this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Warning: Wall-o-Text incoming, please bear with me as I have a few points to make.
Maybe with modern phone games and social media, you might think so, but let me tell you this. At age 10 I played video games in my spare time, but had no other hobbies.
My parents didn't willingly take away video games from me. The fucking government did.
"Sure, he has Asperger's and no friends and no other hobbies, and has an anger issue. Take away video games because the fucking director of 'Children and Families' in [home town redacted] got his job by reading shit from that BS doctor who wrote that book in the 70s, and thinks video games like Kirby Super Star or Diddy Kong Racing are basically Mortal Kombat or Doom 64 or said director will have him forcibly removed from your home."
(Please note I learned to swear when I was in high school, the above angry cursing is entirely because I was not informed of any of the meddling done by people who had never even met me and never would, until 15 years later, not because I was one of those screeching spoiled brats on multi-player servers.)
"Oh, he took that poorly and gets upset because you can't tell him the real reason he can't play video games? We're taking him away and putting him in a foster home."
Yeah, I have issues, but taking away a kid's biggest hobby does not take away addiction, it creates escapism addicts who will do anything to avoid reality because they were forced to deal with reality 24/7 during their childhood.
Maybe look up "Hikikomori" and the reasons they refuse to talk to parents or even leave their rooms because they were denied a balance between work and downtime; given the choice but not the option for balance, all humans choose the latter as their imbalance.
I know how this works because that's my life. I am only an addict to video games because I was unfairly starved of them for 2 years at ages 11-13 and it didn't even make my anger issues go away during that time. I know because it wasn't just video games, it was TV and even having friends.
I had no friends for my entire childhood because I was taught 1-1 by a teacher's aide in Elementary school just because of government interference with my entire life. The Ministry of Children and Families in BC, Canada was apparently corrupt from the top and leaking down in the period when I was 11-13, and while it wasn't personal to them that they interfered with hundreds of already-damaged childhoods, it ended mine just before my 11th birthday.
I spent half of high school watching shows from the early 00s just after they went off the air (anyone remember tvlinks.cc?) because I had to play catchup with people 2 years ahead of me pop-culturally. I never made any friends because my peers viewed me as "the outcast who literally was made so by real adults" and decided that meant I should be completely alone for all of high school.
Compound that with my dislike of mid-00s gangsta rap and you have a recipe for someone who is too petrified of everyone to make friends. You know why I live with my parents? Because I don't like being completely alone all the time and I don't like being alone in public. At least my parents apologized and admitted they'd f-ed up all those years ago, and are and were otherwise the best parents I could have had.
I can't say the same for the BC government who I was forced to be fed by (disability pension) because I can't handle the stress of a normal job without flipping out at the first sign that a customer or co-worker is being a jerk and I'm not just talking verbally; I have so little patience for people being assholes that I have to actively avoid it.
Hopefully all that explains why I hate you for being one of those parents. Fuck you, you're just like the goddamn foster parents who wouldn't even let me watch TV of have friends, let alone use a computer, and people like you ruined my life without even having a good reason to.
Give your kid a freaking Switch or, if you want him to actually learn stuff, a Steam Deck and some simulation genre games and maybe a pair of replacement joysticks so you can show them how to replace them if the Steam Deck gets stick drift. Let them know that, even if you get upset about them having made a serious mistake online like being photographed by some creep, you're worried for them and not wrathful.
I know that, even though I'd never be able to practice it, because that's how my parents handled it when they were allowed to. It prevented further damage after they literally had to go to court to have me come back home from being taken away from them and shoved into a household I didn't want to be in and wasn't wanted in.
Do not hold your kids to any standard of perfection, yours or a religious one or even an objective one. The government of my province did exactly that last one and it destroyed the rest of my childhood and damaged me mentally. I'm lucky my parents did get me back home when they did.
I have a good understanding of the situation, I'm not saying gacha games or commercialized social media are good influences, but you are making a terrible mistake if your kid is being censored from games with minimal microtransactions or told not to use Lemmy. The internet isn't perfect and your kids won't be, but what ever is?
Please just show your kids where you recommend they go. Watching everything your kids do is creepy, but denying them access to computers entirely is draconian and cruel because kids who are forcibly left out of media consumption grow up to be kids who are up to 18 years behind their peers.
