The article does bring some valid points, the tools are not robust enough to foster communication between parents and children but if you think about it, its not in the companies best interest to make better tools for this since children, with their huge free time, are ideal consumers of their products.

A point not mentioned in the article is the fact that the vast majority of games for children contain gambling like mechanics while the game itself is marked appropriate for 3 year olds. This is utter bullshit and invalidates the age restriction setting in the App store. I do know that this is not entirely the companies faults but its worth mentioning.

Yeah the controls offered are god awful. I want to prevent my kid from accessing youtube on the nintendo switch. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the xbox. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the ipad. Kinda.

I just want to keep him from getting access to user-created content because it is terribly moderated and often explicitly paid for by rightwing shittards that are trying to poison our culture. Too bad. Guess he doesn't get to use those devices anymore.

Surprisingly good article.

We had parental controls on our daughters iPad but it basically never worked as intended. Either she couldn't access stuff which she needed at school or she figured out the password by asking mom to extend it and watching her puttin g the password in or the system clichéd and allowed websites and apps which were clearly in the blocked list.

Now that she is in middle school she has to use a Mac computer, there we removed the parental controls and I only block the websites she shouldn't use (it's a very short list) and I just use the /etc/hosts file to redirect to localhost. If she figures it out we will see her using rose sites on her computer but if she does I'll be very proud of her investigating and learning about computers. I'm afraid she can't figure it out without hints though.