Parental controls? What parental controls? | Hacker News Reader

Parental controls? What parental controls?

gabrielsieben.tech

131 pointsgjsman-1000113 comments

This is because software engineers never actually use devices that have parental controls enabled. Most parents either don’t enable the controls, or never use devices while those controls are active. It’s a user experience that is not tested in real world conditions very much.

And the people that do experience it, children, obviously don’t want it enabled whether it works or not. They’re not going to go reporting bugs, lol! What parents consider bugs are actually features for the children.

Only the kind of adult that wrote this blog post actually uses devices that have parental controls enabled, and sees how they actually work.

The author suggests that companies should make their parental controls work to stave off government regulation. I think there’s actually a midway solution.

I don’t want to see a government put its hand on the wheel and do the controls themselves. Instead, the government should regulate the companies and use the force of law to get them to make their parental controls work. Create a standard for parental control features that must be offered, tested, and working. If a platform doesn’t have the controls available that actually work, then you can’t sell it.

If a government tells Apple it can’t sell iPhones until it fixes these problems with screen time, or that Nintendo can’t sell switches until it fixes their issues, then you can be damn sure they’ll be fixed within the week.

> This is because software engineers never actually use devices that have parental controls enabled

Well, I do. Back when I was ~13 years-old I tried to block one of my parent from visiting gambling sites with the parental control feature in Internet Explorer ~6 so they can't download virus, and I do have Software Engineer in my job title. Unless of course by "software engineers" you specifically mean the period of life after one been granted with that title, then in that case you won.

Of course, my parental control efforts never worked. As many security researchers has suggested in many different ways, it is hard to deploy security if the attacker can touch the hardware. One's parent can just pay someone to reinstall the OS, removing every trace of your security measures along with all the projects that you've saved on that computer. In addition to that, the parent could also administer a reasonable dose of beating enough to convince you to not deploy any similar measures on the newly installed pirated OS ever again, and given the fact that the OS is already preloaded with adware and viruses, there is no point of doing that anyways, so you give up with them.

Love that story! Parental controls: for controlling your parent. I guess in that mode, it would additionally have to disguise itself or just pretend network errors, so the child does not get a beating.

In a sane society, beating your kids is an express one-way ticket to being an ex-parent.

Yes of course, but sub in any other kind of punishment then.

> This is because software engineers never actually use devices that have parental controls enabled.

Yeah, it’s super-obvious. In many cases they’ve put work into implementing crap that’s useless without a lot more work to add more features… or they could have done something much simpler and it’d at least be a lot better than what they’ve actually done.

After apple moved iphone power button from the top to the side of the device - most times i try to turn off my phone one-handed - i take a screenshot instead.

My camera roll is full of screenshots of my lock screen and occasional random website.

I was going to say - do they use their own devices? But if they don’t - what do they use? I mean it’s an iphone…

Cynically: you should not want to switch off your device, at least not often, so this function is deprioritized. If you want it off for reasons other than long-term storage, something in the design is lacking.

Well, maybe it wasn’t clear from my description, but by attempting to press the power button my intention is not to “power it down”, but rather to “lock” it.

…which I do countless times a day, and apple put their “screenshot” combination buttons on opposite sides of the screen, EXACTLY where I hold it.

Because if I don’t - it butt-dials random numbers. And by random - I don’t mean digits, but something a lot worse - a russian roulette of employers, acquaintances, municipal services, businesses or anything else that happens to be in recent calls, or contacts, or numbers that dialed me, or that I dialed, or… you get the idea.

One of the best practices endorsed by the us government to protect yourself from persistent malware on iPhone is to power it off and on periodically: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Sep/16/2002855921/-1/-1/0/MOB...

Software this complex needs regular reboots to clear caches and resource leaks.

Also many venues like cinemas, theaters or planetariums require you to turn the phone off for the duration of the performance.

Also you may need to save battery, e.g. on a long trip with no way to charge the phone.

Where has someone asked you to turn it off? IME, cinemas/theaters would at most ask you to enable airplane mode or silent mode and to not use the phone, but turning it off is an unnecessary step.

To save battery on a long trip, I combine airplane mode with low-power mode. Then my iPhone 8's battery level does not move.

I put it on silent for shows. I turn it off off for weddings and funerals, I'm taking zero chance there.

Last time? In a planetarium. The staff person insisted on everyone specifically turning all electronics with the screen off and observed the group doing that, because, paraphrasing, there's always some idiot who takes "switch off" to mean "put in airplane mode", and in this case light from the screen is by itself disturbing.

related anecdote: when my mother misplaced her phone for a few days, causing it to run out of power and shut down, she was able to charge it but she could not turn it on because she had forgotten how.

Perhaps it was a tradeoff they consciously made to benefit elsewhere in the design.

Considering how much this change annoys me - it’d make me feel better if I could tell what that benefit was.

Same goes for removing the home physical button.

I hear they are coming for the physical mute toggle next.

>>Only the kind of adult that wrote this blog post actually uses devices that have parental controls enabled, and sees how they actually work.

It seems he is 21 years old :)

Simply requiring the parental control API to be open to third parties is enough.

I use third party controls, it they’re just a VPN (on Apple devices). Severe limits there.

Here's the actual problem. Kids are cute and annoying. You love them but they will drive you nuts if you don't drain their energy and attention.

The previous solution to this was that parents booted their kids out of the house and made them play outside. This has somehow gone from normal parenting to abusive behavior that could get you arrested in some places with a possibility of losing the child.

