That argument is getting weaker every year. Let’s assume that the parents were 18 when they had her, that means the parents were born in 1985. That makes them millennials, who probably had the internet from at least 5 years old. So they aren’t some ignorant boomers who have no idea what the internet is, and they can take steps to moderate the experience.
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Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 7 months agowhat kind of idiot parent lets an underage child on the internet unrestricted
All of them? The only restrictions my parents gave were about the amount of time I spent there and it’s the same story with all my friends.
systemguy_64@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Born in 85 and had the internet since “at least” 5 years old? How many people are you thinking had internet in their home in 1990…?
In 95 it wasn’t super common, and didn’t really even start to explode until after 98…
Also, people are even less tech savvy now than they were then. It’s becoming a real problem and is only seeming to get worse.
Obi@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Also also no one is having kids at 18 anymore.
That said don’t underestimate the tech saviness of Gen X, they may not have had a PC at home growing up but I’d say a lot of them were still able to hop on board, unlike boomers.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Scary thing is gen x is more likely to know how tech works than gen z is…
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 7 months ago
Yeah, they got their dates badly messed up. OTOH, being tech savvy has virtually nothing to do with being a responsible parent and understanding that the internet is full of stuff that’s wildly inappropriate for children.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
The problem with that is a vast majority of parents aren’t responsible anymore and rely on outside systems to protect and raise their kids. :(
phx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah even mid-90’s “the Internet” started with a doodadootdootdadadoot and wasn’t exactly fast for the vast majority of little. Early 28.8kbps came out around '94-95, and real-time video of decent quality wasn’t so much a thing. More like RealPlayer buffering.
That said, there was still plenty of janky stuff around. BBS’s weren’t uncommon even before that and generally had people uploading all sorts of stuff. Porn was plentiful, though you often had to wait upwards of a minute for that file to load and see if there were actual boobs.
Newsgroups were full of weird groups as well as fairly normal ones where the occasional troll would post nasty stuff.
You could definitely still run across predators hanging around in various places. IRC had tons of them, and A/S/L is a pretty well-known intro to this day. There were some video chats, though it would have been a pixel, low-FPS mess.
Nowadays the internet is faster, more connected globally and with more people. There’s still terrible shit but I don’t know that it’s any more unexpected/unavoidable than back in the 28.8 days. Parents should be aware and children should be educated on how to be safe online, and platforms should do their best to stem abuse but that’s not really an easy thing without style pretty strict ID requirements, which are often strongly resisted for privacy reasons.
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world 7 months ago
the internet wasn’t actually that available til 1994 or so, and the dot-com boom was late 90s.
hihellobyeoh@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Born in 93, my home had internet when I was like 5-6, but that was only for my mother to play virtual cards with friends and for research for her college. Didn’t really have regular internet access until early 2000’s.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You are not accounting for how lately average tech knowledge and skills have been declining rather than increasing, and that internet access is so ubiquitous that even given the best attempts at monitoring and restricting, there is no lack of alternate ways to access whatever one wants to.
Legitimately, it was much easier to control what kids accessed when the only place they could do that was the single family computer the household had.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Lol you’re assuming that everyone had the internet in 1990? Most households didn’t get it until the 00’s. I was in the early group, and I didn’t get it until around '95 (I still have dodgeball.exe downloaded from the Cartoon Network website in 1996). Most people I went to school with didn’t have internet at all, many didn’t even have a computer.
Even if you were clued up, is it really appropriate for parents to snoop on everything their child does? As they get older, it’s expected that they have a little privacy to themselves, and arguably not giving them some privacy could be considered abuse.
systemguy_64@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Is it really appropriate for parents to snoop on everything their child does?
When did I say they need to be a helicopter parent? I am simply saying kids in the 90s had parents who did not grow up with this computer thing, and were not aware of what they could be doing. So kids could do whatever. This person obviously had this type of parent.
These days, if you’re not at least taking an interest in what websites and communities they are participating in, you are not parenting.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Back in the dial up days, my dad installed a switch in the phone socket in his room (which was wired before the phone socket in the computer room) so he could disable the internet at night. I used to sneak in while he was snoring and crawl around the bed to switch it back on.
Point being, there’s only so much you can do to prevent kids from accessing things they shouldn’t. The right way to parent is to try and direct your kids towards the right things, but also offer age-appropriate yet honest explanations for the things they do find. But it’s a difficult balance, as kids get older they deserve more privacy, and it’s difficult enough for an individual to stay ahead of the tech curve than to keep your whole family on top of it.