The Chinese government is worse than most others, but not for this reason. All governments and societies make all kinds of "tyrannical" rules about raising children, in the name of limiting harm to children. This is no different.

In Germany, the government does not trust parents to home-school their children

In the US, legal adults between the ages of 18 and 21 can decide to join the Army, travel to exotic lands and die there. The same adults are not trusted to make the decision of buying and drinking beer.

This is to protect children from their parents, this "anti-excessive-gaming" bullshit is directly attacking personal agency! If you have the resources (time, money, teachers etc.) to get your children the same education they would get in a (german) public school you might as well found a private one. This is even incentivized by federal and local government. ("Freie Trägerschaft")

(Anecdotal warning:) Everyone I've met (about a dozen people) who wanted to home school their children did so for a specific reason. They were religious, wanted their kid to hold the same religious/esoteric views and thought their kid was their property. Most (older) kids were very happy they could visit an actual school.

Unless Germany's public school education somehow doesn't show its results on tests like PISA then this shouldn't be too difficult to provide to one or two kids. More than that would make it way harder. And I'm sure that if you did try to found a private school you'd have to deal with a mile long list of inane regulations as seems standard in all aspects of Germany.

Just an example of the absurd regulations in a different subject: Germany requires a license to stream to more than 500 people and they've actually enforced this on streamers. The license can cost €10k.

This information is outdated and misleading. Since 2020, licenses for public broadcast are only required for broadcasts which, averaged over six months, exceed 20000 viewers and have significant importance for the formation of public and private opinion [1].

Prior to this change, some streamers had indeed been forced to acquire such a license (although there were more conditions than just regularly having 500 viewers). Also, licenses for streamers actually cost around 1000-2500 €, instead of the 10000 € you claimed. In addition, there was an exception for cases where this would be an undue hardship [2]. The regulator basically agreed that this was pretty silly, but that it planned to enforce the law as written (as is its job), until it was changed (which it has been).

[1] (german) § 54 MStV, https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/MStV-54

[2] (german) https://t3n.de/news/livestreams-rundfunklizenz-1175321/

My cousin is home-schooling her daughters, and they're all years ahead of kids their same age while only needing to study ~9 hours a week. They have two full weekdays devoted to social activities with other homeschooled kids. It looks really amazing IMO

That was before I met home-schooled kids from the rest of the country, where it had nothing to do with giving them a better education; it had a lot to do with limiting their education, and forcing them into a fundamentalist Christian or Mormon ideology. Those kids really didn't get out to socialize much, and they didn't get a good education, either.

I think parents have a right to homeschool their kids, and a government ban on that scares me. But I also think the parents need to meet or exceed the qualifications of the teachers who would otherwise be teaching, and [edit][strikethrough]the government[/strikethrough] *society* has some interest in preventing someone from having 48 children and forming a cult.

So like a lot of other stuff extremist wackos do, "this is why we can't have nice things." The goal is to walk a fine line in the center where government can stop crazy people from using freedoms to do crazy things, while still allowing sane people to have the rights and privileges they need as free individuals within the framework of society.

I think having to pass standardized tests as homeschooled kids makes sense

I went to a school that practiced "Montessori pedagogy" and I wish I could have visited a "normal" school in hindsight.

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a22724843/ki...

Only couple of months ago in my area a mum had left a 3 year old and baby in the car, walked into her house and fell asleep for an hour. She woke up, realised what happened, ran to the car and the kids were dead. Another more recent incident occurred where a child was left in a day care bus unknowingly by the driver. He did not inspect the seats prior to locking up the bus outside in the sun. The child was found dead when he got back in the bus that afternoon.

My wife was screamed at by someone who thought there was zero risk involved in bringing the little ones through an incredibly busy parking lot where everyone drives SUVs and oversized trucks. It’s as if they couldn’t imagine a situation where the parents have already done the risk analysis and determined it is far less safe walking a pack of kids through the jungle of death machines.

