> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that.

The solution would then be to break them up or do things like require adversarial interoperability, rather than ineffective non-sequiturs like requiring them to ID everyone.

The perverse incentive comes from a single company sitting on a network effect. You have to use Facebook because other people use Facebook, so if the algorithm shows you trash and rage bait you can't unilaterally decide to leave without abandoning everyone still there, and the Facebook company gets to show ads to everyone who uses it and therefore wants to maximize everyone's time wasted on Facebook, so the algorithm shows you trash and rage bait.

Now suppose they're not allowed to restrict third party user agents. You get a messaging app and it can send messages to people on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, etc. all in the same interface. It can download the things in "your feed" and then put it in a different order, or filter things out, and again show content from multiple services in the same interface, including RSS. And then that user agent can do things like filter out adult content, if you want it to.

We need to fix the actual problem, which is that the hosting service shouldn't be in control of the user interface to the service.

> ... start with fuck these companies. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

I'm not sure how those two positions connect.

Execs bad, so laws requiring giving those execs everyone's IDs, instead of laws against twirled mustaches?

>Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

For me this is a crux, at least in principle. Once online media is so centralized... the from argument freedom is diminished.

There are differences between national government power and international oligopoly but... even that is starting to get complicated.

That said... This still leaves the problem in practice. We get decrees that age-restriction is mandatory. There will be bad compliance implementations. Privacy implications.

Meanwhile a while... how much will we actually gain when it comes to child protection.

You can come up will all sorts of examples proving "Facebook bad" but that doesn't mean these things are fixed when/if regulation actually comes into play.

> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

Wild times when we're seeing highest voted Hacker News commenters call for the nanny state.

If you're thinking these regulations will be limited to singular companies or platforms you don't use, there is no reason to believe that's true.

There was already outrage on Hacker News when Discord voluntarily introduced limited ID checks for certain features. The invitations to bring on the nanny state reverse course very quickly when people realize those regulations might impact the sites they use, too.

A lot of the comments I'm seeing assume that only Facebook or other platforms will be impacted, but there's now way that would be the case.

Social media is like tobacco. We went after tobacco for targeting kids, we should do the same to social media. Highly engineered addictive content is not unlike what was done to cigarettes.

Those execs were also using the tactics to addict adults, and while they may have targeted teens, the problem is, at its core: humans. So no amount of nannying by either the company nor the government will solve this issue.

Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?

Exactly. The same people that should be responsible for giving them unfettered access to an internet that is no longer safe. Even adults have to be wary of getting hooked on scrolling, and while I agree that the onus is on the companies, it has been demonstrated over and over again that they will not be held to account for their behavior.

So the only logical choice left that actually preserves freedom is for parents to get off their ass and keep their child safe. Parent's that don't use filtering and monitoring software with their children should be charged with neglect. They are for sending a kid into the cold without a coat, or letting them go hungry, why is it different sending them onto the internet?

And to your last point: You are dead wrong. No government anywhere in the world has demonstrated that they have the resources, expertise, or technical knowledge to solve this problem. The most famously successful attempt is the Chinese Great Firewall, which is breached routinely by folks. As soon as a government controls what speech you are allowed to consume, the next logical step for them is to restrict what speech you can say, because waging war on what people access will always fail. I mean, Facebook alone already contains tons of content that's against its terms of service, and they have more money than God, so either they actually want that content there, or they are too understaffed to deal with the volume, and the volume problem only ever increases.

So in my view, you are the one against freedom by advocating for the government to control the speech adults can access for the sake of "protecting the children" when the actual people that are socially, morally, and legally culpable for that protection are derelict in their duties.

>There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted.

Then close their business. Age verification just makes their crimes even more annoying.

Screw over Meta then. Not everybody else.

Meta is the bozo in a panel van with no windows. All The legit porn sites put up Big Blinking Neon Signs.

> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

How about we reject all institutional nannies?

It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are downstream of this.

> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

This is a huge self own. I can't believe I'm reading this on a website called "hacker news".

The problem is that internet is used nowadays for democratic purposes. Once you introduce a globally unique personal ID, you will be monitored. And boy, you will be monitored throughoutly. In case of any democratic process that needs to be undertaken in future against government, this very government will take the tools of identification and will knock to the doors of people who try to raise awareness and maybe mutiny. And this is what Orwell wrote about

> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

why-not-both.jpg

Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government.

Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.

Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from collecting hard identification by holding them accountable for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible, model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.

The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution services from holding identification data, reducing the information held by any single entity.

> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here. I get your position, but like.

No one. You’ll see a few politicians and more individuals stuck to their principles, but anyone with major clout sees the writing on the wall and is simply working to entrench their power.

> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

Indeed, what lolberts fail to understand usually is not a choice between government vs “freedom” it’s a choice between the current government and whoever will fill up the power vacuum left by the government.

> Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

The state can imprison you. Zuck can't.

Centralization and standardization are going to be the topic in the 21st century.

You sound like someone that would work for the CIA or FBI if they offered you a job. Those are the types of people that I cannot and will not ever trust. I do not respect your opinion.

For all the complaining some U.S.-Americans seem to do about the EU approach to these issues, things like the Digital Markets Act aim to fix exactly these types of issues.

>I get your position ... There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands

Their position was to compare it to alcohol, guns, and tobacco, not bands using naughty words. Alcohol and tobacco definitely enter mustache swirling territory, getting children addicted and funding misinformation on the harms of their product.

> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here.

That’s because “freedom” is complicated and doesn’t precisely map to the interests of any of the major actors. Its largely a war between parties seeking control for different elites for different purposes.

> documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted

If you genuinely believe that this is about those moustache twirling executives, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Have you ever wondered why and how these systems are being implemented? Have you ever gone why Discord / Twitch / what have you and why now? Have you ever thought that this might be happening because of Nepal and the fears of another Arab spring?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...

I think too many people on this platform don't understand what this is about. This is about power. It's not about what's good for you or the children. Or for the constituents. It's about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.

There are many ways in which such a system could be implemented. They could have asked people to use a credit card. Adult entertainment services have been using this as a way to do tacit age verification for a very long time now. Or, they could have made a new zero-knowledge proof system. Or, ideally, they could have told the authorities to get bent. †

Tech is hardly the first industry to face significant (justifiable or unjustifiable) government backlash. I am hesitant to use them as examples as they're a net harm, whereas this is about preventing a societal net harm, but the fossil fuel and tobacco industries fought their governments for decades and straight up changed the political system to suit them. ††

FAANG are richer than they ever were. Even Discord can raise more and deploy more capital than most of the tobacco industry at the time. It's also a righteous cause. A cause most people can get behind (see: privacy as a selling point for Apple and the backlash to Ring). But they're not fighting this. They're leaning into it.

Let's take a look at what Discord asked people for a second, the face scan,

    If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.

There was an article that went viral for spoofing this, https://age-verifier.kibty.town/ // https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421 . In the article, the author found by examining the API response the system was sending,

    k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details.

We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.

We are assuming that the surveillance state will require humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. It won't. You can just use a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model instead. Servers are cheap and never need to eat or sleep.

Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351

We can assume de facto that Discord is also doing profiling along vectors (presumably behavioral and demographic features) which that author described as,

    after some trial and error, we narrowed the checked part to the prediction arrays, which are outputs, primaryOutputs and raws.

    turns out, both outputs and primaryOutputs are generated from raws. basically, the raw numbers are mapped to age outputs, and then the outliers get removed with z-score (once for primaryOutputs and twice for outputs).

In general, Discord seems to have fairly reliable data about the other applications the user is running. Discord also has data about your voice and now your face.

Is some or all of this data being turned into features that are being fed to this third-party k-ID? https://www.k-id.com/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2024/06/25/k-id-cl...

https://www.techinasia.com/a16z-lightspeed-bet-singapore-par...

k-ID is (at first glance) extracting fairly similar data from Snapchat, Twitch etc. With ID documents added into the mix, this certainly seems like a very interesting global profiling dataset backstopped with government documentation as ground truth.

I'm sure that's totally unrelated. :)

-

† like they already have for algorithmic social media and profiling, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...

Somehow there's tens to hundreds of millions available for crypto causes and algorithmic social media crusades, but there's none for the "existential threat" of age verification.

