I think the argument is that it's possible for a kid browsing to, in a succession of clicks, go from (for example) a surfing website to something they really shouldn't be looking at. These clicks may be naive curiosity on the part of the kid, rather than intentional seeking.
Some of this porny drift would be encouraged by affiliate links and ads. Our society is broken in many ways - who could disagree? - and this tendency is one of them.
One of my burdens as a parent is to provide a counter to this porny drift, and to the other broken aspects of our society for that matter.
Lest anyone think this is pure hypothetical, this happened to me. When I was 6 or 7 years old, my parents let me have an account on the family computer. I couldn't do anything particularly destructive, and didn't spend an overt amount of time on it. Mostly, I would press random keyboard keys into the browser's URL bar.
One day, I ended up at a website that said 'must be 18 or over to access'.
(I suspect it was a credit card scam, not porn, but the point still stands.)
Next time I logged into that computer, I found myself unable to start the webbrowser.
One of the teachers in my wife's school was having the students research the government and asked them to find the address of the President of the United States. Well, most of them typed in "whitehouse.com", which at the time was a porn site. The teacher had to rush around the room turning off the monitors and dealing with the chaos. The site they should have visited was "whitehouse.gov" but they didn't know that. Something like 1.1.1.1 for Families would have prevented this from happening.
I work closely with the school and am keenly aware of the dangers of censorship. We do NOT want to block access to some things that sound like they could be "bad" (ie. Essex England, breast cancer, etc.) However, that doesn't mean its a free for all where you can go anywhere and see anything. The Internet is a really, really big place for a 1st grader.
The second half of your comment is true, and I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise so the strength of your assertion is unnecessary.
On the first half, children need boundaries set for them. And unless you are yourself a child rebelling against parental rules, you will find yourself on the barely populated side of the argument.
I fundamentally disagree with you on the philosophy of parenting. You're not setting boundaries, you're incentivizing them to break rules and teaching your children not to trust you. Children are people, not property, and they ought to be treated as such.
I don't know how you got the idea of property or lack of trust here: my family know exactly what has been done and how to bypass it — I have taught my children to break unjust rules, but obey just ones based their moral judgement. The DNS filtering is for their protection, not their control.
ps. you REALLY ought to make your children wear their seat-belts in the back of the car, freedom be damned. ;)
"based on their moral judgement" this sounds like a subjective standard of morality based purely on personal judgement/feelings/what feels right to me. So what happens when the child opts to do something they feel is moral based on their subjective standard even when others have termed it immoral? How do you reconcile that?
"based on their moral judgement" could be interpreted as, and I suspect was meant as or roughly as, "based on what they believe is moral". That doesn't imply relativism.
(I feel a bit wary about the word "subjective" because I feel like it is used in a number of different ways, and I don't want to get those different meanings mixed up. This is why I said "relativism" rather than "subjective".)
I've never been in a position of much authority over a child, so I can't speak from experience on the side of the parent, but from my experience as a former child, my expectation is that often if a child (in the sense of age, not just "offspring regardless of age") disagrees with a moral claim and instruction made by a parent (especially one endorsed by much of society), that talking about it can go fairly well, as far as the parent's goals/beliefs are concerned. The parent is more experienced in life, and often better able to compose arguments, and that combined with even a small amount of claim of authority, can I think go a long way.
Of course, there are three main types of disagreements of this kind that I can see:
1) The child believes that an action is permissible (or simply safe), and the parent believes (perhaps knows) that it is not. In this case, it seems reasonable that the child be more willing to default to the parent's perspective, because if the child is right, less is lost if they comply than is lost if the parent is right and the child does not comply.
2) The parent believes that something is morally obligatory, but the child does not believe this. Again, for the same reason, it seems like it would make sense for the child to be more likely to default to what the parent instructs.
3) The parent makes an instruction for sake of convenience which they believe is permissible, but the child believes to be impermissible. In this case it seems more reasonable for the child to resist the instruction more thoroughly. If sufficiently strongly convinced (i.e. if they have a strong enough degree of belief that they are correct) it may be appropriate for the child to refuse, even under risk of punishment, or, in extreme cases, even flee and seek refuge with others.
