My parents are installing a parental control service on all of my houses devices called bark home, and as a teenager who values privacy and freedom, this feels like a huge breach of trust and security. My parents are strict when it comes to the internet, and they only really allow me on instagram, the racism app of all apps. Meanwhile everyone else my age is on tiktok and snapchat doing whatever the hell they want. It’s not like this service is gonna undo everything i’ve been exposed to, and all that i’ve been through. (Not gonna get into detail, yes, it’s that bad.) I just wanna live without having someone looking over my shoulder 24/7. But I wanna hear your opinions on services like these, so put them down below. /nf
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Parental controls are basically a crutch for parents who don’t know how to raise their children. Obviously for like, actual young kids, it’s probably a good idea (though I think kids under the age of 10 probably shouldnt have unsupervised internet access anyway), but if you have like a 15 year old and you’re still locking them out of half of the internet then I’m going to assume you have no idea how to be a good parent. You should talk to your kids about how to be safe on the internet, not arbitrarily ban them from random websites, and if you yourself aren’t sure how to be safe on the internet, then you better do your research and get someone to teach you and your kid(s) how to protect themselves
TL;DR parental controls are fine for very small children but I think you’re a bad parent if you need a tool like this for your teenage kids
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yeah, they asked me if my school has taught us about adult content yet, and I said no, and they legit didn’t even bother explaining it to me. (they don’t know that I know what it is)
like, bad parenting 101. I’m 14 and you guys still shelter me like I’m some precious innocent baby.
fuck ur parents tbh
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i mean, ill just say unrestricted internet access as a child is absolutely attrocious
but i wont comment on parental control services. i dont exactly know what they imply and i know absolutely nothing about parenting let alone how your family works.
im aware im seemingly a “special” case for not having family issues, and the fact i didnt even have internet until 2014ish means i wasnt really raised with unrestricted internet access in the first place. to me it was just the funny thing to play flash games at school
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While a little excessive, they usually do so for your best interest, even if it’s poor (not bad) parenting.
I have no say in how a family should educate their child, even more so in a situation that I’m not aware of, but you should opt to discuss this subject with them instead of children on the internet.
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Well, despite what I said in my former message, I will still be delving into it as I don't want yet another parent-child topic to turn into an unnecessary source of conflict.
From what you’re sharing, it seems like they’re trying their best to make sure that you aren’t exposed to any such things by preventing you from knowing and accessing it in the first place.
They aren’t in your head, they can’t know what you’ve gone through as they aren’t yourself. Yes, their expectation of you are low as they appear to still take you for a young child, but you have to remember that it’s what they’ve seen you be for a majority of your life.
Communication and transparency is key when it comes to upholding relationships, so unless they aren’t open to it themselves, you should approach them.
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Parental controls until middle school’s over. That’s what I’d do as a parent. Then the conversation for being responsible on the internet w/ more freedom will come up.
They should be communicating more about the internet with you rather than just blocking internet access out of the blue. But Waping said they dont know how your family works. And i dont either, none of us really know. So idk where we will go w/ this knowing that fact
I went on the internet unsupervised as a kid and it really fucked me up. To this day I am still seeing the effects from all the bullshit. It took a lot to start healing.
So from personal experience I definitely think a level of restriction is healthy for children. Your parents have your best interest at heart, but i dont know the lengths of which they are going
this is the thing, they’ve let me on the internet unsupervised for so long and i’m suffering the effects. and only now are my parents actually concerned about their children’s safety. it’s not like restricting me is gonna do anything, it’s not gonna unexpose me to the shit i’ve been exposed to, it’s not gonna help, it’s ironic how only now they’re concerned when they should have been concerned YEARS ago. They fail to see the signs that something is going on. And if I told them anything, they’d just take my stuff away and blame it on me. Just like what they did to me in 5th grade after I was groomed. It’s obviously my fault that I was curious, it’s obviously my fault that I was naive, everything is my fault it seems. Everyone keeps telling me that, everyone keeps showing me that through their actions. I’m just a growing teenager, how the fuck does one expect me to know online safety when no one has properly educated me on it and monitored me in my early days of being on the internet? It’s so funny, really.
depends on the age
for young children i think it’s actually a good idea but since ur a teen i think it sucks
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Parental Controls are a decent idea, but often times they either overreach or do absolutely nothing. They also can’t replace a human actively watching what a kid does on the internet; if somebody actually watched what I did online as a little kid, I wouldn’t have seen some… weird stuff, to put it lightly.
