Just recently did this with XBox.

I cannot prevent the kid from seeing the marketplace.

I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature. It won't let them play it, but it lists all the games installed in the XBox.

I cannot prevent them from downloading free stuff.

It was frustrating and clear to me that this wasn't designed for the benefits of parents.

I just want it to act like a console with a fixed set of games installed and no marketplace access.

It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.

If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

I have been using (and contributing to) on an open source project called Zaparoo[1] that lets my kids (5-8) play retro games, watch videos, and listen to music using NFC cards. The whole thing runs on a Raspberry Pi running Batocera[2]. I program the cards using the mobile app and my kids like cutting and pasting the cover art on the cards.

All the media is local to my house- I am the librarian who curates the selection of media based on my kids interests, maturity, and my comfort. It feels like the only way forward.

That said I feel YouTube Kids does a pretty good job IF you change to curate only mode: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids

[1]: https://zaparoo.org [2]: https://batocera.org

This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connection.

Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.

Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?

I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article.

For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membership. It’s really that simple. But don’t complain that one is required to do this other thing than you literally just said you didn’t want to do.

I do agree that managing parental controls are painful. But the author clearly wrote their blog in a moment of rage and as a result of that, any useful messaging that could have been shared was lost.

My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one.

As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust parental controls to do everything for me.

Now that said, Minecraft on the Switch is one gawd-awful frankenstein amalgamation of permissions and accounts run by Nintendo and Microsoft. I got that working but it's by far the worst experience I've ever dealt with to play a game, even single player.

Assuming you go down the path of allowing online anything, seems like, after doing your best with parental controls, the most effective thing is time boxing screen usage. Only so much can happen in, say, 2-3 30 minute sessions throughout the day, and the chances of a kid deciding to blow their precious minutes responding to some random person seems much lower than if bored and checking messages idly. Being nearby during a healthy sample of sessions to have a pulse on what's going on helps too - usually pretty obvious what they are doing.

But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).

Dear All,

As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.

There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.

Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.

Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.

Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.

If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.

The issues with the Nintendo Switch are, I think, just Nintendo being perennially bad at anything involving the internet. Remember Friend Codes?

They've definitely gotten better, but they're still kind of living in 2008. I'm not sure why a company full of software engineers can't figure this out.

I do find it odd there's no option to outright disable the internet (except for software updates). Perhaps the best solution is to not give your child the wifi password? Or for a more technical solution, block the Switch's MAC address in the router.

I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop.

It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.

When I grew up my parents literally had no understanding of what the internet was, nor what I was doing on it. That wasn't a problem because all the rest of the upbringing they did prepared me well to handle every situation I encountered there. There approach was to let me and my brothers learn early how to judge situations and risk ourselves and trusted us to set those boundaries ourselves.

This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.

If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.

Family Link is kind of funny like that as well. As a parent you can limit which apps your child can use, and even how long they can use them. My child is above the age we can monitor their every move, but they're below the age where we can trust they won't spend all day playing games when they need to study. So that feature is nice.

Except you have to allow the Google app. And you have to allow it unrestricted time. That's not all that bad yet, though not great. The annoying thing is that Google loves their little easter eggs. So the child is procrastinating by playing Pacman, Snake, that stupid Dino run game, and what not. Courtesy of the makers of the parental controls.

The Roblox ones are a bit of a minefield too.

I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms.

Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world.

It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job I suppose

It's easy to say "oh, this is just enterprise controls, and your family is an enterprise."

But then I remember every time I've had to delve into actual enterprise administration, and yeah that's its own full-time job.

Side rant: when will businesses acknowledge that an account might be owned by two people (spouses, for example) and allow separate logins for the same account? Their terms of service almost always prohibit sharing passwords, and because the lost password flow would require sharing an email address, you didn't want to do that anyway.

The comment section seems to be divided between "don't police your children" and "absolutely police everything your children do".

Parental controls are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. Payment systems are really robust but there's still fraud. If there's prey, there will be predators.

