Ask HN: Do you censor your children's internet?

As I teenager I can say I have never had my internet censored. As a matter of fact it has never been controlled in any way whatsoever. My mum would never even mention anything at all about the so called "dangers of the Internet" or any inappropriate content. Of course I visited few sites I "shouldn't" have. But no tragedy happened.

Fast forward a few years and now it looks like I am one of the few men that doesn't visit adult websites or perform the act of self-sex at all. Sometimes I actually wonder if my mum thinks I'm doing that stuff.

Coincidence? For the most part definitely. But I don't see how such censorship can work at all. Unless of course you're home-schooling your child.

And the worst approach would be to monitor what they do. If I knew my parents were monitoring what I put in google I know there's a lot of things I wouldn't search for even if there's nothing inappropriate about them, it simply might be simply embarrassing. Whenever someone comes to my room I minimize my browser, there's no secret in there, I just don't want people to see what I'm doing. I love my privacy.

Given how lives of many people nowadays are spent in a large part on the Internet controlling your child's Internet is very close to controlling their lives.

Yes and no. I have a 10 and 13 year-old boys and there are two things we do to limit what they can do on the internet. First, we only allow a certain amount of screen time. We're somewhat flexible with that but when I see that my oldest has been playing Doom for 45 minutes, I'll tell him that's been long enough.

The other thing we enforce is that the computer can't go into their bedrooms. They can use the desk in the kitchen, sit on the sofa in the living room or spread out on the floor, but while we don't monitor what they are doing, whatever they are doing is somewhat public.

This seems to be a good mix for us now. The kids are comfortable on the computer and we're comfortable with what they are using it for.