this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Beats parenting.
Dude you have no clue how fucking hard it is to keep kids away from this shit.
“Well just parent better”
Man you can try but kids just love making bad decisions and finding ways around blocks and filters left and right. Like I’m over letting my kid have anything more technical than two tin cups with some string.
IDK, I have a kid and nowadays there is OS level filters. Router level filters. The only wah my kid is getting around this stuff is if they guess my password. I mean.. Good luck my password vault password is over 20 characters long and I don't even know the others as a result.
My experience as a parent is parents telling themselves it's too hard too too complicated to do the basics like turn on parental controls and configure it. I can't do anything if my kid looks at YouTube, plays roblox or whatever on some other kid's device, but at least I can do harm reduction same my parents and the harm of the day.
I hate these laws because often I'm forced to either allow my kid access to everything or nothing not even the stuff I want to teach her slowly how to safely use. These laws are the worst because I lost control because other parents can't be bothered to turn on baked in parental controls, have decent passwords and/or listen to whining.
That's just to Unterkomplex. Ppl are genuinely unable to do router based blocking
Nah. Look, see, I put blocks on a lot of shit. Screentime to limit how much time he gets, no safari access or other browser, contact limits, etc. won’t go into the whole background of why, but look.
First it was Spotify. Kid was dead tired mid day and come to find out when I check Screentime it’s cause he was up till like 3 or 4 am on Spotify and finally figured out it’s not cause he was falling asleep to it, no he found out there’s videos on it and watching them all hours. This was a while back.
The. recently I find he’s constantly asking for access to this fucking TCG app, and he’s obsessed with Pokémon and all about selling cards and shit. Turns out that because the apps just a shitty wrapper he’s using it to get on Reddit and DM’ing rando’s and shit because he is the kind of kid to text a number he found on the floor, no joke.
Then removing that he figures he can just use fucking maps to open a safari sub window and have free web access.
Fuck sakes like kinda impressed at the finding holes, but also he’s a god damn drug addict after anything he can get his hands on. Hence the reason I’m ready to hand him two tin cans with string.
Not trying to tell you to parent better, shit's hard, but I see two possible things that might help.
First, any device he uses should be filtered from the open internet on router level with a white list of approved things he can access.
And second, you really need to talk with him about it. Why it's a bad idea to text numbers of the floor, how cards are gambling and how specifically gabling will ruin his life and about addiction and how almost everything on the internet is designed to create it and abuse it. These would be long and not just once conversations with examples and reiterations because the subjects are complex and he will need a long time to process and absorb all that.
Good luck!
Yeah man, we’ve had many long talks about it. Doesn’t seem to get through. He says he understands, but then this shit happens. It’s just an ongoing thing
then take away their fucking phone. they can call you with a dumb phone. they earned it. they may get back their phone in 2 weeks, until then, there's the computer.
Yeah way ahead of you man. Already have. Been through this many many many time. Just over it.
You know what’s wild? Dumb phones have no way to block that crappy old browser. Also being able to see where they are is useful. And dude smart/dumb phones are expensive.
they have a web browser? weird, how is that usable on such a small screen and without a pointing device?
well not cheap, but I wouldn't call them expensive either. these are the prices where I live, in HUF so you need to convert it: https://www.arukereso.hu/mobiltelefon-c3277/klasszikus/