Education and clear rules are absolutely necessary, yet they won't be enough by themselves. There's people that's very evil and also very clever. You can educate and trust your 12yo to understand 80% of it, yet for the remaining 20% you have to be there.

And, oh boy, the issue about parental controls being incredibly complicated is 100% by design. Simple and sensible parental controls would make exploitative business models like Roblox go bankrupt overnight.

You could, I dunno, trust your son, communicate with him, and let him make decisions for himself? If instead of wasting all your time on scam products trying to isolate him from the world, you'd spent the same time teaching him to navigate the world, you wouldn't have had any problems, and he would be better prepared for adult life when he doesn't have someone breathing down his shoulder. Just my 2c.

I completely empathize with the author. I had that same reaction years ago when I discovered strangers were sending unsolicited pictures to my nine year old through DuoLingo! Made me sick.

> ...It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.

Hoooooboy you're in for a treat once you see the deals on all the weird "hentai" and "ecchi" softcore games on eShop that Nintendo let past the lotcheck process.

Seems like a trusted non-profit should spearhead a working group to come up with clear requirements and recommendations. This parental control spec would be clear for developers to implement instead of each team guessing what should and should not be allowed. This could then be 3rd party verified and parents could rest a little easier. (All of the above has probably been tried in previous instantiations of the Matrix.)

Not to avoid the point of the article, but GroupMe is sometimes used for academic purposes. In the 2010s I used it in school for clubs, sports, and group activities, so that may be why it wasn't blocked.

I don't mean to sound like the stereotypical "I did X and turned out fine" but...

I grew up with an internet access on my computer in my room without anybody watching over my back and without any restrictions and nothing bad really happened. Meanwhile these days some people around me with children around the 10-15 range seem think their children cannot be trusted and restrictions are absolutely essential.

Has the internet really changed that much in the last decade or two? Or are people and media just talking about the dangers more?

---

Also, what happens to these kids when they reach adulthood and the guard rails come off?

Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc? I have a feeling many people (including children) don't really learn unless they get hurt so the best we can do it making sure they do get hurt but only a little.

E.g. let them get scammed in a game instead of real life. Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?

The author of article seems under the impression that parental controls allows parents to stop having to assess risk for themselves.

I'm stuck with my son not able to play minecraft from his nintendo account anymore though it used to work. I'm just getting an unhelpful error message and all permissions should be enough. Parental control is a joke. Deezer has kids accounts but you can just switch to another account. Spotify kids was a joke when I used it, poor discoverability, poor cataloge specifically if you care about childrens audio books.

Google family link is also kinda weird. As a parent I don't want to restrict the time per app or total usage time. I want to limit usage of a group of apps. E.g. i don't want to limit spotify but I want to limit the total play time of certain games.

So I agree with the sentiment of the post. But maybe I should consider the route from my child hood: unrestricted access. At least I know, in contrast to my parents, what is out there.

One thing you can do: glue the device into a dock, hook it up to the family TV then set the expectations that they can only use it when an adult is around (or take the power adaptor when you leave if you need to be strict about it).

But the author is right, it should be easy to set appropriate limits out of the box.

Here's what I think is happening:

Market research says "Parents want control."

In the journey from CEO mandate "build a product that gives parents control" to developer implementation, "parents want control" somehow turns into "What parents want is extremely fine-grained controls," which isn't the same thing.

So a bunch of product managers brainstorm a huge list of ways that parents might want "control," hand that off to some developers, and voila: Everything becomes way too complicated for everybody and the company is able to say they offer "control" while abdicating their stated obligation of giving parents the "safe" product that the parents expect.

I got my son a Miyoo mini, a cheap but decent emulator. I had zero headaches and was able to curate the game list as I thought fit. There’s no online (even thouh the device has wifi) for now and worked as expected, kid plays, gets bored and lets the device down. I will not let my kid play games online because that’s a too big of a risk to addiction or priming for this later. Minecraft has potential for addiction.

