I left this [1] comment a few weeks ago, and I already knew people like you would have dogged on GP for giving their child this level of access and autonomy, just like I knew the HN thread from the other day about homeschooling was going to dog on people who allow their child to go to public school - because teaching children self-sufficiency, self-assurance, and confidence to deal with bad influences is a relic of a time gone by.
Parents would rather justify to themselves the act of building, end-to-end, what their child is exposed to and around - even when that's not how the world works, rather than building a child that knows how to handle themselves when exposed to, and around, anything - because that's ACTUALLY how adult life works.
There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety; but it's still a lot more fruitful than just hand-picking a child's exposure to any and all things during their most formative years - when they're SUPPOSED to be learning how to deal with exposure to as many things as possible, good and bad for them.
The linked comment seems to imply that you have no kids of your own, and generally identify with a child still. That's fine, but not a good look for this kind of conversation.
Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical. That exposure does not build agency, it does the opposite. You cannot expect a child to be able to resist the combined effort of a multi-trillion dollar industry toward building maximally addictive things.
Glad we sorted that out. Barring that, I am not interested in what things you find to be a "good/bad look" for my participation in this conversation.
>"Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical."
They should not. And luckily for you, for at least 2/3 things you said, neither do adults. We've already established a baseline belief as a society that those (legally) require permissive access from subject matter experts, so I don't see your point. My originating comment - or the one I linked - certainly doesn't advocate for minors to have more permissive access to those (or any) industries than an adult?
For your comments onwards, you could have saved yourself a lot of time in your reply by acknowledging what I said in GP:
>"There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety;"
You are right that exposure does not build agency alone - but I never claimed such; access to guidance and mentorship builds better decision-making and problem-solving for a child, and letting them practice agency and autonomy in their own lives allows them to see real-world use cases and applicability of those decision-making and problem-solving skills.
It's how parenting worked before this newest helicopter-lite style of parenting emerged, which seeks to declare as many hardships, trials and tribulations in life as a boogeyman in which a child CANNOT interact with, and pressures parents to coddle their child and build a zero-problem world around them - when that's not how the real world works. In doing so, a parent does not equip their child with the tools to appropriately carry themselves in a sometimes inappropriate world.
I read your "People like you" comment and got angrier and nastier than I should have. I apologize.
I will not continue this discussion. You're arguing against things I don't represent, and have assigned a lot of opinions to me after reading a one-sentence comment.
I appreciate the apology, and I want to apologize if "people like you" came off as prickly. I genuinely didn't mean *you* as a person, but rather "someone like you" as an entity that took an action I had expected to see; I knew that someone was going to leave a one-liner criticizing GP's choice to give their child a certain level of digital autonomy, and advocated for GP on their behalf. I should have said "someone" rather than "people like you".
That said, "arguing against things I don't represent" is generally how debates and newfound perspectives go, and I wish we could have continued. I certainly don't think I assigned any opinions to you, let me know if I'm amiss.
