Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

220 pointskqr222 comments

Or, more generally, how to give children freedom and privacy, yet also be there to help them understand the lessons the world is about to teach them?

I have this preconceived notion that I don't want to violate my children's privacy. It's very tempting, of course, to passively monitor e.g. their spending or online habits, but I don't want to.

(As a concrete example, I know a some people get very detailed reports from the daycare about what their children have been up to. I'm not interested in that -- when I want to know what the daycare experience is like, I personally spend a day at the daycare.

This gives me much more nuance than a report ever would, but it also feels more respectful toward my child that they're allowed a part of their life outside of my supervision. But the reason I can do that is because there are other helpful adults at the daycare. That won't be the case everywhere, unfortunately.)

So I want them to have privacy, but I would also want to pick up on problems early -- either their own bad behaviour, or if they're victim's of someone else's bad behaviour.

Some more concrete questions in the same vein:

- What fraction of their online time should I sit with them?

- Do I play all video games with them or should they have some of "their own"?

- Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

- Do I allow them to use up all of their money even as a mistake, or do I set up a limit?

- Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?

This depends on maturity levels, of course, but I'm looking for generalisations. My children are 2 and 0.2 years old now, so this won't be relevant in a while but I like to be prepared and if you have thoughts regarding any maturity level, please share.

The reason I ask you HN folks is (a) that you are likely to understand my concern for privacy and personal integrity, and (b) that I've received very useful and thought-out child-related advice here before.

----

I'm also skipping a bunch of privilege-related questions like "who the hell can take a day off to spend it at the daycare?" Or, perhaps more importantly, "what determines how much time you spend online with your children may not be what's appropriate, but how much time you can spare for it?"

And yeah, both of those are problems for myself as well -- I'm interested in all creative solutions here, also that help work around such problems.

View on HN

I’m going to go the other direction…it’s your responsibility to violate your childrens online privacy at least up to a certain age.

Block, restrict, monitor. Say no pretty much all the time. They’ll be fine.

There’s so much stuff out there where they’ll have no idea what’s going on but you’ll recognize it immediately.

NextDNS is great for this stuff. Apple Family Manager too. On a phone or iPad just remove safari entirely if you need to.

You’re their parent, not their friend. You can’t be both.

Yeah, lots of good points raised in other comments but I agree. For young kids there isn't as much of an upside to freely roaming the internet.

With guidance, children can get all the good stuff while not having to face grooming, bullying, hate spam, or other dangerous traps online.

Once young people need to start giving back, publishing content, selling/purchasing things, networking, etc... then the benefits of the free internet really come into play for them.

My wife and I explain how much privacy that they should expect (not much) and stick to that. This entails playing their Roblox games occasionally and reviewing their browser history.

And don't flip out too much when you catch them learning to avoid the control. That's an important lesson for them to learn, because once they're grown and out of the nest, the people trying to control, monitor, and limit their access to information are not doing it for the victims' benefit.

Oh, my son figured out some of them and I congratulated him. He’s actually figured out a bunch, but he’s also old enough that it’s time for him to start getting more access.

Acknowledging up front that I don't have kids, if I did, it would be extremely important to me to teach them that there is no such thing as privacy on the internet.

If you want them to grow up to be adults who live in the world, drive that lesson home: Every single thing they ever do on the internet is being tracked and monitored and can be shared with anyone, at any time, especially the people they'd least like to see it.

"Online privacy" is an oxymoron. Sure, there are ways to be much more secure about it than others. Teach them to use them. Raise them to be "that kid" who understands why their messages should always be encrypted and self-destructing.

The world will not respect your children's privacy on the internet. They need to know that, and the earlier, the better. Don't Santa Claus them on this. Don't set them up for failure.

Good point. I take a pretty hands off approach with my kids, but they know I'm not afraid to dig in and figure out what they've been doing. I dabble in digital forensics and have a networking background. This keeps them in line for the most part, but you have to be diligent as a parent. There's no excuse for ignoring your kids.

The kids are not smart enough yet to understand the threats that face them even when I try to explain. I have Pfsense setup on the house with pfblockerng and several firewall rules and other settings. I gave them Linux computers and GrapheneOS phones with VOIP and burner SIMs. They are pretty happy with them. I also have a Nextcloud, XMPP, email, and other server apps setup for them. People get locked into the first tech they use which Apple and others are well aware of. It is your duty to set them right from the beginning.

Note that this can have the opposite of the intended effect: "Oh, my parents are so crazy, everyone uses this tech, it's _fine_."

Not sure if there's any avoiding this.

They understand the reasons and feel ahead of their peers. Their friends want to learn more from me.

Sounds like you've won then!

I'm glad that there's not only hope, but hope to successfully pass that hope on.

>You’re their parent, not their friend. You can’t be both.

Sure you can. And the only reason you are saying otherwise is you don't know how to do both.

At some point you’re going to have to choose one or the other. You can only do both until that happens.

but it’s not absolutely one or the other. you can be both a friend most of the time but a parent all of the time

I don't know what issues you apparently have with your kids, but stop projecting that on the rest of us who have managed a healthy balance.

I don’t know what you think being the parent means that you react so strongly to the idea?

Let me flip that around on you - what do YOU think being a parent means which is mutually exclusive with being a friend?

Would you ever deny a friend something they wanted to do that you knew wasn’t good for them?

You aren’t responsible for your friends.

> Would you ever deny a friend something they wanted to do that you knew wasn’t good for them?

Ahm...yes? A friend isn't characterized by how much they agree with you. It's perfectly valid to say no.

I would definitely try to stop my friend from doing something I see as unhealthy or dangerous.

As others have said - absolutely, yes. Responsibility has very little to do with it, it's all about wanting the best outcome for them. And that should apply to both your children and your friends.

I guess that depends on how you treat your friends.

These sentences lack too much nuance that life has.

You can do both up to a point, but it is true you are a parent first and a friend second.

The problem with the previous statement is - many situations require switching and it's extremely tough to know what to be when. My guess is, if you do worry/think about it, your kids will overall be fine.

I agree. You shouldn’t have draconian restrictions and monitoring up until their 18th birthday, but it’s the parents job to gradually scale up the freedom as the child matures rather than letting them swim straight into the deep end right away.

I know the tired “back in my day” stories about how kids were less supervised decades ago and they turned out fine, but I think different times call for different measures. When my parents grew up in farm country, their parents knew every other family nearby and had a good idea of what to expect by letting their kids wander around the neighborhood. The internet is nothing like that. You really do need to gradually introduce internet freedom to kids and be able to provide some parental guidance and context as they grow up. You can’t protect against everything, but there’s a huge difference between letting kids play in a few kid-friendly places and just letting them discover whatever comes their way.

I think some people forget that restrictions are malleable. If a kid wants to use a certain website that isn’t on the allow list, they can ask and we can give it a quick review and approval. Setting boundaries isn’t an end to exploration.

I have friends with children in the age of 12-14, one of which excessively monitors his son's online behavior.

He's shown me results of his monitoring and it pretty much ended the debate. Weird old guys contacting his son, excessive cyberbullying, swearing (fine by me, but still), being drawn to the wrong kind of "friends", hate speech, general addiction and obsession with games and in-game items, the list goes on.

Doesn't mean one should intervene all the time, but you should know. I'm not a parent so I don't know at what age you should back off, but I'd say don't do it too early. Your trust is misplaced.

> Your trust is misplaced.

This way of approaching the topic feels unhealthy to me. I’d put less focus on “don’t trust your kids”, and more on “make sure your kids have a responsible adult they trust”.

I interpreted it as meaning: don't place too muxh trust in the internet to be good.

I didn't mean it that way, but even if taken literally "don't trust your kids" is solid advise. Meaning, you cannot trust on them to navigate an online world full of harm and bad agents.

It's not the kid being unhealthy, instead its environment.

> Weird old guys contacting his son

I'm almost 40 and weird old guys contact me on the internet all the time.

The difference is that you're not a naive, inexperienced with life and prime target for predators 13 years old boy.

On the internet, no one knows you're a middle-aged man

Or a dog for that matter ;)

If a 13 year old is that inexperienced and much of a target... it's probably time to have a conversation about sexuality and the perils of sharing sexual pictures of oneself with random people on the internet.

I swear, most of the "But what if?!"isms boil down to "I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with my child to teach them about the world."

(Said as the father of a 14 year old)

You should, but at the same time kids are naive and sometimes do things they know they shouldn't

I think you underestimate the problem space.

Think of it like security issues where the attackers/researchers are constantly evolving and generating novel ways to hack a system. Your solution is telling fresh out of school developers to be really careful about use after free bugs and spear phishing. Obviously a good start. But it's not enough in a lot of cases.

The central problem here is trust: either your kid trusts you enough to discuss things with you, or they don't.

If that doesn't exist, implementing a technical panopticon is a way to paper over its worst effects, but it's not a solution to the root problem.

> The central problem here is trust: either your kid trusts you enough to discuss things with you, or they don't.

I don't think it's that simple. A predator can catfish as a high school girl, send raunchy texts and images to the boy, and the boy might be tempted to engage but wouldn't tell their parents out of embarassment (just like how a teenage boy isn't going to tell their parents about their porn watching habits)

The solution to that isn't tapping your boy's IM and chat history though. It's having a relationship with him where he feels comfortable mentioning he's talking to someone new.

And the opposition is doing everything they can to

1) make that communication remain innocuous long enough to fall into background ignore status

2) escalate in a way that will either avoid communicatong with you or even better seem fine to the child but not to you and so invoke the "my parent isn't fair" response and stop consulting you wholesale

Yes. And why is your teen so desperate for attention that they're willing to get it from a random stranger on the internet? Instead of their friends or someone they know in real life?

Jesus, this thread of an exercise of people making more and more convoluted excuses to treat their own children like criminals.

Is this the HN that was against warrantless wiretapping, or did I mistakenly fall through into another forum?

You're obviously well convinced of your position; I haven't had to make one yet. I think a pure trust approach is laudable but scary.

A common refrain from parents in these situations is how strong they thought their relationship with their child was and how they never imagined it could happen to them. Thats scary. Weighing a very low probability extreme consequence vs. various questionably impactful interventions with certain downsides is hard (at least in my view).

Not to mention that there are risks the internet exposes you to that aren't sexual abuse related. Desensitization to violence, insane discourse (epithets dropped like candy), etc are also important aspects of a parent's moderation choices. Trust and conversations cannot address this since the desensitization takes place as a consequence of simple repeated exposure. In the extreme case, desensitization translates to usage, and I think thats clear if you listen to any 14 year old kid on an xbox stream.

> Weighing a very low probability extreme consequence vs. various questionably impactful interventions with certain downsides is hard (at least in my view).

And that's the essence of the decision.

IMHO, the sane move is not crippling your child's development and your trust relationship with them in exchange for preventing an extremely low probability event: that they will be approached by a sexual predator, who's convincing enough, decide not to talk about it with you, and successfully conceal it from you.

To me, it's a known harm (spying on your child) in exchange for a nebulous good (you might catch something).