So instead, we throw tvs, ipads, and phones at them just so we can get a modicum of quiet. Not surprisingly, each one of those is bad for the kid. The developmental problem is screen time but the scary one is strangers on the Internet. Elsa Gate upset a lot of people, and that's not the worst thing that happens.

Policing the Internet is a bad decision. Any Internet Safety Committee will eventually be staffed by the people you would least like to be there. That's especially problematic because one person's bad guy is another person's hero a lot of the time. Although this is the inevitable future due to increasing clamor by Internet companies for regulatory capture, it won't even be effective.

Parental controls never work. Your kid has way more time and motivation to figure out workarounds, even if the parents and the company set everything correctly. Everyone also knows that there will be at least one friend whose parents don't care. This is true whether the parental controls are local or done by a central committee.

The only solution to this mess is:

* Remove the insane laws and policies that prevent parents from letting their children play outside, especially unaccompanied.

* Educate parents on the importance of moderating and monitoring electronics use.

* Educate parents on how to educate their children about the dangers of the Internet, especially social media, pornography, and pedophiles.

* Accept that some parents don't care and will neglect their children no matter what you do. Instead, empower the parents that do care to easily and safely raise their children.

By middle school most kids are effectively required to be on their computers and/or phones on a daily basis to even just do their homework. And their friends are going to be texting. These kids are going to be on screens, regardless of playtime outside. I already have a pretty good understanding of "the importance of moderating and monitoring electronics use", and would really like the tools that help me do just those things to work better.

This is what makes me irritated when folks (like, say, on this very site) are all, “LOL just do your job, parents.”

Yeah, I’m fucking trying, but all the tech features for this are defective and this is a whole pile of extra crap that prior generations of parents didn’t have to spend time and attention on. Maybe help? By not writing software with defective or absent parental controls? Please?

God help parents who didn’t grow up doing stuff like configuring OpenBSD routers for fun. They have no hope of figuring all this out.

This is the truth!

When you have a motivated child, they have way more free time and energy to circumvent any restrictions in place. I’ve had to restrict outbound DNS, block traffic to devices at hours when kids should be asleep, and move to an allow list for web content that must get approved for time. And then we lock up devices at night.

And if I didn’t have those things in place? My son would literally stay up all night playing games, figuring out ways to bypass content filters, and who knows what else.

If you’re a parent and think, “not my kid!”, that might be true, but it probably isn’t for their friends.

And Apple’s “One more minute” feature that requires understanding undocumented, incoherent Screen Time config, screw that. If I set limits, I don’t expect my kids to be able to on-more-minute their game playing for multiple hours in a row.

I got my son a phone with an actual phone plan so blocking things at the router is sadly no longer an option.

iPhone parental controls are not sufficient. He's figured out he can just message himself videos so he can watch them when all other app access is disabled and the messages app can't be blocked.

There are so many obvious ways in which it could be improved and made easier for parents to control.

We ended up with a TCL My Flip that has a paired down Android build that allowed me to disable the browser using ADB and very limited minutes, data, and text ($25/yr on Tracphone). Our son is a middle schooler, so we like that he can contact us, but know he couldn’t handle anything that could be remotely entertaining to use. If we eventually go the iPhone route, it will probably be wireguarded back to our house or other service.

Apple does support making your own MDM profiles which provides more options than Screen Time, but the complexity is also much higher. That allows locking down DNS, apps, etc.

For Messages, you can restrict who can be contacted to just known contacts (via Screen Time) and then I think you can restrict the ability to manage contacts (though maybe that doesn’t work for the “self” contact.

After thinking about the above some more, I should point out that all of our kids are very different (both our as in my family and the greater community of parents). I have one who we could trust with anything and never have to worry about rules being broken (except by siblings who figure it out they have less restrictions than they do). We have two who might get into a little mischief or sneak some screen time here and there without controls in place. And then one who will boil oceans to bypass restrictions and break rules. Are we better parents to some than others? I don’t think so. We have a lot of different “nature” via adoption, and different early childhood “nurture”, but otherwise think we’re meeting everyone’s needs as best as we can as individuals. And the result is four very different, wonderful kids who all need slightly different guard rails in different areas of life (some behavioral, some academic, some social, etc.).

At the end of the day I often wonder if we should move to the woods and homeschool everyone but ultimately that won’t prepare them for leaving our house and going out into the world.

Move him to a phone intended for the purpose, Gabb has options.

The phone is right for all the purposes; it's not what it can do -- it's when it can do those things.

The media has been pushing for years that playing outside is dangerous and to be punished.

It's not just laws that need to change, it's public opinion.

Look, i dont have kids, so take this with a grain of salt, but even crossing the street at an interstion with clear rules, in a walkable city, is dangerous these days.

Everyone is on their phones, not paying attention. I dont know who to blame, but collectively we are kinda F'd.

Just the other day someone almost hit, while i was walking in a desiginated walking area and they just said "sorry, didnt see you." I replied in kind "duck you get off your phone"

it sucks kids cant run around and play, i did, but also we've gotten ourselves in a bad spot with screens and phone.

im not advocating anything, just saying, it sucks everwhere

Traffic accidents including kids (as well as traffic accidents in general) have been trending down for decades significantly[1]. This is also the case for virtually any safety related statistic.

It has nothing to do with reality, it's simply that helicopter parenting and neuroticism has been trending up for ages.

[1]https://seriousaccidents.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/chil...

Maybe traffic accidents including kids have been trending down because kids are spending less time outside? It can be both true that the number of accidents have decreased and that actually playing outside is more dangerous.

If helicopter parenting is trending up while traffic accidents including kids are trending down, isn’t that more likely to be evidence in favor of helicopter parenting?