Edit. For those interested in the risk analysis side:

“ On average, 38 children under the age of 15 die each year from heatstroke after being left in a vehicle. Nearly every state has experienced at least one death since 1998. In both 2018 and 2019 a record number of 53 children died after being left in a hot vehicle.”

..

“ an average of 50 children per week are injured by being backed over in a parking lot or driveway. Despite the increasing prevalence of back-up cameras in vehicles, parking lots remain dangerous for families due to: Driver distraction (looking for a perfect spot or other in-vehicle distractions)”

That is the U.S.. Which is why I brought this point up. Different countries/cultures have different perspectives.

It's only in the past 15 years that our histrionic society has decided that in all instances, without exception, that leaving your children unsupervised in a car is attempted murder.

My parents used to leave me in the car from time to time, they always made sure the window was cracked, the car was out of direct sunlight, and the sunshade was put on the windscreen. On the other hand, the thing that came closest to killing me (multiple times) was traffic.

That said, here in Australia, apparently parents leaving their kids in the car while they go to the pub to play pokies (slot machines) is enough of a problem that venues have signs reminding people not to leave children in cars. The pub round the corner from my place even has a kids playground, which I suspect was put in to stop parents leaving their kids in the car.

That is completely different to kids in cars, there wont be a time where we will decide 'Hey maybe leaving them in the car is better.', it just wont happen.

Society views always change, that should be obvious to anyone. Events that shock people change the way we think about certain situations. Kids dying in cars as hot as oven's is one of them.

Those incidents I mentioned occurred in Australia. ‘Well the incident rate is low’, that’s because almost all parents take their kids with them. If we all decided to start leaving kids in cars then the number of incidents would increase.

You live in a community, if you take actions generally frowned upon by the majority of people, like it or not you will possibly receive some negative consequences, especially if it involves children. Likewise a business like a pub would be trying to avoid an incident with a child left in a car while their parents played their addictive pokies. No business wants to deal with those negative consequences.

This is the logic used by people who call the police on children walking to the park without an adult. These are commonly people who watch a lot of news (and are therefore more misinformed according to multiple studies) and who would fail basic knowledge tests on actual risks of various activities.

This is all one big joke. I think I'm about finished arguing the absurd.

Totally not trolling, just pushing back against media misinformation.

Who lets their children run around in different direction around moving vehicles? Thats the whole point of having a parent present. Thats your responsibility... you go on about risk, but ignore the fact you should go another time or another shop if its too busy for you to manage multiple kids, find a car park closer to the entrance or find some help. Thats mitigating risk. Locking kids in cars with engines running is the exact opposite of risk mitigation.

I don't claim that any of this is easy, quite the opposite. But it was 'too hard' is not going to cut it.

You've completely distorted the statistics to justify, I assume your wife's actions. Imagine the scenario where instead of all parents taking their child with them into the shops, they all left their kids in the car with engine running. What do you think would happen to your statistics?

[{"@type":"WebPageElement","isAccessibleForFree":"False","cssSelector":".content-container"}],"articleBody":"It happened on a mild day in March, in the quiet suburb in Virginia where I grew up....

They're trusted to join the Army which includes fairly strict supervision from the chain of command. This is more akin to drinking with your parents than going off by yourself.

"We are going to trust you to go into war - a stressful situation - and know who to kill and who not to kill, if need be... but no, we definitely won't let you sit at home and drink a beer, even if it is with your parents. That is criminal"

It is pretending to treat someone like a mature adult, with all of the responsibilities, but refusing to allow beer and bars, which are common recreational and social habits in the culture.

Are there any other countries that enforce a daily time limit on an activity, whether for children or adults?

It seems either an activity (like smoking) is typically banned entirely or allowed; having it be partially allowed like this is difficult to enforce and consequently invites weird and invasive measures like these.

- Anyone driving a large vehicle for more than 9 hours per day, 56 in a week, and 90 over a two-week period in the European Union.

- Adults using a tanning under a sunlamp for more than one cycle in a 24 hour period in many countries (others, such as Australia, did ban them entirely).

- Children spending more than 10 hours per day in child care centers in many US states, such as Washington.