†† Once again, this is old hat. See also: Turbotax, https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

I don't get your point, at least not in relation to the GP post. I agree with GP, parents need to be more accountable. We as parents, and We should all be concerned about future children/generations, should be demanding more regulation to help force the change we need on this topic. We as a society need to treat SM like those other addictive product classes. The fact SM is addicting and execs try to juice it more, is frankly to be expected.

Vilify them all you want, but same has been done with nicotine products, alcohol products, etc. and to GPs point, we SM as a toy for our children to play with. We chose to change the rules (laws, regulations, etc) because capitalists can never be simply trusted to do what's best for anything except their bottom line. That's a fundamental law no different than inertia or gravity in a capitalistic society. That's why regulators exist. Until you regulate it, they will wear their villain badge and rake in the billions. It's easy to be disliked when the topic of your disdain is what makes you filthy rich (in other words, they don't care what you or I think of what they're doing).

> There is almost literally documented examples of…

lol

Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use Facebook or whatever other site. I quit using most social media over a decade ago. If you don't want to use it, or you don't want your children to use it, then don't use it.

when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.

Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own.

The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.

I think the argument is more around it being illegal so as to not be forced into playing "the bad guy". It's hard to prevent a level of entitlement and resentment if those less well parented have full access. If nobody is allowed then there's no parental friction at all.

Its unfortunate that the application of this rule is being performed at the software level via ad-hoc age verification as opposed to the device level (e.g. smartphones themselves). However that might require the rigimirole of the state forcibly confiscating smartphones from minors or worrying nepalise outcomes.

ISPs and OSs should be the ones providing these tools and make is stupid easy to set up a child's account and have a walled garden for kids to use.

Companies are legally prohibited from marketing and selling certain products like tobacco and alcohol because they historically tried to.

Parents are legally and socially expected to keep their kids away from tobacco and alcohol. You're breaking legal and social convention if you allow your kids to access dangerous drugs.

Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well.

The school, in loco parentis.

Not responsible for selling to all minors, just theirs.

Well the parents entrust their kids to the school, so they would be the ones responsible for what goes on on their premises. In turn, school computers are famously locked down to the point of being absolutely useless.

As a parent of young children, this is your entire problem:

> the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

You're treating this as a technical problem, not a parental rules problem. Your own rules say he's allowed to watch!

You have to set the expectations and enforce it as a parent.

The obvious solution would be TLS interception and protocol whitelisting. Same as corporate IT. Stick the kids' devices on a separate vLAN if you don't want to catch all the other devices in the crossfire.

Still, there's an awful lot of excellent educational content on YouTube. It seems unfortunate to block access to that. Have you considered self hosting an alternative frontend for it?

Sounds like a smart kid, is part of you secretly proud of him for his tenacity?

Is it impractical to keep an eye on what he's doing on his computer, i.e. physically checking in on him from time to time?

How about holding him responsible for his own behavior, to develop respect for the rules you impose? Is it just hopeless, and if so how come? Is it impossible for him to understand why you don't want him watching certain content or why he should care about being worthy of your trust?

I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious.

I remember when I was a kid that age there were rules and some were technically enforced. But if you found a way around the technical enforcement you were in huge trouble. The equivalent here would he been, if you used a proxy to watch what you weren't meant to, then you lose all screen time indefinitely. Sneaking around parents' rules was absolutely not on.

Putting controls on the machine you want to restrict is pretty normal. While I agree with your first sentence that it's hard for parents to get proper monitoring tools, the rest of this sounds like a self-imposed problem. If you don't want to mess with the actual machine then run a proxy it has to use.

> which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids would probably like.

That's not exactly accurate. The two key parts of the attractive nuisance law are a failure to secure something combined with the victim being too young to understand the risks.

So if you put a trampoline in your front yard, that's an easy attractive nuisance case.

If you put a pool in your back yard with a fence and a locked gate, it would be much harder to argue that it was an attractive nuisance.

If a 17 year old kid comes along and breaks into your back yard by hopping a 6-foot tall fence, you'd also have a hard time knowing they didn't understand that their activities came with some risk. Most cases are about very young children, though there are exceptions

And that law is incredibly and hideously stupid, as it's a heckler's veto on having cool stuff.

The Internet is basically the final frontier where this harmful law doesn't reach, though the Karens are really trying to expand their power there.

