What I Learned When My 13 Year Old Couldn’t Post On Their Favorite Forum: Parenting Tips For Digital Citizenship
Last Tuesday, my 13-year-old Javi pushed a spear of broccoli around his plate for three minutes before dropping his fork with a clatter. His phone stayed face down on the table, like it had personally offended him. “Stupid rule,” he mumbled. “It’s just stupid.”
I asked what was wrong, and he flipped the phone around to show me. He’d made a new account on the local plant propagation subreddit three days earlier, excited to give away six extra pothos cuttings he’d rooted that month. He’d spent two hours after school editing photos, writing a little blurb about how he grows all his plants without synthetic fertilizer, and marking the post as free to local pickups. When he hit submit, a gray box popped up with clear text: In order to post your account must be older than 10 days and have 100 positive karma.
Javi’s first thought was to make a second account. I’d barely finished nodding before he shook his head. He’d already read the sub FAQ: new accounts that bypass the minimum age rule get shadowbanned automatically, and he didn’t want to lose the ability to join future giveaways. He just wanted to give away free plants, he kept saying. Why was that so hard?
I sat next to him on the couch after we cleared the dinner plates, and we stared at the message together. I’ve sat through half a dozen school assemblies on internet safety that talked about not sharing your address and not talking to random adults, but I couldn’t remember anyone ever talking about these small, unspoken gatekeeping rules that govern almost every niche online community kids join these days. Javi grew up on TikTok, where you can film, edit, and post a video 10 minutes after making an account. This whole “wait and earn permission” thing didn’t make sense to him.
I started with a comparison he got. When he joined the school’s after-school gardening club last fall, he didn’t walk in the first day and ask everyone to give him their extra tomato seeds, right? He came to the first meeting, helped haul mulch, asked three different people about their pumpkin growing tips, and got a handful of seeds from Ms. Lee a week later. This rule is the same thing, I told him. The people who run the sub made it to stop scammers who come in, post fake giveaways to steal people’s info, and leave. They don’t know you’re not a scammer yet, so you have to show them you’re actually here to be part of the group, not just drop a post and go.
He still grumbled that it was dumb, but he agreed to play along. We brainstormed small, genuine things he could do over the 10 day wait to hit that 100 karma mark, no spamming required. First, he could go through the new feed of the sub and upvote any posts he actually liked – upvoting other people’s content gives you a small amount of karma on Reddit, so that was an easy start. Second, he could comment on posts that he actually had something to say about. If someone was asking for help with fungus gnats, he could share the cinnamon trick he’d figured out last summer. If someone posted a photo of a new variegated monstera, he could say what he really thought about it. No generic “cool post” comments, just things he’d actually say if he was talking in person.
The first two days, he only got 18 karma. By day five, he’d answered a question about rooting cuttings in water vs soil, got 47 upvotes from that one comment alone. He checked his karma total every night before bed, like it was a video game quest. By day 8, he hit 102 positive karma. All he had to do was wait two more days.
I’ve thought a lot about this little moment over the past few weeks, because it’s such a perfect example of what we miss when we talk to kids about being online. We focus so much on the big scary stuff that we skip over the small, everyday lessons about how to be part of a community. For parents who haven’t spent time on niche forums lately, these 10 day, 100 karma rules look like arbitrary hoops. But they’re not – they’re community norms, written down instead of unspoken, just like the norms we follow offline.
If this happens to your kid, the first thing I’d tell you is don’t dismiss their frustration. It’s easy to say “it’s just the internet, who cares about a few plant cuttings” but that space matters to them, and dismissing that just shuts down the conversation. Instead, ask them to walk you through the rule, and connect it to something they’ve experienced offline – a sports team, a club, even a friend group where you don’t drop a big request the first day you hang out. Second, help them brainstorm genuine small steps to meet the requirement, don’t encourage them to spam or cheat the system. Cheating gets you the post, but it doesn’t teach them anything about being part of the group. Third, don’t jump in to fix it for them. I have a 10 year old account on Reddit with tons of karma, but I didn’t post his cuttings for him. Doing the work to meet the rule is the whole point of the lesson.
When the 10 days were up, Javi posted his cuttings and gave all six away within 24 hours. One of the people who picked one up was a sophomore from his high school, and they now swap cuttings after school once a month. Last week, Javi came to me upset again because a different plant forum won’t let him post original memes until he has 1000 karma. He still thinks a lot of these rules are unnecessarily strict, and honestly, I don’t always disagree. Some of them are just gatekeeping to keep new people out for no good reason. But he’s starting to get that any place that’s worth joining, online or off, expects you to show up and participate a little before you get what you want out of it. It’s not a perfect lesson, and it’s not the most exciting one. But it’s sticking with him more than any assembly ever did.
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