- Alcohol purchases are limited to certain times of day in many European countries (compare "No games between 10pm and 8am" in China).

Many of these are very difficult to enforce, and enforcement benefits from intrusive technology (such as tachographs) and even more so from intrusive AI (e.g. many EU countries were set to implement platforms to monitor truck drivers using AI, until the European Commission's Artificial Intelligence Act forced a change of plans).

I also disagree with the previous examples being as different in kind as you seem to think: e.g. the "no home-schooling" requirements, combined with mandatory attendance, still limits children's gaming time to something less than 19 hours on weekdays. Which is different from "no more than 1.5 hours", but only quantitatively, not qualitatively. And it certainly matches "the government does not trust its citizens to raise their own children", which was my main point.

Well, I guess you should give those examples another read. Unless you consider using a tanning bed to be work. Not to mention "buying alcohol at night".

What China has done is take an arbitrary, ridiculous rule like that, and make it even more absurd. Imagine if they said that after 30 minutes, a massage is by definition sex. And if you do it more than 90 minutes a week, it's sex addiction.

It's just arbitrary ways of controlling the populace. I doubt if they care whether kids play games. It's just a way to start facial recognition for the social credit system early.

It is legal to smoke. It is legal to go into a restaurant. However, it is not legal to go into a restaurant and smoke.

That's neither arbitrary nor ridiculous, it actually makes a lot of sense.

I will agree with you that often if not always, rules come with a background shady agenda behind them, such as this one being about mass surveillance.

But it is critically important to understand the purpose of things before disregarding them.

No, they objectively don't, wtf. Stop normalizing this kind of behavior

Or is that more of a firmly and deeply held personal belief more akin to blind faith or hopeful candor than an actual opinion supported by facts?

From the guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

All societies have them, and many such rules are widely accepted by the societies that have them as beneficial. E.g. such laws are the reason parents are not allowed to expose their children to obscene images, even if the parents really are convinced that doing so would benefit their children.

Also, how is "not allowing homeschooling" tyrannical? Corona especially has shown us that the quality of education received at a school is much higher than at home. Every child deserves to not be held back by their parents in this way.

It's not the same to have the parents purposefully owning and caring and dedicating to the education of the children and on the other side, an unexpected circumstance that causes your children to suddenly stay at home and try to follow an education program in which no one is prepared for such scenario.

Homeschool as a way of life is not comparable to what happened during/because of the pandemic.

"Not allowing homeschooling" in an absolute way is completely tyrannical.

Among a population of parents who have a revealed preference not to home-school, sure. But it says nothing about outcomes among a population of parents who actually want to home-school their kids.

This is very different to homeschooling.

Particularly with parents making a conscious decision to homeschool and properly planning how they're going to find the time.

Because we, the Dutch, haven't been really progressive for like at least two decades.

There's limits on the age you're allowed to buy alcohol in The Netherlands just like in other countries.

This definitely depends on whether those are the only two choices. If homeschooling includes the parents having the choice to send their kids to private academies of their choosing instead, then it's possible that homeschooling can be superior.

I don't know what it's like in the Netherlands, but in South Korea, with the very strong private academy culture, the public school system is actual comparatively subpar. Public schools are more useful for subjects like civics and history than more academic subjects like math and science.

I'm genuinely curious-- What specifially are you talking about?

I'm having a really hard time coming up with harmful misinformation that is perpetuated intentionally by the education system (or government) in any western country...

1. "Coronavirus: 'We do not recommend face masks for general wearing'". https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52153145

2. "Timeline: The UK's arguments against face masks for all". https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-06/Timeline-The-UK-s-ar...

3. "Coronavirus: Chief medical officer tells public not to wear masks". https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-...

4. "Why is the Government so adamant that face masks don't work?". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/15/government-adama...

5. "Why Telling People They Don't Need Masks Backfired". https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

6. "The Face Mask Debate Reveals a Scientific Double Standard". https://www.wired.com/story/the-face-mask-debate-reveals-a-s...

