Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more.

In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.

The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!

With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls.

The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.

There is a fairly big gap between chained in the closet and completely free access to the internet. There is also a lot difference between catching a glimpse of some porn and spending hours in their bedroom exploring the darkest corners of the internet.

I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.

> It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available.

The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.

>It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available.

What's stopping VPN providers from being forced to censor the internet?

I think buy the time your kids can order, pay for, and configure a VPN they are old enough to look at boobies on the internet.

You can legally order pipe tobacco and cigars on the internet in the US without showing ID. When I was a kid you could do it with wine too, and I doubt that's changed. I don't find it to be a problem.

I think smoking is a little different for a few reasons.

It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely.

Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready.

Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around.

Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.