Do I have conversations with my child about what they do online? Absolutely! Do I keep a weather eye on any new developments or characters who pop up? Absolutely!

But do I think the solution is technically spying on my child? Hell no. The proper means of redress are analog and emotional.

Uh... Because they're a teenager. Sometimes, that are bottomless pits of craving attention for reasons that aren't logical.

Especially if it’s someone posing as the opposite sex.

> Is this the HN that was against warrantless wiretapping

I’m pretty sure there are different rules and regulations around issuing warrants for minors.

And that’s the whole point here. They are not adults.

It’s not a relationship between equals. They’re not ready for trust yet. Not in the same that trust can exist between two adults. And they need protection, in a way that adults don’t.

And it’s not a question of parenting either. No amount of parenting will make a person’s brain fully developed at 13.

The "girl" doesn't want him to mention her, because her dad's possessive and abusive and if he finds out, she's dead meat. Your kid now has a selfless, noble reason to be uncomfortable sharing that information.

Do you have children?

If they trust a stranger they just met on the internet more than a parent, that's the problem.

No amount of technological redress is going to fix that.

I think you underestimate how children overestimate themselves. I have an exceedingly good relationship with my younger siblings and they will think they can handle situations beyond their capacity, and then when they bring me in sometimes the emotional or psychological damage has already been done.

This isn't a single issue, and your view seems excessively simplistic. Kids are gullible. Kids keep secrets for any number of reasons -- and while I've taught my kid that strangers insisting he keep a secret is a major red flag, if a predator convinces him that they're a peer, they might enter the "friend" category when an adult would still call them a "stranger." Also, what kids and parents consider to be noteworthy can differ by a mile. How do you (a) enforce an ironclad rule that the kid tells you everything about every new contact and status update and (b) maintain the kid's trust? You don't, that's impossible. Yes, parents have duty to educate their kids and engender a trusting relationship, but every child is an individual who develops autonomy (by definition) before they're ready for it.

I have a friend who was catfished in high school, and the fisher took on a persona for several years before "introducing" her to the fisher's "friend" who was actually the fisher -- and he maintained the ruse for several years after. I'm honestly unsure of how a parent could even prevent something like that. The only comfort I've got today is that video chat is normal and a friend who couldn't do that would probably noteworthy enough to mention. That comfort is diminishing: by the time my kid will be old enough to worry about, deepfakes will be that much more advanced.

You can't solve everything with a discussion. You can tell kids not to do something all day long, doesn't mean they won't do it.

> it's not a solution to the root problem.

And will make that root problem worse.

It is good to have that conversation but it isn't remotely enough. Children lack the reasoning capacity to make good decisions. They are immature by definition. No matter how well-informed and well-schooled your child is, they will not have the faculties or defenses of an adult.

> Your trust is misplaced.

Could you provide some explicit examples to what you linked above?

> Weird old guys contacting his son

This one sounds a little weird, but the rest could just be the kid isn’t following modern western progressive values (and being obsessed with games depending on how much is just being a kid).

> swearing (fine by me, but still), being drawn to the wrong kind of "friends", hate speech

I’d need specific examples here, but it sounds like the kid is just rebelling against the current cultural norms. Much like most of us rebelling against conservative norms growing up.

It’s sad that being against hate speech is considered modern, western and progressive. It seemed like the norm not too long ago.

The norm used to be that as bad as hate speech is, bad speech is the most important type of speech to protect because no one tries to ban speech that they like.

This was recognized as important because invariably the powers that be change hands and then people with very different rules on what speech is bad get to use the same tools to suppress speech.

That is why you had the ACLU defending the rights of nazis to hold rallies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_... which would likely not happen today

Nowadays they come armed with bodyarmor and rifles so.. it's not completely the same thing.

it greatly depends on how you define hate speech

Being against the use of hate speech is pretty a core progressive value.

It's 100% ok to teach kids they they shouldn't promote genocide or use racial slurs.

I joined tried out a new game afew months back, a Vietnam War based FPS that was free on Epic.

I was treated to the most disgusting explanation of why Jews deserve everything that happened to them, among other choice horrible bigotry from one of the players.

Other players, seemed irritated and muttered about him, but he kept going until I finally logged off.

was it Bobby Fischer?

What does your friend use for monitoring?

Pretty much for all online accounts his son has, he has access. So he regularly logs in and checks activity. He also has some special app to monitor Playstation chat/voice but I don't know what it's called.

Other replies already addressed the screen time/hanging out together aspect, so I will comment on being unsupervised.

I was a kid on the early-ish internet and I was free to "surf the interwebs" unsupervised. The internet is not the same anymore but I think the general rules still apply. This was a very valuable learning experience for me.

Based on my own experience (anecdata, I know) what I found really helped me is grownups around me explaining things clearly and hammering a few facts into my brain:

1. Don't put anything about your real self on the internet (this is increasingly harder due to social media, I'm glad I was just on IRC back in the day).

1a. What goes in the internet will stay in the internet forever. Mind the info you get out there, even if it's supposed to be a private message. Leaks happen.

1b. Encourage them not to use their real name and address, to be pseudonymous at the least (or better, completely anonymous). Help them set up accounts that don't link to their identity (specially email which is the center of your online identity nowadays).

2. Not everyone on the internet is who they say they are. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog.

2a. Be clear on what grooming and pedos are and that they're out there to catch you off-guard.

2b. Show them what spam, scams, malicious sites, phishing, etc. look like and how to prevent damage.

3. No matter what happens or how deep in shit they are they can come to you for help. You won't approve the ugly things they do, but you will forgive them and help them clean up the mess. If in doubt, come get help. The earlier you ask for help, the faster the cleanup.

Make all of this real by showing them what could happen. Show them real cases (there's plenty on the news) and the consequences. Show them how easy it is to trick the other side of the conversation. E.g. it was eye-opening for me to watch a friend of my brother pretend he was an MD from a completely different city on the IRC. He was just a horny teen looking to meet women. He often joked about how we were probably chatting with other men lying about their identity too.

Once your kids are old enough to understand this then they can go on the internet 100% unsupervised (it was around 8-9 y/o for me but everyone is different).

This will take a while given your kids' age, but we all know time flies. Better get them ready before the time comes!

I think this is some great advice. Educate rather than restrict

I also grew up on the early internet and my sentiments are the same, education and awareness is required but once you know how to interact, things are safer

This pretty much mirrors my experience as a kid on the early web. Ultimately there's nothing new under the sun that wasn't there in the 90s. It's pretty easy to avoid being roped in to a scam or ill-intentioned person's orbit if you teach your kids to be skeptical and stay alert. Biggest difference perhaps about today's net is that a decent amount of online communication is done over video/audio nowadays.

The greatest difference is probably on predatory practices by companies. Even adults are vulnerable to loot boxes, gachas, addiction mechanics and other shady skinnerboxy traps.

Great advice. I'm not a parent (yet) but reading your comment it strikes me that playing outdoors is safer than it was when I was a kid in the 90s, but is more discouraged. Playing online is actually more dangerous than it was in the 90s/00s but is more encouraged.

Unfortunately, playing online has pretty much become critical competency-training for life, replacing playing outside which used to be the same.

I'd hazard playing outside is still critical competency-training for a mentally well-adjusted life.

From personal observation of {plays outside some of the time} vs {never plays outside}, the latter definitely have more neuroses.

But be aware that the opposite causation may also play a part: neurotic traits/predispositions/parents are likely to affect how and where you play

Crime is down everywhere relative to when we were kids. Throw the kids outside and lock the door behind them.

> 2b. Show them what spam, scams, malicious sites, phishing, etc. look like and how to prevent damage.

To expand on this, with the $CURRENT_YEAR generation of kids, it is very likely that the first scam they will encounter will be a Discord or Steam related account stealing or malware scam.

These are the specific examples that everyone using Discord should be aware of - https://i.imgur.com/PPni16I.png

I have some pre-teen children that have access to an iPad, Xbox, and an Apple TV.

My #1 recommendation is NO YOUTUBE, unless it's for education purposes. I don't have the App installed on any of my kids devices (they can access it via the website, but they don't do that). It's just a cesspool of garbage for kids. Even YouTube Kids is bad. Occasionally, they will complain about not having the YouTube app... but I never took it away, so they aren't missing it.

I've loaded up the iPad with fun age appropriate games and activities, that don't require any In-App purchases. If my kids want more apps, then Apple will ask my permission on my iPhone.

I use an Ubiquiti Dream Machine as my home router, so I have some basic content filtering and I have some categorisation of the traffic available, but nothing detailed.

In terms of video games, my recommendation is have a games console in the living room. They have access to video games, but they can play them where everyone can observe. They can have their own video games, this isn't a problem. Microsoft sends me a family report every week about what games were played, but I don't pay much attention to it. Purchases require parent approval on Xbox too.

With a 0.2 and 2 year old, you are somewhat lucky. The ages are close enough that they will play with each other a lot... and screen time won't be too much of an issue until they hit teenage years.

Good luck.

Great tips. Agree with the youtube vision you have. How do you deal with banning youtube all together? It's even on the smart tv menu. It's like playin whack a mole.

What we should be doing as a sort of collective parenting is curating Youtube playlists and categorize them with good, informational, fun and inspiring videos. Then we limit the children's access to that curated material only.

How do you limit their access to the curated material?

Try Freetube. No login and no algorithm.

You can block the YouTube domains on pie hole or with something like OpenDNS.

I did that and then my 10-year-old installed a vpn extension on his Chromebook.

It's always a cat and mouse game, and was when we were kids too.

You can (in order of simplicity):

* Get a list of common VPN provider domains and block in DNS

* Block all traffic to common DNS ports

* Use various filtering/monitoring applications to categorise traffic and look for odd outliers (probably VPNs)

* Force proxy only access and MITM sniff traffic

Of course the most important thing to do is discuss consequences and bring up why it's hurtful for him to lie to you via his actions. But the above technical solutions will cover 95% of what most kids can do... Until they can get a mobile data connection.

YouTube is really bad and hard to stop. When kids get curious about something on the fringe, the algorithm pushes them further and further into the rat hole until they are practically brainwashed by the craziest YouTubers. Unfortunately Google has chosen profit over allowing controls that are effective for parents.

My policy always was YouTube only allowed for searched content (or subscribed I suppose, cant do that without logging in though), no recommendations or other passive watching. Not really possible to implement in practice though. Disabling autoplay and such can only do so much, and the new “shorts” thing really threw a wrench into it.

Found a specialised safari content blocker that seems to block most of it though.

YouTube is horrible. They use it for school occasionally and so it would have to be available during that Covid year of online schooling. My wife actually noticed that around Feb of 2021, the algorithm had won. Our son was hooked.

‘How can a 6 year old boy compete with a bunch of engineers at Google?’ - wife

Since that time I have been playing with a YouTube app concept that only allows limited access and doesn’t auto play.

I don’t know that it is a full ‘solution’ but it does allow Science Max and Mystery Doug and other great content to learn from without all the negatives.

You log them in, manage their subscriptions.

