Guys, I’m begging you. I am PLEADING with you. Can we please stop just assuming that every parent is a negligent moron? Parenting is a hard, 24/7 job. After the birth of her first child, my sister said that “I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired.” She texted me the first time she was sick and said “I have a newfound appreciation for mom for getting up and powering through it. I can’t take a day off. I have to look after the kid.” There are no days off.
Next, you’re discrediting yourself. “Just learn code/networking/Linux/etc.” This is stuff that takes a lot of dedicated research (hold that thought). Not to mention parsing through all the garbage snake oil there like “NordVPN will solve all your problems, baby!” Understanding what the actual hell a tech stack is, let alone how it works, and picking what’s right for you and your needs. That takes a lot of work. Not to mention that at the start, people don’t know what the don’t know. Most parents have no idea they can look into tools like DNS block. My sister’s been on iPhone for nearly a decade and didn’t realize til I told her last month that it has parental controls built into it. People don’t know what the don’t know. You guys are REALLY insulting yourselves when you act like this wealth of tech knowledge you’ve accumulated over years of dedicated study is something that people should just innately know and that anyone who doesn’t know it is mentally challenged or maliciously ignorant.
And on the topic of “dedicated research,” parents are tight on time. Most parents work full time these days, both parents. Plus running errands. Plus cooking. Plus spending quality time with their spouse and their kids. Helping with homework. Being attentive IRL and not just at securing their devices. You’re basically asking them to go back to school fulltime (see again that “people don’t know what they don’t know” and “parsing snake oil”) on top of all this.
Finally, a lot of people just aren’t that interested in this stuff. You’re in a tech forum. Of course you know all this stuff. It’s obviously your passion. Now explain to me - you yourself, don’t send me a link - how to rebuild an entire car from scratch. Or every system of the human body. Shoot, even doctors can’t do that’s why they have specialists. Explain the deep historical context of every factor that led to World War 1. To you guys, this stuff is fun to study, and that helps make it easy and interesting. A lot of “normies” are intimidated by this stuff, and they find it hard. It’s like math class. They’re just not interested. And yes, there is a baseline tech literacy I believe everyone should have, but blaming them as “negligent” and stupid because they’re not eating, sleeping, and breathing this topic is on par with calling you guys negligent because you can’t explain to me exactly how your various body systems work in great detail. Nobody knows everything. There’s plenty of important topics where you’re ignorant, and that doesn’t make you stupid or negligent. It makes you human.
Please, please, PLEASE stop calling parents negligent or stupid. Especially when they’re going up against experts working against them - like algorithms, dark patterns, and data harvesting. It’s gatekeepy, it’s cruel, and it’s false. You’re watching Mike Tyson fight an infant and making fun of the infant for not doing well.