Helicopter parenting doesn't account for the decrease in accidents involving adults.

Only if you optimize for survival and survival alone.

Thats an intersting chart, and i conced doesnt align with my anecdotal data. Can you like the source post or data for this data?

I dont think its the scary boogy man of people snaching kids, but really drivers just on their phones, but hard to tell.

yes here's the source: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...

is this not about crash death for children inside the vehicle?

> crash deaths occur among children traveling as passenger vehicle occupants

just like most/all auto safty crash reports are about the occupants, not the meat popsicle they might hit

as it literally says both on the page and graph, both pedestrian and occupant numbers are down, surprisingly child pedestrian deaths fell at a quicker rate.

Seventy-eight percent of child motor vehicle crash deaths in 2021 were passenger vehicle occupants, 15 percent were pedestrians, and 2 percent were bicyclists. Child pedestrian and bicyclist deaths declined by 91 and 95 percent, respectively, since 1975. Passenger vehicle child occupant deaths in 2021 were 48 percent lower than in 1975.

Would this data be affected by the number of kids trending down?

>...it sucks everwhere.

So true.

Vehicle hood heights and visibility have dropped big time, and more importantly, everyone is distracted driving.

Cars are the only reason I cannot let me just pay unattended until they are quite a bit older.

As a parent who's kid does find amazingly creative solution to working around the parental controls, I don't believe they never work. I have pretty strict parental controls which amounts to still a pretty open net but it's not nothing. Something, in this case, is better than nothing at all.

My goal is not to prevent all access to all "naughty" information that but rather to provide some control because my kid doesn't yet have fully developed self-control.

I'm not a parent but how bad is this social policing on letting your kid have a life outside? Are there actual laws against abuse that are weaponized in these situations or is it kind of a social stigma. Like I really really do not plan on over sheltering my kids unless forced to at gunpoint.

So, my state has laws on the books to explicitly protect reasonable solo outdoor play.

I still get reported by random people if my kids are outside, in our own front yard, without a visible parent watching. They call the cops, sometimes other agencies.

The police come and lecture me with a tone that I shouldn't do anything that might cause someone to call. That they shouldn't be in our own yard without direct supervision.

The agencies will sometimes come do a "wellness check" when you have enough reports against you. It's really creepy having state agencies looking for problems at your place that have nothing to do with the reports.

If you fail they can haul off your kids. Lots of rumors that they can be capricious and don't require any court proceedings.

So I don't let my kids play much outside. Nobody seems to care what is reasonable or legal.

The people I live with are extremely anxious to even let their CATS outside, there is no way anyones letting their kids run around the street anymore. It's pure social pressure.

>> Remove the insane laws and policies that prevent parents from letting their children play outside, especially unaccompanied.

Well, there's no such law where I live but I still don't quite let loose of my 10 years old kid outside, because the crowded city environment he grew in is very different from the loose countryside where I grew. What I fear most is him getting run over by a car, they're fucking everywhere. Running after a toy, riding his bike into a road crossing or just popping into the road without looking, all too probable possibilities for me to risk it.

So better inside with some Lego or what else but that can only last for so long before he gets bored out of his mind and switches to some screen.

Chances are it wouldn’t even be a car car, more like a “truck” (SUV, crossover). Something high off the ground with reduced ground level visibility, insanely safe for the driver so they feel safe driving at higher speeds.

Vehicles which also tend to be highly popular with families. The tragic irony.

I'm so glad someone has called this out. I bought my kids Nintendo Switches and was appalled at the sad state of the Switch parental controls. No PIN locking, so my little ones can just swipe my teenager's Switch (which I don't bother with parental controls with). You can't specify "no time today" - your minimum time choice is 15 minutes. It's just plain awful.

Apple TV is just as bad- I have Apple TVs throughout the house... but there's no way to lock them down either! Want to enforce no TV until a certain hour of the morning on Saturday? Too bad!

I've just resorted to physically moving the errant devices into what we call "Switch jail" - aka my lockable network rack in the basement. Trouble is... I bought my teenage daughter a lockpicking set for Christmas... guess what happened next... I guess I should be proud of the effort!

> I bought my teenage daughter a lockpicking set for Christmas... guess what happened next

I'm surprised you didn't see that one coming. There's an old saying: "give a small boy a hammer and he will discover everything needs pounding". Lockpicks are the same: "give a teen a lockpick, and they will discover every lock needs picking".

I suggest progressively more challenging locks to hone her skills.

"This is the Lock Picking Daughter, and what I have for you today is a network cabinet with my Nintendo Switch locked inside."

Ha! I love it.

One thing I can’t believe about Apple TV is that you can’t require a PIN for all apps but an allow-list—just for all apps. This, coupled with the fact that nothing other than first-party Apple apps respect the age rating settings makes the parental controls basically useless for anything but “lock everything”.

I'm obviously a terrible parent. My 10 year old gets unfiltered access to the Internet, with no technical restrictions, and she is responsible for moderating her time spent playing and browsing. She knows what is and isn't allowed and knows I have sorcerer-like powers to verify (viewing logs). We treat her like a human being with agency, we provide boundaries and guidance, and and don't rely on technical crutches and tools. She knows there are zero strikes. She 100% knows if she abuses this trust and responsibility, she'll be in a world of shit. She also knows that she needs to consciously strike a balance between fun time and school because we expect perfection at school. She gets anything besides straight A's in school, and the hammer comes down. Hasn't had to happen yet.

