Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

91 pointsbad_username155 comments

What screen time limit do you set? What apps or web sites do you restrict (or allow)? What tools do you use?

How do you describe the dangers of the Internet without making it scary, or sounding dramatic?

How do you respond to "but dad, all my classmates have their phones unlimited and unsupervised"?

For context, what is the approximate age category of your child?

There's a billion articles written about all of it, but I am really interested to hear the crowd here.

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4,5,15

15 year old does his own thing, not a lot can be done there, but he's not stupid with it. Mainly just playing xbox with his friends, watching other people play games on youtube.

Younger ones have a Fire tablet each, 1 hour a day limit (unless they ask for more) - mostly seems to be learning games/lego cartoons. Browser disabled, can only use stuff in their age range. They aren't allowed to watch youTube unless one of us is in the room with them (Too often it just changes to some random advert/show that is very different to what they were watching ...)

I have a separate Pi-Hole for the kids vlan which blocks gambling/porn/mining stuff as well as adverts.

Every now and then we all sit and play xbox/PS4 together - Disney games/(Train|Farm) simulators etc

Edit: The youngest also like to sit with me if I'm playing a game on my PC, and I let them use the mouse/keyboard to try and get them used to the control of it.

(I'm thinking of setting them up a Pi that is 'theirs' to get the mouse/keyboard control going)

Any chance of you doing a write up somewhere of how you set this up, how it all works? This sounds fantastic.

I'm 3 months out from becoming a parent. This stuff isn't a big deal yet, but in 3 years or so I'm going to need it. I'd love to learn from you. I know what vlans and pi-holes are, but I've never set them up like that and I want to be able to.

And if there's me wanting it, I'll bet there's a lot more parents or future parents who might also want to know about it.

I could certainly try, but the gist is:

I have a Mikrotik hAP ac² that I setup the VLANs on, and then some NAT rules that force DNS requests to go to the kid specific raspberry pi if its their VLAN

I also have a Unifi AP for WiFI, which uses radius auth to set the VLAN for devices. So everyone has their own user/password for WiFi, and it sets the VLAN based on that.

Each room also has a network socket in (I ran a load when we bought this house - they aren't used yet in their rooms) which goes back to a netgear managed switch, so if they were to plug into their room, they would get their VLAN also.

At some point I need to sort out a way to limit the speed after a certain time on their VLAN, but it's not super important at the moment.

Edit: Just to add, this was also done as a learning exercise for me, but I think it kinda makes sense. As the youngest get older, we can talk to them about being safe online, and what not to do etc. But at the moment I figure it's the same as locking the cabinet under the sink, or not letting them use the big sharp knives. Sure as they get older we can change it, but at the moment it means they can enjoy the new funky technology without being hassled by some dodgy advert or troll hassling them lol

For very young kids, no screen whatsoever. It’s the time they develop bonding with other humans. Best to let them play with physical toys or people.

Resist baby einstein and other things like it for as long as you can

If you don't want to spend the time setting up a pi-hole, you might consider a service like NextDNS. It makes the process extremely simple.

Why do you block minors from accessing content designed for miners?

I think we are past the era of sending the minors down the mines and it is past time to leave the mining to the miners.

I think "mining stuff" means scripts that secretly mine cryptocurrencies using your browser.

I'm not a parent, but I was somewhat recently parented.

Consider holding yourself to the same standard you set for your kid. My parents are mental health professionals and did this with me. I think it was incredibly valuable and I respect them a lot for it now that I'm older.

I don't think its wise to restrict usage, watch over their shoulder, or block websites if you aren't willing to submit to the same restrictions or naturally limit your usage.

You risk sending your kids some messages I'm not sure parents realize they are sending. Worst of all: "do as I say not as I do" and "I don't trust or expect you to act as responsibly as I do."

At what point do you see this starting? I certainly don’t expect or trust a 3 year old to act as responsibly as I do

And I’m already a fairly irresponsible person.

Probably when they're capable of realizing you're a hypocrite?

Well said

There a difference between children having different limits to parents and to hypocrisy. There also a difference in responsibility, yes it's wrong for me to get drunk; letting a child get drunk, well that's immoral, criminal and a lot further down the 'unhealthy' road.

Treating children as small adults is wrong in so many ways.

I kind of agree but I think you make another point there, as a parent there is a big difference between getting drunk in-front of your kids and having a beer with food.

And it's the same thing with screen time and internet usage I don't think it's practically possible to have the same rules for adults and children in a home, bed time is an excellent example.

However you can still have clear and communicated rules for both the adults and the children that way holding yourself to the same standards.

In the bedtime example our 5yo goes to bed by ~1800 and the entire family gets up at ~0500 with the adults having a set bedtime at ~2100-2200. Of course these times can be altered by external circumstances but then we try to make the reasoning clear.

For screens and devices we use the same logic, yeah I work on the computer thus I will be using the screen more than a 5yo but outside of work I limit my own screen time as well as my kids, not the same level but a distinct limit to both of us.

I fully agree with this. In our household FB, Instagram, TikTok... are bad mouthed and blocked for everyone. Kids understand this and are on board with it.

If I was using FB and blocking for them, it would have been a hard sell.

I'm paranoid about passwords and sharing info online, and they've also started adopting those practices. Yesterday a kid had to login onto a public terminal at school, and once done the kid immediately changed password because I've been doing this. I was very proud. :)

Younger kid also makes sure passwords are hidden and so on...

That sounds tempting honestly, because I respect my kids. But OTOH I know for a fact that their prefrontal cortex has not yet developed fully, and I know how well paid the people are whose day jobs are dedicated to keeping users glued to the screen.

Even if the adults are not able to restrict themselves, they are still responsible for the well being of the children who don't know better, at least until they are past the point of reducing cognitive, critical thinking and reading comprehension. A four year old doesn't know better.

Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Neurodevelopment, Learning, Memory, Mental Health, and Neurodegeneration: a Scoping Review https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-019-00182-2 Evidence suggests that chronic sensory stimulation via excessive exposure to screen time may affect brain development in negative ways. Excessive smartphone use may increase the risk of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional disorders in adolescents and young adults that also has the potential to increase the risk of early onset dementia in late adulthood.

https://healthmatters.nyp.org/what-does-too-much-screen-time... Early data from a landmark National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that began in 2018 indicates that children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning.

Sure, they won't call it 'brain damage' - just reduced cognitive reasoning and critical thinking.

One thing that I think would be hard to tease out, but would be important to do so, is do these kids have more screen time than usual, because they are harder to handle as children and thus are more likely to have excessive screen time given to them by their parents? Or the parents have less capacity limit this and is overall part of a theme of less parental resources?

I seem to have a very different experience from most of the comments so far, so thought I should share. My kids are 6 and 2 and we have no screen time limits but also no problems right now. However, I also think nature is very strong, and we're probably lucky that the kids are naturally very active and don't want to sit at a screen for long periods of time.

The oldest used to want devices so bad I was really worried about how we were going to handle screen time, but then COVID-19 happened and he had to basically get his own iPad for school, plus all sorts of exceptional situations in a pandemic, so he effectively unlocked unlimited screen time early.

The most exciting thing to him was being able to message us, and for a while he didn't want to talk directly but only text us. And he searched for all sorts of things on Google, but mostly just educational stuff (strongest metals, tallest person, etc). But he quickly got used to the iPad just being there, and forgot to be obsessed with it.

To this day, the iPad just sits around and he can grab it anytime to look up stuff. He uses it to show us stuff they talked about in school, look up questions he has, listen to music, etc. Basically using it like a responsible adult would. Occasionally he asks to get a game he's heard about, but we just say no and he seems fine with it.

He is not a particularly well-behaved kid otherwise, so I'm don't want to give the impression I'm humble-bragging about him. I just wanted to share that not everyone needs strict limits to develop a healthy relationship with technology. If the pandemic hadn't blown the doors open, we might still be struggling with limits on an assumed obsession, but we stumbled into the much easier solution of no limits and it worked for us.

how can you do this! most of kids after they first get their infinite screen time spend all of time on play mobil games and watch YouTube funny videos.... my family just gave up, we just think every kid are in same condition.

I think the key is making other things more fun. My kids love the roller blading, walks, parks, little games, bathtub, breakfast. If they want to watch the phone all day, they're responsible for feeling miserable about it at the end of the day.

You can't really help them until they want out. So my trick is to make them want to stop and then help them.

I kinda like that idea. The importance is providing them with the skill to recognize it ("you seem really bored/frustrated by that game")

So, I gave my daughter access to the Nintendo Switch.

Games are hard (she is 3),will either get very frustrated or bored. Otherwise she has fun and it's slowly making progress.

It's really hard to find well-suited videogames. All of them expect you to read.

