Parenting

2716 readers

38 users here now

A place to talk about parenting.

Be respectful of others' parenting decisions.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Tot@lemmy.world

Parental controls on children’s tech devices are out of touch with child’s play (theconversation.com)

submitted 6 days ago by otters_raft@lemmy.ca to c/parenting@lemmy.world

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The "protection of children" has been the cited reason for a lot of controversial laws and measures recently. A common response is that parents should use parental controls to manage that on their own instead of relying on the government to do it to everyone. I found this article interesting since it touched on how the existing tools aren't that good, and addressing that problem might be a better thing to focus on

Authors:

Sara M. Grimes | Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and Professor, McGill University

Riley McNair | PhD Student in Information Studies, University of Toronto

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 6 days ago (11 children)

Yeah the controls offered are god awful. I want to prevent my kid from accessing youtube on the nintendo switch. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the xbox. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the ipad. Kinda.

I just want to keep him from getting access to user-created content because it is terribly moderated and often explicitly paid for by rightwing shittards that are trying to poison our culture. Too bad. Guess he doesn't get to use those devices anymore.

[–] Tower@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 days ago (3 children)

My kid watches a ton of educational content, so I don't even necessarily want to block all of YouTube. I just want to be able to block individual videos and channels.

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Or whitelist a bunch of channels or videos I'm happy with.

[–] harmbugler@piefed.social 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

A YouTube whitelist would go a long way, but I think Google don't want you to do that. The ads are obviously another problem if you can't block them.

One option (if you are technical) is to use automation tools to subscribe to a whitelist of channels and pre-cache the videos locally.

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 1 points 5 days ago

Lol, easier to just get long form media and jellyfin it instead.

I know some countries, ads on TV are not allowed for kids. Some outlaw certain types of ads, like junk food. We could quite easily regulate them so that it's more profitable to not show ads and have proper parental controls.

I'm in Australia which is banning social media for kids and many online we're berating it as unworkable for things like YouTube. Well, they had plenty of time to get their house in order and chose short term profits instead.

load more comments (7 replies)