I guess there is another case, which seem less relevant:
4) The child believes that something is obligatory, while the parent believes that it is not obligatory, and instructs the child to not do it. I don't think this situation happens enough to be all that relevant.
However, there is also the possibility of a combination of some of these cases.
If the child believes that an action is morally forbidden, while the parent believes it is morally obligatory, then this is indeed a difficult situation.
If they cannot reach an agreement, then the only thing left to determine what happens is power, but this is not what determines who is in the right. If the child is correct, then they are in the right to refuse as best they can, and if the parent makes them do the thing, the parent is in the wrong. If the parent is correct, then they may be in the right to make the child comply, provided that they means that they do so are commensurate with the severity of the moral issue, and also not more forceful etc. than is necessary.
This all seems straightforwards to me.
When someone has practical authority over you, it is generally appropriate, insofar as is compatible with acting morally, to act in accordance with their commands-in-the-area-in-which-they-have-authority, but if their commands contravene what is morally required of you, then one ought to do what one is morally required to do (tautologically), not the commands to the contrary.
If you are in authority over someone else, you not only have an obligation not to command them to do anything immoral, but if there is something which they believe to be immoral, but which you do not believe to be immoral, and it isn't critical that they do it, out of respect for the possibility that you may be wrong, and also out of respect for their goodness (If something is morally permissible and not morally obligatory, but one incorrectly believes that it is impermissible, as long as one believes that it is impermissible, one should not do it. If you tell someone to do something not-morally-obligatory-nor-supererogatory which they think wrong, and they do it, then you have caused them to behave poorly, which is something you should not do.) it is generally better not to ask that they do it.
Perhaps they're referring to pornography, and more extreme pornography on the peripheries that can be pretty easy to find even with a Google image search. I don't have citations at hand right now, but pornography has been shown to have particularly worrying effects on children. It's very reasonable to not want your children to be exposed to porn, just as it is to not want them drinking alcohol.
"Additionally, there is meta-analytic evidence to indicate that viewing more pornography and viewing extreme pornography is associated with the sexual objectification of women and more aggressive attitudes (Hald et al., 2010)[0]. Some longitudinal findings link sexual aggression and use of violent pornography, for example, one study of 10-15 year olds in the US found that those who intentionally viewed violent X-rated materials were nearly six times more likely than others to report sexually aggressive behaviour (Ybarra et al. 2011)[1]."[2]
[0] Hald, G.M., Malamuth, N.M., & Yuen, C. (2010). Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: Revisiting the relationship in non-experimental studies. Aggressive Behavior.36, 14-20. doi: 10.1002/ab.20328
[1] Ybarra, M.L., Mitchell, K.J., Hamburger, M., Diener-West, M. & Leaf, P.J. (2011). X-rated material and perpetration of sexually aggressive behavior among children and adolescents: Is there a link? Aggressive Behavior, 37, 1–18.
[2] Victoria et al. (2016). Identifying the routes by which children view pornography online: implications for future policy-makers seeking to limit viewing report of expert panel for DCMS. Technical Report. Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
>one study of 10-15 year olds in the US found that those who intentionally viewed violent X-rated materials were nearly six times more likely than others to report sexually aggressive behaviour
Isn't that a biased selection? It's a bit like finding that swimmers are more likely to drown or vice versa.
The way that first citation is worded makes me question the validity of the source. Looking into it further it seems like the researchers went in there with the answer and looked for supporting evidence for it:
>A meta‐analysis was conducted to determine whether nonexperimental studies revealed an association between men's pornography consumption and their attitudes supporting violence against women.
Keep in mind that these are fields that are very close to a lot of bs science. If you look up the first author on the study the first keyword that appears is "gender studies". All of this kind of stuff has to be looked at with extreme skepticism, especially when it's a politically charged topic.
>Isn't that a biased selection? It's a bit like finding that swimmers are more likely to drown or vice versa.