Subscribe them to science channels.

What about these alternative YT front ends that I can’t remember the names of? They’re all based on the same software but some people make their instances public.

There is no algorithm there, no ads, no auto play.

On Androïd, what about newpipe?

Is YouTube really so bad nowadays? I feel like I'm in a weird position as I'm young enough to have grown up with YouTube, having used it regularly since age 11 or 12, and I got a ton out of it, but "The Algorithm" wasn't a thing in the same way back then. I still use YouTube today and still get a lot out of it, but I mainly watch videos from channels I'm subscribed to or through direct recommendation by other people.

Am I living in a weird bubble while the rest of the world experiences a parallel, much worse YouTube?

There’s plenty of quality content on YouTube. But there’s plenty of low quality knockoffs, and even outright dangerous videos like Blippi smashing things with hammers or Peppa Pig murdering her friends and family with a knife.

YouTube has too much crowd generated garbage to leave kids unsupervised.

There is a big trend of odd videos that no adult can seem to understand. My 4-year old loves them. They star familiar characters like Mario, pac-man, siren head, huggy wuggy, etc. they use sampled sound effects repeated ad naseum. There is no plot or story that lasts more than maybe 10 seconds, but the videos can be 30 minutes. Sometimes there’s no plot or story at all.

https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-yo...

Yeah, I'm probably around your age. I remember YouTube being great circa 2011 ish, I started getting into Minecraft mods and from that programming because of it.

Now, in 2022 I've been YouTube short (and TikTok) free for a month or so and I consider that an accomplishment lol.

The problem I feel is mindful browsing vs doomscrolling.

A lot of platforms nowadays have gotten really good at promoting mindless content with zero required attention span that's just a dopamine injection. IMO that kind of content is just objectively bad. Then again, I also follow a lot of people on YouTube and other platforms that make content that I would say is the opposite of that.

Yes. The recommendations that are pushed to me are wildly different than what my kids see.

Mine are mostly DIY fix-your-shit videos and boring science stuff I assume it puts there because I'm old and boring.

Most of my kids' recs are the cult-of-personality YouTubers who gain popularity with innocuous unboxing videos and game streaming that attract underage audiences attracted to colors and theatrics, and over time devolve into progressively toxic "lolcow" or sexually-predatory behavior that makes the denizens of 8chan look tame.

That much, in addition to the sometimes-fatal "challenges" these clowns try to promote (though that's a TikTok thing too) and the "accidents" involving exposing audiences of children to incidental pornography.

These people used to be kept in check by ratings boards and the stations held liable by the FCC for what they broadcast to audiences. YouTube has no accountability whatsoever; you are entrusting your children's television programming to self-publishing internet trolls.

Try Freetube. No login and no algorithm.

You can also download folders full of content you want kids to have access to and put it on Kodi or similar.

One thing I noticed that is often missing in these discussions, sometimes it isn't up to the parents to decide at all.

Imagine your 8 - 11 years old daughter's social circle, and the school she is at where her classmate were allowed very little Internet at home or school. Then you wouldn't have a problem enforcing whatever internet rules.

Now imagine everyone of her classmate were playing Minecraft, and she is the only one being left out.

The point is, if everyone at her school is spending time on god damn stupid Chinese TikTok, then a 10 - 15 minutes Tik Tok for her would be a necessary evil.

So far most of the Internet stuff are entertainment only. So stuff like Pop Music, Anime, Viral Videos etc. While not productive, they are harmless. And educating them not to use real names and talk to strangers on the internet seems to have worked so far. And only keep track of topics they looked into. ( At least before the age of 12 or 14 ) Generally speaking the internet is still fairly safe under some guidance.

But I have witness teenagers ( son of my close friend ) wondered into politics and culture war at the age of 14+. And it is absolutely destructive. The age where they start doing things without telling you, and going on to Reddit or whatever Internet forums. I dont have a good solution to that.

Part of the reason why I have been thinking about Age restricted participation on web forums. You could only reply if you are over the age of X.

> Tik Tok for her would be a necessary evil. [...] While not productive, they are harmless.

I think it is a mistake to view something like viral TikTok videos as "harmless". Wasn't it a few weeks ago that we had a front page article on a child that died during a "pass out challenge"?

But you raise a good point. Other parents giving their children unsupervised access to the internet creates a massive problem. A colleague of mine started with a hard and fast "no internet" rule. That absolutely broke when all his son's friends were playing minecraft.

I haven’t got the discipline to keep a minimum of screen time and I notice a massive difference between kids that do have very little unsupervised access (i.e many hours of TikTok and YouTube): the screen kids in my non-English speaking country speak fluent English at age 9 or 10. The non screen kids might never catch up. So while I’m sure it’s toxic as hell at least there is some benefit.

If I was in an English speaking country I’d set my kids’ TikTok to e.g Spanish ;)

Of course they will catch up, if they’re motivated at some point to do so. And the others will lose it as soon as they stop using it.

I swear it will be like, OpenBSD only, custom router, firewall everything, no Windows...

If you can break out, good on you. If you can write your own tools, even better.

"I was traumatized from computing because my dad never let me see a GUI outside of X11."

I hope they'll be bored enough to wander over to books--"old" programming and math books--and just start working through those. Who knows.

There were at least three groups of folks with unlimited access to computers and Internet in school: smart gamers, smarter tinkerers, and me. What I'd like to encourage, if I could control some portion of it, is to funnel activity to the second of the three. And that based on constraints, because I don't know any better than utter abstinence.

Any complaints about Minecraft will get them pointed to the book on Foley, gcc, and the promise of my time to help...

In the end, they'll figure out everything anyway. But at least in the beginning, I tried to have them focus on first principles.

Did I mention the Great Books? I have to put those somewhere.

I will say, YouTube killed my nephew’s interest in programming and tinkering. He started out with all sorts of interests and teaching himself how to code. Now he just watches YouTube and TikTok like all the other sheep and does nothing interesting.

I optimized my life to build projects, and I avoid youtube and tutorials unless I can't really guess how to achieve something. Tutorials, and especially video tutorials that are less easy to quickly examine just deplede your "creativity moment". Why make something if someone already did? The goal that was "magical and special" for me is now a consumerism's image in the Desert of the Real.

I get so annoyed these days when I google "how to X" and the top 20 results are youtube videos like I don't want to make noise or put headphones on sheesh.

I get angry because they're largely bullshit filler to begin with, and even that aside I can skim a lot faster than I can read. They're an intentional waste of my time soley for the sake of draining my wallet.

The placement of videos over text tutorials is a literal scam, and I resent it strongly.

I suppose it's different for younger kids, but Minecraft was very productive for me compared to many alternatives. I was playing as a teenager, though. I learned binary logic through the redstone system, server administration (and how to build computers) from server hosting. Met some friends that I've kept for over 10 years and still see in person when we're in the same area.

It's a pretty wholesome game with a lot of skills you can learn without even realizing.

> most of the Internet stuff are entertainment only. So stuff like Pop Music, Anime, Viral Videos etc. While not productive, they are harmless

You are so obviously not the parent of a teen girl. The viral videos have created a crisis of self harm the world has not yet come to terms with.

Agreed. Munchausen-by-internet is not yet a household name, but it will be after this generation.

Friends of ours have a pretty okay-ish implementation for social media for their kids. They make the kid the 'brand manager' for a pet first. The kid gets the interaction of social media and their friends, but they have to do it for their dog/cat for a year first, then they can get their own account. The kids have gotten some low level brand sponsorships for the pets, something that the other kids at school are jealous of, or so I am told. The kiddos know the ins and outs of social media from the business side a bit more, though I am skeptical of that. Also, the pets are eating and getting toys at a discount, kinda. Seems like not the worst of ideas and allows for a soft entry into that hellscape.

What does being a brand manager for a dog mean? What dog? What brand? Where does social media fit in? Who are the followers?

It means that rather than posting about themselves, they're posting about the pet. Nobody is going to bully a cat or dog, so they can get used to SM without any of the drama that might be aimed at them by their peers.

It's a clever solution.

I thought so too! I imagine there are a lot of ways to dip your toes into SM without all the drama. Things like model trains, art, metalworking, 4H, or other 'creative' pursuits where the focus is not on the poster but rather what the poster has created/done. Less documenting your own life and more documenting your efforts. The pet thing seems to work well as it has the kids do chores surreptitiously.

such a great idea.

It reminds me of the old bit of advice for newly arrived starlets to Hollywood:

"If you have something to say, better to be behind the camera than in front of it"

AFAIK, the kids can only take pics/vids of the pet and the kids post as the pet. There's not a lot of DMs and the like, as it's in the 'voice' of the pet.

Their own pets

The kids are making the pet into a 'brand'

The kids use tiktok and insta as their social media outlets. FB is, as I am told, 'for old people'.

They have followers like any influencer does. Mostly these seem to be bots to me, but of the 'real' humans, they seem to be people that are into cute animals and dumb pet tricks. Especially with the dog, the one kid has gotten it into Frisbee tricks and that seems to have gotten a bit of traction online.

I think this is underrated. One girl in middle school who was my daughter's friend wasn't allowed a phone or internet. By the end of 8th grade she had very few friends and really had nothing in common with anyone else to talk about. This was a during a lot of stay at home covid schooling which probably made the effect more severe.

As a tech worker with kids, what I see is an all out war being waged on their attention span, motivation to consume, and healthy self-concept with zero regard for their healthy cognitive development. I let my kids watch certain specific shows on YouTube Kids and Netflix, and that's it. About 30 minutes a day, tops, and I am almost always in earshot. Articles that came out in the last 5 years or so about Silicon Valley execs keeping their kids away from the very products that make them rich was a very telling indicator. Much good as the internet has done or my life, I was also blessed to have grown up with a childhood that was not permeated by it during my early formative years. There is some great content out there, but the data is coming down firmly on a negative correlation between screen time and a variety of child health measures. Kids deserve their innocence. When they are older, I will definitely be installing monitoring on my router for their IP traffic.

If you try to control your kids internet/device usage too much they will learn to work around it (at least once they hit the young teens). Try to have open conversations with them and teach them about the dangers of strangers, predatory microtransactions, the permanence of whatever they post on the internet etc.

If you just try to monitor and restrict what they do they will grow to resent you, and they'll hide everything from you (and they'll likely be much better at this than you expect).

Do note this advice is for teenagers though. I suspect you'd be quite successful limiting a 5-10 year olds unsupervised access to the internet, and probably justified in doing so imo.

I highly recommend Kidpower [0] as a resource for how to have these kinds of conversations - they're really good at making things really specific and understandable for kids without going into details that are not age-appropriate.

They also have good advice for how to teach and equip kids to be independent while maintaining appropriate safety boundaries at each stage along the way to full independence. [1]

Discussion and trust are important but I think there is a phase where kids do not yet have the maturity for discussion and trust to be enough to keep them safe. In the meantime, they also need supervision and physical boundaries to be safe.

As an analogy, no amount of verbal instruction will allow a toddler to walk safely by themselves near traffic. Until they reach a certain maturity level, children need an adult who is paying attention and is ready to physically intervene if they start heading for the street.

