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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids.

To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.

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Streaming services in particular are driving me crazy. They don't have parental controls. Not really. You can make a kids account or whatever but you can't dictate what can or can't be seen.

I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents.

edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.

You can ban individual shows in kids' Netflix.

I can't find it, despite trying for the last ~10 minutes.

edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!

I had to look that up on the web recently, too. To remove some shows that have recently seen heavy rotation, or are otherwise too annoying for the parents.

Sounds just as useless, I'd expect "allow these shows" and not "oh, I need to ban 500"

Depends on your use case.

We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.

I see. I don't have kids but from what friends have told me, something like "only allow Peppa Pig and Sesame Street" sounds kinda useful. Guess it depends on the age.

For us, it's the opposite. We specifically want to ban Peppa Pig, because that piglet is damn annoying to listen to (and mean, especially to her dad). Same goes for Cocomelon.

Youtube Kids lets you set a whitelist, but I found that too much of a hassle. I don't mind if the toddler finds new things to watch. But she's also under light supervision when using the phone. (Ie in the same room, but not being constantly hovered over.)

> they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.

Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.

I’m curious what you think parental controls are missing that are needed by parents?

Templated, reusable schedules so I don’t have to set up downtime for each kid individually. Allow overrides for holidays etc.

Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable.

Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff.

More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work.

Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.

The ability to make all content opt-in instead of opt-out would get you 90% of the way there. Very few services that I know of offer this. Most of them offer gating by age range into all content the service considers appropriate for that age, and most allow you to block specific content as well, but all I really want for my young kids is to know exactly what content is available to them because I have added it specifically.

Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.

This. There is some fantastic stuff for kids on YouTube (most of it though is actually made for adults and is not available on YouTube kids). However, there is a tremendous amount of trash, and the recommender loves it. I wish I could add a bunch of good channels and let the kids pick their own content, but only from that list.

Forced IRC only hours.

Vastly smoother settings adjustment or profile selection per combo of kid/activity/device.

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