How is it a biased selection? Study 10-15 year olds, and ask about their porn use. Those who say they intentionally view violent materials are more likely to report aggressive behavior. True, this doesn't mean porn causes sexually aggressive behavior - but that's not the claim being made anyway.
>If you look up the first author on the study the first keyword that appears is "gender studies". All of this kind of stuff has to be looked at with extreme skepticism, especially when it's a politically charged topic.
I agree, and the field does have other problems too (in particular, the variation in how "pornography" is defined between studies) - but to call it BS science needs more than just an accusation. Homeopathy is BS, but that doesn't make the scientists criticizing it BS scientists, nor does it discount their research because the topic is politically charged. Malamuth, for instance, is a highly respected sociologist/psychologist. Either way, there's plenty of stuff out there for this, both "for" and "against". Open Google Scholar and do a search for "pornography and violence" or "pornography and attitudes on women", and select whatever date you want (after 2010, or after 2015, etc.)
It's important to remember that science does not prescribe "oughts", it just makes it harder for people who hold certain "oughts" to hold their views consistently.
>I don't know how you got the idea of property or lack of trust here: my family know exactly what has been done and how to bypass it — I have taught my children to break unjust rules, but obey just ones based their moral judgement. The DNS filtering is for their protection, not their control.
If your children know how to break the filters, and they wouldn't get in trouble for doing so, then I retract my statements.
>ps. you REALLY ought to make your children wear their seat-belts in the back of the car, freedom be damned. ;)
This is not a fair comparison, you are legally obliged to wear a seatbelt in the car. I would not drive my adult friends around if they refused to wear their seatbelt.
Drawing the line for the behavior of what I require my children to do at "is this legal or not?" is patently a bad idea, not to mention morally confused.
As children get older, you of course give them more autonomy, but so long as they are your dependents, you have both an obligation and a right to set reasonable boundaries on their behavior.
I certainly explain the rationale, and when possible try to persuade rather than force behavior where possible, and also let them make bad choices so they can learn from the experience, but they don't always possess the rational capacity to think about the long-term consequences or the ability to deal with those consequences when they occur.
I require my children to brush their teeth, because a failure to do so would result in both poor health consequences for them, and a great deal of expense for me.
As for restricting access to lurid content when my children are given internet access? Absolutely. I say this as someone who had unfiltered internet access as a teenager. They do whatever they want once they get their own internet access.
>As for restricting access to lurid content when my children are given internet access? Absolutely. I say this as someone who had unfiltered internet access as a teenager. They do whatever they want once they get their own internet access.
I think that's the parent poster's point. You had this kind of access. Do you think you're worse off now because you had this access as a teenager?
Perhaps it hasn't been necessary to force them because he is capable of explaining _why_ they're important, i.e. he is capable of engaging in a dialogue with his children.
Also, what kind of weird country do you live in where there even is such a thing as legally mandatory vaccines?
> Perhaps it hasn't been necessary to force them because he is capable of explaining _why_ they're important, i.e. he is capable of engaging in a dialogue with his children.
As someone who actually does mainly employ this technique because it is generally more effective (especially with very spirited children), this is a delusional statement.
For one thing, children don't always respond in good faith, and some (especially those who are verbally gifted) will try to manipulate the process of dialogue.
It's also a bad idea to give them a false impression that something is up for negotiation when it is not.
> false impression that something is up for negotiation when it is not.
It is up for negotiating, though. If you don't treat them as a rational being _always_ then you never treat them as rational. You don't get to choose when their rationality applies. If you do choose then you're the one who gives "them a false impression that something is up for negotiation when it is not".
> If you do choose then you're the one who gives "them a false impression that something is up for negotiation when it is not".
I do not give false impressions because I tell my children when I am giving them an option or an explanation.
When they are young, you require certain behavior of them so that they can develop healthy habits. Things like "eat your vegetables", "wash your hands" or "don't take your younger siblings toys out of their hands" are mandatory because it is important for children to develop habits of health, hygiene, and pro-social behavior.
I may use positive as well as negative reinforcement, but you cannot expect such behavior out of small children purely through negotiation.