You know, there's different kind of kids. Consider yourself lucky that this works for you, but please also accept that this approach may not work for others.

Who knows if it will even work for us? Parenting is the terrifying experiment where you have a very small sample size and no control group.

Brace yourself for impact, coz you will have a loota fun in about three years.

There's not always an impact coming. Some kids just behave.

I used to think like this. This book 'A nation of wimps' [1] changed my life.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1513831.A_Nation_of_Wimp...

Sounds very similar to how I grew up (1990s-2000s). Almost no form of mainstream media was restricted in our house but I would get regular warnings that if I was imitating unsavory behaviour in media (this was when "violence in media" was still a residual mainstream concern), then that cool movie or cool video game was gone. If dad decided to open the history one day and found porn then the internet was gone. They had a stake in the matter but on the whole the burden was on you not to force them to exercise it. I can't say if that will work for every child, but if you suspect they're going to grow up to be an HN reader like you and me, hey, maybe it probably would.

if your measure of successful parenting is the 100% compliance with your rules: how can your child learn if every mistake is met with harsh disciplinary measures? how can it learn when every try/misstep isnt met with guidance but a penalty? judging from your text your educational style resembles more of a bootcamp. no judgement here, but please rethink this.

Been so frustrated by the plethora of controls, their various inability to do what I want and the constant need to check the settings to make sure they didn't fail open or that I just forgot to lock something back down because my children needed access to do school and I was in a hurry and just disabled everything because it was simpler.

Adding multiple devices of different types just exacerbates the problem and made me set everything to max lockdown and only unlock on demand.

We have a switch. You can't lock it. You can set a minimum playtime of 15 minutes but then the kids sneak up to the attic and get their "free" 15 minutes of playtime in the middle of a school day. You can't set playtimes individually per kids account either.

We have a family imac and our teens have android phones so now I've got three separate family account managers to use, family link (Google), screen time (apple) and Nintendo. No, make that 4, because I also have ubiquiti networking and have a separate WiFi network for kids devices so I can block the school provided chromebooks which I otherwise have no control over.

You know what we've resorted to? Keeping devices in our bedroom and physically controlling them. Super simple, no passwords or random fail states.

Enforcing screen time in any way other than physical device security is an exercise in frustration.

With apple screen time is sometimes not counted, and sometimes counted when the screen is off. On mac especially it is basically useless. And in a multi-device scenario you cannot have the times add up across platforms, so unless you’re micromanaging they can have their full screen time allotment per platform. If you do go in for micromanaging you find that the syncing is unreliable, so the kids keep nagging to enable something that’s already enabled.

There needs to be an interoperable standard for screen time and parental controls, with pluggable management apps that allow flexibility in the rule sets, and unified views across devices, accounts and platforms. This is on the tech companies to make it happen, because these platforms are so locked down that nobody else can do it.

On the switch parental controls if you choose to set limits by day then you can choose zero minutes.

Our issue is that there is no cross platform parent control. Laptop, iPhone, switch, and let’s not forget about the TV. If I want to set a limit of screen time there is no way to just limit all time to 2 hours a day.

Yes parental controls are horribly complex and buggy. In my ideal world we'd just do away with them entirely, and not replace them with overly restrictive laws instead. As a parent I would rather spend my time actually talking with my kids about computer and internet use rather than fighting to work around these restrictive systems. Fortunately there isn't (yet!) a need to actually prove age when creating accounts in most cases.

Edit: to be fair, I can imagine how they would be useful in some cases if they didn't suck so much, so I'm sympathetic to the OP. But I'd far and away take "nothing" over what we have now.

When the APA released their guidance on the use of social media by adolescents[0] earlier this year, they cited a study[1] that described the impacts of instructive[2] (a.k.a. active) versus restrictive[3] parental mediation in preventing cyber-bullying. This study found that the use of active mediation was associated with a decrease in victimisation, whereas restrictive parental mediation was not only unhelpful, it actually increased the risk of victimisation. In the discussion section, the authors reference several other studies that also suggest restrictive parental mediation is worse than doing nothing when it comes to stopping online victimisation.

The APA appear to go out of their way in the guidance to explain that what they mean by “adult monitoring” is open coaching and discussion, not spying and blocking, but this sort of distinction seems to be missed or deliberately ignored in many discussions about online safety.

As such, the source of the problem here doesn’t appear to be that the tools are inadequate at their jobs, but rather that they’re all fundamentally the wrong tools. In this case, no amount of engineering can solve it. Given this, perhaps the question should not be “What parental controls?”, but rather, “Should these kinds of restrictive parental controls even exist?”

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104026

[2] Definition from the study: “Instructive mediation […] explicitly involves children in the process of online monitoring. For instance, a parent adopting an instructive approach might appraise their children of the potential harms of certain online material, the appropriateness of sharing personal information online, and the latent danger of interacting with strangers on social media platforms.”

[3] Also from the study: “Restrictive mediation does not directly include children in the intervention process. Rather, it involves the curtailing of cyber-routines through blocking software or parental monitoring of children's online habits and associations. Shielding children from the dangers of the Internet is given primacy over educating them about such hazards[.]”

Right, but adolescents in the study are in the age range 12 to 18, and the study specifically concerns cyberhate victimization, while the issues raised mostly concern younger kids, and include things like blocking access to online stores. (The "Kids Online Safety Act" is nominally about "kids", defined as "under the age of 13", but the bill's text mostly concerns minors, defined as "under the age of 17".)

We just installed MS Windows 11 and it's clearly trying to get your attention with its tabloid-like feed meant to draw you to their web site.