It would not be quite that simple. The trampoline (or pool, or whatever) would have to be visible, in a place children were likely to be, not protected by any reasonable amount of care, and the kid would have to be young enough to not know any better.

The legal doctrine is also not specific to the US, of course.

> we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire

Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.

Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart people are just caving to making this about parents/children at all?

We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the datasets.

I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.

Its more like age verification corporations, identity verification corporations, the child "safety" organizations that were lobbying for Chat Control versus individuals who want to protect their privacy.

Yes if they do bad things like drunk, have sex and do drugs.

I would start with banning cellphones.

Could your child not just call or text their friends? Or is the real expectation to not have to intervene at all about their preferred platform?

Sorry, I know it's a hard line for parents to tread and it's really easy to criticize parenting decisions other people are making, but the "everyone else is doing it so I have to" always seems as lazy to me today, as it probably did to my parents when I said it to them as a teenager.

Is it more important to prevent your son from being weaponized and turned into a little ball of hate and anger, and your daughter from spending her teen years depressed and encouraged to develop eating disorders, or to make sure they can binge the same influencers as their "friends"?

this is the biggest problem, so many parents are head-in-the-sand when it comes to things that can damage a child’s mind like screen time, yet no matter how much you protect them if it’s not a shared effort it all goes out the window, then the kid becomes incentivized to spend more time with friends just for the access, and can develop a sense that maybe mom and dad are just wrong because why aren’t so-and-so’s parents so strict?

because their parents didn’t read the research or don’t care about the opportunity cost because it can’t be that big of a deal or it would not be allowed or legal right? at least not until their kid gets into a jam or shows behavioral issues, but even then they don’t evaluate, they often just fall prey to the next monthly subscription to cancel out the effects of the first: medication

Should the state have force your parents to give you up for adoption? That's the social support the state can offer.

GP isn't interested in protecting children either. Punishing parents harder does nothing to improve the lives of children — in fact it makes them much worse, because now they are addicted to Facebook and their parents are in jail. It just makes certain people feel morally righteous that someone got punished.

This.

The world is becoming increasingly more uncertain geopolitically. We have incipient (and actual) wars coming, and near term potential for societal disruption from technological unemployment. Meanwhile social media has all but completely undermined broadcast media as a means of social control.

This isn't about protecting children. It's about preventing a repeated of the Arab Spring in western countries later this decade.

"Think of the children" is the oldest trick in the book, and should always be met with skepticism.

And as a bonus you can block your boomer parent's access to cnn and msnbc (or whatever its called now) and perhaps fox. It will make Thankgiving a lot more pleasant for all.

PS Mom, I don't know why cnn doesn't work anymore. ;)

Ironically, the government that is pushing this only set a drinking age just a couple of years ago (as in the last 10 years). In case you believed this was actually about kids.

Devices such as phones come with an option when you start the device asking simply is this for a child or an adult. Your router generally these days comes with a parental filter option on start up too. Heck we have chatgpt that can guide a parent through setting up a system if they want something more custom.

If people want to push, they should just push to make these set up options more ubiquitous, obvious and standardized. And perhaps fund some advertising for these features.

This is where Apple, Microsoft and Android need to step up. Indeed they already have in many ways with things being better than they used to be.

There needs to be a strict (as in MDM level) parental control system.

Furthermore there needs to be a "School Mode" which allows the devices to be used educationally but not as a distraction. This would work far better than a ban.

It wasn’t always this way: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”

[dead]

The internet is not an object, its a communication medium. That is an apples to organges argument, it doesn't wash.

So we should trust the governments of the world? The same governments that don't seem to be doing anything about a large group of people that visited a specific island to abuse minors?

How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS devices?

Yes, but how on earth is their malicious compliance at providing parental controls a good reason to go for the surveillance state that hurts absolutely everyone?

Social media operators love the surveillance state idea. That's why they aren't pushing against this.

I even cancelled YT Premium because their "made for kids" system interfered with being able to use my paid adult account. I urge other people to do the same when the solutions offered are insufficient.

> Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.

We could mandate that companies that market the products actually have to deliver effective solutions.

Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

Age verification tech companies are lobbying heavily for governments to legally require their services. The proposed "solutions" are about funneling money into the hands of other tech companies and shady groups, while violating user privacy.