7. "Fauci Confirms Public-Health Experts Downplayed Efficacy of Masks to Ensure They Would Be Available to Health-care Workers". https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-confirms-public-health-experts-...

With Trump (or maybe just the rise of social media in general) cancel culture has become rampant. The general discussion culture has become angrier and unforgiving. People feel they are fighting a war and the enemy has to be shut down at all cost.

With Corona and climate many people feel like literally their lives are at risk. With Corona, censorship of dissenting opinions has become the norm.

I don't want my kids to be taught that boys are bad by nature and have to be taught to be like girls, and girls are only good if they behave like boys.

I don't want my kids to be taught that they are inherently sexist or something-phobic if they are not gay or Trans, or merely approach somebody they are attracted to.

I don't want them to be taught that they are inherently racist and bad because they are white.

I don't want them to be taught that they are doomed because global warming will end the world in a couple of years.

I don't want them to be taught that capitalism exploits people and socialism is the only recourse.

I don't want them to be taught that they should listen to "experts" and believe the scientists. They should be taught critical thinking and doing science.

I think one example is the age of consent, which is 14 in China, lower than most of Europe and the USA. It's a good alternative to video games...

I am sure I can't find other examples. Not saying what china does is right, but we obviously haven't mastered raising children either.

My understanding is that studies showed that drinking before a certain age (on average of course) has a high chance of causing physiological brain deterioration, but I haven’t done any recent research to see if this was still a thing. The age requirement is the government not trusting their citizens not to damage themselves.

The incoherence is still there.

Not trusted not to damage themselves with alcool, but trusted to be given weapons and sent to the far side of the world where quite a few people would love to get their heads or, barring that, at least kill them?

From the little research I’ve done, soldiers have greater chances of dying violently, being maimed, of remaining traumatised years after their service, and of killing themselves once back home (apparently more kill themselves after than are killed in action by enemy bullets [1]).

How is letting them enlist not letting them damage themselves?

It isn’t, because the average age of the enlisted soldier is less than 21. So if they actually went all the way and bothered being aligned with themselves and their supposed values, they’d bar anyone less than 21 from joining the army and lose many, many, of what are probably the most easy to recruit recruits.

It’s just hypocrisy dressed up in fine rags.

[1]: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/mental-healt...

What does society lose if enlisting before 21 is banned? Most of its recruits. The military would be in ruins, the strength of the country on the battlefield in jeopardy.

What does society lose if drinking before 21 is banned? Some revenue for brewing companies and associated tax income, which are easily compensated by having saved significant amounts of brain cells in young adults to have an impact on the economy for generations.

Everything government is a tradeoff. And in politics. And in life.

However, pretending that preserving these precious young people even against themselves is of the utmost importance while still making such tradeoffs is hypocrisy.

There’s no shame in making such a choice, and wether or not it is a wrong one is a whole other matter.

The hypocrisy lies in pretending it isn’t what it is.

Also, other countries have an average age of 28 for their soldiers. And given that apparently the brain’s functions, and particularly the prefrontal cortex, aren’t all finished until 25[1], it seems like a sensible thing to wait a few years before relying on their judgement on how to apply the use of lethal force in more than stressful environments.

But then again, if one were to be cynical, one could say it makes them all the more easier to recruit.

[1]: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

Let's not assume the drinking age is anything to do with evidence.

It's also a top public spending priority: https://www.athleticbusiness.com/college/the-highest-paid-pu...

My college gives a presentation to freshman that essentially says "we know you're going to drink, so please drink responsibly and take care of yourself." And I personally think this is much better than telling kids to not drink underage.

It reminds me of parents who teach their kids abstinence and then are shocked to find them pregnant.

Is it simply power? What is the point of it?

You cannot crime or human behavior to misbehave.

I wonder how long it will be until China's citizens start to crack under the pressure.

In Confucianism, the relationship between a father and a son, a superior and their subordinate, a state and its citizen are considered equal. Therefore it is considered normal for the state to be paternalistic. Also, collective responsibility takes precedence over individual freedom. Each person is supposed to conform to its role in society. Children’s role is to study, rather than play video games all night.

