Australians to face age checks from search engines

Don’t buy them devices and lock down your computer and networks.

I guess if a teenager is enterprising enough to get a job and save up and buy their own devices and pay for their own internet then more power to them.

Obviously an impossible task. Kids need computers for school, and every school provides laptops. Kids don't need access to social media.

No? This was how it was for me. And the only downside was, that all the other kids are glued to their smartphones.

Why is this even controverse. Is there any rational reason why kids should have smartphones? The only reason I see is to let the big companies earn money and because adults don't want to admit, that they are addicted themselves.

Yeah, I think the thing usually missing from the child smartphone discussions is that many parents are addicted, sometimes even more than their children. Wouldn't expect a phone-addicted parent to moderate their kids, or if they tried, the kids would notice the hypocrisy.

Don't know how long ago you went to school, but at least in Australia, every student is provided a personal laptop for school work which is capable of connecting to social media. Maybe you could block it on your home wifi, but that't a step beyond what most people are capable of. And you'd be an extremely unpopular parent if you were the only one blocking social media while every other kid continues to arrange event invites on Facebook

Blocking it at the service level would be significantly more effective and mean all kids would have to socialise and send using IM platforms instead.

So educate parents or rethink what they need laptops for?

I didn’t say it was going to be easy. But all the middle aged guys who created all these tech startups that are rotting your children’s brains didn’t grow up with this level of technology.

So it’s clearly possible. Does the government or parents have the will to make the change? Maybe not.