Sometimes, yet again, there is cat

on "growing up tech literate, and parental controls"

i was allowed to use the computer we had at the house at around 6yo

my dad would install games for me, mom would watch videos with me

but crucially, it was a computer in the living room, anyone going by could see what i was doing there

i had to ask permission to use it, and would be allowed to use it for about 2~4h

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by 13, i got my first personal laptop, a cheap hp 2-in-1, that lasted all the way until i was 17

by then, my dad had already taught me how to install windows, how to pirate games and movies, and i was basically the one fixing people's computer problems on the house

and i already knew how to use the internet, what to look at and what to not

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i believe that a small child, preteen, shouldn't be left alone with an internet enabled device ever, nor be allowed to be glued to it all day

and that a teenager should already have been taught how to use the internet properly, and have at least some notion of viewer discretion

when a kid is already a teenager, there must be trust between parent and child

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then, in my opinion, parental controls is a way to offload some of the parenting responsibility from the parent, to the device

(not much different to how age verification is, in orders of magnitude greater, offloading parental responsibility to the government and companies)

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in an ideal world, parental controls would be just guardrails, for parents that want to be sure nothing bad goes through, that goes away around the time the kid becomes a teenager

but in our non-ideal world, it can and likely is used by abusive parents to control their (teenage) children, to prevent them from doing or seeing things the parents disagrees with (e.g. queer media)

so i cannot be in favor of parental controls on devices

Beware of the Guardian Loafs