I think there's a similar dynamic at play when it comes to internet safety. We need to teach our kids so that they will be ready for independence but we also need to recognize that they will not be ready for full independence for quite a while, given the complexity of the risks involved.

[0] https://www.kidpower.org/library/article/online-safety-for-y...

[1] https://www.kidpower.org/library/article/preparing-independe...

> they will learn to work around it (at least once they hit the young teens).

Teenage years and the 7-12 range are worlds apart in terms of what’s appropriate.

Regardless, it’s not a good idea to let “perfect be the enemy of good”. The idea that putting any restrictions in place will result in kids going off and accessing the worst stuff doesn’t really follow, in my experience. Half the battle is communicating expectations and creating a framework for understanding what’s reasonable and what’s not.

I explained memetics to my kids from around 3 and have given free access (and supervision) with education like you have said and its working fine so far up to 7. He even used to turn over the ipad if there was an ad appearing (we pay for no ads mostly). It really can work down young.

>What fraction of their online time should I sit with them?

Unless they're 5 year old and learning the ropes or asking for it, then none

>Do I play all video games with them or should they have some of "their own"?

If they want to play with you: as much as you want, otherwise none.(I kinda wish I played with my parents honestly, but they never cared)

>Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

Physical products? Probably yes, but it should go through you to check that the site is not a scam or shady. Virtual items, crappy lootboxes and predatory subscriptions? Absolutely not.

>Do I allow them to use up all of their money even as a mistake, or do I set up a limit?

Depends on how much money you have.

>Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?

No, I don't see the point. I spent hours doing programming exercises in freaking notebooks because my parents were soo keen on limiting my screen time. Dozens of arguments because they would take away my consoles. Not worth it.

Also I'm not really in favor of trying to control what your children do, but block TikTok if it still exists in 5 years, some social medias aren't social medias, they're psychological warfare.

Completely agree on all points, but wanna add my thoughts:

About sitting with kids: they'd come to you or at least mention if they found out something interesting anyway.

About budgeting: that's a whole course of it's own to be taught.

I know only 2 good solutions about screen time: you have to set the upper limit with mandatory things to do and can virtually lower it by presenting activities that would be genuinely more interesting than the online ones.

My opinion: children don't need access to the internet, period. There are plenty of ways to let them explore, learn, and play, without giving them any access to the internet. I plan to host an entirely off-line copy of Wikipedia, a bunch of other resources, video games, programming tutorials and libraries. Basically a whole bunch of content that will let them learn about computers and the world, without having access to the internet. The internet is not what is used to be, and the cons severely outweigh any possible pros, especially since the pros can be achieved in other ways.

Counterpoint, if your child grows up and isn't "internet native" they will be like people who "don't get computers" over the last decade. It's very limiting.

I grew up without access to computers at all until I was 12. I thought I would break my uncle's computer by moving the mouse.

I've had a career ranging from telecom and supercomputer chips to mobile, desktop, and web dev. I do not think my lack of exposure to the internet at a young age has limited me.

One person in my CS degree (which started in 2008) had his first time using a computer a few weeks before said degree which was interesting. He managed it fine.

They might not know how to navigate an iPhone or TikTok, but those are not foundational skills.

Spending time on the Internet doesn't make you understand computers. (It does make you understand that you get a hit of happy-brain-juice when you press the Play button.) My wife teaches college courses and laments that her students, fully in the always-online generation, are helpless in Excel, let alone something like a command line.

They are kids.

Kids should be able to have their room door closed but that room is a save space.

The internet is not a save place it's like walking in an huge anyounmous city

You should not let your kids walk alone in a huge city until certain knowledge is learned.

Unfortunately the internet provides even more hurdles than a huge city.

I personally would even create a list of things I would teach my kids over a period of month and years. From grooming, pedophiles, scams, password management, spyware etc.

I thought I had a good handle on my kids' online activity until COVID hit and suddenly they were home 24/7 for a long time. In order to keep working, I had to give up on a lot of limits on screen time in order to retain my sanity. The rules we have settled on is that they can't use devices until at least 3 or 4pm. This manages to limit their screen time considerably and forces them to use their brains for most of the day.

I installed Qustodio on their computers and made sure that everything on their is set with an age limit (including their windows account, youtube, and chrome account). You'd be surprised how much support there is now for limiting content for your kids.

I also strongly discourage them from watching youtube videos and prefer them to actually play video games.

My kids are under 10.

1. No internet access 2. A tablet with a few select apps and no games. 3. A tv with a Raspberry Pi running xbmc with a few videos I've curated.

Access to the tablet and tv are limited to certain times, say when we're driving or when my wife's cooking. At some point I'll probably use a PiHole or something like that to give them whitelisted access to a few sites. Not sure where I'll go after that. I don't plan to secretly monitor any conversations but I think I'll stress that I don't consider online and messaging communications to be private and they will be monitored.

As for the money, I'd address the goals separately. Have investment accounts which aren't touched and a performance-based allowance which they can spend completely. I think the Dave Ramsey "when the money's gone it's gone" lesson is something that's supremely important to learn early. And if they need some more money they can always make an appeal to the local VC (you).

> I think I'll stress that I don't consider online and messaging communications to be private and they will be monitored.

What a wonderfull dystopia we are building here together. And then we wonder why the average people don’t care about privacy. Perhaps because they were conditioned from a young age to expect none?

Maybe my wording wasn't precise enough. My kids have a reasonable amount of privacy which is less than the amount of privacy I expect them to be granted by other people. The internet grants access to literally every type of content and image if you try hard enough and there are obvious things I don't want my children exposed to. My idea of a dystopia involves children being exposed to rotten.com, porn, and communicating with pederasts in any way. And honestly it doesn't seem like people are building much of anything, just abdicating responsibility for the most part.

And then when they finally have access they are going to binge like crazy because they haven't learned how to manage that access. It's like the sheltered kids that go off the deep end when they hit college because they have no experience with anything.

Or, it's like the college students who drink water, eat vegetables, and exercise and continue to do so throughout their life because they haven't been exposed to junk food, soda, and flavored sugar disguised as food during their childhood.

> I don't plan to secretly monitor any conversations but I think I'll stress that I don't consider online and messaging communications to be private and they will be monitored.

So you'll be lying to your kids?

No I'll tell them up front I'll be monitoring their usage.

Short answer: we don’t know. This technology is too new on a human sociological timeline.

Our strategy is explicit in categorizing digital activity as reading literature, gaming, content consumption, and creation.

We will sometimes tell the kids that they are only allowed to play games on the iPad, and if they are in a ‘ I only want to drone out and watch shows‘-Mode, then they will actually choose to do something else in the real world many times.

Shows are super useful for road trips, road trips have never been easier. But download good movies to their device to limit choices.

Expose your kids to activities that are more compelling than screens. Trust me, once you take a kid go-karting, they aren't going to be as excited playing a video game.

Do cool shit with your kids. Go skiing, camping, fishing, go-karting, flying (small plane tours), drone racing, etc.

I know most of us here are nerds, but the jocks really do have life figured out when it comes to fun stuff.

I realise HN has a disproportionate amount of software engineers, but I know my parents would struggle to afford the likes of skiing, flying, go-karting as regular activities, never mind in sufficient quantities to displace video games and the internet. Even a trip to the bowling alley was a rare treat when I was growing up.

It takes a few years before even something as simple as a walk to the park isn't exciting anymore. And I think the thing that's implied in most of the pessimistic responses here is "you have to start early or you lose control".

Inexpensive outdoor activities like biking, skateboarding, ball sports, etc, all accomplish the same thing. In purchasing supplies for these activities, you're essentially signing them up for something that will consume their time and energy, leaving little to expend on diving into internet rabbit holes.

Never allow a children below 12 access to internet, a not give to they cellphones until the 14 or until they needed, in my experience as father, I give him 4 or 5 hour in videogames or videos in the computer monday-saturday, sunday is for family time, everytime he ask for buy something, I tell him that he must work for obtain that as reward or compensation, not let them take the monitor outside of your range, even in his room my son has the monitor close the wall but in front of the door so I can see what is he doing when I pass to his door, our family policy is that all the rooms are with open doors, is forbiden stay in a closed door, constantly I ask what is he doing in the computer, sometimes he lies but is ok, I not cross certain limit, sometimes I stay with him looking him playing his videogames, talk a lot with them, tell all the good and bad things that are in the internet, tell about the scamers, and all the bad actors in the social networks, but most important, show they that you love them and you care them and those are the reasons why are you doing this things.

Does watching PBS Kids or Disney+ count? What about YouTube Kids or YouTube?

The point being that almost all content is on the Internet now.

I guess your reply can be seen as a good faith response because if you block everything, there’s no need to monitor. It’s just very extreme to disallow content if provided over the Internet, rather than building trust and nuance, which I think is more along the lines of the original question.

I don't know what it is like now, but for a long time YouTube kids was a minefield of wildly inappropriate content- there were a bunch of articles on it a few years back:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...

At least PBS and Disney+ are curated. Anything social or user-generated can be nasty, and not easy to see at first.

I'd be more flexible.

There are kid safe quality sites and apps like Khan Academy, Youtube Kids , SplashLearn, the local library and more

Its possible to allow list only specific URls and apps and set time limits and that works well with my 5 year old.

I grew up in a house with no closed doors and it pushed me to find other, less healthy, ways to distance myself.

>Never allow a children below 12 access to internet

What in the ever living heck are you talking about...

>show they that you love them

In my opinion everything you stated is pretty much the exact opposite of showing them that you love them.

>our family policy is that all the rooms are with open doors

I guess your kids see some good sex action with you and the wife then.

The wide open internet is a pretty serious threat environment and it makes sense that parents want to protect their kids from strangers and horrific content. But one thing I find pretty disturbing is parents monitoring the digital footprint of their children's real-world relationships. Most people would find it pretty creepy if you made your child wear a tape recorder to school or a friend's house, but the digital equivalent - reading text and instant message content - is surprisingly accepted. I had some friends who were monitored this way and it was very uncomfortable knowing that their parents were party to any conversation we had.

My enormous volumes of unrestricted screen time led to my interest and eventual career in technology; I'm pretty grateful for them. On the other hand I do feel like success in modern life is down to resisting the siren song of empty-calories time sinks like social media, gaming, Reddit, Twitter, etc. and the successful adults of the next generation will be those whose parents inculcate self-control and moderation here.

Schools have adult supervision already and don't need parental surveillance. Kids are most often molested/influenced by someone close, and internet only expands that reach. If you think parents doing their job is the primary problem here, I'm frankly a bit surprised. The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it.

I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back in the slightest.

>Schools have adult supervision already

Students have a great deal more privacy at school than in digital-surveillance households: conversations at lunch and recess are not normally monitored or reviewable by staff members, for example.

>The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it.

