I cannot prevent the kid from seeing the marketplace.
I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature. It won't let them play it, but it lists all the games installed in the XBox.
I cannot prevent them from downloading free stuff.
It was frustrating and clear to me that this wasn't designed for the benefits of parents.
I just want it to act like a console with a fixed set of games installed and no marketplace access.
These are not implementation errors or miscommunication between different business units.
What you are witnessing is an intentional setting of a revenue dial to the maximum allowable setting that still permits the original sale.
I don't think the companies such as Google*, Microsoft, Valve or Nintendo** have a Child Safety business unit.
If they did, the software they produce would work and I would be able set some sane settings once when creating a group of users which contain children.
What I am experiencing is user hostility when trying to limit who can chat or influence my children. The UI is usually horrible and some devices have no way of limiting or whitelisting what games can be played by children.
* Fuck you for not requiring TVs to implement the features required to use child users on TVs.
** Fuck you for making the of doing anything on the switch related to child-profiles a horrible experience.
A fact childless nerds have forgotten.
The sole reason this devide exists is to put marketplace before your kid's eyes. They won't let you disable it.
And because there are definitely benefits of Internet access. Saved games, for example.
But yeah, fair point. I should configure router to selectively enable/disable access to that device while the kid uses it to see how usable it is. It may just be good enough for his games
> I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.
This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.
No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.
Nope, parental controls are fucked up since ages. And this is by design, and not because of some "b-list developers".
Yeah, like Microsoft requesting that Firefox shall be (parentally) reviewed, while Edge happilly could connect to internet. Fixed by creating a local account.
> If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.
The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.
Not sure if I want to call it by design.
It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
One axis is if they even want to make parental controls work, which they may well not want to but rather wish to just check some checkboxes.
But the company that builds Teams and Windows 11: I think it's entirely plausible they can't.
All the media is local to my house- I am the librarian who curates the selection of media based on my kids interests, maturity, and my comfort. It feels like the only way forward.
That said I feel YouTube Kids does a pretty good job IF you change to curate only mode: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids
[1]: https://zaparoo.org [2]: https://batocera.org
Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?
Not communicate.
Not buy stuff.
Just play (local) games.
Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.
And absolutely no reason to have all 3 bundled in one.
> Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.
Everything you just said is true for gun ownership as well!
> Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.
I agree, but I also see absolutely no reason why 5 years old children would have access to a gaming device. Pretty much any other activity I can imagine is better for them.
Turns out what was fun for you at age 5 will be fun for your kids at age 5. Just the same as The Cat In The Hat is still a beloved book.
I personally have found this to be the absolute winner of a solution.
My daughter, when she was 6 or 7, was terrified by certain things she accidentally found on YouTube, and asked me to have them filtered out. At 13, she already didn't need that, of course, but the notion of "kids" includes "small kids", who definitely should not be exposed to everything the Internet has to offer, or let to go out unsupervised.
One day your kid might have the friend over that you suspect might be trouble. You check in a little more often. Online is harder. You see them with the device, and without controls, what's going on could be almost anything.
Rough analogies:
- Not letting kids buy unlimited candy ~ not giving them unlimited screen time
- Preventing your kid from interacting with “bad” kids or going into unsafe neighborhoods ~ blocking “bad” websites
- Not letting your kid watch adult shows or go to adult places ~ automatically hiding NSWF content
On the last point: if you’re not careful and your kid is unlucky, they may find shocking and traumatizing content accidentally. This is true in real life but the internet moreso (vs safe neighborhoods), even today. e.g. I regularly hear reports about Instagram recommending gore seemingly out of nowhere, such as https://www.cbsnews.com/news/instagram-violence/ (Instagram seems particularly notorious for some reason).
I didn’t start by giving my kindergartener a lecture about the dangers of riptides and then let them navigate the risk of the ocean themselves as they learn to keep their head above water.
Granular parental controls are a way to create that kind of progression, allowing them gradually increasing autonomy within a managed environment.
Businesses don't care for the careful minority when they know such advices will be shared, silencing those who really care.
Even the feature name "parental control" is chosen to induce guilt in parents.
It's really not unique. America might be high on the list and a bit weird about it, but it is most definitely not alone.
The Internet and mobile phones are not a particularly American problem. They’re literally everywhere.
