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Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

I still think that treating the problem as screen time is the wrong approach. It is too low resolution. What happens on the screen matters. Many parents end up using screen time as a very blunt tool because we simply lack better tools.

But curating content as a family is close to unfeasible because it goes against sponsored algorithmic curation to which others are still exposed and once a kid is socialized they face the problem of peer pressure.

Even if you have a private Jellyfin server that automatically downloads approved fresh content, kids will still complain they do not have access to Youtube like other kids. And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.

I find that caring parents are put in an impossible position of at the same time trying to maintain trust and also be a curator and censor.

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Caring parents aren't in an impossible situation. The problem is that we have given up on the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Corporations have, intentionally or not, contributed heavily to the destruction of our villages, physical and online. I think with just five sets of parents sharing a similar worldview, it would very practical for them to curate enough good educational content for all their kids. Having four other families on the same program in their own community will reinforce to the kids that the parents aren't antagonists, but that this is what their mini-"society" just does regularly, and so mitigate resentment.

> And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.

Good, then you can teach them to subvert you productively. Keep the tablet locked down, but put an unlocked Linux machine in the house and tell them they can watch whatever they want in Firefox. Once they've done that, make them launch Firefox from the command line. Once that's mastered, make them connect to the wifi manually. Then make them start the DE manually. Then make them configure the router to get online. Then disassemble the PC and force them to put it together. Better to learn computer literacy skills in the process than just be a drooling, gormless consumer.

Incredibly based

> [Fifth grade classmate] Did you watch the new Wednesday episode yesterday?

> [My kid] I could only catch the last half hour, it took a little longer than I thought to solder all the components on the TV's motherboard before I could turn it on again. The real issue is getting the forge hot enough to heat up the screwdriver I use as a soldering iron...

I’m not sure that slicing yourself up assembling a machine is part of computer literacy. If job interviews are anything to go by, computer literacy is a familiarity with trash apps like Teams.

Having their concentration broken 100 times an hour with surprise egg content will prepare them well for a life on Teams.

This is why it is simpler to set time limits and let the kids do what they want. It’s too much management and friction and negotiation otherwise. For now, I’ve done so anyway: games (even dumb ones) are fine but video is only available under special circumstances (e.g. on an airplane). I’m sure even this very coarse line will eventually erode though.

We had the same rule, and modified it to include type of games. Phone games have time limits, unless it's things like Dragonbox, flow free, or other "educational" games (at least games that require some kind of thinking) approved by us beforehand, including minecraft. Because 99.999% of games for children are just absolute trash stuffed full of ads.

Any PC game that is age appropriate gets a pass, but only if it's evening and we're inside already, or if it's really shitty outside.

As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way. So much technology today is meant to be set and forget. I had my oldest build a linux pc last year, and that seemed to pique his interest, but it was short lived, because so much is just apps and consumption with no backend. Even age appropriate apps for programming and learning about that sort of thing are very boxed in.

> As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way.

Let me know if you ever figure out - I feel I'll be facing the same problem in the next few years.

From my tech person perspective, I agree with your summary: advances in computer tech and consumer product design have done away with tinkering: where it isn't actively discouraged, it's still hard and doesn't seem that fun anymore.

Yes, people will bring up BBC Micro and those 8-bit handheld boards and Arduinos - but the truth is, even if they replicate the experience of 20-30 years ago somewhat, a big part of the motivation (to me) was knowing you're doing something unique, that you can't just trivially buy a ready-made product that does the same thing but much better.

I feel you can't get people to "tinker" in general - this happens when they have a goal and tinkering is the best way to achieve it. For me as a kid, this was building model rockets and writing video games - it's what got me to do electronics and programming. Without such goals, I wouldn't sustain my interest in learning and playing with these things.

And why should tinkering be easy ? The whole point of it is understanding things beyond the initial use and this is the mindset that, I believe, only handful of people have (like one in ten). I distinctly remember that when I was tinkering in high school with things most of my peers were tinkering with people (a.k.a living life). So maybe, just maybe, it does not really matter if tinkering is easy or not - because its mostly character that decides if You will be into it or not (I subscribe more to nature then nurture side).

And I honestly question if my children should waste their life on things instead of people.

I'm not a kid now :) but I tinkered a lot with tech as a kid and still do today as an adult.

Most of that came from the fact that I didn't have a lot of the stuff others had - no cable TV, outdated computer, etc. Thus the tinkering came out of necessity and over time I started to like it. That stuff broke constantly and I remember searching for troubleshooting info on school computers to bring home and try.

I did have the Internet though, and soon began exploring Linux, finding ways to make the computer faster, learning to repair secondhand equipment, and so forth. Not having easily accessible entertainment also had the bonus of getting me into other hobbies like writing, drawing, and music which I still do today. The more you do these things, the more you like them - and the satisfaction of making or fixing something is always greater than mindless consumption.

And before you ask - yes, my social life suffered a bit as I couldn't play the games others played, talk about the shows they watched, etc. I knew many other kids who were "good" with tech, but they didn't really have the motivation to tinker as they could easily buy stuff that just worked.

I think the solution wrt youtube would be supervised browsing and then adding approved videos to jellyfin/plex. or even a folder on their device if you don't want to get fancy.

above all, I would try explaining how media sites try to capture your attention and helping kids recognize when it's happening. easier said than done of course.

I think "screen time" is this generation's "Dungeons and Dragons" boogeyman. Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way, but people really aren't articulating how. What's the mechanism, and how did it differ from similar kids entertainment of the past? Is "Algorithmically Generated Spiderman/Frozen Mashup #45501" or "Streamer babbling on about nothing" really that much worse for an 8 year old than the crappy cartoons I grew up on in the '80s?

Our household has pretty simple rules. Keep your grades high (straight A's, one B allowed) and kid can have as much screen time as she wants. Grades drop, and entertainment (including the dreaded screens) proportionately goes away until they come back up. That's it. We've had to limit her once, and she got the message and course corrected.

> Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way

It didn’t take a lot of My Little Pony before my child’s accent whet from that of a New Zealand child to whatever the accent is that the horses have (Texan?).

Yeah, there is some truth to your D&D scaremongering analogy, tho I don't think anyone is calling for parents to lock arms and drive Satan out of the Apple Store.

I think there is a big difference in the devices and content of yesteryear and the magic phones filled with an unlimited library of today. Eventually the cartoons would end and we would emerge bleary-eyed into the daylight.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a quantitative difference in the life outcomes between kids who were given firm boundaries by their parents and kids whose parents just gave up and let them watch any old shit. We are running this experiment on live humans, so time will tell.

Curating content is also borderline illegal because the only effective solution is synonymous with copyright violation.

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