When they are older, you grant them more autonomy but require behavior of them as a consequence of the fact that they are your dependents. As a parent, I am both the owner of the house they live in and their legal guardian. That means that I have latitude to set restrictions on their behavior so long as they are a) residents in my house, and b) my legal wards.
When they are old enough, they are perfectly within their rights to seek emancipation. The goal, of course, is to set bounds that are both sufficiently liberal and sufficiently reasonable that the (older) child will have no desire to seek complete autonomy prior to the age of majority.
You are. By choosing when they get to choose, you're creating a cultural hegemony that they aren't conscious participants in.
Your goal as a parent shouldn't be to socialize them into the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant social group. The only thing you gain by this is replicating society.
> you cannot expect such behavior out of small children purely through negotiation.
You misunderstand, I do not argue for negotiation because you shouldn't negotiate. You carry no stake in your child's future, in this sense they're only themselves. If they are only themselves, then there is nothing for you to negotiate about.
> and their legal guardian
Please understand that I do not care about the actuality of your legal status. My concern isn't in what is but in what ought. I am purely interested in your[0] limitation of their potentiality for "pure reason", as Kant would put it.
[0] I use and have used the word "your" rather carelessly. I don't mean you because I don't know you.
> You are. By choosing when they get to choose, you're creating a cultural hegemony that they aren't conscious participants in.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're saying here.
> Your goal as a parent shouldn't be to socialize them into the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant social group. The only thing you gain by this is replicating society.
What do you think should be my goal?
For my part, my goal is to socialize them into the norms, values, and beliefs that I hold. In part I do this for their benefit (so that they can be autonomous adults) and partly to shape future society. But perhaps most of all I share impart these values and beliefs because I value and believe them. No parent can help but to impart their values and beliefs. The only question is whether you do so consciously or not.
> You misunderstand, I do not argue for negotiation because you shouldn't negotiate. You carry no stake in your child's future, in this sense they're only themselves. If they are only themselves, then there is nothing for you to negotiate about.
Again, my apologies, but I really don't get what you are trying to convey. What does this have to do with compelling young children to eat their vegetables or restricting a teenager's access to lurid content on the internet? Perhaps you have different examples in mind?
> Please understand that I do not care about the actuality of your legal status. My concern isn't in what is but in what ought. I am purely interested in your[0] limitation of their potentiality for "pure reason", as Kant would put it.
I have a moral obligation to help mold the plastic elements of my child's psyche (much of which is admittedly not malleable) to serve their best interests and the interests of the society into which they will enter.
> I use and have used the word "your" rather carelessly. I don't mean you because I don't know you.
Several vaccines are most effective when administered to infants. I'm not explaining to infants the benefits of herd immunity, I'm doing what's good for them as their parent.
Are infants property? That seems to be the level of reasoning on display here.
There is clearly a continuum between infants and adult roommates, but as the person who pays the internet bill, I decide what the default DNS server is. Those old enough to be bothered by that are welcome to choose a non-default DNS server.
To argue that this is somehow immoral because children shouldn't have their default DNS provider dictated to them is asinine, an argument most likely to resonate with teenagers without kids of their own.
> Children are people, not property, and they ought to be treated as such.
Children certainly aren't property, and they certainly are people. Immature, 'work in progress' people.
Our autistic son is a person, and not property. At the age of 17 years, he also has a reasonable command of language.
The only reason he can talk today is because we spent years using various techniques to strongly encourage him to learn language. Most of these were positive reinforcement: do this thing and you'll get something you want. Some were negative reinforcement: if you do this other thing, then you lose something you want.
This was an enormous and draining work. At the age of six, he was evaluated by a world class group of autism experts in the SF bay area, and we were told, point blank, that he would never speak.
It's true that this is a special case, but it's meant to clearly illustrate the underlying truth: to have positive outcomes, most children require variable amounts of coercion.
More to the point: I agree that it's relatively easy for most people and many children to work around DNS based censorship. I think it can be useful in some cases, but not as many as its proponents believe.
