I totally disagree with this, depending how you define porn. Porn can be algorithmic brain rot too. Brainrot is bad. Binging on junk food is bad. Children being exposed to pornography is bad. I viewed a small amount of pornography as a child and it was bad for me.
Pornography is like a drug. It isn’t an innocent form of entertainment. Habitual consumption and addiction is worse the earlier it begins. I am not morally opposed to pornography. As an adult I enjoy pornography sometimes. As a teenager I viewed too much pornography with nothing and no one to stop me.
Children shouldn’t be exposed to adult sexuality. When my grandparents married they didn’t even know what sex was. They were married until the end and had plenty of children. Most adults today won’t marry and sexual activity between consenting adults is on the decline. Dating apps are bad. Hookup culture is bad. STIs are bad. I’m not saying you can’t enjoy those things but children should be steered in the opposite direction.
This is where your argument loses nuance. I tell my kids NO all the time. I first said no phones, then no smartphones, then no social media, and now no TikTok and still no screens in bedrooms. But as they grow older you have to make these little adjustments so they can get ready to be adults.
I never thought I would allow my child to use WhatsApp, but I did. It wasn’t laziness or not daring to say no. It was because I realised that my child would feel left out of quite a significant aspect of social life in high school, and I didn’t want to do that. It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong about WhatsApp, what matters is that, at the time at least, that’s where that communication was taking place, and having my child be the only one missing out felt more harmful than the intended good.
I used Facebook in highschool too. My thoughts apply from 2026 onward. Social media was nothing like it is now. We couldn’t have imagined a future where big tech cotrolled our lives to the degree it does. I’m also differentiating between children (<12) and teenagers (13+).
I would allow other applications but nothing from Meta, X, Microslop, Apple, Snapchat. Basically anything designed to be addictive or exploitative.
To reframe my thoughts – if I wouldn’t or don’t use it as an adult, my children won’t either. The government doesn’t decide these things for me. My children will use VPNs.
Parents choose what to feed their children. How they are educated. Where they go. What they wear. Computers are an extension of this. If my 12yo daughter wants to wear a crop top like the neighbours 14yo the answer is no. I don’t care how many other children wear croptops. If they bully my daughter I’ll teach her to rise above it. If she comes home with sunburn I might look the other way. Children always rebel, I know that. Small concessions are neccesary. But it isn’t abusive, negligent, or irresponsible, to say no to Snapchat. It isn’t arbitrary either. My child (under 18) lives by my rules. If the situation changes we will adapt. My children will be loved and respected as individuaus. They will also resent me for it. I will offer an alternative or compromise whenever possible. But downloading WhatsApp isn’t allowed. I’d confiscate the phone. It is my property and I’ll make sure they understand that. Allowing my children to be groomed online isn’t an option.
I would encourage internet free private screen time for age appropriate activities. As long as they spend plenty of time outdoors they can play games indoors as much as they want. I am aware other teenagers will give them access to pornography. This is ineviatable but the longer I can protect them the better. This does not mean they will be soft or unusually vulnerable to addiction later in life. They will know happiness and prefer being around real friends.
I was over 18 when Snapchat became available. I didn’t own a smartphone. Yes I missed out on sending stupid selfies. Does that matter? No. I don’t use WhatsApp either. Do I miss out? Yes. Does it matter? A little. Can I live without it? Yes. Will my children be happy without it? Yes.
I’m not pro-parental controls but I’m coming at this from a harm reduction standpoint. Giving your kids a heavily nerfed smartphone is infinitely better than giving them a dumb phone with terrible security or installing some third party nightmare surveillance software like many parents do.
The alternative is unencrypted SMS. Surely we can agree that E2EE WhatsApp is better than that.
No I wouldn’t allow SMS either. They can use Signal with some constraints. I don’t have children yet, so there will be more choices than when @ThePrivacyDad was raising his eldest. WhatsApp is better than SMS but my household will be FOSS or nothing as far as my children are concerned. Stallman style. My children will only have access to phones outside for emergencies. Firewall rules to prevent anything other than Signal. I will monitor their network usage in bytes.
It isn’t about rebellion but about becoming their own persons. Are you just like your parents in every way or did you choose a different path?
Children don’t live in a kind of child bubble until 18 and then suddenly emerge as adults with their own independent ideas. It’s a gradual process that happens at home. They are not going to like some of your views not just for the sake of it, but because they are developing their own identities and will have different ideas to you.
That’s an interesting insight. A better way to phrase my meaning is to test boundaries i.e. turn a t-shirt into a crop-top. Rebellion was maybe too strong a word. Every child resists and resents parental imposition at some stage. There will be a point of friction somewhere. I’ll be lucky if it’s only clothing; where I can compromise. WhatsApp is non-negotiable. Posting on Instagram or TikTok would result in drastic action. I would limit the bandwith to kilobytes per second so it can only transmit text messages without significant delay.
I grew up without a mobile phone. When I was given one as a teenager it was explicitly for emergencies. Looking back my parents were too focused on that aspect. My children will be free to send messages as often as they like. But they don’t need unlimited bandwidth for doom scrolling. If I provide them with a smartphone it will function like a dumb phone plus offline maps in case they get lost and eventually email once they need it.
Will it be possible to give the child sudo privileges to let it fully use the system with the only restriction that it can’t tamper with parental control (+ all restriction’s enforced by the parental control app) ?
And will it be possible to set more then one blocked time, for example one for bedtime and one for homework time?
If you give it sudo privilege for your child it might actually backfire as they may figure out how to bypass the parental control
at the end of the day sudo is essentially escalating root privileges, so the child account has to be a standard user.
However if you do rely on Flatpak or Snap while it is a standard user, I say it is effective. In my experience with trying to create a standard user for my user to use my pc as a guest, when you do say install an app in flatpak (I do use KDE Discover doe), the admin password actually gets prompted which that would be say a parent administrator account
though I do hate that flatpak apps follow accross users I guess, not sure that’s resolvable
And what about when your kid is hanging out with other kids? At someone else house? On the school bus, or walking home after school? You can’t control other kids’ screens. Or tell other parents how they should parent.
Yes, educate your kids about bad places to avoid. But we all know what it’s like to be told not to look at something. And how poorly effective that is unless your child is a mindless robot completely immune to peer pressure.