This is the only true solution. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids are doing online, what they’re viewing and who they’re talking to. This generation of parents should be prepared for that but apparently not.
As a parent, I do agree with taking responsibility on it. My older children is 8, so not much computer for her now. Just a bit of dactylography before she can play Gcompris, mostly chess lately, nothing online so far. They did have some initiation at school (for context this is public school in France).
That said, I do expect I won't be able to prevent them to reach inappropriate resources once they meet the point where they can browse online without me being there to inspect, so I'll rather invest time to explain them that can happen, make sure they are confident they can tell me if they faced something odd. Forbidding would be the best way to encourage, and any automatic system alone will have too shallow circumvention paths or too much burden of admin to follow for relevancy as a Parenthood tool.
I think this approach made a lot of sense in the 2000s and 2010s, when consumer electronics with internet access were expensive things well out of reach of a child unless given to them by a parent.
But we're in an era now where cell phones and tablets — especially used + low-spec ones — are something that even a young child can acquire en masse: from their friends at school, or from any mall kiosk or convenience store with their allowance, etc.
You can put all the parental controls you like on the nice phone you buy your child — but how do you put parental controls on the four other phones you have no idea they own?
(Before you say "search their room" — they could leave them in their desk at school, charging them with a battery bank they charged at home or got a friend to charge for them; and then use them with free public wi-fi rather than locked-down school wi-fi. This doesn't require any particular cleverness; it's the path of least resistance!)
If you ask me "well, what do we do, then?"... I have no idea, honestly.
Like with anything, you need to do a proper job educating your kids before trusting safeguards to keep them safe. That would be my bet for a scalable solution.
Some kids will still drown, it’s unavoidable. But swimming lessons are much more effective at preventing drowning deaths than fences.
I somewhat agree with your point, but I'd quibble with the analogy, and its implication about the usefulness/importance of fences.
I'd argue that the Internet is less like water, and more like a freeway. (It is the "information super-highway", after all!)
We do put (quite tall) fences up between freeways and residential areas (or between freeways and areas with wildlife!), and for good reason: unlike deep water (that both humans and animals have a vague instinct is an "unknown quantity" best to be approached cautiously), a freeway can, at a non-rush-hour time, look like a perfectly safe and quiet and predictable place — a place just like the calm, safe meadow or bike path or residential lane beside it — until, midway through crossing one, a truck sudenly whizzes over the horizon going 120mph and smashes right into you before the driver has time to react.
And that's the Internet: a seemingly safe, predictable place — with unexpected trucks whizzing through it, ready to smack into you.
Freeway is a great example in more ways: large swaths of society were destroyed in the process of making them (less purposefully in the case of the Internet/social media I think) and paradoxically reduced social connections despite seemingly making it easier to travel/connect. Now everywhere is unsafe because of car dependence/social media everywhere (i.e. Pauly Likens meeting adults on grindr https://www.newsweek.com/missing-teen-dead-pauly-likens-dash...)
Fair and I'll run with it. Where I live (Lisbon) it's very very easy to get to unprotected highways with no fences. No trouble at all, maybe a 15-minute walk from my home. No epidemic of kids being run over. We still fence them, where we want to pretend highways don't exist. Also a good analogy.
I tried to block YouTube when my kids were remote learning during the pandemic, it took several attempts and they were in grade school. They even got around Apple's considerable content controls I had to set up a DNS proxy.
At my son's school they recently started blocking ChatGPT, not because kids were using it to cheat, but because kids kept asking ChatGPT how to get around the content controls, and it would constantly find new ways to proxy or evade.
This never happens tho - parents dont sometimes even know how to use the tech. Its like giving a gun to a child and telling them its ok, just remember when you open the packaging to take the safety off.
...and oh yeh the safety software changes every few months so you will have to review it
> Because if internet/tech is the gun then the clear solution is “not giving your children guns”.
Funnily enough, no. The clear solution is to ensure that you talk to your children about [gun|online] safety. Show them how to use the [gun|internet] safely. Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision.
Take the mystery away through education and experience, and like anything else [guns|the internet] becomes just another part of adult life. Just one more thing that can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
> Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision.
You could do that, but there's no particular need for it. "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away".
You need to use the internet a lot before you become an adult, you need to use a gun never before you become an adult. You need a lot of practice to build up internet safety skills, you need barely any practice to build up gun safety skills.
