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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a bit of an overreaction. My kids are just a few years younger than OP's, but I'm not going to cut them off.

I will teach them the dangers of being online and will force the phones to use a VPN through our house with PiHole installed. I may or may not go as far as putting a custom cert on the phone so I can monitor all the traffic -- that will depend on if I catch them violating my trust. My default stance will be no custom cert.

But if I do add a custom cert it won't be a secret -- they will know that I'm monitoring them until they earn the trust back and we will review the logs together.

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Keep in mind that invading their privacy means breaking their trust at an age where a large part of their emotional and social development all but requires it. It's a good way to ensure that they won't come to you with any delicate topics later on, like questions and concerns about drugs, sex, or shady behaviour of peers — you know, the part where you want to be that trustworthy parent that they can talk to, always. To them this is like requiring them to use the bathroom with the door open with you looking in — you don't do that after a certain age unless you have a severely mentally handicapped child.

Also, you won't really block them from anything unless you forbid them to meet up with friends with their own unmonitored devices.

> Keep in mind that invading their privacy means breaking their trust at an age where a large part of their emotional and social development all but requires it.

That's why I was careful to say that the default would be to trust them, but only after they show they can't handle it will they be monitored, but in a way they are fully aware of and we would review the logs together. But my point was I hope I never have to get that far -- that I can just teach them to be safe and leave it at that.

Sniffing their traffic is the opposite of trust. Either you trust them or you don't and monitor their behaviour.

I think the idea of monitoring the network traffic of your children is an overreaction itself. Sure, internet content is a bit more buzzing these days, but older generations who accessed unfiltered content survived as well.

Normalizing being under surveillance for them is a lesson hard to understand to be honest. I don't know your kids, but at some point their technical abilities to circumvent the paternalism is likely to make such mechanisms futile anyway and there just remains a breach of privacy.

I agree that keeping tech out of childrens hands is a bit futile, but the surveillance ambitions of some parents look more unhealthy than the harm any internet content could cause.

Monitoring children, not just in a technical sense, is part of being a parent.

When I was about 12 I routed my parents dialup connection through -my- computer so I could monitor (and sometimes manipulate) -their- internet usage.

When they didn't like the content of my livejournal, I simply used my MITM to serve them a copy different from what the rest of the world saw.

The more you teach a kid about how tech works, they sooner they will use it to defy you.

It is not a big surprise I ended up in infosec.

> I may or may not go as far as putting a custom cert on the phone so I can monitor all the traffic -- that will depend on if I catch them violating my trust.

You are going to spy on you kids if they violate your trust, what does it take to violate your trust; visit a website that you don't like? How will your kids ever trust you again, if they find out you're spying on them for possible trust-violations?

I made it clear that I would not be spying on them -- that they would have full access to the monitoring and we would review it together.

Knowing that your every move is recorded and semi-public is a problem in itself and not far removed from 'spying'.

He says him and his kids are going to "review it together" until they earn his trust, sure sounds like fun.

> that they would have full access to the monitoring and we would review it together.

Can you imagine your own parents asking you for the same (at any age)?

Perhaps it's not technically spying when they know they are being monitored or spied on, but it's not something better...

We always discuss power abuse in terms of corporate bosses, politicians; but parents seem to abuse their power very frequently. Almost everywhere I've worked most of my coworkers have had exactly this attitude. I.e. that they can spy on their kids (cell phone/iPad/computer), or invade their privacy in all sorts of ways, and they always do this to protect them of course, so nice of them. If it were to happen to me, I'd be leaving home as soon as possible at least - and I don't think I'd come back to visit.

So you'll go over and review your own browsing with them too right?

Of course he will, he will also review it with his own parents in order to win back their trust.

You can land in shady internet places very well also unwillingly, so it's less about "trust" and more about plain "protection". And the OP made it clear it's not a covert operation, the kids know it's the rule of the game.

Helicopter parenting has been shown to be orders of magnitude more damaging than any potential "dangers" out there.

Any sources for this?

> Results showed that higher overall helicopter parenting scores were associated with stronger symptoms of anxiety and depression. According to that study, helicopter parenting “was also associated with poorer functioning in emotional functioning, decision making, and academic functioning.

https://www.gottman.com/blog/helicopter-parenting-good-inten...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27561986/

My note: The process of attempting and failing is the learning experience; children should (imho, based on experience and input from professionals) given the opportunity to learn and fail with grace, while being provided a strong safety net to ensure the failure is inexpensive (from a harm perspective).

> Seems like a bit of an overreaction.

Especially when most of the risks the author sees are technical security issues. The real issue is that kids and adults alike are unable to police their screen time.

I have made a conscious decision to limit my smartphone usage to communication, not entertainment, and it seems to work fine.

Back then when kid was in that age I solved the dilemma by giving her a feature phone (yeah they were still around) and the computer traffic was monitored by the antivirus parental control. Yes she knew about all this and didn't mind. I never needed to step in.

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