By the way, I got one miyoo mini for myself and enjoy pico-8 quite a bit that I started making games myself, together with my kid and chatgpt assistance. Call me old school but I know what’s good for my own kid.

People who decide to implement such bad tech are probably childless, or so much into their company, instead of their family, that they barely see their own children.

The same people who joke about the uselessness of "moral".

I have a wonderful collection of retro consoles and games that I let my nephews play when I babysit without much worry or trouble. Sure some of it is considered obscene, offensive, gory for today’s standard, but I can definitively say the internet and connected games are far worse but let the modern parent be fooled.

I prevented a lot of IRL fighting over the holidays. I tell them, if they want to fight each other that they can only do so in game (their preferred fighting game is primal rage) and it gets their aggression and hyperactive tendency out. Beyond fighting games they love to battle out in racing simulators like Daytona USA or controller swap Crash Bandicoot and Sonic. They have Switch 2 at home and can play it here as well but it’s not sick as Neo Geo, Sega Genesis/Saturn, NES, GameCube, PlayStation, Virtual Boy, and many others. 67

The biggest benefit of offline gaming is that friends interact IRL. You either get invited or invite friends and have real interaction, share snacks, etc. which often leads to outdoor activities when gaming is a bore or over. We need to bring that back. If the companies are unwilling it’s time to hack the offline switch or speak with our wallet.

Last time I checked disney plus doesn't have any option to hide specific shows. None. You either let your child watch everything, or nothing.

At least netflix allows me to hide certain shows...

> " and no easy way to make this thing function like an old-school Game Boy and just let a kid have fun with a game cartridge"

Have you considered buying them an old-school gameboy?

I think it's an abdication of parental responsibility to let a child use Internet-connected devices without adult supervision.

Nothing connected to the Internet can protect children from seeing information they couldn't see (as determined by culture/familial mores), meeting potentially exploitative strangers, being exposed to a highly curated stream of marketing content and targeted AI messaging (including social media feeds).

I believe that Internet sites and apps should not have age controls.

I believe that physical Internet access (computer, phone, TV, etc) should require an adult ID to purchase (but not logged, like cigarettes, alcohol, etc) l and the the owner of the device is responsible for its use.

If they hand it over to a minor and they are harmed, then the original adult is liable (like alcohol).

This holds someone with material motive accountable. And it becomes jurisdiction-specific accountability (location of the device).

And in the case of parents, if they allow their kids to use one of the parent's devices then they are responsible for how the kid uses it. And directly responsible for how it's used, what's allowed and what's not.

You can't trust a mega+corp with protecting your kids.

I went through some of this myself.

> Nintendo Switch Online (not really another account, mind you, but a membership) involves a recurring fee. It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.

You don't need to pay for Nintendo Switch Online to get access to the eShop, you just need a Nintendo Account. I made one for myself and one for my son, and neither stays logged in. My wife and I have the passwords for both, and will not give him his password until he's older. Meaning one of us needs to be there for any purchases, free or otherwise.

He has access to the Minecraft marketplace, but can't add funds to it without us. We did not use our MS accounts, and didn't make one for him, so he can't play Minecraft online. But you know what, I'm totally ok with that. He can still invite a friend over and play together in person (which he does do).

My overall response with this stuff is to think about the lax parenting typical in the 80s or so and compare it. Kids much younger were allowed to run amok outside, and crime rates are much lower today. Are the same instincts that perhaps rightly perhaps wrongly compel people to keep a closer eye on their kids in the real world being applied to the digital one?

This HN post fits into the category of "Pithy blog title with casually anecdotal content."

Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.

If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."

I identify with so much of what's in this article - especially the rage that has the author giving serious, coldblooded thought to just destroying the Switch.

The Minecraft stuff in particular reads like some kind of standup comedy bit where the joke is that the joke goes on way too long. It is genuinely insane what it takes to get a kid online these days, to the point where I honestly don't know how families without some poor technical sadsap can even manage to get it done.