It's also parents who get them their first phone and choose what kind of a phone to get them (it's not all that unusual to see kids with dumbphones anymore).
Of course there should be a way to limit things like transactions and screen time but it doesn't have to be this whole surveillance tech with GPS tracking, granular permissions, and revealing what the kid texted his friends on a given day.
It mostly extends to interactions in the physical world though - restricting children's use of digital devices is socially acceptable and expected
Online grooming happens on a gigantic scale in Europe. It just doesn't get the headlines it should. And parents don't care to protect their children. They're busy.
It's fine and well to say the solution is to just be around more or take an interest in what they're doing, but that is hard to do with full time jobs, multiple kids, etc. Parental controls are supposed to exist to let the parents let their kids explore in a safe space. It's not about constant supervision or tracking, its more akin to hiring a babysitter rather than leave your children home alone.
It takes a village to raise a child. And it's about damn time that Silicon Valley takes some responsibility for this creature that they have created.
But still, there's going to be many who are not. I would rather good parental controls existed to make it easier for people to be better parents. Yes, maybe parental controls don't make the difference from bad to good, but they do make a positive difference for many.
However, it doesn't work for families where both parents have to work 2-3 jobs just to keep food on the table and the heat on all winter.
And no; poor families neither do nor should "just keep the kids from getting cellphones" or something (not that you would necessarily make that argument, but I've seen its like too many times on HN...).
Poor parents can certainly still "take an earnest interest", but they're much less likely to be able to be there...and, frankly, due to the stresses and pressures of Living While Poor, they're less likely to have the emotional bandwidth to communicate clearly and productively about these things, too.
Now, what is the answer? ...hell if I know. Being poor sucks, and there aren't always good ways around that.
For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.
I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.
The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
Honestly, maybe the Gabb Phone marketing is lulling users into a false sense of security. If you still have to do the same legwork as the default Android experience, what's the point of their devices?
So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app.
I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators.
This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.
The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.
jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547
Clear how it could restrict to friends-only when connecting directly to another Nintendo Switch user, but a bit murky how it'd make that determination in cases like Minecraft where the client is connecting to a cross-platform user-hosted game server that is not associated with any Nintendo/Microsoft account.
Could work if you have the parents manually whitelist specific server IPs, as they could with router/firewall, though not sure if "could you whitelist 209.216.230.207 please?" would present a meaningful choice in most cases.
In a country where you have parents with wildly different ideas about what constitutes “safety”, I have no idea why anyone thinks it is possible to set a single standard for this.
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
I played a lot of Titanfall back in the day and had a lot of reservations about talking with other people's kids. Nothing really bad happened, and I had a lot of fun, but it was creepy.
I kinda enjoy that the matchmaker rooms in Beat Saber only allow you to emote with large body gestures and not say anything or even make hand gestures. I enjoy acting like a cartoon character to honor and recognize the other players (like choosing the song that I really hate because another player has asked for it five times in a row) and not getting involved in the mean bullshit you get in games like League of Legends. (It's fun to be in a private room with 2 or more players too where you can chat but then you are talking with people you picked which in my case are nice people)
My son and his friend created a new game called "the kick game" inside a certain online game where the real game was to trick the other players into kicking out other players that they didn't like or wanted to bully -- frequently the victims didn't understand the rules of this game at all. On Roblox they would find racist games where you cut down thousands of Zulu, just awful stuff.
Not to say I haven't had a good time with serious League players who communicate on Discord and have a positive team but I think communication features and UGC are often a disaster in games.
There are also unreasonable restrictions, like not being able to play user-created maps in Mario Maker unless you have a membership.
As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.
Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.
It’s all fine and dandy, until (i) you find that they’ve actually just saved up their pocket money and gifts for the last year and a half to buy the phone (age 11 in my daughter’s case) and that all the after school and weekend activities are being arranged on phones. Seeing your kids excluded from real-world activities is tough.
In our case, a combination of talking to the kids plus Apple parental controls offered a reasonable approach.
This still is possible for me, surely it is possible for kids.
The child may also learn about making social effort to keep in touch rather than relying on a beacon to ping them about social events.
Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence is not.
Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.