It takes time to learn media literacy, and companies should not be allowed to use the excuse that parents simply need to monitor more, while they do everything they can to get people to use their services and to buy from them, without distinguishing between 6 year olds and 60 year olds.

What is a single parent to do to provide adult monitoring for their 8 year old latchkey kid?

Make no mistake, they're not trying to pass these laws because parental controls suck. They're trying to pass these laws so they can control what we say and read on the internet.

The Heritage Foundation openly telegraphed their intent to use KOSA, should it pass, to push for classification of all transgender resources as adult content. [1]

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/24/heritage-foundation-says...

Levying fines is also fun!

I have a special needs son. Parental controls are useless. Huge swathes of legitimate content gets blocked while he can still get to horrible material I don’t want him watching. His inability to obey any rules has resulted in him losing his pc because we simply couldn’t keep plugging all the holes he was finding to sneak into YouTube. And don’t get me started on streaming services where if you let your kid watch Star Wars, they can also watch The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.

Well if anyone is interested, we're working on solving many of the problems outlined in this post. In particular our system sits in between the child and their internet, so we can do things like filter out links and social media posts before it even gets to the child's computer.

Hopefully we'll be launched in 1-2 weeks, sign up for our email list if you want! https://parentcontrols.win/

I think this is a great idea! My kids use iPads and managing their screen time works well with what iOS has on board, but I cannot control social media, as this would nearly always intrude the privacy of the kid.

Posts like these make me appreciate my parents for not bothering to do any of this nonsense. Absolutely zero care in the slightest for movie/game/music ratings, completely unfiltered internet. The only standard I was held to as a kid was "will she have nightmares if we let her watch it." Honestly there's something to the theory that if you don't make it a thing it stops being a thing.

At any point I could have put on an R rated movie, took one of my mom's cigarettes, or drank one of my dad's beers if I wanted but I didn't. For I'm sure their own amusement they even offered them to me just to watch me go bleh. And why would I -- ewwww those were boring dad movies. Hell I could have found porn but what stopped me wasn't parental controls, it was being 9 and not knowing such a thing existed. I'm still embarrassed that I never realized that that's what was behind the swinging doors at hollywood video until I was at college.

And I still remember the moment that was tossed aside too; I was like 8-9 years old, couldn't sleep and came down stairs because my dad was still up watching a movie. He must been in the bathroom or getting something from the fridge but regardless he wasn't there so I got into his chair, put on his headphones and hit play. Didn't know at the time what I was watching but it was Kill Bill and I thought it was so cool these two badass women were fighting each other. When my dad came back and caught me I was mortified so sure I was gonna get in trouble. But no, he was like, "you think this is cool?" and got our another pair of headphones so we could watch together. Big don't tell your mom I'm letting you stay up late energy. After that my dad was like I know what she's goona like and we watched the entire Alien series together and Alien 2 is still my favorite movie to this day.

Yeah, I posted this in one of these threads last time and got beaten down with sticks and swords. Oh well, I'm on a hot streak and have karma to burn, so I'll agree with you.

Parents, if you don't want your children to have internet access, then don't give it to them. If you have reached a point where that is no longer possible (eg. grade school) then it's time to figure things out. Your kids will be perambulating around recess and interacting with all the lovely publicly schooled children. You know, the nose-pickers that stole their brother's smut magazine and brag about it being in their backpack. It's horrifying! But also real-life.

I sympathize with my parents for trying to make the best environment for me growing up. I'm even happier (for my sake and theirs) that they didn't overreact when I was playing violent video games or walking in on them watching Shaun of the Dead. I'm not sure I'd be a personally confident individual without those early moments of humility between me and my parents.

That worked out well for you, but there are kids who discover horrible or inappropriate content.

It’s not natural for a 9 year old to see that and can be harmful.

Yeah, I spent years being frightened of stuff like Jurassic Park, Critters, X-Files, and even a MacGyver episode(!) That last one is where MacGyver gets lead poisoning and starts hallucinating; I must've seen that when I was, 4, 5, maybe? I remembered it when I saw it years later at the age of 12 or so (at which point it wasn't scary at all).

But around that age I did see Jurassic Park, and I spent months scared in bed – every time I heard some rumbling noise (usually just a car) I worried it might be some T-Rex or whatnot shrug. X-Files was also all the rage at the time and I always imagined aliens and whatnot peeking through my window.

It all seems profoundly silly even to me who lived through this to the point of mental illness, but kids can be really silly and have a kind of over-active imaginations that can make things scary that you or I have trouble imagining.

And all of that was before the internet. Even back in the 90s some more parental controls wouldn't be a bad idea, tailored to the personality of the child.

Why? What is going to happen to someone if they see inappropriate content?

they will learn of the existence of sex and swearwords?

No, I meant the potential to see much worse for children: hardcore porn, beheadings, horrific stuff.

No software will ever replace parenting. If you have an 8 year who needs to do homework you sit them at the kitchen table with a laptop and peek over their shoulder every 15-20 minutes. If your 8 year old is browsing porn instead of doing math you're going to notice. Better yet, sit down right next to your kid and help them.

If I worried about this, my solution would probably be more like this:

Small children (say under 8-10) get computers with zero internet access. Not even an ethernet adapter. Zero unsupervised access to the internet on other devices.

Older children (10-14) get devices with access to the internet, but first get education on what is/isn't appropriate to do/share online. I'll still check over their shoulders from time to time and everything is logged at the router. Ad blockers everywhere. Everything kept fully transparent so they know monitoring is happening and if I see requests made to questionable websites we can have a conversation about it. By now it'll be drilled into their heads that everything they do online is monitored by us, by the state, and by other companies who will sell that information to data brokers where it will end up collected into dossiers that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

Young adults (14-18) don't need parental controls and are hopefully tech savvy enough by now to get around any if I tried using them anyway.