I think this kind of defeatism is bad, but even as far as it goes, the sense in which "nothing is private" refers to, like, the NSA and advertising bots. That is a very different thing from disclosure to people who have personal relationships and power dynamics with you. I would hope that kids don't "get used to it" and go on to perpetrate or accept that kind of behavior in their future relationships.

>I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back in the slightest.

While most kids using computers have nothing to do with technology careers, it is pretty clearly the case now that programming for the first time in CS101 would put you at an extreme (though not necessarily insurmountable) disadvantage.

> parents doing their job

Parents are reinterpreting "their job" to be much more intense over the last few decades already (helicopter parenting, stranger paranoia, driving everywhere, etc). In a remote-first world, they are poised to have essentially total visibility and control over every aspect of life. At some point their job has got to be to produce adults.

> Students have a great deal more privacy at school

Not really. Maybe out on the school yard for a few mins, that's expected. You may have not read up on this, but schools have already turned into a surveillance dystopia: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/schools-are-spying-studen...

It's almost as if an advertising-surveillance-company is in charge of our school's IT.

> The truth is nothing is private --> defeatism

One of my most painful career lessons was never put sensitive things in email! Wish my parents could have taught me that over something inconsequential a decade earlier.

Never was and never will be private. That is the lesson.

> CS101

Computer science is not software engineering, right? That one trips up a lot of folks. But this comparison stretches even farther, it is not even in the same neighborhood as social media, friends, or fomo.

It's often an applied science class (aka programming) where it is very helpful to know a bit of algebra, typing, and the basics of computer hardware. CS theory often starts the second year. The two sets don't overlap at all, but lay folks tend to think so because computers are "magic":

http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

When my kids were small, I was fighting with crazy Youtube videos. Kids started with something innocent and soon were watching sick and disturbing pieces.

So I built an app to control their Youtube consumption, which later turned to a cool small business https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1431645198

I'm curious, can you elaborate what kind of disturbing pieces popped up?

Giant plastic spiders chasing kids. Momo. Kids behaving silly in front of camera and playing silly games. Kids with masks of superheroes. Something about SCP.

This was (is) Elsa-gate. It was a whole big thing.

Honestly they looked like cartoon shorts that belong on adultswim or something. It's hilarious that they were unironically being watched by kids, but also not.

The relevant search term here is “Elsagate”.

I have 3 kids between 7 and 12.

Both PCs and Chromebooks have parental controls that are okay but not stellar.

For PCs, Microsoft lets you set up profiles for your kids where you can specify what apps they can access, and for web access you can either go with a Microsoft-selected whitelist or build your own white/blacklists.

We as parents get a weekly activity report showing what sites they spent the most time on and what disallowed sites they tried to access. Obviously, this doesn't align with your privacy objective, but frankly, until my kids are able to keep themselves safe online without parental supervision, the slight infringement on their privacy is a reasonable trade-off.

No internet before age 13 at least.

1) Touching grass is super important at this phase of their development. We were given brains to move our bodies; kids need practice at running around and playing in a physically active manner.

2) Aside from the usual risks (exposure to porn, Elsagate material, child abusers, etc.) there's the fact that even innocuous kids' apps encourage addictive behavior. I made the acquaintance of a delightful six-year-old girl, the child of a family friend. She was eager to show me the games she played on her Kindle Fire, and some of them were the Skinner-boxiest things imaginable. Feed the animals ice cream by tapping the indicated thing and get a visual and sound reward. I flat out told her her favorite tablet games were boring, intended for toddlers and not big girls like her, and she needed something that would challenge her brain. She is rather smart and creative given the opportunity; she makes her own maps and such for Little Big Planet. But she is quite prone to being satisfied with the familiar and not seeking the challenge and advancement she needs (for that matter, so am I), and the internet -- even at its best, before actively harmful material enters the picture -- is only too happy to supply that stagnant comfort, to drive up engagement metrics.

By all means, get your kid a computer! Do not connect it to wifi or ethernet. Tell them if they want a game for it they will have to write it themselves, and in response to their frustrated "HOW?!" open the discussion about how to program. Get them a Raspberry Pi autonomous car kit or something. All of this at appropriate ages of course. If they need to look something up online, do it for them or supervise their internet use. Require beforehand that they ask to look up something specific and once they have it, have them save it for future reference.

>you are likely to understand my concern for privacy and personal integrity,

I've given up on the high ideals I used to hold about (online) privacy (and anonymity). There's an argument that they, in some circumstances, are the antithesis of personal and public responsibility.

My current plan is that my kids will get tech when they can afford it themselves. I'm also dreading it, as more parents bow to the pressure and allow kids to have phones and tablets at an ever-younger age. I do understand the downsides of this, and also don't want my kids to be social pariahs.

Also - you role model what your kids will do. If you think it's ok to sit and scroll on your phone at every opportunity, so will your kids. If you game till the early hours, so will your kids.

FWIW both my wife and I gave up smartphones last year, and all "tech" in the house is banished to our home office. When a family computer becomes a necessity, it will be in a shared area.

Can you talk more about giving up smartphones? That's a pretty radical move.

Did fine without one for my first 47 years, so I'm not sure how "radical" that really is. I couldn't be without while away from home. But do we really need them at home?

Yeah, that was my thought -- maybe just keep a separate smartphone in the car, and never bring it in the house? Seems like the only times you really "need" a smartphone are when you're out somewhere.

You say "radical". I say "attempting to undo some of the damage of the past few years". Anyway, I've always had an independent streak, and never liked how my of my life was controlled through my phone by big tech. I've tried all of the typical steps - fully-FOSS phone (CyanogenMod), quitting social media, and leaving my phone in a different room at night than my bedroom (which was probably one of the single most helpful steps). The hardest thing to quit was Whatsapp - at least where I live (UK), it has come to dominate social organisation.

I can only recommend this process, even if you don't make it all the way. I also appreciate that where I live, less of life has become dependent on smartphones and apps, and making these choices might have more sideffects on your life if you are somewhere like the US.

> I do understand the downsides of this, and also don't want my kids to be social pariahs.

FWIW, they will more likely become pariahs (or suicidal) from a lapse in judgment involving said device.

When I was a kid (8 or 9 yrs old?) back in the early 2000s, my mom was pretty tech savvy compared to her peers. She actually installed corporate monitoring monitoring software on my machine and told me about it. She said the internet is dangerous and she needs to see what I'm doing to protect me / make sure I'm not up to no good. Once I'm older she'd remove it. It all made sense to me and I didn't mind. I think it also helped deter me from doing anything too stupid.

I am a parent. It's difficult at times to balance freedom and regulation. Do the best you can, and remember balance is key. Early years (2-7yo) was highly regulated, but gave more freedom at older ages (7+ yo).

For rewards, we use the star/chart system, works well! Define some chores, each chore got a star sticky. After 10 stars, gets a toy or Roblox bucks. Roblox is pretty good at teaching lessons in money management, spend it all or slowly save up. Never allow them to buy without a parent. Do not save that CC info online! Same with iPad and other devices, lock down all payments!

Video watching is more open now that they are at a later age, but I had to put my foot down on Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure recently, lol, maybe when they're older. I used to regulate the YouTube to ONLY certain channels that don't swear, like Zack Scott, who is great, BTW.

> After 10 stars, gets a toy

Tip: the Dollar Stores have a toy aisle with toys little kids love. Go nuts at $1.25 each. Some of them they may only play with once.

I kind of don’t understand all the crazy concern around kids and tech. Was like every current parent negatively impacted by their computer and internet use when they were younger?

Is this simply a concern around social media usage which has ballooned in the past 10 years?

I sometimes feel like I’m in the minority here when I’m going to give me children wide latitude in their tech/internet usage. And only intervene if I see detrimental behavior as a result.

I had a strange epiphany around age 16 when I realized that, thanks to 4chan, I had probably seen more ghastly shit within the past few months than my parents had in the entire lives -- and that I was already completely desensitized to it.

I'm definitely in the weird minority that feels like that phase of edgy internet counterculture diving was an overwhelming positive thing for me. It gave me perspective as a sheltered suburb kid as to how fucked up things can be in the world. I feel I have a lot more empathy now whereas before I struggled to internalize the problems and suffering of people around me as "real" (things like war or crime were things that happened on television and in fictional novels, not in real life). Even now I feel like some people, especially in my parents' generation, have trouble seriously understanding the lives of people outside their immediate ingroups.

I would not recommend it as a method for anybody though, there are a dozen other routes that kind of journey could have gone down and most of them lead to terrible conclusions.

You may not be aware of the full extent of the problem. It's not just the "time wasting" of the old days, just ~15 years ago. Try these documentaries:

- "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix

- "The United States of Secrets" on PBS.

- John Oliver on Data Brokers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA

There are others I can't remember off the top of my head. You may feel differently when you find out about companies profiting off the current (as in right now) whereabouts of your child.

Whatever you do, don’t give them free access to devices or the internet before a certain age. Some parents give their kids iPads as early as two and you can see the behavioral challenges and addiction they struggle with as they get older.

All of the answers to your questions are personal to you and your beliefs. The only considerations are to set some ground rules for using these things, moderate how long they can be on them a day, and have a trusting relationship about what they are doing on it by asking them regularly and caring without being too protective.

You may benefit from reading “The Self-Driven Child”.

> I have this preconceived notion that I don't want to violate my children's privacy.

If you have a preconceived notion that frames these questions in terms of privacy, then you will have a preconceived solution. Why is this discussion being framed in terms of "privacy"?

There is a large and growing advocacy for "children's privacy" that I am quite hostile to. The advocacy largely seems to be focused around allowing children to "experiment" and try things for themselves without feeling pressure from their parents to respond in a particular way, or fear repercussions. The stated goal is to let the child become their own person.

But by and large, these "experiments" are around topics like drugs, sexuality, politics, and religion -- and at increasingly younger and younger ages. All of these are extremely hot button issues, so I'll choose the last to make an example of. I've worked extensively through my church with our youth ministry. How would you feel if I wanted to have a "private" conversation with your grade school child about their sin, and necessity of repentance? If I responded to your objections by framing you as the unreasonable one, and asking why you wanted to invade your child's privacy? They need to become their own person, and be free to make choices for themselves!

You would be right to have a legitimate fear that your child would not be "becoming their own person" (as advertised), but being indoctrinated (or even brainwashed) into a certain way of thinking when their minds are too young to know how to appropriately think about these things independently. As a parent, no one should want to have "private" access to your children -- and even unsupervised access to your children should be completely transparent.

Freedom and privacy are important values to teach your children. But this is the privacy that should be taught: there are certain things that you should not expose to the world, and others have no right to ask of you. But the "privacy" that I see being discussed is an inversion of that. "We want privacy with your children, and you cannot violate that privacy!"

To close with an example of how I'd frame this issue: YouTube/TikTok wants unfettered access to my children, to sit them infront of a non-stop roll of advertisements, content that has been engineered to be addictive, and has the potential to create harmful feedback loops. To supervise, monitor, and restrict the quantity and quality of what my child watches (or even searches for) is not an invasion of my child's "privacy" or "freedom".

Children's privacy with respect to freedom to experiment and become their own people would generally mean private interactions with their peers, not corporations or adults.