I do have to pull her away occasionally when SHE doesn't want to be there anymore and it's extra tired/bored. This is thankfully rare and it's usually connected to me neglecting her for the day (harsh truth), so I just try to just make a point of playing with her once throughout the day and it just doesn't happen. God it's hard though. Some days you are just so drained you want to be braindead but you can't, you have kids!

9 year old. He started coding when he was 7. JS. He maintains an online website with all his JS code. Updates his own website. No screentime limits. No restrictions. I bookmarked developer.mozilla on his pc but he still prefers that dirty w3schools. I help out sometimes but that shitty language truly drives me up the wall. Sometimes out of spite I code up 1-liners in R and tease him that it'll take 100 years to do the same in JS. But he doesn't take the bait. I think kids are stupid in general. When I was his age I was a huge qbasic freak. My teachers told me then to use Turbo CPP for my pictures but qbasic was just so much simpler. I see my kid making the same mistakes now. oh well.

Wait, you think JS is worse than R? I haven't done a ton of stuff with R admittedly, but every time I've had to touch it it's the worst part of my day. JS is irritating, but I feel like its quirks are easier to get used to then R.

w3schools is really not that bad. I hate that it still gets such a bad rep. I don't use it myself, nowadays the MDN docs have long since exceeded it in comprehensive content and clarity, but w3schools is fine for people who are learning. I learned the same way 10 years ago. It has plenty of excellent examples and clear explanations. Yes, it has a couple of flawed pieces of information (like recommending document.write once upon a time)....but people really like to just crucify the whole site over that, and it's never made much sense to me. It's a frustrating case of experienced mentors not understanding what makes an educational resource good or bad and biasing towards what's useful to them as already-experienced coders.

I agree; I've been coding for awhile now, so I don't use W3School for anything JS related, but I don't think it's so bad if you have zero experience with anything related to web development.

Also, I honestly think that their Raspberry Pi + Node.js GPIO programming tutorial series is actually pretty good.

One day he'll see the light. My coworkers are still saying the same about me when it comes to monads and functional programming.

If nothing else, you can have your son write up a few one-function JS librarie, put them up on NPM, and hopefully collect some of Drew DeVault's money in time for Christmas.

"Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions."

— Mark Twain

1) For M-F, they are allowed 1 hour a day.

Go to Settings->Screen Time->App Limits.

2) For Sat and Sun, 3 hour limit, but a time window of 6am-9am. So if they're going to use the time, it'd better be in the morning while we're sleeping in. :)

Go to Settings->Screen Time->Downtime (enable scheduled).

3) I've always curated their Youtube subscriptions, without their knowledge, unsubscribing from the 100's of Minecraft channels they subscribe to (leaving a few) and adding Science and discovery type channels. :)

Manage Youtube subscriptions here: https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels

4) Lastly, my wife and I have decided to start curating the apps that that they can use with extended hours. If they want to use their iPads longer than the daily hour, they will have utilize one of the following:

- iMovie

- Garage Band

- Epic Game Maker ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epic-game-maker-sandbox-craft/... )

- Pokemon Go (since that would still get them out of the house.

The above app limit exceptions can also be managed with: Settings->Screen Time->App Limits.

The above curation idea was taken from a Billie Eilish - she said that her parents let her stay up as long as she was doing something creative (which was always writing or composing music).

Add to that list Factorio or Minecraft! They’re very creative games (especially Factorio, which makes me use my CS education on a daily basis).

It seems like Factorio (I prefer Dyson Sphere Program) might be an outlet for creativity that you already have. Other people will not be as creative, they might need guiding to learn how to optimise and how to make tradeoffs, etc.

Depends on the child/person a lot IME. Sometimes we think it's the game that is creative, but it is we who are creative and that creativity can be built in other skills.

We've debated Minecraft.

They play it so, so much (still). We're just trying to force them to branch out a bit.

> but a time window of 6am-9am. So if they're going to use the time, it'd better be in the morning while we're sleeping in

absolutely genius!

Got some tips on which Science and discovery type channels?

Ah, I also set up a lot of pretty clever iOS screentime rules for the 14 year old.

Then I noticed it is ridiculously easy to circumvent a lot of the stuff by changing timezones on the device and Apple STILL has not fixed it :-(

Haven't tried this personally, but found this:

1) Turn on “Content & Privacy Restrictions”

2) Go down and tap on “Location Services”

3) At the bottom you’ll see “System Services”

Enable “Setting Time Zone” and then go back

4) At the top of the “Location Services” screen, toggle on “Don’t Allow Changes” - This should grey out the options in System Services and “Setting Time Zone"

5) Now in Settings > General > Date & Time everything should be greyed out and the kid won’t be able to change anything!

https://setupsynclearn.com/blog/15/11/2019/ios-tip-how-to-st...

Yeah, this circulates a lot on the internet. I do not know if it EVER worked in any iOS version, but it does not work right now.

Which seems logical, as the only thing you're disabling is the use of location services to auto-detect the timezone. Nothing prevents a manual change of the timezone. So if it worked at any time, and not just somebody misunderstanding what it does and then everybody copying the tip without verifying it, it probably simply was a bug, which was fixed since then.

Thanks for trying to help, though.

We have three kids, aged 6, 3, and 10 months. The six-year-old gets ~30 minutes of Switch play a week (mostly driving circles in Rocket League), and the whole family watches an episode of Lego Masters on Sunday. That's the only screen time they get.

When our oldest was ~3, he had been potty trained for awhile. We were on vacation and he was on the iPad we had brought for the plane. He was so engrossed in the game that he didn't even notice he was peeing there in the living room. That incident really firmed up our Minimal Screen Time resolve.

Kids are going to spend their whole lives on screens, just like all of us do. IMO there's no reason to get that started early if you can help it.

Word of caution - my parents strictly controlled screen time until I was a young adult - at which point they just stopped. At the same time I moved to a room they couldn't supervise.

I lacked the self discipline tools to control my own bed times and screen time, and failed to manage either, impacting my grades.

That was an important lesson for sure, but I do think if we'd done something more phased earlier on, it would have been better. You can tell a 13 year old "You can go on the computer as much as you like on Thursday, but if you don't get your homework done and spend 3 hours doing non-screen things, you will not be allowed to next week". Not so much with an 18 year old.

Sounds like better communication would have been helpful, sharing concerns and listening to each other. This is where I see families, who communicate well, having to the most success in all areas.

Yeah I have a cousin who I belive is permanently emotionally stunted because of this. Her whole life revolved around getting more screen time for the first 15 years.

Haha, yes, I had the same cousin! We would go play hide and seek while he played Legend of Zelda on his own in the corner :-/

Thanks, we're aware of that possibility. We talk a lot with them about the motivation for the limits so hopefully they will see the value in applying them to themselves even when we're not around. But it's obviously a long journey. Hope you've developed those tools now, I'm sorry you weren't set up to succeed there.

A friend of mine had his son (14) playing sometimes all night.

He thought, as his son is (really) smart, that he will realise by himself it was stupid.

Well, he didn't, his grades fall and now he doesn't even live with my friend, as his mother (ex-wife of my friend) let him do whatever he wants, so he decides to move with her.

We all cross finger that he will at a time have an epiphany and go back on track...

I think that smart kids needs raising too. They won't adopt your values unless you talk to them and interact with them.

And if they spend most of the time playing, they will adopt values of whatever gaming community they run into. And gaming communities don't tend to think gaming is stupid.

The only one we have so far is that we blocked YouTube at the router level.

YouTube (and YouTube Kids etc.) is down-right creepy when kids get hold of it.

The kids will watch things like Netflix or Amazon Prime for a bit, get bored, and do something else. They'll play stuff like Minecraft for a bit and move on too. But put them in front of YouTube and they will sit there all day watching banal, repetitive, shockingly obnoxious, and sometimes creepy and disturbing content. Sometimes the younger ones will literally urinate on themselves because they are so transfixed by YouTube.

What's even spookier is that the same content on normal streaming networks does not have the same effect. There's a young kids show called Blippi that they watched on YouTube before we banned it. They'd watch it all day on YouTube. Then after our ban it showed upon Amazon Prime. They found it there and will watch it... occasionally... for a bit.

There is something about YouTube's design and algorithm that's a perfect Skinner box for humans, and it works disturbingly well for children.

P.S. the adult behavior often involves a powerful "rabbit hole" effect where you watch one political or ideological video and you get profiled and served tons more like it. Combined with the Skinner box effect it has and it's like some weird dystopia where you get Clockwork Orange style brainwashing but get to pick what you're brainwashed with. Reminds me of a skit Monty Python would have done:

"Hello sir, I'm here for the brainwashing. Can I see a menu?"

"Certainly, sir! Today's we have a half off special on Leninism and UFO abductee cults..."

"Do you have holocaust denial?"