But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).
neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
The story outlined, one of a child prodigy solo-navigating the gritty online world of pre-2000's, is old and tired. An active parent can support a child at all ages safely in these "hacker" moments that are described without giving them un-reined access to tools. A parent should be able to ask "how was your day today?" and get a truthful answer about online activity, just like the same question being asked at the end of the school day. It's out of curiosity and protection, and from a nurtured relationship.
My wife and I disagreed about letting my son have my old desktop replacement laptop at a young age. Of course I said yes, based on my own experience, but my wife turned out to be right in the end. He got into some pretty dark places and the toxic relationships he developed with other people his age were bad enough and the trouble he got into was real and not hypothetical.
He's turned it around and is getting the support to do well relative to his Gen Z peers, but it took some harrowing experiences to get there.
You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place in order to mitigate a risk that is very scary but less likely to kill them than drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
People are freaking out over stranger danger not because it is by the numbers prevalent but because they feel like they can control it then find out the controls suck.
What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
What if you read again and again that it didn't work because of how many accidents are caused by drivers or momentary mistakes.
Would you feel only as unsafe as before or worse?
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/...
93% of victims under 18 know their abuser.
Sure there's 7% thats not, but a significant supermajority is family/friends. 59% were acquaintances, and 34% are family.
Edit: seriously, -1 cause I link to actual facts, rather than shitty emotional outbursts? Family and friends of family have always been the major list of suspects for child sex abuse. They're the ones who have time and access.
But somehow linking to cited facts is -1 central. Sigh.
Yes, but no. I used to think the same, coming from the same background, and sometimes I still do but back in the day there was a big filter already (not everyone wanted or liked videogames or a PC), and we were not terminally online. Plus, for the average HNer there is a big survivorship bias on these topics because "I went earning 6 figures thanks to my experiences with computers back in the day".
Nowadays almost everyone has access to an Internet connected smartphone, owning it is not a feature in itself anymore and the vast majority are not entertained trying to hack it. So it becomes something just like any other thing relates to children/teenagers: use common sense, adapt to your kids behavior, strengths and weaknesses and don't stick to rigid rules proposed by someone else that doesn't know you, but keep those rules in mind as an inspiration.
In the mid 90’s I got my first PC when I was 13 but my parents would not let me online. I ended up finding a way via nefarious means. I bought a 25’ telephone cord from Radio Shack and when my parents weren’t home I would unplug their bedroom phone. I discovered that if I ran the Prodigy installer it would connect to the Internet briefly to download the latest phone numbers in my area. I found that I could alt-tab out of the full screen installer and use the lnternet unfiltered for about 10 minutes or so before they kicked me off. This worked for about a year or so.
I then had to resort to stealing my parent’s credit card and signing up for free trials and cancelling them before the charges incurred. I eventually screwed up big time. I downloaded a “free porn” BBS dialer and it made an international call to South America and ran up the phone bill $300 or so. I lost my computer privileges for a couple of months. I guess the silver lining was when I turned 16, I immediately got a job and my drivers license so I could pay for my own phone line. I kept my grades up to maintain privileges and was a straight arrow since.
caution is necessary and kids can learn plenty without unrestricted access
I personally would have been better off without internet access, no knowledge of hex dumps would have been worth it. It's a little upsetting that you're using that as an example of why kids should have more permissive access.
We know that children and teenagers are vulnerable to all sorts of filth that the internet makes available very easily, and indeed even inflicts without consent onto users. Porn, for example, was something that was more difficult to encounter before the internet, and when you did encounter it, it was in smaller amounts. Today, you are a URL away from an unlimited sea of it, and the ubiquity of mobile devices means restricting access is difficult. This makes parenting more challenging. And that's a more pernicious even if common problem. Social media and SFV cause all sorts of developmental harm without suffering the same stigmas as pornography or violence, and so its use continue with the full approval of the social environment.
(And age range here is not so important to discuss; pornography consumption and social media/SFV use is bad for everyone, including adults.)
> Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
A corollary of what I wrote about is that you have to understand what matters. Becoming a "hacker" isn't the priority of childhood, and it's odd to prioritize that. It isn't worth anything if you are left screwed up by consuming bad content. (Nor does most of the most fruitful experimentation require constant and unfettered internet access. Without maturity and discipline, the internet easily becomes an enabler of shallow and superficial engagement. Deeper exploration is often best facilitated by disconnecting.) It's also senseless to appeal to exceptions.
