I agree with you so much. Great parenting is education, not restriction. I don't want my kid to not talk to strangers because I told him its something bad that you shouldn't do. He won't talk to strangers because he understands the implications and what can happen.

A kid with no education and restricted access will just find a way to do whatever he wants to do. A kid with good education and unrestricted access will know to steer away from bad stuff and talk to adults when he finds something strange.

One of the proudest moments of my grandfather (in my household, he was the most tech savy) was when I found a way to "bypass" an restriction program around age 11. From then on he decided I "outgrew" this kind of limits and just gave me unlimited access to the family computer and the internet.

But years later he confessed, the "click" moment for him was not that I could bypass the restriction, but that I trusted him enough to show him and that I self-reported the situation. And this is pure education and has nothing to do with restrictions.

I read so many parents here that want to "educate" their children but want to offload that work to some service or program instead of putting the work in. You prefer spending 5 hours configuring your child's nintendo switch rather than sitting down with him for 1 hour to explain to him what he can encounter on the internet, how he should behave and react and building the bond needed for him to trust you enough to come to you when needed.

The thing many parents get wrong about education is to think that the kid learns what you tell it. You tell the kid X is dangerous, so now the kid learned X is dangerous. That is not how it works at all. What the kid learns is that it can't be trusted to judge danger itself, since always when it tries to do something itself found okay a panicked adult will tell it this was dangerous.

The lesson isn't the meaning of the words you say to your kids, the lesson is how what you say relates to them and what they observe you doing. And this isn't just about this example of traching them to make a sound judgement, this can be expanded to nearly every educational problem one could have with their kid.

E.g. extremely commonly you will find kids who develop bad behavior despite their parents "telling them not to" will not only witness the bad behavior by their parents, but will be ignored, ridiculed, disrespected or mistrusted whenever they do in fact behave well.

And it all boils down to the simple notion that you can't just tell your kid a thing and expect that to be the lesson.