It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.

I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.

But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”

The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.

With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.

A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.

And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.

This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.

Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.

Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.

Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.

So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.

They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.

Please contact me or share your contact information, I am working on something exactly like this.