However, I do think that the most important factor isn't parental controls, but the family environment, what parents teach their children, and the social groups your family and your children move around in. If parents are relying on technology as a substitute for their job as parents, then children will easily fall prey to all sorts of trash. But if children have parents who communicate clearly what they should and should not be doing, maintain a healthy and active family life, and model good behavior by example while penalizing bad behavior, then children will generally stick to good behaviors.
I think law has an important role to play. The former should support the latter. And more fundamentally, this requires a certain backtracking from the anything goes/do what feels good ethos of the contemporary moral landscape. Moral confusion is the biggest factor. Law is effectively a determination of general moral principles within certain socially and culturally concrete circumstances. As the old expression goes, lex iniusta non est lex (an unjust law is not a law). The point of the law is to guard the common good (which is what makes a society) and help steer people away from the bad and toward the good. We all need these to live good lives, and we need to finally put to rest the pernicious notion that the law is not about moral guidance and that all it exists for is to secure our "rights" to whatever we want, where the understanding of rights entails a destructive do what thou wilt relativism. True freedom is not the ability to do whatever you damn well please. It is the ability to do what is good, and to be able to do the good, one must be virtuous - a proper formation - that enables you to be good. Vice cripples our ability to be. A legal system and a society that is supportive of virtue and the good is good for its individual members. One that embraces a bullshit "neutrality" is an easy target for predatory exploitation. There is a great deal of money to be made from vice and stupidity. We become morally defenseless in the face of the wolves. Might becomes right, and in a culture of moral relativism, we internalize this tyrannical false principle.
HN: No no no let me stop you right there
They miss out on the social group and then fade away from it and just become "that one guy in our class."
The last time I mentioned this several people argued that, "true friends would stick together" or some such. Well, if you already have those friends. But if you're in high school and finding yourself, you probably haven't met all of them yet.
A lot of both communication and organizing of social events happen through the phone. Kids without a phone (or some online method) will just be forgotten. This is just the reality.
Unrestricted access? That depends on the kid. We had them charge in the living room (no overnight use), and their computers were actual desktops in a single office in the house.
We never used filtering or tracking software. The one exception was blocking youtube (through /etc/hosts) for my youngest during covid when it was too big a distraction.
They MIGHT be one of the few hyper-social ones that thrives despite being left out of online circles but they are the exception.
(IMHO, once a kid has figured out how to do this, they have earned the privilege. It’s part of growing up.)
A responsible and forward-thinking parent could provide a Graphene OS smartphone if the kid absolutely insists on having one, to limit the privacy damage.
They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of software engineers can't figure this out.
I do find it odd there's no option to outright disable the internet (except for software updates). Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.
Seeing other Japanese companies account systems (Square Enix and Rakuten, for example), the only conclusion I can draw is that the Japanese dev industry does not consider clear account management to be important.
It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.
When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking.
This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanagement was not good for their relationship or his personal development, to put it mildly.
Every time I read HN comments from parents declaring their child will not have a phone until they turn 16 (another comment in this thread) or how they’ll lock their kids out of games and social media completely I think back to my friend whose mom was extremely controlling in the same way.
Young kids need tight controls, but this needs to be loosened as they age. Parenting discussions really need to come with age ranges because what’s appropriate changes so fast from year to year.
Also you have to consider the ramifications of such behavior if that gets public, I mean could possibly be the source of bullying and what not.
As a child we were de incentivized to playing games with the computer. The schema was:
A) computer you can have, because is useful beyond playing, consoles, no way. Forget it “that is stupidizing BS”
B) No money for games. Other SW would be bought, but rarely games.
That moved us to start spending time with other things in the computer, like programming our own games.
Of course today that is all difficult to impossible, by design, without ostracizing the kids.
Sounds barely realistic, when school are using iPads, education is one URL away from entertainment crack and parental controls on iOS are a joke.
1. Ask your school to change their policies. Coordinate with other parents. Make it clear to the school that if they don't start to enforce these policies then you will hold the school directly responsible for any harm that comes to your child in the environment they create.
2. Pick different schools. (Home School, Private school) if you can afford it. Charter schools may be an option.
Both of these require sacrifice on your part and neither are easy. But no one should ever think parenting is easy.
In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.
