And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet. Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.
Dusseldorf 10mo ago
Within the past week the CEO described predatory behavior on the platform as "not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well". Not sure what YouTube videos have to do with that, regardless of production value.
- ch2026 10mo ago
  CEO is an autistic dumbass who isn't good at conveying his thoughts. What he could have said: "While we have the best protection of any gaming or social media platform today, any amount of predatory behavior is an unacceptable problem. Roblox has increased from 20M DAUs to 150M DAUs over the last 5 years and the absolute number of these unfortunate incidents has remained flat: an 80% decline in incidence rate. In this way, we view it also as an opportunity: How can we can continue to scale the platform while getting the incidence rate to zero?"
  - frm88 10mo ago
    I agree with this interpretation. I watched the interview and - to me - it was very obvious that this was his intention. It was also very obvious that he has a lot of trouble verbally expressing himself precisely. I will admit, he completely lost it when he talked about including Polymarket in a children's gaming platform.

GaryBluto 10mo ago

> I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet. All that does is encourage her to lie and find work-arounds rather than fess-up and suffer consequences.

ctheb 10mo ago
What would a better approach look like?
- iamnothere 10mo ago
  Explain why it was bad, show them how you caught them, and tell them they have to do better next time. Rinse and repeat until a young hacker is born.
- tarsinge 10mo ago
  There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.
  - Hizonner 10mo ago
    Worked for me. I now have a secure young adult who's as well adapted as anybody I've seen. Come to think of it, I never got punished much as a kid myself, unless you count lectures. Did OK. Sorry about your cycle of authoritarianism there.
- orwin 10mo ago
  Repetition. Then make them repeat, to see if they understood why (they _will_ roll their eyes, until they age enough). The only thing we were punished for in my childhood was lying. Not forgetting/not following on promises ('yes I will do it, don't worry '), that was fine, but saying 'i did it' when it wasn't done, that was getting harsh punishment. You didn't clean the toilet after use despite multiple warnings? As long as you admit it, no punishment, only a calm talk. I destroyed my little sister room and ran out for an hour during a teenager fit? Calm talk, asked to fix everything the best I can (and I did). Lying after the fact? Yeah, you've gained a curfew, and an unpaid job. The 'where were you' that most kid are asked in their late teenage years was always answered truthfully, even when it was doing illegal stuff (happened with my younger brother, in front of my even younger sister). Calm discussion, no punishments. A few year, my sister called my dad at 3 am, while inebriated and high, and afraid (I don't remember if it was because she didn't trust her friend to drive her or that she felt weirdly bad and was afraid of GHB). The trust built in the early years from this approach might have saved her life.

joseangel_sc 10mo ago

my teenager self finds this as a challenge and just a way to defy your authority

mjevans 10mo ago
I'd feel better about a kid smart enough to learn how to get around DNS block lists and other forms of mass surveillance and filtering than one who free ranges and isn't even trying to get out.
- joseangel_sc 10mo ago
  me too, but i want my child to get around those authorities and i want them to defy them, but i don’t want too be one of those authorities

annoyingnoob 10mo ago

Kids need room to explore the boundaries and fail, it is part of growing up.

lisbbb 10mo ago

It's not about parents failing to do their jobs, it is about heavy handed big government wanting to step even further into our lives using our own technology.

justinator 10mo ago

Brutha when I was young my parents would ring a bell at dinnertime and if I ran to the dining room in 5 minutes I got to eat and that was basically the extent of their monitoring of me.

fragmede 10mo ago
But did you have unrestricted access to a device with a camera where pedophiles the world over tried to talk thirteen year old you into doing dances in your underwear for them?
- justinator 10mo ago
  My dude if someone wanted 13 year old me to do undie dances for their pleasure, they'd just kidnap me off the street. Are you under the impression that crime was just invented 5 years ago?
  - Ferret7446 10mo ago
    That's kinda the point of online grooming. You get kids to trust you and then you tell them to go to some location where you can kidnap them off the street. It's the predator equivalent of door-to-door snake oil -> email phishing, the Internet allowed them to "upgrade".
- anal_reactor 10mo ago
  I honestly think that pedophiles aren't half as bad as Facebook algorithm making you addicted to doomscrolling. I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends. Once I came across a guy who openly told me he's a pedophile. Nothing bad ever happened to me.
  - eskori 10mo ago
    I completely empathize with you on this: > I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends Plus I also agree in how harmful doomscrolling can be, specially for the young. Can't compare that with pedophiles though, sorry. I don't know your age, but I think we can both agree in the fact that the Internet has changed a lot in a short period of time, and still does. I met some of my best friends online: games, forums, group chats. However, as well as we could go out and play in the street without much concern some years ago and now the streets are for cars that can injure/kill you + other stuff, the Internet is no longer the same either. Not only that, but now parents are also people who grew up with the Internet and no longer see it as something new or weird, so they are not as afraid as previous parents were. That means that children are raised without or with much less fear to online dangers. Of course we are talking about a large-scale issue and we can't just use personal experience to justify anything. But I wanted to point out that using "Nothing bad ever happened to me" is specially dangerous here because we are not even talking about the same scenario.

idiotsecant 10mo ago

If it's baffling it's because it's bullshit. Very few parents are calling for this. It's just 'Wont someone please think of the children' moral hand-wringing on its face and not very subtle creeping fascism underneath.

navigate8310 10mo ago

This kind of helicopter parenting encourages the child to break your trust even more. Instead of regulating what your child does online, be very transparent and talk about out all the perils of such services. Be ready to invest considerable time with them that encourages physical outdoor activities instead of being lazy and hoping internet will be their parent and then micro manage stuff.

frizlab 10mo ago
Do you have children?
- navigate8310 10mo ago
  Does my point becomes invalid if I say I don't? I've been a child before.
  - mbirth 10mo ago
    Or as Hofstetter put it: “If I see a helicopter in a tree, I don’t have to be a pilot to know: Someone fucked up”
    - frizlab 10mo ago
      But it does not tell you how.
  - frizlab 10mo ago
    Oh boy, you’ve been a child?! Good for you, you must know what it is to raise one then. That is truly and desperately stupid, I hope you’re joking.
- wryoak 10mo ago
  A: “it’s important to communicate honestly with your kids and spend time with them in a way that provides them alternatives to common yet inferior modes of living life” B: “To suggest such, you must not have kids yourself” Is someone feeling inadequate? Better to look into the mirror than to try to turn it on those who challenge you

fuzzythinker 10mo ago

How can such obtuse opinion be the top comment? A good parent builds trust with their kids, not monitor them. If that trust can not be obtained, then block sites in hosts or at the network level. If you believe Roblox is horrible for your kid, why allow them to use it at all?

slumberlust 10mo ago

Would you support removing age restrictions elsewhere under the guise of 'just parent?' Drinking age? Gambling? Driving?

port11 10mo ago

So we're blaming parents now? I don't know a single parent that understands what a VPN is or why the government needs to be on top of that. This is 100% a crusade against online anonymity and a bid for control. Children aren't using VPNs, adults are, and politicians are quite convinced that that's where dissidence and danger lies.