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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlThoughts on parental controls?
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    3 days ago

    My upbringing was extremely “do what you want, but deal with the consequences.”

    “You can watch an R-rated horror movie, but don’t come to me if you can’t sleep at night”-type of situation.

    My impression has generally been that my freedom to do what I want let me learn a lot about decision making, responsibility, curiosity, and modern survival skills like Googling things. I’m genuinely baffled by how poorly some people my age use the computer and find things on Google, and I somewhat suspect many of them probably simply haven’t had the opportunity to explore technology on their own. And a lot of my hobbies were developed exactly because I allowed to do what I wanted when I was a child.

    As for children doing stupid shit and searching up things that aren’t appropriate for their age, my thought has generally been, why is it the parent’s role to keep that from the child? I strongly believe that a parent’s role is to prepare the child to be a functional adult, not to baby them.

    I acknowledge that all children are different, and perhaps there are some cases in which having parental controls would help. But I think my life would be duller if I were raised with parental controls.

    Edit: having read some of the other comments, I think there’s 2 aspects to the question of parental control. The first is the aspect of children learning about age-inappropriate things, which I’ve mainly been focusing on. The other is the aspect of discipline and management (ie, preventing your children from spending 12 hours on YouTube). I think people have made interesting points about this aspect, and I respect their opinions. I personally agree with BananaKing’s take that parental controls is the wrong tool for the job. Train your children properly and you shouldn’t need to use parental controls to control their screen time.







  • You can’t outright, but you can at least try to minimize your exposure. Easiest way is to avoid buying products that use plastic packaging, especially if the product that you’re planning to buy is food. Don’t microwave plastics, even the supposedly “food safe” one - that releases a ton of microplastics into your food. Don’t order takeout - again, lots of plastic in the containers. Even paper food containers contain a plastic coating.

    Don’t touch receipts, especially with wet hands. Or at minimum, wash your hands thoroughly after touching it













  • Parents’ jobs aren’t to protect their kids. It’s to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

    There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

    I grew up in the “age of internet anarchism,” where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we’ve swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

    To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that’s the only thing you can do on the internet, that’s what you’ll do