> without the risk of undue exposure to the internet, advertising, and bullying
> I have increasingly wanted to make sure they have access to older educational content that is not dependent on the will of a publisher and does not constantly connect them with possible cyber-bullying.
My life experience leads me to reject some of the premises of this effort, the path to hell is paved by well meaning people trying to control children’s access to information. My parents did everything in their power to ensure I only consumed content that aligned with fundamentalist religion, young earth creationism, and hyper conservative politics. I wasn’t allowed to learn about dinosaurs because content about them made reference to their existing millions of years ago, not inside the “<6000 years age of the earth”. I wasn’t allowed to read science materials that discussed or even tangentially referenced evolution. I didn’t really know what a gay person was until I was an adult. I wasn’t allowed to watch most popular cartoons and movies because they depicted sex, violence, and other sin. They enforced the ridiculous concept of “bad words”. I am thankful every day that occasional unsupervised Internet access allowed me to broaden my perspective. I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand. I now believe in talking to children about challenging subjects, not preventing them from being exposed to them. My experience made me much more zealous about freedom of information and speech than most.
Cyber bullying is a weak excuse for limiting Internet freedom. I was psychologically tortured in person every day by other kids, made an outcast, and shunned. I was hit/kicked/punched/tackled or threatened with a weapon almost every day for years. I developed something akin to PTSD from constantly watching my back for kids trying to surprise attack me from behind. Internet interactions are incredibly safe environments for learning how to cope with bullies by comparison, like training wheels for dealing with real world bullying you will encounter. Unless you’re associated with something that goes mega viral like Monica Lewinsky or the Star Wars kid making you forever tied to an embarrassment, online bullying will never have even 5% of the impact of what you’ll have done to you in person. We need to worry about the far more damaging things that are done in person with full awareness of teachers/administrators who are sometimes even complicit. Kids can’t even feel physically safe in schools and we’re responding by limiting their access to the Internet. Even more access to the Internet might have allowed me to realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, it’s almost universally experienced by ADHD and autistic kids, and it gets much better when you get past school.
The old Internet, even with all its "unsafe" content, felt far more friendly than the modern Internet for two big reasons:
1. Everybody who was there actively wanted to be there. You could easily live your life without Internet access and most people did. This also meant you could take a break and disconnect without feeling like you were seriously missing out.
2. Web design hadn't been relentlessly optimized for extracting money from you. There was no A/B testing or engagement metrics. Commercial web sites existed but they weren't designed by expert psychological manipulators like modern ones. Amateur web sites were purely amateur in the original sense (something done for the love of it) with no possibility of monetization corrupting this positive attitude.
I don't see any chance of returning to that state of affairs.
Please do not read too much into this as me trying to control our kids beyond normal parenting and making sure they learn to grow up to be strong, confident, and caring for others. They do have age appropriate access to the Internet and an iPad with modern educational games on it as well.
There is disagreement among bible believing Christians about Genesis. I remember clearly reading it for myself as a child and realizing that the day counting did not start until the third verse. It starts out saying in God created the universe and everything in it in verse 1 without reference to a time frame. It's worth looking up Hugh Ross videos as he presents on this stuff in a way very different from the young earth creationists. There is a Northern Irish professor by the name of John Lennox who gives a very good lecture too. I presume that many here are well versed with many of the high quality secular professors, so I specifically wanted to point out two who are coming from a Christian point of view. Not everyone fully subscribes to Bishop's dating methods.
I too was very exposed to that idea but I was not restricted from reading science or anything I wanted.
> I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand.
At what age should we wait to allow kids to read about suicide methods?
Yeah, I personally will not subscribe to this. I am a grown man and I strongly dislike watching depictions of violence and want nothing personally to do with porn. My wife works in mental health and is well aware of suicide and counseling people.
I am not hiding my children from the world, but I am also not letting a toddler or a kindergartner cook on a stove or metaphorically speaking "putting a loaded weapon in their hands" too soon. There is plenty of real world stuff they do not need to be concerned with at this time.
There will be a time when they are mature enough to deal with the adult world, but now is not that time.
Across dozens of studies, the evidence is clear:
Exposure by itself produces a predisposition to engage.
Just seeing drugs/alcohol/sex in media increases the likelihood of trying them by 25-50%, further increasing with number of exposures.
It’s nice to have ideals that information should be free, even better to fight off abuse (what your parents did to you), but that does not make it the right direction to go in.
This coming from a child psychiatrist’s mouth.
You want your kids to stay away from drugs? Don’t even show it to them until their brains are formed. Don’t even acknowledge they exist. You’ll breed curiosity, and they’ll be statistically more likely to say yes when offered.
I saw 0 kids doing drugs in the bathrooms when I was in school, and I went during the 80s and 90s, the height of Just Say No / Winners Don't Use Drugs.
> Homeschooling: where someone unqualified to teach every subject toughs through it and there are absolutely no standards
And if my wife and I are teachers? With postdoctoral degrees?
>
> School choice: How we get taxpayers to pay for your kid's private and/or religious education
Seems a little more fair than the current state where I pay both taxes for public school and tuition for a private school. You do know that there's lots of non-religious people who want to take an active role in their children's education?
>
> I'm okay with 1 if you admit that you can't teach your kids every subject, and get help where you can, but 2 is unacceptable.
I'm a pacifist - can I get a refund of the part of my income tax that funds the Pentagon? Can people who don't have kids get a refund on their school property tax assessment?
If you want to send your kid to private or religious school then you can pay for it yourself.
> I have increasingly wanted to make sure they have access to older educational content that is not dependent on the will of a publisher and does not constantly connect them with possible cyber-bullying.
My life experience leads me to reject some of the premises of this effort, the path to hell is paved by well meaning people trying to control children’s access to information. My parents did everything in their power to ensure I only consumed content that aligned with fundamentalist religion, young earth creationism, and hyper conservative politics. I wasn’t allowed to learn about dinosaurs because content about them made reference to their existing millions of years ago, not inside the “<6000 years age of the earth”. I wasn’t allowed to read science materials that discussed or even tangentially referenced evolution. I didn’t really know what a gay person was until I was an adult. I wasn’t allowed to watch most popular cartoons and movies because they depicted sex, violence, and other sin. They enforced the ridiculous concept of “bad words”. I am thankful every day that occasional unsupervised Internet access allowed me to broaden my perspective. I’m grateful for being exposed to violence and porn and racism and discussion about suicide and every controversial thing that exists because these are things that exist in the world that I should be aware of and understand. I now believe in talking to children about challenging subjects, not preventing them from being exposed to them. My experience made me much more zealous about freedom of information and speech than most.
Cyber bullying is a weak excuse for limiting Internet freedom. I was psychologically tortured in person every day by other kids, made an outcast, and shunned. I was hit/kicked/punched/tackled or threatened with a weapon almost every day for years. I developed something akin to PTSD from constantly watching my back for kids trying to surprise attack me from behind. Internet interactions are incredibly safe environments for learning how to cope with bullies by comparison, like training wheels for dealing with real world bullying you will encounter. Unless you’re associated with something that goes mega viral like Monica Lewinsky or the Star Wars kid making you forever tied to an embarrassment, online bullying will never have even 5% of the impact of what you’ll have done to you in person. We need to worry about the far more damaging things that are done in person with full awareness of teachers/administrators who are sometimes even complicit. Kids can’t even feel physically safe in schools and we’re responding by limiting their access to the Internet. Even more access to the Internet might have allowed me to realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, it’s almost universally experienced by ADHD and autistic kids, and it gets much better when you get past school.