You never woke up after your parents went to bed to watch TV? With cable you could sometimes get a clear spot in the scrambled channels.

And I assume you were not a latchkey kid, alone for hours before an adult came home?

Never left unattended for hours when a 7 year old? (When sick, and both parents need to work; or on Saturday if one parent is running errands and the other handling lawn care; or any of many situations I can think of.)

And from a rich enough family that could afford a personal device for each kid? (And no one shared or "borrowed" devices?)

Where do you even get a computer these days with zero internet access? What software will the kid use?

Your router log only handles questionable domains. Logging doesn't handle most of the issues mentioned in the article, like not wanting your 6 year old to see the "headlines of the day about how the world is on fire", or not wanting your kids to download something from the Microsoft Store.

> With cable you could sometimes get a clear spot in the scrambled channels.

I do remember that. By the time kids were old enough to bother with it, none of them were hurt by it.

> And I assume you were not a latchkey kid, alone for hours before an adult came home?

I actually was. That's how I know that older children don't need to have parents hovering over them 24/7. I didn't burn the house down, didn't join a street gang, didn't become an alcoholic, or host orgies. I was given education about dangers and how to avoid them and the freedom to develop a sense of responsibility. I didn't always listen to my parents, but I never did anything bad enough to matter either. A parent's job isn't to make it 100% impossible for kids to ever do anything, it's to prepare them to make smart choices even when you aren't around.

For smaller children (the kind you can't just leave in a house alone for hours) it's easy to keep devices where they can't get them or to temporarily disable a PC. If you leave the older kids alone, you'd just have to check up on the logs when you get back.

> And from a rich enough family that could afford a personal device for each kid?

Shared devices are even easier to monitor and control access to. A lot of families have a single shared computer in a public space (living room or den).

> Where do you even get a computer these days with zero internet access? What software will the kid use?

I'd probably give the kid one of my old ones with the NIC pulled or the port removed or epoxied, but honestly you probably don't have to go through the trouble for small kids. Disabling the interface in software is probably good enough.

As for what kind of software they could use: games/emulators, ms-paint/photoshop, office apps for writing/journals/notes/homework, an MP3 player, VLC for pre-selected/loaded movies, a comic viewer/ebook reader, AV recording software, LOGO or some other kid programing stuff, etc. A computer without internet access is still a pretty useful and entertaining device.

> Logging doesn't handle most of the issues mentioned in the article, like not wanting your 6 year old to see the "headlines of the day about how the world is on fire", or not wanting your kids to download something from the Microsoft Store.

I don't have any objection to kids seeing news, if they want to. I have an objection to news being forced on them so Bing gets disabled or (more likely) just don't use windows. Let's face it, windows is user-hostile. Even with windows is it actually impossible to disable the store or set windows to not allow random software to be installed without admin rights? For work I've got a windows machine I've set up with polices to block the store, but I assume there must be options for home users. More to the point, it's not the end of the world if the computer allows children to install something. It's my job to set boundaries and make sure the kid understands them. If I see that something got installed that shouldn't have been I can handle that by parenting the child not tweaking the OS.

> I didn't burn the house down ...

What a way to dial things up to 11.

The usual scenario is more "You can watch 30 minutes of Disney+ then you need to work on your online homework", but the kid instead watches 2 hours of Disney+, because it's easy to forget the timer when watching Ninjago.

You can't take the computer away, because schools assign online homework.

So what should you do to help the kid remember to do homework?

Some people buy a lockable drinks cabinet to keep their underage children out of the liquor supply, which is a solution for alcohol, but schools don't require students to drink.

> Shared devices are even easier to monitor and control access to. A lot of families have a single shared computer in a public space (living room or den).

The example of sharing was when using a Switch, and one kid is allowed to play M-rated titles, while the other may only play E-rated titles. That is not the same as single shared computer in a public space.

Just because a solution works for you doesn't mean it's an appropriate solution for everyone else.

Just because you don't need a lockable drinks cabinet doesn't mean it can't be appropriate for others.

> but I assume there must be options for home users

As far as I can tell, there is not.

Since Windows is user-hostile, can/should we legislate for less hostility?

The overlying point of the article is that you can't simply dismiss the heavy hand of government intervention by saying that parental controls exist and are enough.

If you don't want parental controls, that's fine. But you must realize that if the system providers don't be careful, the government will use it as an excuse to step in.

> The usual scenario is more "You can watch 30 minutes of Disney+ then you need to work on your online homework", but the kid instead watches 2 hours of Disney+, because it's easy to forget the timer when watching Ninjago.

That's a parenting problem though, not a technology problem. Either the kid's homework is getting done or it isn't.

> You can't take the computer away, because schools assign online homework.

Young kids can get access to a computer with an internet connection while you're there watching over them. Older kids can do their homework and the logs will tell you if they were doing other things when they should have been studying.

> So what should you do to help the kid remember to do homework?

That problem has existed long before computers. The oldest solutions still work too, but a lot of it comes down to parents nagging. It's just part of the long and natural process of teaching kids how to manage their time.

> Some people buy a lockable drinks cabinet to keep their underage children out of the liquor supply, which is a solution for alcohol, but schools don't require students to drink.

If schools did require kids to drink alcohol it'd be reasonable for parents to unlock the cabinet while the kids were being watched and to serve them what they need before locking it up again. Same with computers. No student in elementary/middle school needs 24 hour access to the internet to be successful in class.

