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Comment on The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

I have to disagree with most of that.

Raising a kid right now is weird, the way they interact with tech is nothing like when we were kids. I was lucky growing up in the 90s with a computer, I could play with it all day and never get into any kind trouble it was just video games and pulling around, seeing what it could do. I think having access to a computer at such a young age was transformative and wonderful.

But today, there’s so much trouble to get into, it’s crazy. I need to lock down that computer for my kid, there’s not enough parental control software in the world to make it safe for a defiant child, so I just can’t give him free access to the computer. I log him in for every session and make sure he’s monitored the whole time.

He had access to some public Minecraft server for a while and initially I was like “this is fine”, but it was like 5 days before he was telling people to kill themselves in the chat and yelling ethnic slurs into his headset… he’s 7.

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nonfuinoncuro@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve been dreading this and it saddens me to hear from you that my worst fears were correct.

I’ll just take solace in the fact that I had 30 year head start and that my tech-fu will hopefully stay one step ahead of my 1-year-old

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- Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, the technical problems are also pretty frustrating. I’ve been an IT guy for a long time, and I knew that I a second hand iMac would be a great machine for him, so that’s what I got. But unfortunately apple has abandoned their support for 32bit applications, seriously slashing their library of software. So I’ve stuck to an older Mac OS that does still support it. Steam has a “family view” mode and with that I can easily curate my own huge steam library and allow him to play appropriate games. Except of course, that about 2/3 of that library will be unavailable soon, as with future steam updates they will not be supporting the last macOS version that still runs 32 bit programs. Sigh.
  
  I already tried installing Linux mint on that Mac and it was a nightmare. Linux doesn’t really do parental controls, at least not out of the box. The only silver lining was that at least when he clicked on every single web link he found, the dozens of malicious .exe files he downloaded won’t run on Linux.
  
  But I guess to reassure you, the tech can be hard, but the kid doesn’t have to be. Our situation is a bit extreme, probably atypical. We adopted a 6 year old, so we have a lot of problematic behaviors, distrust, and defiance to train him out of. That shit is hard. But if you can build love and trust right from the start, you can set norms for tech usage and behavior. It’ll be ok.
  
  But I do fear social media, it looms in our future…
  
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ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

He had access to some public Minecraft server for a while and initially I was like “this is fine”, but it was like 5 days before he was telling people to kill themselves in the chat and yelling ethnic slurs into his headset… he’s 7.

The battle is real, I’ve heard and seen things out of my kid the same age that left me speechless. Kids think that because it was on the screen or in their headset 100x that this must mean it’s ok, and with the number of people who just give it a pass by not paying the least attention…

Formative years are no place for such anarchistic environments, particularly when they’re used as an unmonitored substitute for actual engagement.

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