No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and volume of their children’s social contact on a platform like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for me.
Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?
For a more fair comparison to liquor stores and adult movie theaters: it would be requiring people to be 18 to sign up for internet service, which is how it already works.
Parents are buying the alcohol from the liquor store (internet service, which kids cannot buy themselves) and giving it to their kids.
If you don't approve of the alcohol you're giving to your kids then stop giving it to them (it is legal in my state for parents to buy alcohol for their kids).
So what if other kids are drinking too and it would be socially a pain for the kid? That's always been true of having a parent with stricter rules.
When I was a kid in the 90s my parents limited how much TV we could watch.
I knew other kids who could only use the family computer for a limited time and while their parents were in the room.
I sympathize with parents who do want to provide internet service to their kids and want better parental control software.
But making the internet worse for everyone is not the way. Discord has already had a partner leak IDs before. [1]
I like the alcohol comparison it's interesting in how accurate it is and yet society does it.
I also think it's obvious your comparisons of parents limiting time of things like this in the 90s is not apples to apples.
Being the person to start a new trend (in your local bubble) is non-trivial and hard to explain to a child growing up around nearly all their peers having access.
Doubly so if it's something that (I think science supports this?) is far more addicting than it was in the past.
I'm not saying folks get a free pass but I'm not sure we had a global drug crisis that 90% of the population was participating in before which from your analogy is what's happening.
Thanks again for the alcohol comparison I'm going to phrase it like that in my head to hopefully get all of my brain on board with the seriousness of the topic for my kids :)
For a 90% global drug crisis comparison: Also when I was a kid my parents generally didn't let us eat sugar. They were fine if we ate sugar at a friends but they didn't themselves buy sugary cereals or ice cream or candy or soft drinks (except for special occasions like birthdays).
As a kid I hated it and it made me feel like my family was weird. I can only think of one friend growing up that didn't have soft drinks in their house and his mom was a registered dietician. I'll have to ask my folks sometime if they fielded complaints from other parents.
And, yes, the comparison of today to the 90s is not apples to apples. There are legitimate safety reasons why kids today need cell phones. In the 90s there were pay phones everywhere and that is no longer true.
But I assume parental controls on today's cell phones let parents block all apps but Contacts/Dialing/Messaging if they want to.
Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.
Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.
Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.
Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?
Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.
I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.
It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.