> The example of sharing was when using a Switch, and one kid is allowed to play M-rated titles, while the other may only play E-rated titles. That is not the same as single shared computer in a public space.

That's a valid concern, and I'm disappointed that Nintendo doesn't provide profiles for their devices, but it's still an easy problem for parents to solve. Kids who aren't old enough to play adult video games don't get unsupervised access to devices with adult video games installed.

No kid is going to die if they don't have 24 hour access to their gameboy. It could even be a great opportunity to give older siblings responsibility by allowing them unrestricted access to the device if they can make sure to keep it out of the hands of the younger ones. I think a lot of older kids in that situation would be concerned about their younger siblings messing with their saves anyway.

> Just because a solution works for you doesn't mean it's an appropriate solution for everyone else.

That's the truth. Parents have to figure out what will work for them, but they can't expect software to do their job for them. What they should expect is that companies aren't making software that makes their job harder, or undermines their efforts.

> Since Windows is user-hostile, can/should we legislate for less hostility?

We agree here. What MS gets away with these days is insane. I have no doubt that they're collecting a ton of our children's data. I think government regulation and software both have roles to play in protecting kids, and helping parents raise them, but none of that should come at the cost of freedom/privacy for adults. Anything that would mean that adults are restricted from accessing content they want, or that forces them to hand over their personal data to prove their age and identity in order get that access goes too far. Generally, I suspect that we'll all be a lot better off if parents spent more time teaching children how to behave rather than looking for ways to never give them the option or opportunity to misbehave. We should be careful about over-reliance on technological and legislative solutions intended to replace parenting.

Thank you for writing this!

Other issues with parental controls:

  - certain games require admin privileges on windows and there’s no easy way to say, “always launch this game without requiring a parent”

  - children accounts have irrevocable restrictions. E.g. YouTube prevents upload of videos, regardless of whether a parent allows it. So kids just spin up another account.

  - Microsoft makes it almost impossible to do simple things like allow child to buy a Minecraft realm. 10’s of clicks, errors and weird flows

  - parental controls don’t cross ecosystem, and no federation, so you have to setup each service independently

  - there’s no way for the device parental controls to influence web based services

  - there’s no way on Apple devices to allow a particular show, but in general restrict mature content. E.g. if a parent has different standards for violence, language or sexuality.

The right solution is to put full control in parent’s hands (no saying 12 year olds can’t do X), support making device restrictions that are inherited by any application or site on it.

And as others have said, incentive companies to remove bugs and make the solutions workable and not easily exploitable. The Consumer Protection Agency wouldn’t allow a toy that hurt children to exist, but don’t care if parental controls are actively harmful.

The simplest thing missing in iOS is multiple downtimes per day. My old router is able to do it, but Apple still hasn't done it. I don't want my kids on their phones during bed time and during a large part of the day (school!). But downtime lets you define just one period per day. I have to remember switching between them manually. I am sure I am doing something wrong.

Something else that makes it hard to restrict things is that as a parent, you have to know all the features every app has. I think up to a point this is actually a good thing, so let me give an example when I think it's unrealistic. For example I don't want my daughter watching videos all the time, so most apps are blocked much of the time. She loves to draw on her iPad and listen to music though - two things I encourage - so I put Procreate (drawing app) and Spotify in her Always Allowed list. She's very artistic and makes beautiful drawings. But apparently you can import videos into Procreate, and Spotify now has music videos for many songs, so these apps quickly became her go to video watching apps during downtime.

Ideally I think restrictions on platforms like these aren't app based, but "what do you do with them"-based. I'd like an option as a parent that lets me configure "no watching videos after 9pm".

Some bonus gripes:

- if I want to use parental controls for my kids' iOS devices, I need to have an Apple device as well. I can't, say, be on Android and Linux (I have a MacBook and an iPhone, so this doesn't apply to me personally). - Why does everything have to be an app these days. I remember having a router that my ISP provided. When we first got it, it had a very convenient web interface for parental controls. But then they decided to deprecate that and make it into a mobile app. I have a tiny phone (first gen iPhone SE, which I love) but it's not ideal for admin tasks like these.

I was just thinking this week about a business that offered MDM-like functionality for parents.

My wife and I are strict with screen time limits and content filtering and have a teenager who likes to see what he can get away with. I have to manage Screen Time, OpenWRT firewall/DNS rules, Xbox limits, Blizzard limits, PlayStation limits.

What I hate most about Screen Time is web content management. It’s so cumbersome and any change causes Safari to shut down on the client to load new settings. There’s also no way to “Always Allow” a website (say things necessary for school), so if you want to have strict limits on time, I have to be ready at a moment’s notice to approve time during whatever random school period requires it.

That being said, we’ve found a solution that mostly works for us in a school setting. It’s better than what schools offered with Chromebooks, which were effectively wide open and didn’t allow any parent restrictions for time or content.

Apple’s App Store rules prevents MDM for parental control apps.

A lot of the first set of points seem to be a result of Microsoft's self-sabotaging. I'm not going to pretend any Linux-based OS has any support for parental controls, but especially the points about the news feed and search didn't used to be an issue back in the days of like XP.

Back in those days, most families just had one computer, too, so it made it easier to monitor use.

Gnome has but I assume they're very basic. Currently using Qustodio and Linux boots to Waydroid (Android).

