I grew up with unfettered internet access, and of course I also came across the occasional horrific liveleak video, but everything required at least some sort of conscious input. Nowadays you have one app with an endless stream of garbage^Wcontent and the mysterious algorithm runs berserk feeding it to you.

Will you also be taking them to MacDonalds 3 times a day, but with warnings about the need for healthy eating?

That's not the same. In your analogy this would be just giving your kid access to eat what they want, and making sure that they understand different kinds of food and nutrients and how eating different things will affect their growth/energy level/body size and so on. Not the same as taking them to a fast food chain for every meal.

Not sure how old you are but the internet of today is not the same as it was when I was growing up.

Yes, today's internet is far tamer. You need to go on tor to find half the stuff I'd see daily on forum around 1999.

I find the opposite is true. There used to be WAY more easy access to straight up illegal stuff right out of google search.

Indeed, it probably had more hardcore content

I dunno, I grew up when StileProject, Rotten.com, and Ogrish were in their heyday.....theync is just as bad, and IMO more accessible.

I think that the biggest difference with the current situation is the 24/7 reach. You were forced to unplug from the internet for much of the day during your generation simply because there was no way to reach the internet, but nowadays you are on the internet for everything and you can't even unplug to study, work or contact anyone. Anyone who is on TikTok uses it all their waking time.

Not true. I had a laptop starting at age 12 and unfettered 24/7 access, which I'd often use to play around with PHP and things until 3 AM :D

If I didn't have that formative experience of learning to time-manage and manage my own little technology addictions before going to college, college would have been really rough.

And this was very early 2000s like 2004

If you have daughters there is a large chance they will fall in love with manipulative predators. Source: myself and many of my peers.

A lesson that needs to be learned in my opinion. I learned it the hard way, why provide guardrails I didn't have and expect my kids to come out better? I'd rather just re-create as best I can what I had access to and provide advice where I had none. Any attempt I make to restrict thigns further than what I had is just going to back-fire.

What you are describing is called "negligence" and is probably child abuse. You don't give kids unfettered access to anything, especially something as potentially extreme as the internet.