>It's true that this is a special case, but it's meant to clearly illustrate the underlying truth: to have positive outcomes, most children require variable amounts of coercion.
Because it's a special case it doesn't actually illustrate this "underlying truth". I think this kind of coercion tries to normalize kids, to make them more like parents think all the other kids are like. However, it's quite common that parents, for some reason, don't seem to understand (remember) what kids are actually like. Coercing a child can backfire disastrously. It can make them dependent on you and thus unable to deal with life later on. It can make them reject you and rebel against you and the values you try to teach them. What I'm trying to say is that this isn't predictable. There is no straightforward "children need coercion" type thing. If my parents had tried to be as controlling as many people in this thread seem to be, then I would probably never have spoken to them as an adult.
It's also easy for my children to find poison and sharp objects out there in the world, but because of that it doesn't mean I should leave those things lying around the house unsecured.
Are you a parent? It's a bit easier to understand if you are.
It can be harmful when you're not yet developed enough to evaluate that information (and the motives of the people peddling it) properly. There are plenty of online communities that e.g. normalize and encourage eating disorders or suicide, for example. It's our duty to educate our children well enough that they'll eventually be able to make smart decisions themselves - but that takes time and guidance.
Encouraging them to come to you when they see something suspicious or that's instructing them to do something is the solution to this problem, it doesn't seem likely that arbitrary censorship is the right solution.
You'll get far more damaging views from viewing Facebook, a book written by an economist or the front page of a news outlet than anything blocked by one of these filters.
Blocking 'icky' content is easier (notably, it isn't impossible) than blocking bad ideas.
The trick is to talk about what they read online, it's not to stop them from reading it at all.
>You'll get far more damaging views from viewing Facebook, a book written by an economist or the front page of a news outlet than anything blocked by one of these filters.
See now you're just trolling. You think economics books, and newspapers are more damaging than sites encouraging self harm...
This filter does not block sites encouraging self-harm. This filter blocks adult sites. My claim was that the filter only blocks things that are less harmful than what I listed. I don't think that's untrue, and stand by what I said.
It is literally impossible to block all sites containing an idea via DNS filtering. It's substantially more plausible to block 'icky' sites. It's noted elsewhere in this thread that the filter doesn't block Facebook (which has many communities encouraging self-harm) nor reddit (which has countless communities that do so).
The harms that the above poster cites (pro-ana & pro-suicide sites) are not and cannot be censored via use of a DNS filter.
The anti-solution isn't even attempting to be a solution. It's not that it isn't perfect. It's that it's not even resembling anything close to a solution: it's actively harmful to the goals that are apparently trying to be achieved.
Rule one of parenting is that you don't get to tell other parents how to do their job. I'll raise my kids the way I see fit - and that includes exposing them to certain things and choosing to not expose them to other things.
Religion or atheism? Personal safety or fuck it, we'll buy more bandages. Vegan or meat eating? There are a myriad of decisions you make day to day but, above all, you as a random internet commenter don't get to make that decision. I do.
Every time I see someone making absolutist statements about other people's parenting—even something as seemingly obvious as, "I'd never get my kid a candy bar at the grocery store if they were misbehaving"—I assume they don't have kids themselves.
One thing I've learned as a parent is that every kid is different, every situation is different, and there are always tons of undercurrents that aren't immediately visible. Are there shitty parents out there? Of course. But for every shitty parent there are ten parents just trying to get through the day and do the best for their children, often under extenuating circumstances that are difficult for many of us to fathom.
The problem is that enough people feel a certain way about parenting and this has been made law in western countries. Children aren't allowed to play outside unsupervised. In some places children aren't even allowed to go to school and come back on their own. This means that parents are already telling other parents how to raise their children.
Surely you'd agree that's not the fault of the information as much as leaving small children in reach of poisonous objects without teaching them that they shouldn't consume them, wouldn't you? The article notes that it was already a problem before the meme started, and the amount of consumption caused by the internet meme (18 cases; no deaths noted out of those) is still minuscule.