I find it particularly infuriating that Nintendo - who are supposed to be the "family friendly" gaming company, and who lock down a lot of things in variously annoying ways, seems to offer no way to block or disable the Youtube app.

The way this stuff is handled in my house (and let me be clear that this is extremely imperfect) is that I block Youtube and various other sites at the network level. This is really not a total solution - there are many good reasons for the kids to get on Youtube and so I'm often asked to open the gates for a while. Threading the needle in a manner that allows my kids to get the benefits of the net without the huge number of downsides is virtually impossible.

My 17 yo, and me, are still suffering for poor account choices I made when he was young. My 10 yo will only ever have to remember his birth year is the same as mine when asked in regards to any of his accounts created by me.

Controls can never replace parenting, no matter how good they make them.

The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect.

> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.

Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!

It says, on the Gabb app directory the author linked, "Communication with Strangers" in a warning bubble directly below the "GroupMe" listing title. Not to forget the giant box saying "However, some apps allow user-shared content or access to mature material. Apps enabling contact with strangers also pose risks. Families should discuss app usage regularly." right below the app search bar.

Regarding the games console, his problem seems to mainly be the two conflicting account systems offered by two separate vendors, not the parental controls themselves (although I agree the situation in that circumstance is unfortunate). A quick Google search also directed me to an easy step by step guide to doing many of the things (such as the restriction of purchases and free downloads on the Nintendo game store) that he claimed to be impossible.[2]

This is written in a very dramatic manner*, especially with the whole "You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer." paragraph, that it feels almost like it's purely written to goad legislation.

[1] https://gabb.com/app-guide/

[2] https://industrywired.com/gaming/how-to-set-up-parental-cont...

* I do empathize with his situation, but much of it seems to be brought upon by his own ignorance and unwillingness to research.

Reading this reminds me how much parenting must suck in 2026.

This is such a sore spot for me.

Technology is amazing and I want to raise my children in such a way that they learn to use it to improve and enrich their lives.

Video games are amazing. Art has never been easier to create. Being able to spend time with your friends when they are not physically present is incredible. There are so many great podcasts for children.

But silicon valley seems directly opposed to enabling the best technology uses without also requiring exposure to the worst.

Please, can I just let my son listen to music when he goes to bed without also being forced to expose him to some off-brand tiktok hamfisted haphazardly into the app with no way to disable.

Can I let him watch great YouTube channels without the feed automatically funneling him towards absolute garbage.

Something as simple as per app time limits are seemingly impossible for Google or Apple to implement.

It's exhausting to navigate when you don't want to be draconian and just ban everything out right, as if that's even realistic.

The biggest trap parents fall into is they buy devices assuming there will be ways to enforce parental controls on them. The reality is it's impossible to do on many devices, and extremely difficult to get right on the remaining ones. Many of the platforms offering "parental controls" just do lip service and provide a false sense of security.

I see folks saying no access to phones until 16, and others arguing how that will absolutely crush a kid's ability to do stuff socially. Why not just have a 'home' phone? you can use the phone in shared spaces at home, but cannot take it into your room or go to school with it.

Parental controls aren't a good substitution for awareness, deep meaningful connection with your child, giving them a rich and fulfilling offline life, teaching them how to navigate dangers rather than isolating them from reality.

Hold on to your kids[1] and instead of having to spy on them you will know them.

Yes, Parental controls could, in theory, provide many many more protections. But given the trajectory of tech, capitalism, and the USA at large (and the culture it exports), I do not see that pragmatically happening to a relevant degree by the time I have children.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375...

Yes, parental controls are probably for corporations. So they can say they did something and it's not their fault.

I wonder if kids aren't safer in online spaces where there's very little expectation that the person on the other end is a child. Like here.

Your son is talking to his friends in this book chat, and playing Minecraft with them. How do other parents go about governing this?

Sounds like either they’ve figured out these parental controls, and might have some tips for you. Or they trust their kids with fewer controls.

No problem in giving a kid access to technology early. The trick is keep a ratio of 10:1 for produce/create vs consume.