Most 5-year olds should be allowed to close the bathroom door while doing their business, they should not be permitted to access the internet privately.
I do not agree at all with this conclusion.
This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.
If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.
A kid with no education and restricted access will just find a way to do whatever he wants to do. A kid with good education and unrestricted access will know to steer away from bad stuff and talk to adults when he finds something strange.
One of the proudest moments of my grandfather (in my household, he was the most tech savy) was when I found a way to "bypass" an restriction program around age 11. From then on he decided I "outgrew" this kind of limits and just gave me unlimited access to the family computer and the internet.
But years later he confessed, the "click" moment for him was not that I could bypass the restriction, but that I trusted him enough to show him and that I self-reported the situation. And this is pure education and has nothing to do with restrictions.
I read so many parents here that want to "educate" their children but want to offload that work to some service or program instead of putting the work in. You prefer spending 5 hours configuring your child's nintendo switch rather than sitting down with him for 1 hour to explain to him what he can encounter on the internet, how he should behave and react and building the bond needed for him to trust you enough to come to you when needed.
Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.
I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.
Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.
It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose
But then I remember every time I've had to delve into actual enterprise administration, and yeah that's its own full-time job.
Side rant: when will businesses acknowledge that an account might be owned by two people (spouses, for example) and allow separate logins for the same account? Their terms of service almost always prohibit sharing passwords, and because the lost password flow would require sharing an email address, you didn't want to do that anyway.
I’m not saying that’s not possible, but if you have somehow figured the “right” abstractions and interface to achieve this in an incredible simple and sensible yet just as powerful and complete way that any parent can manage it, then you’d make a killing in enterprise sales. It’s not like enterprise IT admins love Group Policy or any random Joe can be a Linux sysadmin.
Parental controls are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. Payment systems are really robust but there's still fraud. If there's prey, there will be predators.
Education and clear rules are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. There's people that's very evil and also very clever. You can educate and trust your 12yo to understand 80% of it, yet for the remaining 20% you have to be there.
And, oh boy, the issue about parental controls being incredibly complicated is 100% by design. Simple and sensible parental controls would make exploitative business models like Roblox go bankrupt overnight.
> I want to limit time spent > I want to limit money spent > After 8 years it's an adult account anyway (10 -> 18)
Shouldn't you trust your children, to come to you in that 20%?
Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.
I grew up with an internet access on my computer in my room without anybody watching over my back and without any restrictions and nothing bad really happened. Meanwhile these days some people around me with children around the 10-15 range seem think their children cannot be trusted and restrictions are absolutely essential.
Has the internet really changed that much in the last decade or two? Or are people and media just talking about the dangers more?
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Also, what happens to these kids when they reach adulthood and the guard rails come off?
Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc? I have a feeling many people (including children) don't really learn unless they get hurt so the best we can do it making sure they do get hurt but only a little.
E.g. let them get scammed in a game instead of real life. Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?
I think that pornography is poison and my parents didn't know that I had access to it. "Not my kid!", they said. But my generation says, "It's every. single. kid."
> Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc?
Another poison is alcohol. Some people think that letting their kids access alcohol in their house is reasonable. I think it is better to wait until your brain is more developed before trying alcohol. First experiences with alcohol at a later age tends to enable people to have a less worse relationship with alcohol.
That seems like a great way to destroy any trust in you your child might have.
Getting scammed in RuneScape is probably a good learning experience, but is RuneScape still the only game that's like the old experience of RuneScape? That and Minecraft I suppose, but you can't really filter out servers in Minecraft.
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems...
Lots of people are in this thread saying "ah, just tell your children not to get groomed / not to watch disturbing content". They're kids. They are going to disobey their parents. There's no one here arguing we don't need to teach kids these things. But, like how when you're learning to drive you start in a parking lot with a crappy car, we need a way to make a relatively safe place for them to learn. Parental controls are currently failing to do that.
Furthermore, where you and I and median commenter on HN might be an engaged, attentive parent, there's lots of parents out there who are not. Having a good, easy-to-setup version of these controls that a less engaged parent will actually turn on would make a positive impact on those children who aren't receiving the teaching you suggest.
Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.
So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.
I'd like a flag for messaging apps called "turn off images and video". Sure, my kid might get called nasty names in plain text, but would not get beheading or bestiality videos or underage schoolmate pics.
