> Who's in charge here, you or your kids?

As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.

If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.

You are, in fact, in charge of your teenager as a parent. They are, in fact, still a kid. Controlling your kid’s access to things which you deem harmful is, in fact, not abusive. Setting appropriate boundaries does not, in fact, mean you are not treating your kid as a person who has their own sense of self. Most kids will not, in fact, hate you for setting boundaries and being their parent.

It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.

They're no longer a child. That is why they have a different nomenclature - teenager. They are not "a kid".

Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].

I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.

To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.

[0] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002003.htm

This is an argument for not applying parental controls to YouTube for teenagers, while the guy I was replying to is explicitly asking for parental controls for YouTube for teenagers. I think "teenager" is too broad to have a productive discussion here. Maybe we can agree that sometime between 13 and 19 you should definitely stop trying to impose parental controls on your kids.

You when your kids reach 18: "why do my kids not talk to me anymore? oh woe is me, what have I ever done wrong!"

If you're lucky. That means they have a good moral compass and figured out that you were the anchor on their lives.

I'm especially worried about the point where parents are accompanying college students into their inerviews. Which is an slowly, but alarmingly rising phenomenon.

This is like the swansong of every parent ever lol.

Yes, people exaggerate, but I have not gone to see mine in person since 2009 and I have not talked to them since 2016. In fact at uni, I initially didn't understand why anybody would want to go home for Christmas - it was many years later that I realised that my childhood wasn't normal.

> It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.

Parenting is pretty subjective, and everybody has their own way of doing it. You may disagree with something, but that doesnt make it incorrect here.

This is a terrible argument. You just repeated the claims and said that they're false, giving no reason to believe this over the claims that you're disagreeing with. If you want to convince anyone, you should explain how you came to the conclusion that these things are false.

My parents did this to me, and while I loved them, I left home as quickly as I could at age 17 despite them more or less begging me to stay.

We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.

Ok, once kids hit certain age, YouTube kids is mostly useless to them. As the most perfectly ok and even educational channels are just not there. Includes channels parent wants to give to the kid.

Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.