Together, you get a video game ban, enforced by the full power of the state.

Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason.

Someone opened an “Internet addiction treatment center”. Parents would pay to send their kids there, where they are deprived of their freedom, be indoctrinated about their “sins”, and even subject to electric shock. [1]

The state official television network, CCTV, aired a documentary endorsing the practice.

I am not making this up.

Obviously nobody cares about this anymore because literally everyone is an Internet addict.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addictio...

In the west there's similar solutions. For game time, parents can use parental controls, time limits and bedtimes to set up phones and the like to not work at night. The government(s) are more concerned about gambling mechanics in games.

Back then, for an average person, there wasn't much to do on the Internet, except online games and chatting with friends, both of which are considered a waste of time. As a result, Internet itself was demonized, and Internet addiction was considered a problem, even a mental disorder.

Nowadays, China has a booming tech sector. Everyone is using the Internet all the time to browse TikTok videos, stream TV shows, order food delivery and shop deals. And people stopped talking about Internet addiction, because suddenly they realize they themselves fit the clinical definition, which was to be online for more than a few hours a day.

Beating up by your parents are pretty common in China, and nobody gives a flying f--k about what you do with you kids. People would praise you for deploying violence, because that shows you are a strict parent, and the level of willingness you would spend on 'rectifying' the behavior of your kids.

And the parents would always tell the kids the violence right now is good for them, with a kind of twisted logic that early age suffering would be made up with later success in your life.

So to many Chinese family, in China or in west, the kids are not treated as individuals, they are a form of property/investment of the whole family. The parents are willing to invest a ton of money in the kids' education, in exchange to greater control/say in shaping up the kids' future.

It is a different social contract all together, I don't personally like it, but I am thankful for my parents for paying up all my tuition all the way until graduate degree, then that is super expensive for them, so there is trade-off.

[edit] We were also taught that marijuana and other drugs help you relax and be creative, that sex within a loving relationship is a good thing, that there's nothing wrong with pornography, that prostitution is an important outlet for sexually repressed men who would otherwise become violent, and that guns are for idiots who can't talk their way out of problems. All of these are still very dangerous views in most of the world.

I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force.

(I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...

Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.

Hope EU will finally get their heads together and act as well before it's too late.

First time I realized I was playing my PSP, gameBoy and PlayStation2/3 games illegally

You can read my post history; I'm anything but a Chinese Nationalist and Xi lover. Still, I don't think this law is crazy.

It clearly serves a purpose of protecting children from harm. The enforcement is creepy, but as a law I don't see it as any different to the laws about parents supplying alcohol to minors in Australia.

This is without even getting into a discussion about government monitoring citizens through cameras in their homes. That is quite literally the premise of 1984. Well I should take that back, the premise was the gov could watch you at any time, not that they actively are.

I wasn't referring to the cameras (" The enforcement is creepy"...), but it does make sense why a government would want to pass laws limiting gaming/screen use late at night amongst teenagers.

I went through it as a teenager and the lack of sleep causes all kinds of mental health and behavioural issues.

I'd argue the fact that CCP solves problems at the source is exactly the reason China didn't crack when people thought it would.

That particular link is not causitive, but correlative. Very little of education causes productivity.

System is linked and processed by data from public security, i.e. government which has more right to bio data than aggressive harvesting by public companies, which PRC is actively cracking down on. In terms of data policies, that's about as reasonable as can be expected and more protection most in the west is expected to receive.

This isn't even a blanket game ban, no different than gov setting up ratings board in response to public opinion (Chinese parents) to block kids from watching certain movies. There's a decades worth of non-always online, DRM free games, emulators etc for kids to waste time and develop skills on. No different than growing up 10 years ago before always-online games became the norm, maybe even preferrable since it cuts down on exposure now endemically popular gambling gaming mechanics and micro transactions (which the legislation also limits).

You mean like they've been doing for millennia? Probably no unanticipated side effects.

It is like you don't sell cigarettes to kids. Sure you can say the governments don't trust their parents on how to teach their kids. Gaming is a health issue the same as everything else.