Considering the demographic targetted by the meme was teenagers, I'd say it doesn't matter if you taught them or not. Disinformation campaigns on the internet are a thing.
Kids don't flawlessly execute every piece of good advice given and sometimes you really do need to stop little Johnny from jumping off a bridge just because his friend said so.
The demographic targeted by the meme was teenagers. This does not imply that teenagers were the majority of people who ended up consuming the pods.
Kids don't flawlessly execute every piece of good advice given, sure, but if you give them the proper foundation it's extremely unlikely that they would do something like this.
Partially related but by no means an argument against your main point: there's a fun xkcd comic that points out how absurd the bridge argument is.
Parent: No, you can't go.
Cueball: But all my friends—
Parent: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
Cueball: Oh, jeez. Probably.
Parent: What!? Why!?
Cueball: Because all my friends did.
Cueball: Think about it — which scenario is more likely:
Cueball: Every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time...
Cueball: ...or the bridge is on fire?
Parent: ...I, uh...hmm.
Cueball: Imagine reading this on CNN: "Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind..."
Cueball: Is something good about to happen to those people?
If your children are young enough that they need a specific time to go to bed, why did you give them phones in the first place? Surely they'd be too young for them?
It also seems very strange to deem not restricting information as neglect. Why not just have a conversation about them as to why they shouldn't do whatever you want them not to do? Advice doesn't breed distrust, but censorship and other regulations do.
I think you're looking at this as keeping porn from young adults who actively seek it but I don't think that's a major use-case. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool, teenagers will quickly be told to use a free VPN or something by their friends and get around your DNS filtering in minutes. Or hell, someone can just give them some on a USB stick or send them a ZIP file on whatever messaging app they use these days.
What's more important is protecting children (think <10) from coming across pornography accidentally while browsing the internet and looking at kid stuff. It's not only fairly well-accepted by society but in many jurisdictions, allowing children to see pornography is considered neglect.
I don't think kids today are as "hacky" as before, or rather, systems of today are just more polished and there's less reason to understand underlying details vs. abstractions.
For a DNS service that could become a kind of LetsEncrypt of DNS, its use case will be a little bit of everything. Cloudflare already has to make moral and social policing decisions, but then again, the bigger your company, the more morally interesting decisions it has to consider. This is especially the case when you're the kind of infrastructure company that serves the world.
Moral filters are going to be about the enforcement of moral norms. Are sites about condom usage, abortion, STD's, premarital sex, and homosexuality an adult topic? Are race relations an adult topic? Are shootings an adult topic? Is this going to be the kind of filter you lift at precisely the age of 12?
There's naturally going to be a lot of questions about how a filter is going to interact with situations, because it's going to be Cloudflare's vision of the web. In my view, DNS settings are often things other people set up for you and you don't really think about it.
> I don't think kids today are as "hacky" as before, or rather, systems of today are just more polished and there's less reason to understand underlying details vs. abstractions.
I think you're partially right but kids don't need to understand the underlying reasoning, they just need to be told what to do. When I was in school, everyone used PHP-based proxy sites to access restricted material on the school network. Nobody had a clue what a "proxy" was or how it worked, they just knew that's what they had to Google to get at whatever they wanted to get at.
Kids these days are the same. They don't need to know what "DNS" is or how a VPN works, they just need to know that a friend told them to look for a VPN app on the app store.
> Are sites about condom usage, abortion, STD's, premarital sex, and homosexuality an adult topic? Are race relations an adult topic?
The question isn't so much "are these adult topics" as "are these topics parents will want small children to encounter on the internet" and I'd say that's a definite "no".
That isn't to say small children shouldn't learn about them, they'll definitely need to be taught, however I don't think that many parents would be comfortable with their children being taught by whatever resources their child happens to stumble upon.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that homosexuality or interracial relations are morally any different to regular relationships, I'm saying that internet material isn't likely to be suitable for educating small children. It'll be very easy for them to stumble across material that's overly sexual in nature, racist or homophobic.
FWIW I come from a country where sex education is covered fairly well by both primary and secondary school curricula, which may colour my response here.
