The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
Y'know what happens instead? Their friends have unfettered access to smartphones, so my nephews see all the idiotic brainrotting shit on youtube shorts anyways. If not at home, they'll see all the crap we're blocking at school from their friends anyways. Hell, they could just go to the library and access the free public computers there if they wanted to! So my sisters who are responsible and do everything correctly, still suffer, and like any reasonable parent don't want to go to the extreme of locking their children up in cages and not letting them outside of the house.
There's a reason we don't legislate alcohol and tobacco sales to the same tune of "Just police your kids 24/7 and keep them under lock and key", we instead realize that we can't (or, shouldn't) supervise kids 24/7 day in and day out, and have society-wide rules that forces everyone to not sell booze to anyone underage.
I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.
Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.
It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.
It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.
Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.
Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?
Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?
How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?
I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.
Raising a kid takes a village.
But we are in western 21st century, people leave their places of birth for myriad of reasons, some better than others but all equally good for them, given its almost never easy to lose one's roots and just move on one's own.
I am in this category, we have 2 small kids and any family is at least 1000km away, the actually helpful good one more like 1500km (and no its not just a hop on some local planes, rather full day ordeal at minimum). No nanny. We see how kids and grandparents enjoy each other, grandparents have more... mental capacity? to teach them after our long day at work and so on.
But there are reasons we moved, its complex mix of leaving poor corrupted place with higher criminality where kids would struggle to achieve a good life via moral legal work and just good efforts. Not everybody has the luxury to come from background where the only difference is amount of money earned. So you give kids a better start and environment, while giving them much smaller set of role models and people who have time for them outside school.
At the end its our choices and our responsibility to raise them. No phones for a loooong time, and even after that some dumb nokia. They can screw up their lives on their own once adults, we won't contribute there even if it would be tremendously easier lifestyle.
It’s ridiculous that schools are forcing young children to carry devices for educational work that will also happily serve up brainrot, video games, and porn — with the supposed solution that the parent needs to be watching over their shoulder 24/7. Let’s just give all the kids loaded guns too, and say if anything goes wrong it’s just bad parenting.