If you can’t put in the time to monitor a little kid’s internet activity or can’t be assed to do so, then don’t let them have the internet. Wait until they’re about 13 or so, which will also save you the headache of making sure they aren’t making accounts for social media sites before they’re old enough to do so.
As for this situation, installing it on literally every device sounds completely bonkers, exacerbated by how you’re probably either in high school already or are getting there. Chances are they see a lot of stories of high school kids doing stupid stuff like vaping, and think that you can’t be trusted to not do that, for whatever reason. Doesn’t make it any better; hell, I’d say it’s worse, because then it would imply that they’d trust a little kid to be safe on the internet more than an older person with experience using computers.
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i only got on the internet 2 or so years ago and im not super fucked up i think
To be honest looking back I would have been better off with parental controls.
I also think it is not healthy to compare yourself with your classmates, yes they are doing fucked up shit but that doesn’t mean you can’t strive to have a better relationship with the Internet.
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However I want to apologize because I thought the parental controls you were talking about were basic things like screentime and adult content limitations. After researching a bit on that bark home thing, I think it is very intrusive and weird. Like using AI to monitor photos and texts, is crazy.
yeah, i’m about to graduate middle school, and to think my parents would even be concerned about me getting addicted to flavored smoke sticks or doing stupid shit is crazy
i’m not that type of kid 
I think my parents did an okay job at restricting my internet access when I was a kid
Holy yap about how I've been raised
I got my first phone when I was 8, but I was only allowed to use two kinds of apps: WhatsApp (they went through my texts), and a mobile phone game of my choice (which was usually some shitty bootleg minecraft)
I had a screentime of 1 hour each day for games at this time. Any child would’ve rebelled against that (admittedly I did too a few times by “forgetting” to set a timer) but at that time I wasn’t really exposed to anything else to make me know what you can really do with a phone so to me it was the only thing I knew, and it seemed reasonable.
When me and my siblings got older (around the time I was 11 or so) our parents gave us more freedom but still tried to monitor what kind of content we were exposed to. We no longer were forced to only 1 hour of screentime per day, but our parents checked any apps we wanted to install on our devices. We weren’t allowed tiktok or any other social media that we were too young for.
At this time they also started treating us more individually. They trusted me more than my sister to not be going on adult sites, so she had her browser history sent to them while I was free to do what I want.
In my early teens (around 14) I had even more freedom. They didn’t check what I was doing on my devices anymore, but instead tried to ask me about it and listened sometimes when I was talking to my online friends to ensure I wasn’t doing anything weird. I was allowed to have discord, but they talked to me about red flags. Oh and they still didn’t allow us to use tiktok, but after growing up without it up to that point I didn’t really feel like I needed it
The only real restrictions I got at this time were my wifi being cut off after 11 pm because I stayed up one too many times with my friends lol. They gave us the responsibility to monitor our screentime. I still get an email with a report of my screentime over the past week but there are no more restrictions.
Now I’m 16 and I feel like I turned out fine. This system is mostly built on trust and luckily it worked pretty well for me.
If you feel like this parental control service is gonna intrude your privacy (and after doing some research about it, yeah it probably would) I suggest talking to your parents about it. Try to hold a civil conversation, ask them why they think it is needed. Ask them what rights they give you, and what kind of things they’re scared of you doing on the internet. I don’t know what you’ve been through so far but you mentioned not knowing any better as a child, try explaining to them that each age requires different parental controls and try to come to an agreement with them about what you think you need.
Also, don’t forget to explain what kind of consequences an intrusive parental control service will have on you. You said it will be mostly negative, try to explain why to them. People are more willing to hear you out if they understand your thought processes.
Good luck
Congrats, your getting a head start on how it feels to be an adult.
Everything can and will screw you over at every turn.
parental controls are fine, what isnt is the way the parents use them
its supposed to protect small kids from the horror that is unrestricted internet access, but the parents see it as a ‘get your child under control’ card
It’s probably an outdated opinion but I personally think kids below like 10 years old should only really have very limited access to devices. Today, contacts are pretty important, but I think it’s bullshit that parents are just giving their 3 year old kid an iPad and let them do whatever.
10-12 years old, I don’t know if parental supervision is really needed. If the kid wasn’t hooked on the devices 24/7 since they were 3 years old, I don’t think it’s really necessary, and if they were, damage is already done.
After that, no.