I disagree with your assessment of that this is what is generally referred to WRT children's privacy -- but I also disagree that privacy and freedom apply to play dates.

My parents largely let me play with whoever I wanted to. But there was at least one occasion I was not allowed to go and play with one family.

Though play time was largely unsupervised, there was still no veil of privacy. If my parents asked me what I was doing with a friend and I fabricated a story that wasn't true, or declined to answer, I don't think I would get to hang out with them much longer, and with good reason.

I can assure you that children from middle school onward absolutely do not give complete and truthful accounts of their interactions with friends. True, this can be a point of family tension! It’s a natural and probably healthy push and pull, children wanting privacy and independence, parents wanting access and control. That’s the process of growing up into your own person. There would be something developmentally wrong with a child who didn’t try & succeed to some extent. And something inhuman about a parent who didn’t resent and resist it. Children get ahead of themselves and parents slow them down. But the kids are supposed to win in the end, ideally before their 18th birthdays.

I worry that digital surveillance gives such an asymmetric advantage to parents’ natural helicoptering impulses that future generations never win. Worse, that they realize they are overmatched and give up. What kind of adults will they be, when their agency has been broken on the wheel in this way?

Teach them internet safety and etiquette. Kids don't fully appreciate that awful people exist or that there are a lot of them, or that they can use the guise of the internet to abuse and exploit people in ways they've never considered before.

> - Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

Depends on the age, this one I'd say no. Let them spend their own money how they see fit, but also educate them about scams and shitty business practices. Don't give them a blank check to buy whatever they want unless you want to incentivize addictive purchasing habits from in-game and in-app purchases. It often amounts to literal gambling, and kids are easy targets for the unscrupulous.

> - Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?

You can hobble phones and tablets and force them to only run approved apps. Let them text and video chat with their friends and keep them away from exploitative business models.

Other than that, I appreciate your respect for your kids' privacy. My experience growing up with friends that had invasive parents is that they just learn to hide things well from their parents, and become averse to telling them the truth because they've learned they can't trust their parents. If your kids have a problem, you want them to come to you for help and not avoid you until they can't anymore.

> - Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

> - Do I allow them to use up all of their money even as a mistake, or do I set up a limit?

IMHO you should not allow online purchases until a certain age, I would say until 10 years old or so, before that they should ask you for something and you pay for them (if the request is reasonable and anyway if they deserve that).

Starting from 5 or 6 years old you will need to teach them about money (its uses, its risks, how it costs time and sweat to have it), which is something extremely difficult in these times of "immaterial" money, in the old times it was easier, with "real" money kids had their own piggy bank that had its own weight that could be felt, when you opened it there was the ritual to count the coins (and possibly a few notes) and see if it was enough to buy the whatever was desired, a 5/6 years old kid will have difficulties in understanding what the balance of an online account is (that those numbers represent actual money).

When you will be able to allow them to directly make their own purchases (again after some training with you) you should let them spend what they want to spend within a given total budget, i.e. refill a rechargeable card to (say) 100 dollars and give them access to it. (i.e. they should be free to spend the whole 100 dollars on a single, stupid item or buy 5 items 10 dollars each and keep the remaining 50 in the balance, without any intervention by you).

At a given fixed interval (let's say monthly) you credit (still say) 50 dollars more to the card, plus you may credit some more dollars for merit/prizes (if they behaved good, had an exceptional good vote at school, etc.).

This way they will (should) learn that money is a finite amount and that - while one is free to use as he/she wishes - it doesn't come out of thin air.

The problem might be with gifts from relatives, in my times (I was a kid many years ago) I had some uncles that often slipped a note to me (without telling anything to my parents, it was our little secret), now the kid would probably have to "declare" this extra income to you in order to be able to spend it online (and I doubt - but I may be wrong - that modern uncles will recharge the card online directly).

I would only allow them to do online purchases themselves once they turn 14 or so. No restrictions what they spend their money on. Reduces the risk of them falling for phishing and scams

#1 Recommendation is no Roblox. It destroys kids. Not to mention, exploration by the game itself, and pedos. Kids who play are unable to do anything else. Maybe your kid will be able to regulate, but I’d guess not. Ask an elementary school teacher about it.

#2 is no devices in their own bedroom.

Edit: Exploitation not exploration

You mean exploitation, right?

Yes, edited.

Would you feel comfortable dropping off your kid, by himself, in a foreign country with no supervision?

That's how you should view being online. When they are very young, they should be attached at the hip. As they age, and (hopefully) mature and develop the capacity for navigating the dangers and the judgement to make good choices, they should be granted increasing levels of freedom.

Most importantly, however, is to remember that you and you alone are the one responsible for the well-being of your child. Nothing matters less than what other parents or other kids are doing, or what schools, governments and "experts" recommend. At the end of the day the responsibility for your child is yours alone. Spending a lot of time with your child and getting a good gauge on just how much freedom and responsibility they can handle is absolutely critical to this process. In my opinion the fact that so many don't have the time to spend with their child, because of work or other obligations, or choose to outsource the raising of their child to a school or daycare program because they see other people doing it, is why our society is turning out so many broken people. If you really take an interest, your child will pick up on that - just like they will pick up on it if you don't.

a few pro tips from me with two kids now 12F and 14M.

Subscribe to youtube premium. you do NOT want those adverts on your kids devices. get them an account each (lie about what their ages are), periodically log in to your kids accounts and look at their watch history and deal with as desired. But more importantly subscribe to the channels you feel they should be seeing and unsubscribe what they should not. You can do this quietly for years and they wont have any idea... its helpful to guide their viewing.

one issue here is youtube shorts.. its viral trash like tiktok and gods dammit I wish I could ban my daughter from it. there is just no way to block it.

Keep computers in the "family area" not in their bedrooms.

keep phones and tablets etc in the family area not in bedrooms

put a pihole in your home network, its free, and very simple to setup on a rPi or synology nas or pretty much anything.

Setup a minecraft server for kids old enough for it. host it yourself and if you can let their friends play on it.

Teach them to lie on the internet. they should not be using their real names and addresses.

teach them to use a PW manager.

Dont allow consoles. Consoles are zombie inducing machines. They want to play games then its computers all the way because computers are multifaceted tools not just dedicated gaming machines. you never know what they will self educate themselves on a computer. on a console they only have one choice... play games.

My son has taught himself C# programing in Unity just by watching youtube videos and self exploration. its a marvel to see him accelerate his learning way past what the school can teach him at the moment. He and his sister are also teaching themselves modelling in blender

One thing about screen time i haven't seen mentioned yet, is it doesn't have to be the same for everything. I know a parent basically saying: you have a limit on playing games, but not on being creative. So drawing, reading, coding, etc. are not limited. Works for them, but requires some supervision of course.

Your first responsibility is to protect your children from external threats, if you give them all the privacy in the world you won't be able to do that, so you need to somehow know what they're doing which means either an internet blocker or little privacy, both of which I'm fine with.

For kids as small as yours the internet would not even be a choice if they were my kids

I had a good handle on my kids online habits until covid hit. Once they transitioned to fully online classes, they got used to longer screen times and internet access.

I have installed Qustodio to block and monitor their internet habits. But my 12 year old somehow figured out how to unblock herself from Qustodio, but things are blocked on my younger one's laptop. Every time I restart the laptop, sites are blocked for sometime, she does something again to unblock herself. So I had to manually block a bunch on in appropriate domains that I am aware of via /etc/hosts.

I think once kids grow up (11y+ in my personal case), they don't like us to know what they are doing online. They wouldn't want you to be around when they chat with their friends etc. But whenever there is an opportunity I try to tell them about the bad that happens online, not share their personal information, addresses, pictures online, monitor the sites they visit and block if they are inappropriate.

My way is to block the internet at study times and only let education-related site be available, block the porn sites at all times for them, with a wifi router.

as long as the internet is on for kids, it's really hard for them to get off-hooked without some strict (technical) rules in house, talking with them did not work for us after many trying, wifi is the only thing works when it is needed(e.g. study time, or no-game time, or no-internet time).

I have been thinking this self-customized wifi might have a market actually, it worked well for us so far, once the study-mode is on, there is no way they can get around to it, not even with tor-browser or any proxy server or vpn(technically this is the hardest part, but I pulled it off), and they can actually focus on studying(these days many home work requires internet to be on, so you have to manage the sites, and you can not just turn internet off).

? How did you pull that off? Can they not just set their own DNS so you can't block them finding sites, and then if they're communicating over tor how do you even know what they're looking at?

Most impressive!

it took me 3 years to figure out(as one of my kids kept finding ways to bypass it, who was a game addict, that forced me to improve the design), it's a combination of different approaches to make the whole thing work at low cost, my kids said it is much more 'clean' comparing to their school wifi network, where they can bypass easily with some free VPN software and proxy server, and kids exchange their findings, so campus-network to them is pretty much fully open.

First thing, I know this is for when they are older, but delay access to tv and computer as much as possible.

When baby are young they look at facial interaction to build their sense of belonging, putting them on tv disrupt their normal developpement. Same things when they are a bit older, they should play with people and physical things.

When they get older we used to watch movie together and now (12yo, 13yo) they play games online but we limit the time.

I removed the phone from my son a few month ago when I discovered that he sneaked it into is room and was watching Tictoc instead of sleeping.

All those games and short video are like drugs to most kids.

On the positive side, he learned a bit of programming, 3D design by himself, we play with 3D printing, etc.

Here most kids don’t play outside anymore, we have almost given up as there is no one outside to play with them. I think the Internet have ruined a normal childhood.

My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist who works with children in Silicon Valley, including the some of the uberwealthy (Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley ranch wealthy, "would you just come with us on the jet this week" wealthy). She has also worked in pre- and post Katrina New Orleans, college towns, east coast, west coast. tropical islands. She's been around, seen kids at the absolute top and some versions of the very bottom (families living in shipping containers). I'm a physician informaticist. our kids are now 17 and 20. One is going to UCLA, the other is going to run out math at the local community college before he graduates high school.

I generally agree with the others who say if you can solve child-rearing, please let me know, we're going to be rich.

That said, the best advice I can offer is exemplify the adults you wish them to become. To the extent possible, raise children through benign neglect.

That said, screen time is the devil incarnate. You don't want your kids to be the first ones with a phone, or the last, but you should try to be as close as possible to last as you can.

The pediatric in-patient psych beds in California were full a decade ago. Californians are now filling all the psych beds in the neighboring states. It seems to hit young teen girls the worst. If you want a peds psych bed and you live in California, start looking at Denver or Omaha. I personally know two teen girls who are seeing psychiatrists or psychologists. Their younger brothers tend to follow. And two other girls in long term, out-of-state psych wards.

It's dose dependent. BEFORE they have devices (which, again, you should avoid like the plague) get Google WiFi and time-limit their access. If you own a TV, throw it away now. My wife threw ours out in 2007. Best decision ever. We eventually bought a projector, but it only works if it's dark enough ... Which is not much of the day.