"Hmm... I think we may be out of that one. Would you like some tankie gulag denial instead?"

That's super weird. Have you tried to figure out what the difference is? Netflix and the like also have a lot of the features that I can think would cause such a reaction: infinite playback without user input, very little friction from opening to playing something and so on. Is it the content? Or what it recommends? Might give a reason to why kids seem to be hooked to elsagate videos...

I can't quite figure it out, but I think the colors and flashiness is part of it. Combine that with the tightness and apparent effectiveness of the engagement-maximizing algorithm and how quickly it moves you along to the next thing and I think you have something.

The content the kids get hooked on is sometimes down-right weird. My older daughter got hooked on this Minecraft YouTuber called Preston who just yammers for hours at the speed of an old fashioned auctioneer. It's utterly obnoxious to grown ups but the kids will sit there until they're in a puddle of their own urine. A neighbor kid got hooked on weird "meme videos" full of pictures from horror games set to banal nursery rhyme style music. They got obsessed with characters from a game called "Five Nights at Freddie's" even though they've never played it. Some of these videos are 12 hours long and obviously assembled by bots.

It's fucking "kill it with fire" creepy. It's so extreme with kids if I didn't know such things were impossible I'd start wondering about 5G mind control conspiracy theories. (Alas, the link is WiFi not 5G...)

Other parents have told me the same thing. I've helped a few neighbors ban YouTube on their routers. I've read it on parenting forums too.

I've heard TikTok can be this way for teens but have no direct experience.

I'm repeating myself, but that's so weird. From personal experience, I've only ever thought of the YouTube algorithm as crap. Every time I check YouTube everything there is just irrelevant to me, and the recommendations next to any video are just as random and pointless that I rarely watch more than one video at a time. It might help that I'm actively repelled by clickbait, and a lot of YouTube has (had to?) go down that hole.

Right, same, but we're adults. I also find clickbait repulsive, am extremely conscious of what youtube is trying to do, and constantly tell it "I'm not interested in this channel" when it starts showing me a ton of content to match something I just watched. But I've seen young kids (6-11) behave EXACTLY as OP has described here, word for word. Just pointlessly watching assemblages of Five Nights of Freddy footage for hours, despite not having the game.

This has a name - Elsagate [0]. There's a subreddit [1] devoted to tracking it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/

As an adult I can relate with the fact that Youtube is addictive while Netflix is not.

If I had to guess why I would say that it's due to the fact that Netflix is mostly fictions. There is a limit to how much fiction I can consume before having enough.

On the other hand Youtube has a lot of non-fiction content on specific niches. The kind of content that teases the brain just enough to make me feel that I'm learning something and not in fact wasting my time, similar to HN. This is made worse by the very accurate algorithm, which works so well because Youtube has orders of magnitude more content than other platforms.

Interesting, for the 5 year old I blocked Youtube and kept Youtube kids, though I'm always over his shoulder. It's weird because, while I have concerns over the tons of Minecraft and that kid who got rich playing with toys with his parents -- the whole Aumsum deal feels worth it; kid's dropping all kinds of knowledge on me from it.

Constant. Battle.

Over time they just learn how to wear you down.

When they were younger we could set limits and keep it enforced, but as they get older they just kept find ways to get around them. We tried Google's Family Link (poor quality and mostly useless with ChromeOS), per-device time limits on the wifi router, whatever, but there's always some new battle and COVID just threw a wrench in everything.

In the earlier days it was easier to make the argument because we had very tight bandwidth caps on our (rural) Internet. So there was simply no streaming video for them. But that's gone, and now my son (11) sneaks into the living room, puts on YouTube with the volume turned down and the closed captions on and just watches Minecraft and Terraria videos as long as he can. If that gets shut off, he paces around in his room talking to himself about the same video games.

And now my 14 year old is in high school and a phone is just a part of life for teens now that is really hard to separate them from.

And there's always some friend with parents who've set no limits that they can point to and tell you what a fascist you are, too.

(IMHO the really dangerous period is especially in teenage girls from ages 10-13, because there's all sorts of content out there to access that can have damaging mental health effects. For us it was Tumblr and all sorts of self-harm content and I ended up having to DNS block all of Tumblr and a few other sites for a while. With maturity and discussion they learn to differentiate and critique and talk to you about things, but it's really hard to keep them away from The Bad Stuff. I imagine with teen boys it's more about porn, and that's a battle I'm sure I'll have to face soon, too)

We tried taking the phone from our teenager as punishment for something and it was like taking a needle from a heroin addict.

Absolutely. This happened just last week and it was the worst -- door locked and barricaded shut, would not eat dinner, wouldn't talk to us for hours, just the worst. Terrifying parent moment and all we did was put our foot down. So hard to set the limits and enforce them.

I think it is because loss of phone also means social isolation during that period.

Public desktop computer, group chat / video call apps only?

Especially with COVID, that pretty much cuts her off from all of her friends, leaving her only able to talk with her parents and her younger brother who she can't relate to instead of venting out to her friend and cooling off.

Her school, extracurricular and free time with her social circle were already taken out from her and now the phone? And we all know whatever social life her friend circle has won't stop. She's just going to be left out. Once again.

I get that this is HN and a lot of people here probably didn't care to be left out (or convinced themselves they didn't).

This also assumes that the OP lives in a place with strict COVID restrictions. In plenty of places in the country you can still meet up IRL, and schools are back fully in-person. In those cases, this is little more than just basic grounding.

Indeed. She goes to high school every day, is fully vaccinated, and sees her friends all the time. And we were only taking the phone for the night and maybe the next day... if she didn't make her lunch and shower.

It was literally just taking the phone away for the rest of the day, that's it. So, no.

So basically like getting grounded, which I thought was the worst that could happen but looking back it was probably for the best and made me rethink some bad behaviors.

I believe the key there is the fact that my parents made it clear why I was being grounded and spent the time explaining it to me.

Wouldn't the same apply to adults though? "Phone" can be used for a lot of different things, including some that are harmful, but basic communication with his peers is IMO essential and denying that is a significant problem (especially now in a pandemic).

At least you know it's an effective incentive.

Turns out it isn't because my teen was willing to go nuclear rather than respond to the incentive.

Have you considered that perhaps your very strong anti-tech views are actually making their "rebellion" stronger? Whenever my parents went to block things, that turned into a "how can I unblock this? how can I get around their limits?"

Have you really sat down and discussed why these are in place? What's the issue with Minecraft and Terraria videos that make it a Constant. Battle? That seems quite harmless.

I would hate having you as my parent, to be completely honest.

Sounds like you just have a problem with authority. Starting from middle school and through high school my parents frequently sat down and explained things thoroughly with me in such a way that earned my respect. I would be very concerned if my kid immediately tried to hack around my limitations and that would immediately warrant even tighter controls.

That's not a battle your child should win.

I have two daughters, 10 and 13 living with me and my partner 3 days per week and their mom 4 days per week.

In short I treat over-use of devices as a symptom and not a cause of social problems ... and they have their share of social problems but they're managing.

Their mom is more strict with phone time on them but they watch unlimited TV. I limit TV and let them have unlimited phone time. At this point their idea of social networking is trolling people in Among Us.

Their mom, my partner and I have helped them build a healthy skepticism for social networks. They basically think they're "stupid" so even though their friends have instagram, and I have instagram, they still think they're dumb and they don't mind that they aren't allowed a social network like that. We're lucky there.

The three of us (especially their mom I feel) have done a thorough job explaining the dangers of connecting with strangers on social networks and they just don't as far as I know. It doesn't hurt that they're fairly anti-social to begin with.

They are paranoid about passwords, the family has our own bitwarden server, and they understand why. Beyond that though they have no concept of internet privacy and don't care what data is being hoovered up by alphabet, apple, etc. I want to try to link privacy and security more closely together but so far I'm not doing great. They spend a lot of time with youtube recommendations and also a lot of time ironically listening to pop music? I don't get it but they love to blast the worst pop they can find and then make gagging noises. I have no idea what the algos are making of that.

They keep secrets from me on their phones. That worries me but my feeling is that if I respect their privacy and focus on building their self-respect then if they have a problem they'll come to me. They spill those secrets to me and my partner occasionally to get revenge on each other and the secrets are harmless. My oldest daughter screen-shotted her sister's browser tabs and made it her background. My kind of petty and I'm proud.

So thanks for this question, I've wanted to get this down in writing to see if it makes sense for ages. Still not sure it does but so far the kids are alright.

> Their mom is more strict with phone time on them but they watch unlimited TV. I limit TV and let them have unlimited phone time.

Lol me too.

I think I'm going to be the odd man out here but I did not restrict my kids. I purchased mobile phones for them when they were around 8 years old (when they become affordable enough for us). I put no restrictions on their screen time, websites, or anything else. I simply talked to them about what I thought was right or wrong and let them decide.