I may not be very mature, but legally I'm 32. I still struggle, but despite not even knowing what porn was until I was 15 and never being supervised online, I don't have an addiction to porn and basically won't play any game that has a gambling mechanic as the only means of getting something (even something cosmetic) for my character that I want. 1a. You don't care about kids, you only care about enforcing your beliefs on them. You act just like someone I once knew, an asshole by the name of Mike Elliot, who was paranoid that I would turn out as a criminal or something because I "lived an unstructured life" and "was too defiant and needed to be disciplined". Guess what? My life is unstructured but now I know enough about the world to decide for myself who to be defiant towards. I'm not a criminal. Yet as recently as when I was 26 Mike and his bitchy wife were apparently still claiming I was bound to end up in prison. Never been to prison, I had to move a long ways from my hometown to get away from my past. 1b. Being that I'm 32, that I am trying to argue in good faith here, and that I still have no friends 15 years after graduation because I was the only intelligent student at my high school to not get to go to university (see #2), I think you're the one in the wrong here.
I have no job and am lucky I live in Canada; due to Autism Spectrum Disorder and the damage done to me psychologically, I can't hold a job. Therefore, I make less than $10,000 USD a year and entirely on government support and support from my parents (money goes a lot further when you can do grocery shopping for a family instead of a retired couple and two independent bachelors).
Video games are not mindless entertainment, nor was I just "not allowed to play video games" and "forcibly confined". I was, for two years, not even allowed to touch a video game console OR computer for any reason, and was banned from social contact with anyone younger than 18 (despite the fact that I was 11-13 when that rule was forced on me by random government bureaucrats) or any adult who wasn't my foster parents or a government worker, yes that EXCLUDED MY BIOLOGICAL PARENTS AND MY SIBLING. This was in 2001 to 2003. It took me 6 years to catch up for having missed 2 years of pop-culture, which I had to do entirely online because I was now a pariah for having disappeared from all my classmate's world for two years. I didn't even know that I would have liked Y2K aesthetic and similar until it had all been replaced by McBling and Frutiger Aero, which themselves were replaced by newer styles. It's not just the time or the pop-culture or the aesthetic or even the loss of social contacts, I had a seething hatred of the "gang thug or emo" lifestyle teenagers subscribed to circa 2002-2008. There were no actual teenage conversations I ever wanted to be part of, because I NEVER EVEN GOT TO EXPERIENCE THE PART OF MY LIFE I'M NOSTALGIC FOR. I have no childhood, it was reduced to nothing but school and reading books. I'm a writer and, because I'm a sci-fi writer, I hate the idea of restricting readers to being readers. Kids and even adults need to be allowed to experience the world without assholes like you telling them that Dr. Lipschitz said "oReO cReAm Is BaD f0r KiDs WiTh AuTiSm SpEcTrUm... but a-okay for normal kids, so make sure your autistic child is told they're not allowed to be normal in every way you possibly can!".
It's not about the fucking oreos, it's about the fact that I AM NOT PROPERTY OF WHOEVER IS RAISING ME. YOUR KID IS NOT YOUR FUCKING SLAVE, GET IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING HEAD AND GET THE OVERBLOWN FEAR OF ADDICTION OUT OF IT BECAUSE THEY DESERVE TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY WHAT THEY ENJOY AND NOT WHAT YOU SAY IS OKAY! YOU WARN THEM, AND THEN YOU FUCKING STEP BACK BECAUSE IF THEY WANT TO MAKE A MISTAKE THEN THAT'S A GODDAMN HUMAN RIGHT TO MAKE ONE. INTERVENTIONS EXIST FOR A REASON, YOU CAN'T PRECRIME ADDICTION OUT OF EXISTENCE.
Maybe go read 1984 first. You know, the GEORGE ORWELL book. Then read Neuromancer or watch Blade runner. See how both a capitalist and socialist dystopia don't look so different? Now watch Escape from L.A. and realize a theocratic dystopia isn't any different either. Then watch Mad Max and see how even anarchy is dystopian.
I'm not saying go with the popular choice or even let the child just do whatever. I'm saying check yourself you fucking hypocrite because right now the popular choices are all some form of extremism and I'm the guy saying "a balanced approach is often the best option". Taking away video games entirely is not balanced, taking away internet is outright censorship, and taking away ANYTHING from an innocent person "for their own protection" or even "for everyone else's protection" instead of "because you made a mistake" is unjust if it isn't universally-applied. Punishments prepare kids for "if you commit a crime, there are consequences". Censorship by parents like you on their own kids teaches them only that they are not the equal of their peers. It's not your fucking choice to make for your children, it's only your responsibility to make sure that if it goes wrong, they know why and why they should never do it again, and that does not include manipulative mind games like sabotaging things when they don't do what you want.
I'm fucking done talking to you, you clearly don't want to argue in good faith and there's a block button for a reason.