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As I posted elsewhere, our teenage son has a flip phone. He always has, and he always will, until he can buy and sustain something more fancy himself.

As far as desktop, he runs whatever the latest version of Ubuntu LTS. He does not have administrative access to it.

I wrote a small program that watches the title of whatever the current/foreground window is and compares that title to a configured list of regular expressions. If any regex matches, then the program kills the process. It logs the current window name in any case.

So we basically blacklist the web sites/apps/whatever that we see in his activity log as needed.

He is required to have a 'chromebook' for school, and they provide one. But instead we got him an old sturdy thinkpad, put Ubuntu on it, and it has the same basic logging/security framework, but with a different blacklist set of regexes.

We have received very positive feedback from his teachers, who struggle to keep the rest of the class off of inappropriate (for class time...ie, time wasting) web pages.

I've been asked how this minor miracle is accomplished, but things go right downhill when I say the first thing you need to do is throw away ChromeOS and install Linux proper.

Teenage me would have been all over that box.

"Little johnny spent 3.5 hours on 'advanced algebra last night'".

Our family PC (this was back in the 90's) had RH on it for about a year before anyone noticed, I grew up around computers (family friend was a sysadmin for an aerospace company so we got lots of 'broken' stuff and cast offs), I had frankenbuilds with drives duct taped to the outside of them but my favourite was the monochrome VGA 386 laptop when the family PC was a 286, the internal ribbon had snapped from been opened and closed, it cost me about 50p to fix it and it was going in the skip (dumpster) anyway.

My plan with my step-son is to keep the bar low enough that he'll keep pushing beyond it, he's already shown a fair amount of interest in Linux, he figured out how Gnome works faster than my GF did, I caught him watching videos on Linux the other day and now he wants to try some of the other DE's.

I find it really hard though, I remember what I was like at 7 and I want to sit and explain it all to him but then he loses the part where he has to work it out for himself so I restrict myself to answering his questions when he gets stuck or nudging him in the right direction.

The family friend just dumped programming books on me and answered stuff when I got really stuck but his response to any question was "and what have you tried so far?", I still remember getting a mouse driver written in assembly to work (pretty much the last time I wrote any actually since I discovered Turbo C and Turbo Pascal pretty soon after).

I think our next project will be a tracked robot with one of the r-pi's I have in the drawer.

How old is your son approximately? Purely out of curiosity, what are you most afraid of him doing that makes you install spyware? Are you worried about time wasting or porn or social media or what?

I have friends who had parents that installed NetNanny etc on their computers and their recollections of their parents behavior around their use of technology are now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet (which they invariably did at a friend's house or some such).

My parents didn't know what a regex was so when I was a teenager with a computer and an (extremely slow dial-up) internet connection we had to have conversations and build trust rather than involve blacklists and non-admin Linux accounts.

I'll answer your questions directly and then add some explanation, because neither our situation nor our son is anywhere close to normal or typical.

Our son is 15 years old, and he's in his second semester of high school, a year behind. > what are you most afraid of him doing ... Are you worried about time wasting or porn or social media or what?

The 'advanced', regex based spyware only arrived after he started high school. I've been logging (via a different system) his activities for many years now, so we know what kinds of things he gravitates toward, and it's not porn or social media. In fact, in most contexts, the stuff he looks at online is quite harmless. The key thing is 'wasting time'.

Very briefly, our son is both autistic and also pretty heavily ADHD. He gets 'stuck' on things very, very easily, and he has virtually no innate self motivation to do things academically. Finally, because of the way he is, he currently has no friends, and has historically very, very few friends.

All this adds up to a lot of challenges that would take all day to write down. What he can do on his laptop is heavily locked down most of the time. Basically anything that's currently drawing his attention or anything that's 'fun' isn't available. We're using that as a lever: a lot of that laptop lockdown will be lifted once he is failing none of his classes.

The lockdown on his personal desktop is usually a lot less severe. In fact, right now, since he just started a new semester, nothing is locked down at all.

I can understand that a lot of this might seem rather draconian, and under more typical circumstances it would be. But there's a lot more going on that I don't have time to get into, and would require a whole lot of context.

> now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet

For all of the trails he faces, our son is surprisingly self aware. He understands his own character, weaknesses, strengths and challenges.

Thank you for your earnest inquiry. I would be happy to answer more questions, if any.

Ahh that's very interesting, and sheds a totally different light on your original post. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the thorough reply, I had not considered a more complicated situation when I was pondering your approach.

Surely.

We actually err on the side of 'open' and 'permissive' in general, because that's how my wife and I were raised. We honestly find the steps we often have to take to influence our son uncomfortable. But it's been the only way to wedge him out of the enormous, intricate, detailed, persistent, fantastic, odd and amazing world that is in his head from time to time. He must join with society at some point.

lol I read some of these comments and all I hear is "Protect the children!"

Introducing your kids to any technology is an excellent way to teach them responsibility and how technology can be used to increase their understanding of the world around them. But this would require you to spend time with your kids and guide them along their journey with enough freedom to make mistakes.

I have 2 kids 5 & 10 that started using phones at 2 years old. A couple of broken screen and a few dramatic crying fits, but I can trust both of them to use technology with respect. Of course the 5 year is still learning and that happens everyday. The 10 year old is amazing now at self control with usage of his phone while interacting with others.

I say start them early to learn good habits, but also demonstrate good habits in your household.

Agree with you. I absolutely loved my first computer at age 10. It became one of my biggest passions and skills in life (to this day). At one point (13 or 14 years old), my parents sincerely told me they were concerned that I was losing focus/attention on other important things. I took that conversation to heart and I tried to be more cognizant of my use patterns. Sure I stayed up to 3am some nights but I was exhausted the next day and I learned my lesson. It was unhealthy.

As they say "Better to teach a man to fish".

This can be translated to "Better to teach a kid how to know when they are using something in a unhealthy way." (rather than do it for them). May take some time but I think that approach pays higher dividends.

I love the idea of giving kids access to the net on an old computer. Even better would be to simulate a 44k modem over wifi. This makes it possible to load anything, but you have to really want it, and you may even have to plan ahead (gasp!) before downloading something. It also inherently biases the kid to learn more about the local machine locally, which I believe is the key to growing a healthy adversarial relationship to computing devices. If you make the usual way of getting entertainment hard (e.g. youtube) my hope is that they will create their own entertainment (hacking the machine).

You would limit your kids’ internet access to dial-up speeds? That’s a little ridiculous.

Would you make them walk to school uphill both ways in the snow too?

Kids don’t have to have their parents’ exact childhood experiences to properly grow up.

You should be prepared for the possiblilty that your son will have no interest in Linux or figuring out how computers work. Kids are not always interested in the same things their parents are, and it can be a hard lesson to learn (ask me how I know).

I have kids and they will get phones soon. They already have some tablets and a Chromebook.

I don't care if my daughter ever memorizes a phone number or leaves the house without a map any more than I care if she learns to write in cursive. She plays games, but is also reading Kindle books and learning to code. I even chat with her on Slack.

And not to pile on, but please be aware that whatever plans you make for how you want your future children to be are 100% guaranteed to go off the rails and your kids will probably be fine anyway :)

When it comes to super old phones, what would you do about security concerns?