Couldn't agree more with this article. Parental controls are often times incredibly useless on many platforms. However, if you are a nerd, there are some good alternatives:

- For desktop computing and gaming, use Linux. Yes, Linux is a viable gaming platform now, thanks to Valve/Steam. Use Timekpr-nExT (https://mjasnik.gitlab.io/timekpr-next/) for managing screen time, which actually supports different screen time for "normal" computer use and gaming (you can define which processes count as "gaming", which in my case is 'steam' plus 'java' for Minecraft). Steam makes it easy to control which games are accessible, but in itself does not support any screen time.

- There are some games which won't work on Linux, like Fortnite. I consider this a feature, but if your kid is absolutely adamant about needing to play it, cloud gaming can be a solution.

- For content filtering, I use NextDNS as a DNS-based content filter, plus a local pi.hole.

- For mobile, I use LineageOS plus TimeLimit (https://timelimit.io). TimeLimit has a very confusing UI/UX, but once you get used to it, it works pretty well. Also, at least in Germany, the full version can be bought old-school without the need for PlayStore/Google account, and it's cheap. Again, NextDNS is used for content filtering.

- In school, iPads are used, which are actually the hardest to control. As said in the article, Apple's Screentime is horrible, but at least the app install stuff can be controlled, and there's the NextDNS app for iOS which works fine and can be PIN-protected.

- For music, I first had Spotify, until I realized that it also has "video podcasts" with all kinds of horrible crap, as well as pornographic stuff disguised as "ASMR podcasts" and whatnot. Spotify obviously has no QC whatsoever and simply does not care. I switched to Deezer, which is also far from perfect, but at least it does not have video.

- The biggest problem really is Youtube. There's Youtube Kids, which still contains tons of garbage, but it really is only for smaller kids. The "restricted" mode, which is aimed at 12+, is an absolute joke, as it still contains lots of terrible stuff and there's almost no difference to normal Youtube. So really, IMHO, there's no solution for it except active supervision what your kid is watching there.

We are tackling this at hellowonder.ai . I took what I learned building ai tools at Google and built a system that does more than just block bad content for kids. It helps kids find exciting content that is aligned with their parents, effectively allowing them much more freedom.

It’s amazing how this system actually brings kids and parents closer together in practice.

Email seth@ that domain if you have kids and would like to skip the waitlist.

Sounds like a really interesting system but the devil's in the details. I really don't see how you solve this without some combination of layer 3 filtering and individual kernel level apps for all supported devices.

Does this work for Android? I'd be interested but we have only Android and desktop Linux devices

Surprisingly Google's FamilyLink when paired with Chromebook/Android Tablets work quite well.

You can control/add devices pretty easily and block all web access and apps by default.

You can add specific sites and apps manually (without manually approving random IP addresses).

> What IP address is that kid’s laptop again?

Technically per-device based filtering is done using MAC addresses, since local IPs can change sometimes. But even then it's trivial to change your MAC address even on an iPhone.

The router-based controls just don't work when the kid's phone has cellular access, combined with unlimited data plans. So then you're back to the device controls which don't work.

Some carriers offer primitive time-based access control but, again, they are broken too.

They really are awful. You definitely get the sense that these things were developed by software developers who didn’t eat their own dogfood.

YouTube options for parents are the worst.

i use nextdns.io. ~~$20 per year. Set up home router's dns to above. And devices' dns-es too.

set up some ad-blocking list. Turn off tik-tok, youtube, etc (quite a few of those, with all their side domains)

And if home router has time-bracket filtering, use it. The UI is probably wooden and terrible. But it's done once. Mine stops i'net to all unlisted devices from 23:00 till 6:00.

All else is too much hassle. Or worse, that AND wrong results.

But at least the ads work! :)

Good article. I really wonder if the management of these companies use their own products (or have kids?) Maybe there is a weird Venn diagram here?

I’m always curious about advancements in parenting controls for electronics, and it always boils down to a serious and frank convo with the child.

Also, why not just install shutup10 in Windows11 and further lock down all bloatware and undesired features?

I heard MacOS screen time can't control Java apps like Minecraft.

It can. The trouble with Minecraft is that it phones home to a dozen IPV6 addresses every time it launches, and it practically never contacts the same one twice. Makes it impractical to apply allow-only address access to the Internet and still allow Minecraft. I’ve not manage to find any kind of list from MS of addresses to allow to stop the insanity. I hate whoever made this happen.

Amazon Kids+ seems to work well, almost entirely allow list driven.

Parental controls are just a feature for advertising purposes

I have no control whatsoever over what kind of parental controls companies offer, but even if I did, I wouldn't accept the "punishment" of Congress revoking our freedoms. I don't even accept the premise that Congress is doing it to protect children. If they were, they'd be legislating parental controls. In other words, you took the bait (think of the children!).

I don’t think that’s a correct interpretation of the article. It’s more that the systemic failure of parental controls create a more fertile environment for Congress to act; compared to a hypothetical situation where the parental controls actually worked and were used.

For what it's worth, having pay-pornography channels next to Local 4 news has inspired a lot of letters to Congress in the past. I don't think that fostered any more of a "fertile environment for Congress to act" than the Christian Moms Against Seedless Watermelons movement.

The fundamental premise is that Congress is actually trying to protect the children, because that's the only way parental controls would have helped. It doesn't actually matter what the facts on the ground were, Congress would have found some excuse to try to pass this legislation.

Such arrogance in thinking that it justifies congressional involvement. They're the ones who fucked the children into existence yet won't take your own goddamned responsibility and instead support the "think of the children" bull-crap.

Seriously what the hell is wrong with people that they think the best thing for children is to create a goddamned dystopia for them in the name of "safety"?

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