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Comment by aaroninsf | Hacker News Reader

Kids approaching 7 and 10 watch some movies/vetted series online, only recently got Kindle tablets which they are literally only allowed to use on long (3 hr+) transits, never at home.

No TV or analog in house.

I am now torn as the older kid is at a prime age to introduce programming...

...but the benefits we see daily from no-screen childhood are to our biased eyes overwhelming.

Our kids spend all their free time engaged in imaginative play much of it collaborative, and manipulating physical objects, and when we can get out, outside.

Their ability to sit in a room with no screen and make a world seems pretty rare, compared to peers who were given ipads or whatever years ago.

But I also worry, how do we also make sure they are literate and savvy.

I fear that as soon if the programming bug bites it will be the End...

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Out of curiosity, and as someone who has a newborn and will be going through this at some point, how do you determine what effects your policies have on their potential social ostracization especially as they get older. In my youth I witnessed this social outcasting happen to children based on parental restrictions such as these. I still see it as they become adults. The effect seems to compound on itself from being the one not allowed to do something, to having only the few friends in a similar boat, to being an adult that grew up with fewer friends and fewer at-large interactions. Do you take into account these costs? Is the cost of over-exposure to media greater than the cost of having them be different/segregated to satisfy this?

I have two kids (<10 years old) who have little to no restrictions on screen toys. My router disables the internet on their devices (iPads, kindles, 3dses, Roku in bedroom) at 7pm on school nights, and there is a strict no-screens policy after bedtime at 8pm, but other than that we don't really monitor or restrict.

Quite often spontaneously, and on occasions where we take away screens as a punishment, they engage in the same kind of collaborative/imaginitive play with physical objects together. I'm probably equally biased to you, but I don't feel that having access to screen has in any way impaired or diminished their ability or desire to engage in that kind of play together, while at the same time preparing them for a future in which screens and computer/internet literacy is going to be a supremely important skill to have.

Maybe offline or rarely-online screens would work? An RPi2 (no wifi) stuck in some corner, running Linux? That kind of thing.

I think the Web's far and away the most dangerous part of screens. I grew up mostly with OTA TV, an NES, and an offline DOS computer as my only screens until age 10 or 11 so when we got dial-up, which could only be used sparingly (one phone line) and sitting at a desk. All were kinda fun, but also boring enough that you'd wanna go outside and ride bikes or something after an hour or two. The modern Web is like having a cable subscription with 100 channels of only stuff you love (and most of it the crappy low-value stuff that you, nonetheless, love). It's hard to moderate use as an adult, let alone for kids.

[EDIT] yes of course you can and should just tell them no, as with other decisions they're bad at making, and I have no problem doing that, but what I'm unsure about is whether the benefit of Web-anwhere-in-the-house and Netflix and Youtube and so on are worth even having to enforce rules to begin with—maybe it's better to not have them at all, because they're so low-value compared with less distracting and addictive alternatives.

You don't even let your kids read a Kindle!?

Also: not every child is going to end up a programmer.

I’m planning to set up a separate heavily filtered kids vlan/wireless network. I’ll leave some vulnerabilities in it so if they want unfiltered internet access they have to get it themselves.

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