Get a lockbox. Put it at the front door. Sometimes, shit's gonna get real and you'll need rules like "Devices go in the box when you get home", "Devices go in the box until homework is done", or "Devices go in the box and hour before bed". You should also have them reflect, even journal, on the experience so they concretely incorporate the knowledge of how they feel with and without the phone.

Once they are in either middle school or high school, encourage them to take notes in bound notebooks. My daughter prefers spiral college rule 8x11, my son prefers Leuchtturm A5 color-coded by subject. Tell them you will keep those notebooks for them until they are old enough to store them themselves.

Encourage paper books.

Buy subscriptions and shun any company that serves ads despite having paid for the subscription.

Take long walks. Get a dog. Get two. Take your kids out into the world. A lot. Every weekend.

Fuck kids sports. My daughter's gymnastics coach broke the Nasser story. Fuck kids sports. The adults are awful. High school sports are pretty healthy. JV is fine. Kids need a lifelong love of exercise, not ACL repairs in high school (record I've heard is a girl who got 7 ACL repairs before graduating college).

I see posts like this about all the rules and pitfalls or raising (functional?) children these days, and I just wonder - why are people doing it? What do they want for their children to do in the world? I couldn't enforce this level of discipline on myself, let alone a child. I suppose I'm happy someone is raising the future laborers and tax payers that I might rely upon someday, but the whole thing just looks very dreary and grim to me.

Having kids was the best decision of my life. They are wonderful beyond compare and will lead the world. My wife, the kids, and I are all thriving. But we are just starting to exit the shitshow of teenage years and let me tell you, the internet has made childhood insane. Like Meow Wolf with live ammunition, stripers, and cocaine.

"Be the adults that you want your kids to become" is the best advice. My parents would just pull the wifi plug, I think that works well since its a rule that applies to everyone. kids sports that are uber-competitive suck. stuff like little league can be good, it all depends on the coach and the community.

There's some good info in here, but drowned out by hysteria. Might want to tone it down a notch.

I thought about that when I posted it. Here's the issue: "Hey bro, stay away from the edge" is not the advice you need to hear while walking blindfolded toward a cliff. "Stop! Stop! Stop!" is the correct advice. No matter how hysterical it might sound to the blind-folded person.

The magnitude and irreversibility of the consequences matter.

Screentime and blocking/filtering are easier than a lock box, no? I don't understand the last paragraph, sounds like kid sports equals molestation.

During the pandemic, I refurbished two old laptops for my kids to use while my wife and I worked during the day.

They play mostly Roblox and Minecraft. I don’t monitor everything they do, but I do check in.

I give them each $5/mo in Roblox money (robux). They can spend it all as soon as they get it, or save it. But that’s all they get.

Even though the screen time is more than I think it should be, we try and create balance by getting out every day- going to the park, to the pool, running errands together, weekend camping trips…

I’ve tried different variations on screen-time, but the truth is it varies enough for us that it doesn’t seem worth it to police it. Some days end up being screen heavy. Some days the screens don’t even get turned on.

In any case, do what you think is right, keep learning as you go, and don’t be too hard on yourself when you inevitably make a mistake.

Before covid each child had a certain amount of time they could go online each day, enforced by the router. During lockdown I took the limit away and we were all basically glued to it.

Now the router turns the Internet off at a certain time each night for the whole house, forcing me to go to bed.

Ideally, this should not be the responsibility of the parent. Mainly because it’s practically impossible to protect every kid in a household-by-household basis. Ideally, the government should have strict restrictions on what content providers are allowed to show children.

I’ve seen two kids practically destroyed by these devices, by the inaction of myself and my society. I thought that because I handled computers and later Internet just fine, that they could do it just as well. I think I underestimated the level of the danger by a huge margin.

I have two more kids who are yet mostly unharmed, and due to this experience, I will clamp down on their device use in a much more drastic manner.

If all the other kids were eating poison, would you want yours to eat it too? Do you really want a corporation, whose express purpose is to turn your child into a shopaholic by the age of 10, to raise your kid? Do you really want your child to have no connection to themselves through "influencer" level indoctrination? Is infinte scroll really worth investing the best years of your child's life in?

I gave my daughter a Nokia flip phone, she soon became part of the family again.

You don't have to buy into the idea that exposing innocent, defenseless people to rapacious corporations is a question of freedom. Its bullshit. Unsubscribe.

Nobody can help you here. They would get a Nobel prize if they knew how to raise kids. By having kids you accept all risks involved, to both your kids and yourself.

There is no silver bullet.

As always, going for education is the only thing you can do to reduce risks.

There is always a silver bullet. There just isn't always a werewolf.

To all the opinions already posted I will add just one more: none of it was given by people who know you and your kids.

They are unique and will have a set of natural and nurtured skills that are critically important when dealing with the social and psychological cornucopia that is the Internet.

This isn’t something where we have a lot good replicated research from which to draw conclusions.

We can all provide our own experience in an honest attempt to help but it will be your family that has to figure this out regardless.

Give yourself and your children the grace to make some mistakes on this journey. That you care enough to be concerned is a sign that you are a good parent.

Every child is different. As parent only you can make the right decision in context. We select and watch film together unless its clearly kids content. Personally I do not encourage spending. Money is a vile thing.

Every child is different, but surely there are patterns and broad commonalities. Surely you should guard your children from heroin and meth and there are some nasty and destructive content on the internet that couldn't possibly be a good choice for any child to consume. When should your kindergartener start consuming snuff pornography? Answer: they a shouldn't, lest we wish a million serialer killers to bloom.

Every troll is different. Lest none of them starve, feed them all.

So hard to balance both.

For my young kids ( under 10 ), I am very strict on what they can see and do online. Screen time, CleanBrowsing, and app restrictions enabled.

For my teenager, it is a bit different. More conversation, more privacy and more spending time teaching her about computers, security, privacy, etc. She chose to install CleanBrowsing, an ad blocker, all on her own to protect herself.

Good luck!

i have a daughter(11)

* i check her feed (together with her) on youtube/instagram once a week for toxic videos, and teach her how to manipulate her feed; either she modifies the feed or the feed modifies her

* i encourage her to pay for the apps/games, for skins, battle passes etc, and if there is 'pay to remove ads' functionality i always pay

* i have a good pi-hole setup at home blocking malware/adult sites etc

* i allow her to watch 3-4 hours of youtube per day (but long videos, longer than 10 minutes per video)

* i allow and encourage her to play video games as much as she wants, but real games, like spiderman on ps4 or fortnite, no lootbox shit

* i dont allow tiktok and youtube shorts for more than 10 minutes per day (enough so she links sent by her friends)

* apps and purchases are with approval, but for each app she has to tell me how this app is making money out of her, or for each purchase she has to explain how is the thing she is buying valuable to her

~4 hours a day? What about homework and fresh air?

I like the lessons however.

its school vacation now, and its like 40 degrees outside

watching youtube and crunchyroll for 4 hours is not the worst

i remember at this age when i was not ouside i could watch cow and chicken marathon for like 8 hours straight :)

Some may like and some may dislike this solution. Sharing in case automating some of these challenges using smart DNS is useful for your use case.

https://github.com/1stOctet/YouWillUnderstandWhenYouAreOlder...

Reading these comments it’s clear there is no consensus and that this is a crisis of sorts that has gone largely unrecognized.

Tech companies are innovating faster than parenting wisdom can evolve. New challenges on the horizon with the metaverse, AI, and an increasing share of products that can only function connected to the Internet.

There's a whole book about this, FWIW:

"Screenwise", by Devorah Heitner (see https://devorahheitner.com/screenwise/).

Being intrusive just trains your kids to be sneaky. Stay aware of what motivates them and talk to them about what theyre doing on their devices.

Start early because this is something thats hard to do without a good foundation.

All I can say is, I grew up in the 80s and that means no internet. I come from a working class family. The neighbor was an architect who had a C64. Because of that I got interested in computers at the age of 8. Age 10 my dad bought me a CPC 464. I learned that BASIC and wrote a graph that displayed a static set of numbers, kind of a stock exchange graph. I had a deal with my dad that he'd pay me if I managed to write this and complete it. He paid. Later I got a C64 because of games. Also the Final Cartridge 1. It had the ability to freeze execution, a memory monitor and assembler editor. I cracked my 1st game at the age of 11. One year later I wrote cracktros and linked them with my cracked games. I also used it to cheat in games. However I never did professional piracy. I only distributed the disks locally among friends. It was really amazing seeing one of my cracktros years later at someone's C64, a guy I never knew.

Nowadays the playing field is different. The internet isn't real life. I have never witnessed such hostility in real life that I have on the internet. But it is now part of life. And it's full of junk. But you can't shield your kid from it. It will have to deal with it sooner or later. But... I still had a somewhat normal childhood, exploring nature, building tree houses and such. If your kid spends all its time in front of a screen, it will never experience or learn about the real reality, not the fake interreality. Already the rudeness of the internet is changing real life. Because people get used to be rude because they're sheltered from repercussions on the net, but get used to that behavior in rl.

To make it short, I was not supervised or monitored. I had great grades in school without learning. Just listening to what the teachers had to say was enough to make it through school with an American B result in the end, without ever learning for a single test. I would've liked if my parents pushed me a little bit. That B could've been an A if I tried. But I really enjoyed my freedom and when the internet came 1995 I enjoyed the freedom I had there. The internet was something that wasn't on the mainstream people's radar. It was my refugee from real life and its harsh, controlling rules. Over the years it turned into this trashpile that's the complete opposite of what it was. It's now used to spy on you and to monitor you and everyone. What was once a dream of freedom and progress is now a tool for oppression and used to spread nationalism and racism or let's put it like that... reality has caught up with it and made it part of its ecosystem only without the barriers of decent behavior toward each other. But then again it's just a medium. The way I live my life and have lived it in the past 25 years was like a slave, sitting in front of a computer screen writing things in a made up world, because I need to earn money to live or rather to perpetuate this slave existence.

I often wonder if I had a child what I would teach it in regards to the internet. Probably that it can be a dangerous place, just like the real world. I would not prohibit its use or have dedicated "screen time". But I would not allow purchases. If they manage to make their own money in it, of course they could spend it any way they want. I would urge them to go outside and play vs spending time in front of the computer. Nowadays you have your computer with you. I would explain why, with every decision I do, so the kid understands why I do what I do and why it should as well. And sometimes I would have to be the authority, because that's life.

My dad said once, "I don't want to be your dad, but a friend". That is not what I wanted. I wanted a dad, friends I could always have, but only 1 dad. I think he said that so it was easier for him to accept his role. I'm not good with kids either or other people. When I was younger I hated chit chat or smalltalk. Most jokes were not funny to me. I always admired Mr. Spock for being cold and logical. When things wouldn't go my way instead of having emotional outbursts, like it did when I was younger I would get cold and robot like and express my disagreement that way. So yeah, of course play with the kid if that's what makes you happy, because if you do it only because you think it's good for the kid, then it's superficial and bad for both. In the end it's just another human, so what do you do with other humans? With your child you have more in common than with other humans. It learns from you, copies you, your good and your bad. Whatever you do, be honest. No, never mess with them and their friends. They're theirs friends, their relationships, not yours. Of course if you see something that is not ok, talk about it. In the end you're the parent.

