This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.” The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people…
Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.
Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).
Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.
Breaking: Willy Wonka execs don’t let their kids eat unlimited amount of candy. See how uninteresting and obvious that is?
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Except that's not true. Plenty of parents let their kids have unlimited access to junk food and candy. Neighbor kids come over and they don't know what to do because I only have water, fruit, and pretzels. I have been to so many parent's houses who have whole pantries of just sugary snacks.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's parenting. Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.
Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.
A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's parenting. Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
The hypocrisy is not because they are limiting access to their kids.
It is because they are limiting access to their kids, while actively creating and executing algorithms to increase user engagement even to the point of making people addictive and dependent on their platforms.
This thread is person after person saying “oh wow, person who sells terrible thing for humanity doesn’t let their kids have unlimited access to terrible thing! It’s so obvious. This isn’t news.” The news is that the CEO of youtube is saying that Youtube is something that should be limited and he thinks harm will come to his children if he does not. This may be obvious to people on this site but a lot of normal people…
I doubt “a lot of people” think spending all day watching YouTube is fine; this sounds hyperbolic.
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
What do you plan to do? Mine is in preschool but it's just a few years away...I feel pretty desperate.
Find some other activities. Tee-ball, soccer, swimming, cub scouts, anything that involves interacting with other kids without technology.
> The only issue is that his future friends may not have the same idea, so it's going to be extremely difficult when he grows older. Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.
What do you plan to do? Mine is in preschool but it's just a few years away...I feel pretty desperate.
Just ban it. My kid is in that age group and roblox is banned. Her feelings on the matter are irrelevant. I don't know why people hand wring about "oh they'll be left out". Oh well? I'm a millennial. I remember being just a poor kid at a school with kkds much wealthier than me. There were a lot of things my friends had that I didn't. Like a cellphone. I wasn't in the group chats and somehow I still survived.
My kid is disappointed, but it's fine. She has friends play the games she does have and she has a lot of other games. She had a lot of other ways to socialize with them. I honestly don't see roblox as different than any other social fad. Roblox is just the default digital hangout spot for kids, but it doesn't have to be for your kid's friend circle.
This isn't hypocrisy, it's parenting. Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
I think you'd have a stronger point if stores sold Bud Kidz, a non-alcoholic beverage with all the great Bud taste and fun mascots.
It’s rarely quite that simple and I would try being a little more charitable towards people.
Exactly, it's a to easy to when people go "Simply set boundaries", "just do this", "use this". A lot of parents don't have a resources, either in terms of mental, energy, resource, knowledge and what not to fight and protect their children from things that are designed to be addictive, hell most of them are stuck in the same hell as their kids. Not acknowledging that this stuff is hard, and being made unnecessarily h…
People give this excuse but somehow I feel like they would be less charitable if it was any othet addictive thing. "Oh, Timmy had a drinking problem at 13? Well we can't blame the parents. They don't have the mental or emotional strength to keep their kid out of the liquor cabinet. How ever could they know about locks?" That's what this feels like to me. As someone who is watching this happen in real time with my kid's peers, a lot parents just don't want to be bothered. And that's their right, but setting up the parental controls baked into all these devices is dead simple. They could, but they don't want to deal with whining or the exception moments. That's their right as a parent, but I don't subscribe to the "poor exhausted parents" theory when they had enough energy to buy these devices and set them up for the kid to use in the first place. It's a couple more minutes to enable the parent controls.