My kids are now adults and it seems to have worked for them.

I got my first computer system when I was 10 years old. I spent more time in front of screens than I spend anywhere else. I believe my entire life and career is a result of being allowed to express my creativity that way and I wanted my kids to be afforded the same freedoms.

Yeah - for sure the difference here is when your kids grew up. I was a 90s/00s kid and in that time frame youtube didn't exist until I was 15. Facebook was new and alone in its category besides myspace. Instagram, Snapchat, and Tiktok didn't exist at all, and youtube hadn't yet cultivated itself into the monstrous addiction engine it is today (for kids, specifically.) Moreover smartphones didn't exist or were just starting to proliferate, so it didn't follow you everywhere. Growing up using the internet was a different experience back then.

My parents were generally lax on how much computer time I had, with the only time they wouldn't let me use my computer was if I got bad grades in middle and high school (which admittedly was far too frequent...sigh).

I pretty much got all my dad's hand-me-down computers since I was a kid, and as a result I became fairly tech-savy relatively young. Once my parents saw that I was learning to code C++ for fun when I was fifteen, without getting any school credit (and instead of playing video games), they stopped taking my computer away completely; partly because I was getting too old to "ground", and partly because they realized that me showing interest in technical work was probably something they want to encourage.

When I dropped out of college, I was able to find tech work pretty quickly, and built a pretty cool career out of it, and I largely thank the fact that I was constantly tinkering with computers as a kid and teenager for that.

YMMV, but we have a four year old daughter and have liberally allowed screen time throughout her life with some minor restrictions via parental controls.

She's learned so much from the content. We're a non-english home and a lot of her early english words/conversations were absorbed from Word Party (Netflix). Additionally we've found that Daniel Tiger via the PBS app is a great children's show. She also has a couple educational games (Khan Academy, etc) and she's really excited whenever she learns something new.

Contrast that to my upbringing where I wasn't allowed to watch tv or use the computer at all until High School, and only with strict supervision. For a long time I was able unable to control myself as I had never developed that skillset. My daughter is already controlling herself and has lots of other interests where too much "screen time" hasn't been a problem. I think she doesn't view screen time isn't a limited resource contrasted to some of her friends where "screen time" has now become a scheduled and limited part of their day.

All that being said, each child is incredibly different and I'm sure our son will have a radically different set of challenges.

Not a parent myself, but my 13 year old sister has been on the same policy now that my parents are older and sick of being the bad guy like they were with her older siblings. Not a stretch to say she is addicted to youtube. Watches for 12+ hours a day on the weekend, rushes home after school to watch as much as possible before going to sleep at midnight earliest. Her grades are solid, but she has 0 social life or interests really besides youtube. Clearly everyone is different, but it does seem wild to me how some kids are able to control themselves with the internet and some seem unable to.

Unless explicitly agreed, devices are to be used in the living room down stairs.

Roughly the rest of rules are as follows: Two oldest get some social media under the condition that they do not do anything that identifies themselves. One exception: accounts that are closed and only shared with closest of close friends.

If anything comes up they can contact us parents, their aunt/uncle or a teacher according to who they feel more comfortable contacting. I have promised to defend them, and even if they have done something stupid they are kids, and even if it is really dumb, telling me will always be the safe and comfortable way out as I prefer knowing. So far it has worked well and we have already sent one report to the police together because they came to me with a rather nasty recruiting attempt that we managed to document. (Yes, this is of course obvious to many of us but I have taken time to spell it out because I want to be ahead of nasty people telling them: what if your Dad finds out?)

I have 5 kids age somewhere below 15, the youngest one is less than 4 and too young for devices.

6 & 4

Friday night is media night. The kids usually watch their dad play Legend of Zelda for an hour, and they decide what Link should do. After that, we watch 1 hour of a movie with each of us taking turns who picks the movie. Other than that, it's just occasional use of Facetime to talk to family or ask Siri to play a song.

I wasn't thrilled with how my then 5 year old handled her Kindergarten iPad last year. She had access to PBS Kids videos on her school iPad and would watch them when she was the least bit bored. We did decide that the iPad should only be used during school time. But now her iPad is at school, so we don't have that issue.

I'm interested in reading what other parents are doing. Even though we're in a hippy, educated community, our kids consume less media than their peers.

Seems like I'm a bit more "loose" with our 3yr old. 10 minutes of iPad every night before going upstairs and reading to her. We attended a seminar about kids and screentime, an interesting fact was that apparently ipad/tv or a book has the same effect, not focussing on further away things is bad for the eyes.

Our teenage boy faces a strict limit of 24 hours a day of screen time. If he goes over, well that's okay, because he'll be getting a Nobel Prize. On a serious note, it works for him, so we haven't had a reason to change it. If he stays up too late, he knows he'll be tired the next day. If he misses assignments at school or does poorly, he knows he'll lose his devices. He's active in sports twelve months a year, so no concerns about physical fitness. Everything with kids is YMMV - what works for us would be a disaster for many.

She is Eight and due to staying home a lot longer the rules for gadget had relaxed a lot.

No FB, IG, Tik Tok or any other Social Media. Some in their age group are already "following" certain idols on Social Media. Ugh.

Only allow Gaming on Nintendo Switch at home. Basically I do allow them to a curated selection of games. But not those Stupid Mobile Game where they trick you to pay, or watch Ads. I have been complaining about the one min Game play and one min Ads for a long time and Apple doesn't give a shit.

Allow Youtube. She can watch Anime in Japanese. Kids Channel.

But that is about it. My general rules is for them to avoid all Digitalisation if possible. Books is better than E-Books Reader or Tablet. Writing is better than typing. She is not interested in Tech Creation ( Photoshop ) or Coding anyway. So my view is that she doesn't and shouldn't be in front of the computer / tablet.

And she seems to be the type that prefer to go out and social anyway. She is VERY chatty. So not much of a problem. ( For now )

> "but dad, all my classmates have their phones unlimited and unsupervised"?

I worry about this a lot. But so far hasn't happened yet. Although a funny thing I discovered was that they all brag about having their own phone at home to their school mates and using it freely, in reality when talked to other parents none of them actually have one. I still find this quite funny. :)

I have a 5 year old son. He has access to an iPad and all of my old game consoles (a Switch, my old PS4 Pro, and my Xbox One X), but he mostly prefers using the iPad.

The iPad is locked down and has a ton of educational apps on it, but the main thing he does on there is watch Youtube Kids or play Minecraft (using an Xbox controller with a bluetooth connection to the iPad).

His Youtube Kids account is locked down to mostly educational content only, with the content restrictions set to 2-4 years old. When I had it set to the 5-7 age range, Youtube kept showing him a lot of inappropriate videos.

He knows how to use the search feature to find videos about just about any topic. I might have a conversation with him about quantum mechanics and then later in the day I will catch him watching a bunch of videos about the topic. He is obsessed with outer space and black holes. He will binge on low quality entertainment like my little pony for a while, and then he will watch some educational videos about math, and then he will switch over to some Kurzgesagt educational videos about outer space or something, and then he might switch to magic school bus.

Any time I see something that I don't like on Youtube kids (like Ryan toys review), I will block the video (or the entire channel). I probably have 30 different channels blocked on Youtube Kids.

I don't know if I'm doing the right thing by letting him watch so much content, but I can definitely say that he knows waaayyy more about the world than I ever did at his age, and he is also a voraciously curious self-educator. He loves math, mainly due to the Number Blocks TV show, for example.

I have a nine year old like that. One moment he's into silly toddler videos, the next he's watching videos about history, astrophysics, math or whatever he fancies at that moment. It's hard to say whether this is good or bad but I don't want to restrict him so I keep an eye out and every now and then suggest a subject.

High school kid (HSK), Elementary School kid (ESK)

HSK has a cellphone (iPhone), ESK does not, and will not get till ESK is in High School. HSK got cellphone in 9th grade.

HSK has the iPhone parent thing on his phone so that HSK needs permission for installing apps. No social media apps of any kind, except Join me, which is used by school (I had to compromise here). HSK is ok with it.

At home: We don't use FB, Instagram, TikTok, Discord.. They are all blocked at home via pi-hole, now I also have pfsense. Kids are OK with it since I've bad mouthed social media enough :). Once kids are off to college, will see - at least I've delayed it and hopefully they will be a bit more mature. YouTube apps are not allowed on TV or gaming devices. YouTube use via computer is allowed, since its heavily used by educational websites.

Both kids have computers for school work. No time limit for most part. I occasionally monitor older via remote logging, but have stopped. It's not worth it. If they want to hide they will hide.

They play video games (Switch or PS5) every day for 30 minutes, strictly enforced. Any video game, except very mature, are allowed, but NO online game pay or online game of any kind.

ESK also uses Scratch on the computer and likes it. But that is educational.