While we're on the topic, our school-issued Chromebooks allow unfettered access to YouTube. Yes, some of it is educational, but the kids can just click on the next video until they get what they want. Very convenient for you, Google Ads.

What if we teach children how to navigate the real world, instead of the digital equivalent of "baby proofing the house"? You don't lock away the kitchen knives from a 12 year old, you teach them how to use them safely.

Leaving a link to Common Sense Media which has been helpful for me to understand some of these new fangled things I don't use...

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/

I'm wondering if a firewall is a solution here. Don't mess around with the stupid device settings. Just block the Xbox store, and then presumably Minecraft uses different server IPs, so you can let those through.

> And when I finally—finally—tried to test online play, Minecraft told me I would need to loosen the parental controls (it did not say which) and create a Nintendo Switch Online account for my son.

I'm a bit confused by this section. It seems to me that the author

1. Turned off online.

2. Bought a game that could be played in single-player or online

3. Got mad that online didn't work because it was turned off

4. Turned online back on

5. Got mad that online was turned on.

6. Dealt with this anger by yelling at his children

I actually don't understand what the author was trying to accomplish here

I am opposed to the whole concept of these "parental controls". Instead of a bond of trust, between a parent and their child, the surveillance economy has gave us the ability to experience the top of the surveillance pyramid ourselves. As Google and Meta spy on the world, we spy on little Timmy. In fact, you are a bad parent if you don't spy on little Timmy. I really can't wrap my head around how asking "how was your day" has evolved into "I saw on your GPS tracker you walked a different route to school today... Do you have something to tell me?" If you look at everyone who is now joining the work force and all, the coming generations, you'll see the thing they lack most is independence.

If you don't want your kid to go online, don't buy them a Nintendo Switch Online membership. Or give them a handheld like a Miyoo Mini without WiFi.

It seems like the industry is going to be forced to rediscover and implement capability based security models and process isolation by consumer demand.

It is impossible for the average user to reason about a different security model for each app, the only way for anyone to be confident about what a program is not doing is to move to a world where apps don't work by default, and a list of boxes need to be checked which enable network or file access and cause features to work. Apple is the closest to the right answer here, but enabled-by-default and opt-out has to go away.

Going on a tangent, didn’t realize until recently that Quora has publicly accessible porn aka adult content that anyone can view without an account.

The Gabb thing is the fault of the parent.

By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.

By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.

This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.

Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?

How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?

Im also coming to the conclusion that video game consoles (and smartphones, and ipads,...) are not for children.

What was the punishment for the 12 year old? This will tell us everything we need to know about this story.

Of all of the uses for AI/LLMs, setting parental controls feels like it would be such a massive net win for everyone involved.

Instead, LLMs are being used to replace support people at the larger platforms (e.g. X Box) with the clear goal of "make it HARDER to get support" (or as patio11 would say "their goal is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible ")

This post makes it clear to me that you should not be giving devices such as the Switch to children.

This was a tough read. On one end I want to hold this parent accountable...and he should be held accountable for any negligence on his part. As noted, Gabb does indicate that GroupMe facilitates communication with strangers. Because, well, it’s a messaging app like any other.

I don’t want to digress too far, but you know what I had when I was young and wanted to talk about books? Libraries. That’s beside the point but somewhere is a point to be made and I don’t want to pry into this man’s personal life beyond what he’s already shared about this ugly experience. But I imagine that few things can deter a predator like a swarm of librarians.

“I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.”

He should've broken the Switch. Anyone who’s ever destroyed electronics knows how cathartic it is. Men are only afforded so many opportunities to display healthy acts of aggression in front of their wives and children. Of course never towards them.

“What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks.”

I suppose that’ll do.

“Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.

What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.”

Again. It’s easy for me to blame this dude because I live in a world where this sort of scenario is wholly unlikely and to a great degree his experience explains why that is the case for me. But this story was too well put together. I never thought that a curl one liner and a bash script could emote a form of anger that I empathize with so readily.