Go ahead and have a basic gun safety talk, that's a good idea, but that's all you need.
> "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away".
This is what leads to stories about kids who make their way into their parents’ locked storage and hurt themselves or others.
“The mystery” is what leads kids to investigate things on their own. Let them know they can just ask. If they do ask, explain what you’re doing as you clear it. Strictly enforce the four rules. Let them disassemble it, or do it for them if necessary.
It’s just a tool. No less useful than a drill or saw, and no more or less dangerous than the car or can of gasoline in the garage.
> This is what leads to stories about kids who make their way into their parents’ locked storage and hurt themselves or others.
> “The mystery” is what leads kids to investigate things on their own.
Do you have evidence that learning gun safety without use doesn't do enough here?
I'm not convinced there's all that much mystery. Even if talk doesn't do enough, I bet letting your kids use guns once would do more than enough to clear up mystery. If you let your kids use a gun every week (or whatever "any time" means) it's because you're a family that likes guns, not for safety reasons.
Okay, I think "use guns once or twice with them" is a very reasonable idea for gun safety.
And it ends up being extremely different from internet safety. It's much much harder to teach and it's not practical to supervise the full learning process.
Apparently the average age of mothers is 30 - these parents should understand the risks of technology having be exposed to it themselves but we don’t seem to be seeing improvement in this area like we might expect.
The problem is that they also understand the benefits of technology. It's easy to limit "screen time" in the abstract, and not too hard to keep it going through toddlerhood if you want. It's much harder to tell your 12 year old that they're not allowed to stay connected with their friends when your own friends just sent you a meme in the group chat 5 minutes ago.
A lot of us experienced the opposite problem. I had parents that restricted large parts of the Internet that probably would have been fine to access. The Internet has changed a lot. It wasn't until I took in a zoomer who grew up with unrestricted Internet access that I realized how damaging it could be.
Your analogy is faulty and doesn't hold up to the basic scrutiny.
Whoever is giving the child access is responsible, not the manufacturer. If a parent gives their child a device capable of accessing the internet with no restrictions, that's on the parent.
Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons.
In your analogy, the bar would be equivalent to a internet cafe or public library that has PCs available to patrons. Those types of businesses should definitely use physical IDs to verify patrons are of age.
To make your analogy work for Pornhub, you'd also have to argue "why shouldn't Jack Daniels have to put age-verifying instant blood tests on their bottles in case a parent puts one in their unlocked liquor cabinet?"
Because then the same concerns arise -- why should Jack Daniels be given access to my blood just to manufacture an age-restricted product? What will they do with it? Will they secure the data appropriately? How do I know it won't be used to negatively impact my future because my health insurance company doesn't like that I drank a bottle of JD?
> Whoever is giving the child access is responsible, not the manufacturer. If a parent gives their child a device capable of accessing the internet with no restrictions, that's on the parent.
Suppose a parent lets their 16 year old borrow the family car, the kid drives to a bar, and the bar serves the kid alcoholic drinks.
By your logic would that be considered the parents fault for providing the kid with a means of transport that doesn't restrict where the kid can go rather than the bar's fault for not checking that their customer could legally use their product?
> Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons.
> To make your analogy work for Pornhub, you'd also have to argue "why shouldn't Jack Daniels have to put age-verifying instant blood tests on their bottles in case a parent puts one in their unlocked liquor cabinet?"
That's a poor comparison, because with Pornhub the end user of their product gets it directly from Pornhub. With Jack Daniels most users get the product through resellers. It is the resellers that handle checking that the final sale to the end user is legal.
Users can buy directly from Jack Daniels (jackdaniels.com) and for those sales Jack Daniels does check the buyer's age.
> Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels.
Pornhub is obviously the retailer in this analogy. False equivalence fallacy.
> Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons.
In France and almost all Western countries, Brown Forman has exactly that responsibility when they are retailing to or serving the public, as the pornography vendors are now.
> Because then the same concerns arise -- why should Jack Daniels be given access to my blood just to manufacture an age-restricted product? What will they do with it? Will they secure the data appropriately? How do I know it won't be used to negatively impact my future because my health insurance company doesn't like that I drank a bottle of JD?
Ignoring your straw man, this is exactly how alcohol is treated. A third party - the state - verifies your age and issues a physical token that you must present to prove your age when purchasing alcohol. That is exactly how pornography will now will regulated in France.