TV is extra and watched by the kids unmetered, but is generally not more that 30min-1hr, if they are free and work is done. They always ask before watching TV.

EDIT: In High School some clubs required FB for activity planning and so on. I had gone and argued with the principal in public meetings about this and why is that a requirement. My HSK was OK with not joining clubs if FB was required.

This seems like one of the best schemes I've heard here so far. Only part I disagree with is the "no multiplayer online games" - they are addictive, I've lost a lot of time to them in my life, so maybe you're right, but I want to believe moderation is better than abstinence.

no multiplayer online games are for two reason:

1) as you said, they can be addictive since they are designed that way.

2) I have no control over who they are playing with, the sort of language that is/will be used (though I'm a potty mouth so ..) and what it can/may lead to. I feel a lot of people prey on kids via these channels, though I may be wrong. It's just an additional layer, but overall kids haven't complained about it.

Yeah #1 I can get behind but fwiw I think #2 isn't a real concern. In the past 20 years I've probably spent 8,000ish hours playing multiplayer games online, since I was about 11 or so, and never once in all that time had someone pull anything inappropriate. I do see plenty of foul language of course, but you get plenty of that from any direction you turn in the modern world anyway. And probably in the pre-modern world too.

Back then I also joined voice chat with a lot of adult guys who were 10-20 years older than me when I was a teenager, and still all of them were just totally normal dudes who had a long day at work and were trying to relax with some Halo or something at the end of the night. Conversation was always 100% normal.

Internet forums and social media outlets are probably worse in this respect, and especially for girls. That's where I hear most of the manipulation stories coming from, where some poor kid was tricked into sending illicit content that was then used against them, etc.

> fwiw I think #2 isn't a real concern

Thanks, good to know.. I guess I can relax a bit if my kids ever ask about a specific online games and pester me a bit :)

I do kind of agree with the rest of your comment also...

3,5,7. They have an iPad they’re allowed to use to watch shows we’ve already approved. We let them try new shows / movies if they look OK, and we’re always around to make sure they’re not watching anything we’re not OK with. They discovered my music making app on the iPad, and sometimes play with that.

They have cameras — 7 year old has graduated from the toy plastic digital cams to a real Kodak digital camera, and takes picture of wildlife, nature, etc. The toy cams have some games like “snake game”, etc, and they’re allowed to play those occasionally.

Generally we don’t limit screen time for shows because they tend to turn it off after a while and go play with physical toys, or pretend games.

7 year old now has access to a laptop running Scratch and now Kahn Academy coding lessons. Spends hours creating little scenes with code.

We have a real piano in the house they like to play — not much in terms of formal lessons yet. My 3 year old got to play with my analog drum machine, which they all want lessons on.

No web access for any of them other than the stuff mentioned above.

7,12,14.

I find that rules and firewalls and schedules and blocking are a fools errand - it is a cat-and-mouse game that you can't win.

So we just turn off the Internet.

We have a different wifi network for the children that has a very restrictive schedule. Basically just Fri/Sat night and 15 mins on weekday evenings to send messages to friends and check school assignments.

The 7 year old gets his Nintendo Switch on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The older two have their ipods/iphones and can use them anytime they want. They are just offline.

The reason this works so well is that we live in a place that has zero cellular signal. If they need to do homework, they plug into an Ethernet switch and sit at the dining room table with a laptop.

The other reason this works so well is that our children are not our friends. We don't have a peer relationship with them and we don't owe them explanations as to why our family is different from other families or blah blah blah.

Complaining is expensive and they know not to waste that energy.

Ethernet only sounds like a good idea, even for adults ;)

> we don't owe them explanations as to why our family is different from other families

Don’t you feel like this will backfire at some point? I don’t think I would have liked it if my parents never explained themselves.

"Don’t you feel like this will backfire at some point? I don’t think I would have liked it if my parents never explained themselves."

This is turning into a discussion of parenting, generally, so I won't go too deeply into this ...

What I will say is that stability and predictability are what make this possible.

When our children were old enough to care about wifi and Internet and social media, these limitations were no surprise at all to them because they were directly inline with all of our parenting up to that point.

We have simple, predictable rules (and schedules and behaviors) and they have a good idea, in advance, as to how everything is going to turn out.

And to be clear ... we explain everything to them ... we have a very high level of communication and discussion and learning.

It's just never in the context of complaining, bargaining or negotiation.

You do give off vibes of an arbitrary authoritarian parenting style. I have to warn you that can backfire hard when your older and they are adults. I do hope you at least try to explain things to them.

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/authoritarian_parenting_style

I don't mean to judge, but this sounds like a great way to make sure your kids become experts at circumventing your limitations. Take it from a kid whose parents didn't let him play RuneScape because it had witchcraft in it, and whose playtime of neopets was limited to 1 hr per day. I quickly became unusually good at both sneaking around the house at night to use the computer at 2am and also was surprisingly good at navigating Windows. We didn't have laptops or WiFi back then so that wasn't a relevant aspect, though.

In your household, I suspect I would be chatting with friends in the dead of night. I also suspect that I would, one way or another, manage to come by the WiFi password that you presumably use for your own devices.

If you're trying to raise kids who regard you as an adversary to overcome, I suppose you're on the right track.

I don't know, my kids are 1 and 2 so maybe I'll change my mind when I get there, but as someone who has made a career out of looking at a screen and spent most of the fun parts of his youth doing so as well, I plan to teach my kids how to self-manage screen time. My parents limiting my screen time just made me try to do everything in my power to maximize it, and I do think that made me quite a bit of an addict when I was a teenager (playing wow 6 hours a day every day on top of school and sleep). I only really learned to manage my enjoyment of screen time with my enjoyment of non-screen-time when I got to my last year of high school and college.

My wife, on the other hand, was never really constrained beyond her parents sanity-checking things now and then to make sure she wasn't getting into trouble. And she has always had healthier screen time management habits than me.

"I don't mean to judge, but this sounds like a great way to make sure your kids become experts at circumventing your limitations."

There is nothing to circumvent and no adversary to overcome.

The Internet just disappears. They can play games or watch shows all they want to.

"... this sounds like a great way to make sure your kids become experts at circumventing your limitations."

If my children manage to erect a cellular tower within range or our ranch I will tip my hat to them.

"Well played", I will say.

> We have a different wifi network for the children that has a very restrictive schedule. Basically just Fri/Sat night and 15 mins on weekday evenings to send messages to friends and check school assignments.

> If they need to do homework, they plug into an Ethernet switch and sit at the dining room table with a laptop.

> There is nothing to circumvent and no adversary to overcome. The Internet just disappears.

You have to realize they very well know this is an arbitrary limit you have created out of thin air since they can see the other wifi network and (at least the oldest) just know that the ethernet switch works 24/7.

I mean, let's be real, they'll read about the Iranian and Egyptians warlords who tried to cut out the country's internet to keep control and make the connection.

Ho-boy you're cruising for a bruising when they get further into their teenage years. No way there's not gonna be rebellion in some form.

> The other reason this works so well is that our children are not our friends. We don't have a peer relationship with them and we don't owe them explanations as to why our family is different from other families or blah blah blah.

You are aware that if you don't become friends with them as they grow up it's very likely you will very likely have a very limited relationship unless you continue to send them money?

I would agree that parents are not friends. It sounds harsh on the surface, but it just denotes that parenthood is a very separate category of relationship. You can't be a responsible parent if you treat your kids exactly like e.g. your adult friends or your neighbor's kids.

Although I definitely disagree with the "we owe no explanations" policy.

It obvious that they are a different relationship than your adult friends. Enforcing stupid rules without discussion or explanations is a pretty hostile action. Nobody wants you to treat a 3 year old as child, but a teenage would be pretty upset if some fuckwit turned of the internet when they are want to look some stuff on MDN or commit code to github. This also teaches your kids to be abused as adults. Excessive obedience is not a good quality. If you just want to boss them around when they grow up don't get upset if send you to a cheap-ass nursing home.

Would you be willing to explain to us why you do this?

This is an incredibly harsh restriction, and "we don't owe them explanations" would piss me right off. It sounds like you're really souring this relationship, and "I can have wifi, not you" seems really quite bizarre.

What do you think you're "protecting" them from? A healthy relationship with their parents based on trust and honesty? /s

Two boys, 9 and almost 7.

They get 40 minutes a day (mon-thur) of tv that they watch together.

On Friday and Sunday, we have family movie night. Age appropriate, which is getting harder.

2 hours a week of games (mostly switch, but they sometimes play minecraft or approved games on mobile devices). This happens over Sat/Sun, and we let them manage how they want to allocate time over the two days.

One observation is that after they play video games, they get agitated and angry afterwards, and it ruins the next hour or two of activities as they act like little assholes.