But the author is right, it should be easy to set appropriate limits out of the box.
Market research says "Parents want control."
In the journey from CEO mandate "build a product that gives parents control" to developer implementation, "parents want control" somehow turns into "What parents want is extremely fine-grained controls," which isn't the same thing.
So a bunch of product managers brainstorm a huge list of ways that parents might want "control," hand that off to some developers, and voila: Everything becomes way too complicated for everybody and the company is able to say they offer "control" while abdicating their stated obligation of giving parents the "safe" product that the parents expect.
To fix this, it's going to have to be legislation so financial incentives are present.
By the way, I got one miyoo mini for myself and enjoy pico-8 quite a bit that I started making games myself, together with my kid and chatgpt assistance. Call me old school but I know what’s good for my own kid.
The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".
The otherside is hands off parenting. I think after about 2 children, parents tend to get tired of being so restrictive there for the youngest gets what they want and other stereotypes.
In the end it’s probably not about the tightness so much as remaining involved and honest and open with your child.
I prevented a lot of IRL fighting over the holidays. I tell them, if they want to fight each other that they can only do so in game (their preferred fighting game is primal rage) and it gets their aggression and hyperactive tendency out. Beyond fighting games they love to battle out in racing simulators like Daytona USA or controller swap Crash Bandicoot and Sonic. They have Switch 2 at home and can play it here as well but it’s not sick as Neo Geo, Sega Genesis/Saturn, NES, GameCube, PlayStation, Virtual Boy, and many others. 67
The biggest benefit of offline gaming is that friends interact IRL. You either get invited or invite friends and have real interaction, share snacks, etc. which often leads to outdoor activities when gaming is a bore or over. We need to bring that back. If the companies are unwilling it’s time to hack the offline switch or speak with our wallet.
At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...
https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parenta...
If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?
Have you considered buying them an old-school gameboy?
Nothing connected to the Internet can protect children from seeing information they couldn't see (as determined by culture/familial mores), meeting potentially exploitative strangers, being exposed to a highly curated stream of marketing content and targeted AI messaging (including social media feeds).
I believe that Internet sites and apps should not have age controls.
I believe that physical Internet access (computer, phone, TV, etc) should require an adult ID to purchase (but not logged, like cigarettes, alcohol, etc) l and the the owner of the device is responsible for its use.
If they hand it over to a minor and they are harmed, then the original adult is liable (like alcohol).
This holds someone with material motive accountable. And it becomes jurisdiction-specific accountability (location of the device).
And in the case of parents, if they allow their kids to use one of the parent's devices then they are responsible for how the kid uses it. And directly responsible for how it's used, what's allowed and what's not.
You can't trust a mega+corp with protecting your kids.
> Nintendo Switch Online (not really another account, mind you, but a membership) involves a recurring fee. It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.
You don't need to pay for Nintendo Switch Online to get access to the eShop, you just need a Nintendo Account. I made one for myself and one for my son, and neither stays logged in. My wife and I have the passwords for both, and will not give him his password until he's older. Meaning one of us needs to be there for any purchases, free or otherwise.
He has access to the Minecraft marketplace, but can't add funds to it without us. We did not use our MS accounts, and didn't make one for him, so he can't play Minecraft online. But you know what, I'm totally ok with that. He can still invite a friend over and play together in person (which he does do).
Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.
If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."
What's the market to learn from this? You're saying one thing but voting with your wallet.
The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.
I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.
The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.
> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.
Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!
Regarding the games console, his problem seems to mainly be the two conflicting account systems offered by two separate vendors, not the parental controls themselves (although I agree the situation in that circumstance is unfortunate). A quick Google search also directed me to an easy step by step guide to doing many of the things (such as the restriction of purchases and free downloads on the Nintendo game store) that he claimed to be impossible.[2]
This is written in a very dramatic manner*, especially with the whole "You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer." paragraph, that it feels almost like it's purely written to goad legislation.
[1] https://gabb.com/app-guide/
[2] https://industrywired.com/gaming/how-to-set-up-parental-cont...
* I do empathize with his situation, but much of it seems to be brought upon by his own ignorance and unwillingness to research.
Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.
Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.
But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.
Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.
Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.
Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.
It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.
So I've never imagined myself wanting to do parental controls. But I might change my mind when my kid is old enough to play with screens.