> Are shootings an adult topic?
That one's difficult and depends on the specific cultural norms you live under I think.
> Is this going to be the kind of filter you lift at precisely the age of 12?
My kid is 2.5 and especially now when we can't get her out of the house, we're relying on a tablet for some of her socializing (seeing friends and family on video chat). We often use this while we're cooking and cleaning. Amazon looooooves to push ads to her tablet and the kid friendly mode they offer is a nightmare to try and use. I filter content for her because as much as we'd like to, we can't always be watching.
She's 2.5. Lots of things in her life aren't voluntary. It's my responsibility and choice to keep her safe. You can let your kids watch all the lemon parties they want but I'll just keep that stuff blocked.
At 2.5 you probably shouldn't even be letting her roam the public internet on 1.1.1.3 - you need a whitelist, not a blacklist. And at the age where it becomes suitable for children to be on the public internet, it is no longer ethical to be filtering their content imo.
I take it you don't have kids. The stacks of ads in apps for kids is nuts and Amazon will gladly feed them to you. Walk away for 5m to feed let's and come back to your kid watching a trailer for some dumb movie. Take it away because you have to avert your gaze for a moment and your 5m chore becomes a 30m tantrum. It's only been made worse by social distancing and no opportunity to learn how to interact with other people.
Think of it like a child safety lock: you only need them until they can figure them out. By the time they know how they work, you can have a conversation with them about being safe around the house.
On the matter of ethics, while I don't feel inclined to filter the world away from older kids, I'm firmly believe you're wrong. There's nothing unethical about making choices for your kids until they're old enough to make informed choices. The amount of garbage online (revenge porn, sexual degradation of women, red pills) makes easy for kids to find bad information at an age where they can't process is correctly. Parents determine what age that is because that's their role and it's entirely situational.
What you say here makes sense to me at least - but haven't you been arguing against just about any form of parent-set boundaries/rules elsewhere in this thread?
Well, let's say we find a compromise. You're paying for the internet, so you're entitled to set rules as to how people use it. But, if your child wants to pony up to, for example, buy a mobile hotspot, it's up to them to set their own rules for how it's used.
If your 2.5 year old is mature enough to manage that, then yeah, maybe they ought to be able to have unfettered internet access, too.
Filtering internet access for someone does not imply they are property; no legal system in the world (that I know of) recognizes or treats children as property. The idea that children should be permitted to do whatever they want so long as they can pay for it seems very backwards. We all know children aren't property, but we also know that parents have a responsibility to raise their children such that they are protected from things they may not understand yet.
To be honest, I was surprised to see you making comments like this, after seeing your programming skill, pretty reasonable takes about software, and discussions on Fedi.
I don't think that kids watching explicit content is something they should be doing, but treating them like property rather than someone you can genuinely influence the views of in a positive way is incredibly destructive.
Why not install an ad-blocker on the tablet and be done with it? If she's 2.5 and for some reason going to explicit sites with intention, you should be fast-tracking her to private schooling, not installing filters on information.
I see my job as a parent as including the following:
1. Protecting my child sufficiently that they will grow up to be a relatively non-traumatized adult.
2. Teaching them about life
3. Protecting others from my child
Obviously #1 and #3 are in tension with #2, as harm is part of life, and natural consequences are great teachers.
In public school where I live, the internet is required for at least some of their work starting around 2nd or 3rd grade. No reasonable filter is going to let me give them otherwise unfettered access to the internet at that age. I find having the computer in an area where I can see the screen is good. It's possible that 1.1.1.3 might be helpful in making it a bit harder for them to stumble something while my back is turned for 2 minutes cooking dinner or helping out a sibling.
Obviously there are limits to what I can do. I have one kid with PTSD that we closely monitored internet usage for at home, told the school she ought not be on any internet connected evice in class, but still managed to cyberbully a classmate to the point where the victim withdrew from school by editing a shared google-document during classtime.
Another kid was shown some fairly extreme pornography in 2nd grade by an older student who had a cell-phone.