Communication is everything. Talk talk talk. Remember when you were young? Spot stressing about it and just go with it.

You probably want Circle[0] that works via ARP spoofing.

[0]: https://meetcircle.com/

Is there an open source / Raspberry Pi version of this?

Ah, those are good questions. It really strikes me as a search for nuance and forethought that you're sharing, too. If so, one natural blind spot here is going to be the dichotomy of 1) an abscence of clearly-drawn lines and 2) a tendency to draw lines too firmly, too late or in a poorly calibrated way. It can be helpful to be aware of that, so you can more easily avoid swingy behaviors and positions that feel less authentic or even less loving.

One of the transcendant superpowers of nuance is not just that it's deep and considerate of all sorts of factors and outcomes, but that it also helps people understand better where and how to draw lines in given situations. This is really cool and helpful, even if it has to be used kinda faster than people may be aware, and in little prospective doses.

So, perhaps one of the best nuanced things you could do to pass along this gift of yours is to share with your children why you draw a line at outright snooping, and ask them what they think about how they use the internet for example (or their money, or...). What you'll be doing here is passing on a subjective perceptual quality factor in your inquiries and personal development, not just a lesson on inappropriate behavior, or whatever. This is pretty huge by itself! Developmental vitamins for your kids, basically. (A lot of what's inappropriate on the internet also has a side that would then naturally feel jarring or somehow off to a kid raised with those vitamins, IMO.)

You'll also have a lot of other opportunities to take in relevant hints as your kids continue to develop, so this is more like a set of questions to revisit over time, and you'll likely observe changes to the set of questions. For that reason I would recommend organizing your own approach digitally or on paper, keeping your personoal philosophy and technique in this area working & developing.

A danger point in this kind of consideration is the dichotomy of thought: "Do I X, or don't I X," for example. These questions are always begging for some rephrasing or new vocabulary. Sometimes it helps to first define the terms and the problems in depth, and second (mentioned briefly above as well) to involve the children in what is effectively you educating yourself. Do they see it as a problem? How would they phrase it? What does that teach you about how they learn best? What insights might it give you about their gifts?

"Aww that's nuthin dad" vs. "That's really scary to think about" can indicate two completely different sets of cognitive gifts at work.

Personally I grew up with a parental dichotomy of sorts. I had one snoopy parent and another who was very lax. To me as someone with kind of ridiculously high personal ethical standards, even as a kid, the snoopy parent made things so much worse. I realized that I could be an absolute angel, and that parent would _still_ find something to pin on me anyway. For example when I was 9 years old, they found a trash bag full of very-adult magazines at a construction site a couple blocks from our house, brought the whole huge muddy bag home, and accused me of hiding my stash over there! (Makes me laugh to this day, but it was also extremely hurtful)

However, this same parent could spot some things that other people just couldn't see--they had an amazing general perceptual ability even if it was overused when it came to some guessing games close to home. And so they actually intervened in some pretty amazing moments, like when our family doctor was really struggling in life, this parent was one of the only one of his friends to notice the signs and intervened to help him out before things got really bad.

Anyway, just some examples of how a parenting gift can also be a huge liability, especially when it turns things into this dichotomy, like "did you or didn't you" vs "hey look, what do you think of this situation, here's why I struggle". Everything we think is so great about ourselves, as parents, our kids have ways of demonstrating is just a fail in other ways. Even or especially if they have the diversity of mind to disagree with us, chances are they have a different set of natural tools, approaches, thought patterns, or other solutions that could also be really effective.

I'm assuming you feel like you have adequate access to swaths of professionals who can help you out along the road as well. Good luck.

This is akin to dropping off your kids in Times Square NYC with a twenty. I'd rethink it.

The privacy you mention does not exist online. All the "good spots" are run by surveillance capitalism in bed with the government. Kids need privacy from these entities, not privacy from their parents until mid-late teens.

Two daughters, ages 6 and 9. We use Google Family Link. They have Netflix, no YouTube (or YT Kids, as it can't be trusted). Websites are approve-only. Apps are approve-only and only premium stuff without ads and IAP. They get half hour each a day for fun, and whatever extra they need for homework.

It wasn't always like this (apart from the 30m limit). We "trusted" them, and have very open relationships and talk about everything. They talked about the searches they were doing (eg inspiration for things to draw) and always asked before installing anything.

But then one day I noticed the older one suddenly exiting YouTube when I enter the room. And she seemed sad. This was over a few days. Bit quieter, sadder, bit more skittish about what she does on her tablet.

One night when she was in bed, I took her tablet and loaded up my activity.google.com And oh my dog, I was dumbfounded by what I saw. Videos like "boy with terminal cancer dying in front of your eyes" and worse. Searches for mermaids (initially for art inspiration) which eventually became searches for boobs, which eventually became searches for boy+girl naughty things. (Thank Christ we at least had safe search enabled, but some pencil sketches of really dodgy stuff leaked through.) And this game where you play rock/paper/scissors and the boy/girl slowly undresses (toon, but still). She also left comments on YouTube, stuff like "I love how you draw", but luckily no-one latched onto how old she me be to start grooming her.

This happened over the space of about 8 weeks, but it's very insidious, the progressively more risque things that they get exposed to.

Fck social networks, and fck their algorithms. Their niece, now 18, suffered all manner of disorders and anorexia over the years after being given free reign, by very loving parents, with very open communication.

And here we are thinking we were being safer with our few extra policies. Not anymore. It's full lockdown from now on.

They're young enough to have taken the new rules well. They can still watch their fav Netflix shows, and still get to play their favourite games (self-hosted/private Minecraft server, thank you very much), so they're happy. But it's without all the insidious dangers that even well-intentioned parents might miss.

We spoke to her very carefully and lovingly about the dodgy stuff she saw, and she said she heard about the rock/paper/scissors game in school (private school in English countryside; this shit can crop up anywhere). The videos came via ads, and suggested content. So, luckily all is well now.

We're about to talk to the school about this whole ordeal, and really want to urge everyone to take a closer look at what the little ones get up to.

I have contemplated this although I'm not yet in a position to face it myself. But I can draw on my own experiences seeing the modern, engineered-experience internet gradually grow up day by day.

The critical thing, I think, is not to hide them from the bad and act like the entire job is done - because then at some point later, you open the door and shove them through it saying "ok, you're ready kid" and they aren't - but to expose them and prepare them in ways of "extracting more from less" - to feel self-sufficient so that they don't get stuck in a bad habit. So blocking can be used as part of the solution, but it has to come with some alternatives. What we're looking at with our information society verges on "basic life skills." The way of the algorithm is to leave you slightly unsatisfied and clicking into the next video, sharing more than you need to, begging for attention. What is the way around it? How does one train themselves to stay safe online in the same way that one learns to tie shoelaces? (I've known adults who gave up on tying their shoelaces. It is a pitiful sight.)

Well, you can visibly take up a hobby of media analysis and philosophical critique. Take the content, identify how it works, and add your critique. If it's entertainment, you can look for technical breakdowns of how it works. If it's politics, find the part of the argument that is a contradiction, because all ideologies have them. And that can be the dinner discussion. Doing that week after week for years will give them an awareness of media that they won't acknowledge as anything special, but will reveal itself abruptly when they start calling out their friends for consuming trash and getting into vicious arguments as a result. And then they can learn to not read their replies. Remember, we're looking towards "what happens after you let them out the door". One path leads them towards being employed as someone's intellectual footsoldier, regurgitating whatever memetic information is out there and living a life that is not entirely their own. Another is to give them exits and ways of being that are genuine to their inclination. Working on yourself and your issues gives them the example to follow, so always look to do "things for myself that my kids can also learn from". Like, my dad had a focus on healthy diet and exercise, my mom did not. Guess which one I followed? My dad, of course. Not immediately in every sense, because I also tried mom's ideas, but I was aware of it and grew towards it. That's what saves a person.

And so...also give them books that are disconnected from the online experience, the "good books" that nobody talks about but everyone recommends, in all subjects. There are a lot of them, and the level of content is so far beyond the average reaction Youtuber. And there are really good Youtubers too, who usually aren't doing clickbait and so aren't the most polished or popular. You can download and archive those, and that will be fine up through the grade school years. But you have to keep up with the subjects that they're interested in, and this tends to shift around really quickly until they're near adult age. And often people just can't hear things unless they like who's saying it, so some valuable advice will inevitably be overlooked. "Youth is wasted on the young" is a basic rule. So you have to not look at it in terms of bringing up their averages. If they grow up knowing "here are some good ways to live" and they still reject all of them, that's not the end of the story, and they may come around in time.

Here's my thoughts.

> - What fraction of their online time should I sit with them?

I try to spend any time I'm not doing something like housework or whatever with my kid. But ultimately (and you're going to hear this repeated) I ask her if I can join. I will state "ok I've finished my chores can I come and hang out with you?" She usually says yes. But I make sure to emphasize that I was doing chores as to give context and to also normalise the idea that when you do chores there's no tv or anything else. (music is fine)

> - Do I play all video games with them or should they have some of "their own"?

I let my daughter drive this... Almost always she wants me to play a multiplayer game with me. But about 20% or more she wants to play something by herself. So I give her that space.

> - Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

Yes and No... We have a calendar on the wall, and every night before bed we do a ritual.. if she was a good girl she gets to color in the day green, if she wasn't good, then she colors it in red. If there's less than 5 red days then she can chose something to have... Last month was a pokemon game for her switch.

That said... I have setup our online consoles so if she wants to buy something it sends me a message, and I approve it. This never happens, as I do the purchasing. But it's an option you can consider.

Finally on our Xbox, Game pass is amazing.. she knows if she sees something in game pass she's free to download it and play..

> - Do I allow them to use up all of their money even as a mistake, or do I set up a limit?

Depends on the age of the kid. If they understand the idea of money, you should probably setup goal oriented systems.. so do X and get $Y, it's important for them to learn how to earn money, and the value of money.

If they are too young to understand money.. then a behaviour based system such as my red day green day calendar system.

> - Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?

No, screen time is a stupid fear a bunch of people have. It's just the next dumb panic. Our grandparents had it when our parents were put in front of the TV. I'm guessing if you go back far enough there was probably panics about kids sitting in front of the radio.

Screen time is dumb. However the real issue is what they are doing..

There should be some educational component.... BUT remember that everyone needs downtime.. you cannot expect your kid to go 100% education all the time....think about us at work, we need to browse the web or table tennis or whatever to have a mental break. So do kids.

0.2 years old. Congratulations, by the way! Mine is 1.5 years old. He has 2 iPhones, 1 iPad and one MacBook Air. All "inherited" stuff. Luckily he is not really interested in the screens and more of how they feel like physically. I will need to plan how to avoid him spending too much time on devices. Luckily we have a huge yard with lots of outside activities, so that mitigates the risk a little.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com