They do have access to Spotify to listen to music (content controls are turned on), but if we notice that they are watching the videos and not "listening" the phones turn off.

The one area where it gets dicey is my 9 year old is learning how to code, so managing that screen time is weird (is it like watching tv/playing games?). I dunno, but I generally don't say anything as this is his best use of devices during the week.

Shit is hard to keep up with tbh.

yeah my kids get angry after playing video games, especially if they lose

I truly hate it. The only saving grace to all of this is that both my boys read at least an hour a day. hopefully it all balances out, but we will have a strict no social media rule until they get to the teenagers that we can't manage anymore.

If their game time is highly restricted then:

1. Losing is hugely disappointing because there's no time to win the next one

2. They can't get very good, so gaming is more frustrating

3. They can't build coping skills because of how little they've won/lost

Solid points. And I agree. I played hours of video games when I was like 10/11.

Woah, these limits are just... brutal. Like excruciatingly low.

Depends on this kids, obviously, but we let ours to stay on pads/computers for (pretty much) as long as they want IF all homework's done, they make occasional breaks, do other things (like read books) and they don't get zombified in process and can quit on a short notice.

No Tiktok, IG or any other doomscrollers. We had a chat about them, they know the party policy, so it's not really enforced, but they don't really crave these either.

Age-restricted stuff tends to sort itself out, but we track what they play. Again, it's all based on the party policy rather than enforcement and we have gentlemen's agreement that they ask if we may consider some game off limits.

Been like that for several years. One is a teenager now, another is on the way. So far so good.

> One observation is that after they play video games, they get agitated and angry afterwards, and it ruins the next hour or two of activities as they act like little assholes.

Two hours isn't a long time to make any progress on a game, especially if they start playing strategy games like Age of Empire where 1 hour games are the norm. It must be very frustrating for them to stop for arbitrary reasons (the $EVIL_SCREEN can't be used for more than $TIME) when they know their schoolwork is done and friends are still online.

> The one area where it gets dicey is my 9 year old is learning how to code, so managing that screen time is weird (is it like watching tv/playing games?)

It might feel like a game to him. Remember reading books? Assigned reading took the fun out of reading since the selection was imposed and you knew you were goign to be quized on it. But especially if it's unstructured and there's no assignment, he may think programming is a weird sandbox/logic game.

Two toddlers, one girl in elementary school.

By default, minimum limits. I want them to build habit and willpower themselves so they don't indulge as adults like many of my friends did in college.

No limit on TV. But I remind them there's a cost. Sometimes we play outside and leave the TV watcher. Sometimes we go upstairs and play in the bedroom. The family has fun without devices, but if you want to watch the same movie again, it's up to you.

Phone has tougher limits. Screen time before 5 PM on a weekday, 6 on a weekend. The earlier you wake up, the more screen time you have. The TV rules still apply: if you're on your phone in your bed all day and we had an awesome breakfast together, it's your fault for missing out.

No devices before a shower. My kids all get showered by 8 AM now, without any fighting. We had a lot of arguing and dragging them to the bathroom before this rule.

If your homework isn't done, stricter phone restrictions, or TV only. Homework causes stress and TV is a great cure, so I think it's fine. Gaming causes stress though, so they have to watch out.

YouTube has a lot of great stuff. My eldest learned every flag and capital city all on her own from YouTube, by 8 years old. My 3 year old knows her alphabet, and the 1 year old can recognize letters and numbers. But it only works if you let them.

The real restrictions are on what they watch and now when.

Kids imitate things a lot. So they can pick up really bad habits from a lot of popular YouTubers like screaming and panicking. Or sometimes even Peppa Pig can be a bit too sassy.

Pay to win games are also a problem. They purposely build addiction and then charge you later. They tend to not sleep, eat, etc and quit the game feeling miserable. You still want to expose the kids to them a little so they build immunity to that crap, but keep a safety valve on.

5, 4, and almost 2.

TV – They'll watch Netfix in the morning if they're up early (0–30m) and for 20-30m to "wind down" before bedtime. We haven't done any parental controls or anything, and it hasn't been an issue. They know what they want to watch, and know how to navigate to it (Xbox or Apple TV).

Tablets/Laptops – The older two have Fire tablets and play educational apps/games: PBS or Starfall. No Netflix or "TV" apps. This is sort of "on-demand", mostly during their quiet time mid-afternoon. Maybe an hour? I enabled the "kid mode" on one tablet, but it is a giant PITA to manage, and really isn't an issue. They don't have the knowledge of the internet yet, do haven't really communicated that.

Other discussions:

Ask HN: How do you watch over your kids digital gadgets? (Parental Control) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535229

Ask HN: What rules do you set for your kids screentime? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473657

Ask HN: Are there technical measures you take to protect your children online? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100396

We've gone back and forth, kids now 12, 10, 7. We implemented screen time limits pre-pandemic as the kids were not listening, would not put devices down, would skip important things by being stuck in front of a screen. We limited to 2 hours a day.

Then Covid hit and home school shattered our ability to apply limits. We've never gotten back to screen limits. Things are a little better as the kids are a little older. We do more parenting now and less tech restrictions, sometimes its a fight.

I'm a fan of letting the kids fail to learn. Too many guard rails changes the lesson.

A boy and a girl, 11.

They got a tablet each and 1H a day of use max, in a 7AM-8PM window.

They can only play games on it on week-ends (blocked with Family Links) and during holidays, and have no internet webbrowser access. They mostly use duolingo, image and video editing and stuf like that. They have an email address to exchange with friends.

TV an episode of a show (curently Gravity Falls) in English (we're French) when tere's no school the day after.

And sometimes a movie on weekend, or some Recalbox time (which I prefer becaus I play with them :-)

It’s really interesting to see the different approaches. We’ve spoke to loads of parents in the past few months whilst building URSOR[0], where we are creating a safe space for kids on the internet to discover, learn and play online, and providing parents the control and visibility they need to protect their kids.

In terms of managing screen-time and developing healthy digital habits we’ve written a blog post discussing three general themes that are important in reaching the right set up for you [1]. And it’ll be different for every parent.

To summarise - It’s important to find a balance rather than going for extremes when managing device times, as other commenters have said, super-restrictive rules often leads to adverse behaviour.

- Be a good role-model when it comes to managing screen time. Be present with your kids and try to set clear boundaries between work time and family time (although this can be tough)

- Make it a family discussion. Set clear rules, but involve kids in the decision. And be involved in your kids screen time!

[0] https://www.ursor.com/

[1] https://www.ursor.com/blog/3-simple-parenting-rules-for-tech...

Limited restrictions except for mandatory grayscale display - it's much harder to get addicted to a black-and-white screen than a rainbow slot machine.

Does it really work? I spent a month with mandatory grayscale and it didn't change my scrolling habits much. Maybe I'm just impervious to it.

My kids are five and nearly eight.

Five year old has her own iPad Mini that's a hand me down with YouTube Kids on it and some kids apps. We've recently let her on a much less locked down profile for YouTube. She also enjoys watching kids TV on Netflix and our Icelandic watch-on-demand service.

Eight year old uses our computers and has recently got a phone which was a hand me down from me. Phone is completely locked down so she just has some games and can send SMSs to us and her friends. She mostly takes pictures though. Computer wise she mostly watches a selection of gaming YouTubers, mostly Minecraft and Roblox related. I also play a lot of Roblox and Minecraft with her. Recently shes started playing Roblox with her friends as well. She's also now addicted to Forza Horizon 5 which is excellent.

Neither of them does any of this without casual supervision and we've not had any real moments of concern. We don't strictly limit their time on devices but do make sure we're doing a lot of other activities.

My own take is it's better to give them more freedom but be there to guide, answer questions and if necessary step in.

OK, well I wrote my doctoral thesis* on digital literacies, so this is a hot topic for me as a parent of an almost 15 year-old boy and almost 11 year-old girl.

TL;DR: we're way stricter than other parents I know both in the UK and other western countries.

For example: we allow them WhatsApp, but no other social media apps on their phone (including YouTube). Devices automatically switch on at 08:00 and off at 20:00. Certain apps, like browsers, have maximum time limits of two hours.

Like me, they're both gamers, but aren't allowed games on their phone - only on tablets and consoles.

This sounds harsh when I write it down in black and white, but as a consequence they both read a lot and are really into sport (both represent the county at football and athletics).

The reason this stuff is so hard is that we're the first generation of parents having to deal with all this. And there are no accepted rules in wider society yet...

* https://dougbelshaw.com/thesis/

Why no social media in particular? Is it a blanket ban because there isn't time to talk to them about it or is it simply, in your opinion, too toxic for teenagers, or something else?

Why no games on their phones? Is this a way to control the time spent on games or to prevent the time wasted on games when out and about?

