As a parent, it’s concerning to me.

It’s funny how I never thought it would be an issue but kids have real impulse control issues and devices are super easy to spend too much time on and contribute to negative mental health. Screen time controls don’t solve this, but they help a little bit as part of many other things to help people learn about how to self regulate.

When I was a kid we managed to hack into my school's lab's computers to install Doom and Warcraft II.

Good times.

> Doom and Warcraft II

If that's all today's kids had access to, I wouldn't be worried about it either.

I work with "average" kids today that have access to far more developmentally-damaging media, and I want the few kids that have parents that care enough to set up controls, to have a fighting chance.

Oh, I am absolutely sure of that.

I didn't mean my silly recollections there to be a way to handwave the concerns of people with parental controls nowadays. Those are important.

I just miss those simpler times. The most risque thing we got our hands on back then were low resolution porn clips. Perhaps some odd hentai AVI with mangled translation.

People used to be up in arms about something silly as Carmageddon being damaging to kid's mental health while truly awful stuff such as social media was brewing on the horizon.

For 90's kids it was video games that were gonna rot your brain and make you a bad person. That turned out to be false.

For 00's kids the new boogeyman is "social media". Likely will turn out false too.

Just sounds like a cop-out way to blame anything other than poor parenting.

Seeing some pretty concerning NEET "battlestations" online I'd think the parents of the 90s were right for at least some of those kids. Doing anything all day to excess to the detriment of everything else is bad, whether it be TV or video games or social media or whatever distraction comes next.

There is definitely poor parenting at play here, and there are also way more, easier access, brain rotters today. 100 years ago, parents weren't giving their babies electronic pacifiers (tablets with YouTube playing).

I mean 100yrs none of that crap existed so yea no shit they weren't doing that. But I'm sure there were things of a similar nature that existed then as well.

Social media may not be "bad" but has serious consequences including it's use to try to overthrow an election.

I vividly remember cracking the admin PWs with ophcrack or the school WEP wifi with aircrack-ng.

What’s funny is so did I. So I’m definitely a hypocrite in restricting what I was not restricted in doing.

As a software engineer with kids, let me tell you: not only do they already bypass parental controls on both Android and iOS (I've yet to figure out how on this one) devices, but they discover these tactics from other kids in school that were saavy enough to find tutorials online. It's not like when I was a kid and had to dive into the registry to find the key associated with the program, understand what a swap file was and why it might contain credentials, write my own code to circumvent the controls, etc. They're not really learning anything about the system when they bypass the controls.