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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

If you had kids, you would know that you can control what they do up until about middle-school age, at which point your ability to control them begins to decline. They're starting to grow into independent adults.

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Best not to try to control them before that age either. Best to try to develop a relationship where you can express your concerns in a straightforward manner and hear their concerns and get their buy-in on some solution that safeguards them from your concerns but let’s them have some semblance of what they want.

Agree. Those tend to be the most functional relationships/young adults that I remember interacting with in the past. Social media though is clearly a thing to approach carefully. I personally just block it all at the firewall and watch for the day society gets through this phase.

Terribly basic question, but, can they not just use a VPN to tunnel through? I've heard kids are doing that kind of thing now.

It all has to pass through a router at some point, and the VPN will have a specific signature especially around connecting to the VPN server itself. Might have to put your threat hunting hat on to find it though. If my kid really does start getting clever there, then we start talking about CTFs and the wonderful world and compensation of Infosec.

If cellular, I’d roll with family iPhones and app restrictions on the kids’ phones, plus a lot of careful messaging.

Indeed. The best thing you can do is to teach them how to think for themselves, how to think freely, what is really important in life etc. Takes a lot of time and effort but it gives them the best defense against peer pressure and ‘social media’

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