Most kid don’t play outside anymore. In my neighborhood I took us more than one year do discover than our some of our neighbors had kids!

We limit the time to 7h/week of gaming (minecraft and roblox) but they also watch some youtube (about minecraft mainly)

Most kids are already in the metaverse, their experience of building things, of challenge with other are all through online games.

10yo girl

30 minutes of social media per day (tiktok, insta, snapchat), all accounts are private, and we meet once per week to look together at the feed and moderate it. (e.g. follow more things like https://www.tiktok.com/@zippycode and less things like Charlie whatever)

Unlimited whatsapp, but we still look at it from time to time to see there is no bullying going on.

Using 1.1.1.1 family (1.1.1.3) always connected so there is some basic malware/adult site filtering.

During dinner phones go in a bucket, and we avoid phones until bed time (as a family).

Between 8pm and 10pm we design and code pgzero video games or turtle graphics, or read books, or play fortnite depending on the day.

> During dinner phones go in a bucket, and we avoid phones until bed time (as a family).

Oh, I like this one. Making it a sort of ritual sounds like something that I could actually hold to.

I have an 8 y/o (3rd grade) and a 6 y/o (kindergarten) -

we have pretty open access to netflix kids, youtube only for cosmic kids yoga (although it might be on amazon now?), and am pretty liberal about the time watched.

My 6 y/o is kind of a jerk after watching television though so we might dial it back.

I bought an amazon fire kids tablet and it was so pre-loaded with junk that I returned it.

We haven't found our way into any devices yet. I think video games are pretty healthy but my wife disagrees so we've been not buying a Switch at all :(

They're pretty bad at video games anyway but my old DS Lite still works (!!) and my 8 y/o discovered Brain Age so I say play that as much as she wants. :)

3 kids, max age 5. Watching children’s programs on the iPad, twice a week, about half an hour. Always with one parent watching with them. FaceTime with friends and extended family once in a while together. Other than that, no screen time.

Mine is 3 years old.

He used to watch 15m of youtube every night (together with me), but he started going mental when he didn’t get his Youtube, so we cut down on that completely.

The only time he sees Youtube now is if we are out for dinner, but ideally we get him to stop that too.

Other than that, there’s TV (educational, or disney channel) in the morning. And sometimes in the evening, depending on the day.

TV is projected by a beamer, and I feel like this cuts down on the intensity of the whole thing.

He finds my Switch and DS around the house and plays with them for a bit, but he doesn’t really get the concept of playing a game yet.

My main worry is that he sees his mom and dad busy with their phone way too much.

8 year old and 5 year old.

Same for both of them. No TV. 25 mins each of video games every other day. We occasionally (maybe once every 6 weeks) watch a film together at the weekend. No tablets. Perhaps once a week they might ask to use the (Windows) laptop to go to a website they use at school, such as Mathletics. We'd normally let them use this. 8 year old has a Kindle (not a Fire but the eReader type) that is used just for reading books from the Kindle Kids subscription that is age limited.

Perhaps once a week we might watch a YouTube video about something vaguely educational, so for example a Tom Scott video.

Personally I would say this sounds mega-restrictive in a non-constructive way. To each their own with parenting of course, but I hope others don't imitate this person's choices. This sounds limiting to the point that the kids might grow up having limited tech skills and no familiarity with the shows, movies, and games that their peers will be talking about.

I remember growing up watching Discovery channel specials like Steve Irwin, learning a ton of history playing Age of Empires (that led to me having a love of reading historical biographies years later), and just watching movies in general that led to me loving writing stories.

However I have also seen young kids do nothing but waste 7+ hours a day on youtube watching imbeciles splutter about their opinions on tabloid drama or reaction videos.

So my point is that I think it's less about total restriction and more about guiding the content.

That's a valid view point. We don't watch TV (as in me and my wife) so it seems odd for us to encourage our children to do something we don't. I'm sure your experiences were formative (I watched a reasonable amount of kids' TV when I was young), and my 8 year old reads way more books than I did and I assume gets something out of this that encourages her to love stories, history, wildlife etc. My 5 year old is Lego obsessed and loves being read to (and it's getting much better at reading). I don't think TV is the only place to get this enjoyment from.

I think you might also not be appreciating how common computers are in (UK) schools. Both children have lots of computer time in schools (both on iPads and standard computers). I don't think either of them lack familiarity (at least for their age) for how to use them. You might be confusing not having a cheap Android tablet that allows children to play a child-friendly version of Candy Crush with the concept of tech skills; I don't think they're the same.

Fair enough! That's a good point too, they really are everywhere now. I guess I just am someone who really enjoys a good movie and got that appreciation by growing up watching a couple every week, and I would lament missing out on that. I loved legos and books too as a kid, and I do agree tablets/phone with Candy Crush and the like are basically mind-poison for young kids.

Kids age 16, 19 and 22. The following rules have applied since birth to all:

- If I pay for the phone, the computer or the internet, I get passwords.

- Any electronic devices are subject to 'audit' (view browser history, pictures, etc) at any time.

- Play games reasonably lengthy times, just be in bed by lights-out time (approximately 9:30 pm)

- No games with obscene visual content or bad language. Violence is generally allowed.

All 3 kids (including the 10th grader) have ACT scores in the 30s. All the kids (including the college student and the one that's recently graduated) still love Mom and Dad and come to the house often.

8 years old. 30 minute screen time per day. Enforced via Google Family Link and Switch Parental controls. He has to finish all his daily errands before he is allowed to play (mostly like unpacking his school bags, do his homework/reading, etc).

We allow him extra time if he helps at home with things, either watching our little one or doing laundry or others which come up.

He is mostly playing Minecraft, Roblox or watches Youtube videos about those games or Lego on Youtube Kids. He barely watches any TV anymore, a movie every other week or some TV show every now and then.

Screen time with pop up for all Apple stuff, 15 mins after start. PiHole that I can use as to zap YouTube on non authorized devices. Also it allows me to pretend the internet is down.

9 yo. Gets 90 min of TV/movie time on the weekend days (45+45)

For all other uses (morning/afternoon responsibilities/chores done first). Has to write a log of start time/purpose (max 45 minutes at a time) . No browsing (Search + single article is okay).

The logging part my wife came up with is great, it helps with responsible use and requires thinking/planning first. (Good as a mental gate - it asks, do I really need to use it?)

Social media for kids is a lot like heroin. If you don't get started, then you don't crave it.

As a philosopher / technologist, I limit all apps with gambling or flashy light content. This is the other heroin.

Once you get rid of these ills (social media and gambling rewards) tech and media can be really great.

Don't let kids play or watch things you would not play or watch.

My 3 year old really likes Ghiblis' Spirited Away and plays Putt Putt.

7 and 9 year old. Only ps4 or switch on the weekend and only for 2h a day. It's pertinent on them having helped at home and done their chores and school work. No social media, no online multiplayer unless it's minecraft with their direct friends. Only iPad logic, math, point and clicks and other non-repetitive slot machine games and they have to trade it off their other game time.

Youtube is 100% banned.

I was really surprised just how intuitive and attractive both touchscreens and console controllers are, for a child who isn't even a year old yet.

I tend to think the content is more important than the medium--there are good video games and trashy books--but having seen how miserable I myself can be with all the rabbit-holes of a smartphone, I want the kid to be phone-free as long as possible.

I have an 8 year old. She uses Chromebook at school for writing.

At home she uses an Ipad for homework.

I teach her Scratch coding on the iPad. We also do some microbit coding.

Once in a while she will ask to watch a video on beagles on YouTube. That is the extent of it.

Some of her classmates have Tiktok accounts. I am not sure their parents know. I think I have a good level of trust with my kids. I have not run into any issues.

I have a 2.5 year old who we occasionally let play an ABC/123 game on an iPad or phone with Guided Access mode on, so he can't access anything else. Usually 30 minutes max or longer in the car.

The only thing I have to say about this right now is that it is shocking to see how quickly and rabidly he becomes absorbed and obsessed with playing the game.

Could be interesting to set the iPad to black and white mode (also in the accessibility settings), and seeing how he reacts to that?

I think that questions like this are unanswerable until you specify age of kids. There is massive difference between 4 years old and 16 years old. Yet both are kids and answering for all possible ages would be super long.

At 18, kid should have full control of own device and privacy. Newborn should have 0 access. And in between you have to gradually loose control.

- Unhook plugin for browser for YouTube. Definitely must have for watching YT by kids. - No smartphone/tablet under 10y (none from my kids yet) - Pi-hole with blocking gambling, ads, malware, porn, etc. - We avoid our screen time afront of kids. They are like mirrors of their parents and learn our habits quickly.

