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Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk | Hacker News Reader

You could try blocking his anime website on your home network. Then he can keep using the Chromebook for school work but can't access his favorite sites.

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That's just an arms race. The kid will find a new favorite website to play games on, there seems no end to them. There's endless websites out there that are more appealing than doing homework. I have a very locked down network, there's always some new website that has games of some sort to play.

If schools are going to provide these things, they should have the sites the kids might need to access white-listed and block everything else. Telling parents to try and block things is not realistic.

With SSDs costing under $50/TB now, it's hard to see why you couldn't put everything the kids need onto the laptop itself. The entirety of Wikipedia with pictures is 110 GB. Throw in a selection of reference books, videos, and software, and there's essentially no reason to have it go online. Provision it with the full year's worth of material at the beginning of the year and that's it.

Definitely agree this is possible and a great idea, but I think one challenge might be if you need access on a school laptop to do the majority of the homework. Not sure if that’s the OP’s case

Whitelisting is the way.

It sounds like they need to get other parents involved and go to the school board and have them create a policy where only Google Classroom or whatever is whitelisted.

Other parents are going to fight that though because it's a free pacifier for their kids.

Sadly, this is very true. Each family is on their own, and you aren’t going to be able to count on the herd to protect you from having to make tough calls.

Parenting involves doing a lot of things that will probably be wildly unpopular with your children if you are taking your responsibilities seriously.

Remember, as a parent you have a specific role. That role is not to be a friend to your child, but rather to be a parent. Making these roles clear with everyone involved is what makes it possible to parent effectively and still be on good terms with your child.

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