I hope this inspires him to question the extent to which he’s relegated parental controls in other areas, if it’s at all the case elsewhere. Either destroy them or set firmer boundaries and raise your expectations for yourself and whatever third parties he sees fit to be held responsible for his household and their affairs. It may take another 12 years or so...but your sons should thank you if you’re successful.

When the fix is to buy a SteamDeck and emulate switch

> A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission."

I understand the problem domain - some people try to exploit and take advantage of kids. That's a problem, I get it.

At the same time, I still think children should not be assumed to be idiots. I remember we oldschool people, when we were young, we played Quake at university campus (we could only play on holidays because one friend had the key to the room, it was a side room though; on saturday other students were not there, so we had a full room with about 30 computers in the 1990s era). We were about 15 years old, so granted, no more young kids. And the technology wasn't quite as advanced, so I am not saying this is 1:1 comparable. But young kids today often have smartphones. They have the internet non-stop. I don't think parental censorship works as a model here. Again, I get it that too young kids are too trusting, and there are creeps - but there is not really an alternative to having kids go through thought processes and understand the issues here. In warcraft 3, young gamers were quite competitive and good. So if they can learn to be better than older people, they will have no real difficulty understanding predators. (Again, it depends on the age; but if your kid is 6 years old, why can there only be games that are played online? Plus it is just chatting right? I remember playing games at the yahoo website, we chatted too. I don't think that was a problem per se. The website makes it sound as if everyone and everything has that problem. I don't think this is the case.)

Edit: Others pointed out the age range problem. I agree. So, which age range are we talking about? Is the age even mentioned on the website?

Edit2: Ah yes, 12 years old. Sorry but at 12 years old, I am having a hard time buying into the "predators exploit him every time". That seems to be ... strange. His son would probably object to the claim he made on the website here aka slandering - perhaps.

Parental controls are all about illusion of control. In reality the kids all know how to get around them. Try just try to block Gmail. It’s impossible. Gmail is the gateway to kids getting on services they aren’t supposed to be on.

Gmail can circumvent almost any security feature even if you set up a profile on iPhone (which is not documented and good luck with that). This is definitely not an accident.

Don’t mean to pick on Google; Apple is also bad, iPhone parental controls are very leaky. My son found a way to jailbreak his phone to completely unlock screen time and disable all parental controls.

Any of the consoles are also bad, PS4, etc… although it is possible to block stuff that PS4 can do via a firewall.

The issue is, and always will be, 3rd party trust. You cannot assume your child is safe using XYZ until you thoroughly audit the app/game/device and enumerate all their loopholes, plug-ins, and rushed updates. The sensical method would be a device-wide deny all firewall rule, where no TCP connection is allowed in or out without explicit parental consent. E.g. Alice wants to chat with Bob via chatmonkey. Approve this one time connection? Good luck finding anything on the market that supports and enforces this very sane level of parental control.

But profits!

It's almost like connected infrastructure is inherently unsafe. I stand by "your kid, your problem". I don't want any kid to be "unsafe", but commonsense went out the window when schools started to require the internet.

The true "safe" option is not allowing any of this until your child is old enough to understand the risks... so 18? 25?

All I'm saying is there is no route to prevent all bad things (or even most) and people who say otherwise are generally selling you something.

Welcome to parenthood in 2026. I can't walk into a Chapters or book fair with my kid without the tentacles of the game industry reaching him.

That academics are failing worldwide due to overexposure to screens is the least surprising thing I can imagine.

Or instead of turning parental controls on, instead teach your children how to identify bad stuff online. That way, they can catch people (peers OR adults) doing or asking really bad stuff. And teaching also has great benefits of lasting a lifetime.

Well, except for doing parental controls on your boomer parents TV, blocking Fox news. Thats a good usage of it. You're not going to defeat propaganda believability with boomers. So blocking is best bet.

Another issue is how many apps now seem to have "chat with strangers" features built in to them.

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