My kids are 5 and 7. First and foremost, with any parenting decision, you should try to be honest with yourself about what your kids are actually like. If your kids are doing well in school , seem to have friends, seem to have interests, and overall seem happy, then you should remember to have license to take it easy on them. The goal is to raise a happy and healthy adult not to impose arbitrary sets of rules. If they are on the path of being happy and healthy then you can relax a little.

We try to keep our kids screen time under around 2 hours a day on weekdays and we don't stress too much about it on the weekends. Being that they're in school all day, it's not too hard to keep it under that time frame during the weekdays. If they were watching TV for more than a few hours straight on the weekends we'd probably kick them off just to encourage a little variety.

To us the important part isn't necessarily the raw hour count, but rather what they're watching and that throughout the week they have a life filled with a diverse range of activities: playing with their friends, playing outside, physical activity, reading, etc. If they're living a diverse life, I don't see including TV as part of that life as an issue.

It's also important to me and my wife that we have time to spend together without the kids throughout the week. Frequently that time is afforded by a couple hours of the kids watching TV. An insignificant price to pay to keep the connection I have with my wife going over the years.

It's really easy to treat screen time as some kind of evil that should be avoided at all cost, but I'm personally not convinced it's all that damaging if consumed in moderation. Realistically it's also just a fact of our modern life and fighting it is going to cause so much more strife than learning to work with it.

YouTube has some of the most interesting and best content around, but you have to be diligent to prune the algorithm periodically to keep suggesting interesting content and not just mindless clickbait or advertisements.

Video games are very stimulating and there are many kid-friendly puzzle games that I think have taught my kids how to properly reason through a problem.

I'm sure this will get much more complicated as my children get older and I have to start worrying about pornography, social media, and other unsavory content, but at this young age I think it's okay to let your kids have a little screen time be a part of their life.

3 and 6 years olds. On iOS (iPad) screen time (45 mins weekdays, 1 hour on Saturday), content and contact filters are ON. I love iOS parental controls. All apps installed by me (Math tango, code sparks, khan academy etc.). Absolutely no YouTube or Netflix unless together with me.

Just one 13 year old.

No limits on browser usage, but all devices run through a mandatory VPN which blocks all ads as well as particular sites at the DNS level: TikTok, Snapchat, a few chat apps. No limits on screen time. App installs on iOS devices are disallowed.

4,9,11,12

No tablets or phones. A PC in the living room with a loose ask before use policy. The older two got PC's in their rooms during pandemic remote schooling. Switches on weekends with friends.

Six year-old girl.

No time limit other than it needs to go away at bedtime.

She has her own kid's account on our streaming services on her tablet and some learning apps (ABCMouse, Khan Academy Kids, some Blockly-based beginner programming tools) and we gladly let her switch over to mom or dad's account if she's wanting to a kids' show that for whatever reason isn't on or got removed from the kids' side (e.g. Moana or Nat Geo's Weird But True). Our daughter is also welcome to watch recorded shows on the living room TV from our family's DVR.

She's also welcome to use phones and computers alongside mom or dad to call and video-chat with relatives or to look up information on the Internet.

We've taught our daughter that screens belong in the living room, to always ask permission if she wants to watch a "new-to-her" show on her device, which she's very good about doing. She also has our express permission to stop watching anything that she feels is too scary or otherwise makes her uncomfortable.

To combat the bad influences online, we have regular family discussions about the purpose of commercials and marketing, what's real and what's make-believe, that violence is rarely a good choice for any real-life situation despite TV, and that there are plenty of good people and content on the Internet but also some tricky ones that are out to hurt other people or steal their things: just like it is offline.

Having myself gotten onto the Internet in the early 1990s via "upcycled" computers and dial-up connections to local universities as a precocious tween with little parental help, I don't much faith in technological measures. As you might suspect, I was short on cash, rebellious, intelligent, and interested in all the wrong things online. Thankfully, those days were a lot more forgiving than our own time, and I ended up with a direct path to a career in software engineering rather untimely visits from law enforcement.

With that in mind, apples really don't fall far from trees. My daughter is already very interested in learning to type and wants to "write programs like dad," has her own ideas about how to efficiently guess mom and dad's passcodes, and is much more competent with social graces and persuasion that I ever was. I've no illusions about just how weak kids' accounts, Internet filters, passwords, or even netsec can be against a smart but bored kid with excess time on their hands.

For my wife and I, involved parenting, being truthful and upfront with our child, and modeling moral behavior has been our approach from day one. Besides, one day she'll leave home and will need to decide for herself.

The kids are now high-school or later and have no general restrictions.

For many years, the rule was simply that the computers were in the living room.

For about a decade, all accounts and passwords were setup by parents. When a kid could successfully keep a password secret from a parent's social engineering attack, they were allowed to maintain those accounts themselves.

Discussion at meals and during homework frequently visited topics like "the school is tracking and censoring your use of their network", "seventy million email addresses and passwords leaked, thanks for letting us know", and "this is why XKCD is funny".

Throwaway for reasons that will become clear. My eldest is 13, she had a phone from about 5 which for a long time seemed like a perfectly fine decision - it wasn't this unobtainable shiny object that only grownups have access to, it was a boring thing with no games on it, so she never had that device addiction. We have all Facebook domains blocked on NextDNS, she has no desire for a Twitter account, or Snapchat or anything else. It helps that she has a rabidly anti-surveillance-capitalism parent who can talk through the real world meaning of having one of these accounts. These days she does have a few games on there, but none of that pay to unlock rubbish. We use Apple Screentime for what it's worth (it's not worth much), but have had to restrict device use to the ground floor of the house as it turned out recently that she'd been self harming and sharing photos of the results when using it in her room. I think that's stopped now, and I don't believe it's related to actually owning the device at all - just a conduit for sharing it.

Overall I think our policies have been successful, but with retrospect I would have banned devices from bedrooms from the start.

Not a parent here but won't let my future kids mess around a lot with gadgets.

11/m

I couldn't ask for a better son as he has been on the Straight A or A/B honor roll from Kindergarten to present day with very little help from us or supervision. He is also pretty active with soccer at age 5 and baseball from 7+ (heck of a player and currently is playing in two leagues as his choice) as well as joining us for bike rides/hikes once in while.

Me, I went through the typical route of Atari 2600, Commodore, Intellivision, Nintendo. Got my first IBM PC at around age 12 and spent countless hours on all those without parents ever limiting me whatsoever (well did get my IBM taken away for two weeks when I racked up a $200 phone bill with my first modem - not knowing it was by the minute back then). Sure I wasted a lot of time on those with games but I also had a huge interest in how they worked by taking them apart, learning DOS, BBS's, hacking/phreaking etc etc. Made me who I am and my career in IT. We didn't have the filth/addiction stuff like Tik-tok, Instagram, blah.

Anyway, From 1st to end of 5th grade he has had an xBox and iPad, and any restrictions to either have been on an as-needed basis - which we have had to do very little over the years (few cases of 1-2 day grounding from devices, etc). During this time he was all about Fortnite/Minecraft/Roblox with friends (sometimes a whole Saturday spent on the headset with friends) and Youtube.

When he started 6th grade recently (Middle school here) we got him his own iphone, which he has asked for a year prior. More to be able to call/text him as Discord was getting tiring and he was staying home alone more often. The pressure put on by all the other parents having given their kids phones by now (Some of his friends have had phones since 2 years ago at age 9) also mounted so we didn't want him to feel left out socially at middle school. Plus he got his own gaming PC to leave the limits of console gaming as well as for his remote learning all during covid.

With the phone and his older social circle the inevitable has started to happen - Social Media (youtube channel), short videos junk Tik-Tok, hits/likes etc. I hate this part personally as I have none of it myself so I've put in screen-time on his phone to limit Tik-Tok to an hour a day and his phone games to 2hrs. Plus phone is disabledfrom 10:30p to 8:30a. He hates the restriction and I'm having to extend it a few hours a week or he just goes on his PC/Ipad to "extend" his time himself. I really don't want to spend all the time locking all these down as I feel it is futile anyway. Youtube is impossible to block without blocking his Google Apps for remote learning. I can block the tik-tok app on his phone but he just then goes in the browser or his PC browser. On and on. I don't have the time NOR the need/desire to go full network guardian mode on him, knowing he will just out-flank me anyway somehow when he learns of VPN's or that our neighbor has an open wifi (need to talk to them about that). I'm sure he knows about porn from friends but I have seen zero evidence on his devices for now, but realize that will be next in few years. Ugh.

I just wish I could get him to be more like I was at that age and tinker/learn more rather than just consume like the majority of other kids. I'd spend a weekend trying to get my BBS setup or newest DOS installed he doesn't have similar interest. I tried to get him to build a PC with me for work and he just watched for 10 minutes and made bathroom excuse never to come back. The videos him and friends watch is just complete mindless junk and idiots doing stupid memes and stuff. Nothing creative or constructive. It is a very hard thing to get them away from once drawn in.

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