Hold on to your kids[1] and instead of having to spy on them you will know them.
Yes, Parental controls could, in theory, provide many many more protections. But given the trajectory of tech, capitalism, and the USA at large (and the culture it exports), I do not see that pragmatically happening to a relevant degree by the time I have children.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375...
I wonder if kids aren't safer in online spaces where there's very little expectation that the person on the other end is a child. Like here.
Sounds like either they’ve figured out these parental controls, and might have some tips for you. Or they trust their kids with fewer controls.
My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't grow up as nerds just don't see the problem. Among the class of people who spend their time on Substack or Hacker News the horror of the modern net and its affect on childhood are well understood at this point. Among "normal people" you will definitely get weird looks if you suggest that this stuff is terrible for your kids.
I'm a bit confused by this section. It seems to me that the author
1. Turned off online.
2. Bought a game that could be played in single-player or online
3. Got mad that online didn't work because it was turned off
4. Turned online back on
5. Got mad that online was turned on.
6. Dealt with this anger by yelling at his children
I actually don't understand what the author was trying to accomplish here
It is impossible for the average user to reason about a different security model for each app, the only way for anyone to be confident about what a program is not doing is to move to a world where apps don't work by default, and a list of boxes need to be checked which enable network or file access and cause features to work. Apple is the closest to the right answer here, but enabled-by-default and opt-out has to go away.
By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.
By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.
This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.
Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?
How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?
Instead, LLMs are being used to replace support people at the larger platforms (e.g. X Box) with the clear goal of "make it HARDER to get support" (or as patio11 would say "their goal is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible ")
Seems simple enough to me
I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.
“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”
He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.
“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”
I suppose that’ll do.
“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.
What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”
Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.
I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.
I understand the problem domain - some people try to exploit and take advantage of kids. That's a problem, I get it.
At the same time, I still think children should not be assumed to be idiots. I remember we oldschool people, when we were young, we played Quake at university campus (we could only play on holidays because one friend had the key to the room, it was a side room though; on saturday other students were not there, so we had a full room with about 30 computers in the 1990s era). We were about 15 years old, so granted, no more young kids. And the technology wasn't quite as advanced, so I am not saying this is 1:1 comparable. But young kids today often have smartphones. They have the internet non-stop. I don't think parental censorship works as a model here. Again, I get it that too young kids are too trusting, and there are creeps - but there is not really an alternative to having kids go through thought processes and understand the issues here. In warcraft 3, young gamers were quite competitive and good. So if they can learn to be better than older people, they will have no real difficulty understanding predators. (Again, it depends on the age; but if your kid is 6 years old, why can there only be games that are played online? Plus it is just chatting right? I remember playing games at the yahoo website, we chatted too. I don't think that was a problem per se. The website makes it sound as if everyone and everything has that problem. I don't think this is the case.)
Edit: Others pointed out the age range problem. I agree. So, which age range are we talking about? Is the age even mentioned on the website?
Edit2: Ah yes, 12 years old. Sorry but at 12 years old, I am having a hard time buying into the "predators exploit him every time". That seems to be ... strange. His son would probably object to the claim he made on the website here aka slandering - perhaps.
Gmail can circumvent almost any security feature even if you set up a profile on iPhone (which is not documented and good luck with that). This is definitely not an accident.
Don’t mean to pick on Google; Apple is also bad, iPhone parental controls are very leaky. My son found a way to jailbreak his phone to completely unlock screen time and disable all parental controls.
Any of the consoles are also bad, PS4, etc… although it is possible to block stuff that PS4 can do via a firewall.
Defense in depth. Multiple layers. Calender reminders to audit devices, usage, and look at router logs. Check in with your kids.
The true "safe" option is not allowing any of this until your child is old enough to understand the risks... so 18? 25?
All I'm saying is there is no route to prevent all bad things (or even most) and people who say otherwise are generally selling you something.
That academics are failing worldwide due to overexposure to screens is the least surprising thing I can imagine.
Well, except for doing parental controls on your boomer parents TV, blocking Fox news. Thats a good usage of it. You're not going to defeat propaganda believability with boomers. So blocking is best bet.
Bam, lost.
What an odd viewpoint. "It's bad to use limit your children's access to the internet in any way, but trying to stop other adults from accessing things I deem to be wrong are good!"
