Different times. Needless to say, I don't think I will be able to try the same approach.
Growing up my father believed playing the GTA would be detrimental to my development. He banned them from our home and told the parents of my friends not to let me play those games at their house, if they said they wouldn't enforce that rule I wasn't allowed over.
Didn't matter, I played the games to completion at friend's houses because their parents didn't really give a crap.
Looking back, I think the only way my father could have reasonably stopped me from playing these games would have been to isolate me from my friends and wreck our relationship. Now luckily, we're pretty sure no harm was done in this case, but the point is that there's not actually that much parents can do to limit access to content if other parents aren't similarly vigilant.
Almost all parents think that, COD included. But I think recent studies said that video game violence does not influence kids and teens to commit real life violence. At least kids and teens today play Minecraft and Roblox which are to lesser extent violent than GTA and COD.
Ah so that's why GameStop Stonk meme happened :)
> In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street
This logic isn’t scale dependent and I know you have a line somewhere before “it totally fine to have landmines in random patches of grass — parents responsibility!” Where is it?
Your alternative I presume is just to treat everyone like a small child equally so that nobody can see anything potentially painful or commit any thought crimes (the ends etc etc). Certainly the internet is very hard to regulate with children but maybe they just shouldn't be spending so much time on it. It's much harder to keep track of 15v hours of usage a day vs 1 or 2. But again that's a personal responsibility thing. If a child gets hit by a car we examine the circumstances surrounding it, the logical conclusion most people would assume is not to sue the car manufacturer to prevent the operation of their vehicles. There's definitely a balance between corporate and personal responsibility but I'm strongly against the childification of the internet and apps that is occurring. It doesn't matter that most people don't understand something, if you prevent them from observing or utilizing it you're effectively enforcing that ignorance.
We should not be enforcing such restrictions. Any restriction may benefit some children, but will rob everyone of the ability to learn how to discern good from bad. We should not be training total reliance. Encountering difficulty is an essential part of human existence
I was confused by how your comment related to what you were replying to, until I realized you just assumed that a child can't possibly be deserving of any autonomy at all, or even be considered a protagonist.
It's super wild to me that there are so many people who parenting as "I own this child" and not "I am the proximate caretaker of this independent person."
One uses it as a justification for the sanitizing of the internet and the other thinks it should be the parents job.
Don't pretend to champion some sort of bigger faith in children, that was never the point of the discussion
In the united states, this stopped being socially acceptable sometime time in the past 20 years. Letting your kids walk to school before high-school (13/14) is considered child abuse by many. Not everywhere, not everyone. But there has been a huge shift in views around what kind of out-of-the-home-unsupervised activity is seen as normal.
It might be other extreme. But it does seem to me that if you are not letting them navigate world until 13, you are probably harming their development.
Here's a recent episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, about the Japanese TV show about toddlers running their "first errand" alone (which has become popular in the USA via netflix, perhaps because it seems so wild in the US?), and comparing US (and apparently Canadian) physical landscapes for children. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
The episode touches on the fact that in Japan dropping off your children to school by car is generally prohibited, with a principal explaining why. I have heard this is true in Germany. It is definitely not true in the USA -- and the US physical and social landscape has been built in such a way it would be largely impossible. It's a disaster.
This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff.
In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.