If anything, we should be banning the collection of any age related information to access social media and more mature content. We need companies to respect privacy, rather than legislation even more privacy violations.

Tobacco, yes you can order pipe tobacco and cigars online sent to your house without ID.

Guns yes, you can buy a schmidt-rubin cartridge rifle or black powder revolver sent straight to your home from an online (even interstate) vendor no ID or background check, perfectly legal.

Alcohol yes, you can order wine straight to your house without ID.

These are all somewhat less known "loopholes" but not really turned out to be a problem despite no meaningful controls on the seller. You probably didn't even know about these loopholes, actually -- that's how little of a problem it's been.

It's funny, all the bible wankers screamed about "the mark of the beast" over things like RealID. Now we have fascists setting up surveillance and censorship tools to tie speech and movement to centralized ID...and they're lining up to lick boots.

You should need to show ID and prove you're over 18 to enter a church. At least we know they're actually harmful to children.

also there's a huge argument to be made that surveilling your kids is really really bad for their development

That same argument doesn't hold water on the internet. Its a communication medium. Its like a flow of information. You don't enter or leave physically spaces. the information flows to you where ever you are. trying to apply the same kinds of laws to the internet is a recipe for disaster because you are effecting everyone at the same time.

Well, yes. If your friends can all go 'round to David's house, where David's parents hand each child a case of beer and send them on their way, any attempt by the other parents to prohibit underage drinking is going to be ineffective. But most parents don't do that. (I've actually never heard of it.) So social solutions involving parent consensus clearly do work here.

"But it's behavioural!" I hear you cry. "What's stopping children from going out, buying a cheap unlocked smartphone / visiting their public library / hacking the parental control system, and going on the internet anyway?" And that's an excellent objection! But, what's stopping children from playing in traffic?

Back in the day you would beat up that person.

> The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things?

Well, I can't speak for parents (as in all parents). I can, however, tell you what we did.

When two of my kids were young we gave them iPods. The idea was to load a few fun educational applications (I had written and published around 10 at the time). Very soon they asked for Clash of Clans to play for a couple of hours on Saturdays. We said that was OK provided they stuck to that rule.

Fast forward to maybe a couple of months later. After repeated warnings that they were not sticking to the plan and promises to do so, I found them playing CoC under the blankets at 11 PM, when they were supposed to be sleeping and had school the next day.

I did not react and gave no indication of having witnessed that.

A couple of days later I asked each of them to their room and asked them to place their top ten favorite toys on the floor.

I then produced a pair of huge garbage bags and we put the toys in them, one bag for each of the kids.

I also asked for their iPods.

No anger, no scolding, just a conversation at a normal tone.

I asked them to grab the bags and follow me.

We went outside, I opened the garbage bin and told them to throw away their toys. It got emotional very quickly. I also gave them the iPods and told them to toss them into the bin.

After the crying subsided I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world and that this was a consequence of them attempting to deceive us by secretly playing CoC when they knew the rules. This was followed by daily talks around the dinner table to explain just how harmful and addictive this stuff could be, how it made them behave and how important it was to honor promises.

Another week later I asked them to come into the garage with me and showed them that I had rescued their favorite toys from the garbage bin. The iPods were gone forever. And now there was a new rule: They could earn one toy per month by bringing top grades from school, helping around the house, keeping their rooms clean and organized and, in general, being well behaved.

That was followed by ten months of absolutely perfect kids learning about earning something they cherished every month. Of course, the behavior and dedication to their school work persisted well beyond having earned their last toy. Lots of talks, going out to do things and positive feedback of course.

They never got the iPods back. They never got social media accounts. They did not get smart phones until much older.

To this day, now well into university, they thank me for having taken away their iPods.

So, again, I don't know about parents in the aggregate, but I don't think being a good parent is difficult.

You are not there to be an all-enabling friend, you are there to guide a new human through life and into adulthood. You are there to teach them everything and, as I still tell them all the time, aim for them to be better than you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99j0zLuNhi8

It is literally the parents responsibility. You want to blame someone else. Raising a kid doesn't mean letting society raise them you have to make tough choices.

If parents can't handle that they can give them up to the state.

That is not what the post you are replying to is advocating for at all - try reading it one more time without so much hostility

Can you offer some rebuttal to give some credence to your point?