Say you were a guardian or parent and get to decide when a child can get a phone or use a computer and get internet with it. If you wish you can also install software and change router settings to what you see fit.
Some parents decide to forbid the internet completely, others are more relaxed. Some go the helicopter route, and some do not care whatsoever what their kid does online.
What is your policy on letting a child use the internet?
crontab, it’s enough to :
- kill any add during specific period
- accumulate usage per app
- check if tabs are opened
and it’s pretty straighforward to configure, e.g.
* 8-17 * * 1-5 killall SlayTheSpire && date >> ~/shame # prevents from playing during weekday working hoursor for accumulation (which can be reset daily, weekly, etc by simply deleting the minutes file)
pgrep mpv && >> mpv_minutes; if [ $(wc -l mpv_minutes) -gt 1000 ]; then echo beyond threshold; fiThat works also for turning up/down network interfaces.
PS: I use this on myself. I’m not a child but I don’t have perfect self control. It works.
I have an 11 year old son. He has neutered Internet that can do normal searches on. An hour budget a day for games. An hour for YouTube. Other than that he can talk to his friends on Discord or text. I check his Discord every now and then. He only talks to his buddies or my gaming buddies.
I automate school, weekend, and summer schedules with parental controls on mobile devices.
They’re just getting into computer gaming so they had to have the internet talk (but most of their games banned chat without ID anyway)
Electronics are for amusement. If he isn’t having fun (fussing), time to do something else.
We use it together and communicate during. Zombie mode --> time to do something else.
Great firewall of my house (whitelist). I’m sure he’ll figure out how to bypass it one day, and hopefully by then I’ve raised him well enough to process the horrors of the open web.
Only with my eyeballs in presence. My son is autistic and barely verbal. He also has combination ADHD. I wish I could forbid the tablet entirely but it just doesn’t work with a child facing these challenges. For example, he can’t sit still through dinner so if we go out, he uses tablet until the food comes. He’s obsessed with Legos. All the content he watches is Lego builds. He watches that on YouTube kids with me present to make sure he doesn’t slip through the cracks. My eldest is 19 now and we let him access the internet unabated, that was a huge mistake I highly recommend people know exactly what their kids are watching and you should restrict traffic to safe content only.
The internet is for communication. A child has no reason to communicate with anyone independent of their parent. No internet.
Block every site except itch.io until they turn 13, so as to recreate my childhood on addictinggames.com
Access to the Internet is not something that the parents are actually capable of restricting. As soon as one kid in the has a phone, their entire peer group is exposed.
The question isn’t about restriction. It’s about who will be teaching these kids about the Internet. The first kid learns from their parents; every other kid learns (mostly) from other kids.
If your kid is the last in their class to have a phone, everything they know about the Internet they will have learned from their peers. They sure as hell aren’t going to tell you they already know about all the things you’ve been trying to hide from them.
I’d wait until they’re older, 7-8 years of age at least. Then I’d make sure they learn how it functions in some capacity and not just operating it mindlessly.
No social media at all. Heavily curated Youtube, and honestly at the end of the day I’d rather them play outside under supervision than spend all day online. The internet as it is does not go well with developing minds.
Our policy was supervised / filtered only until early teens. Kids sites, educational stuff, games we purchased and approved of, etc. We were also late to give them phones, our son got his first because in his freshman year of high-school his band teacher set up a boiler-room to sell worlds finest chocolate and he was the only kid who didn’t have a cell phone.
When we had “the talk” we discussed masturbation and porn, why porn is popular, and all the negatives that go with it without condemning it outright. We talked about online predators and not sharing things with people you didn’t know, especially pics, addresses, etc.
My wife and I are firm believers that kids need space to discover who they are, so as they became teens, things went to semi-supervised. We paid attention to them more than their devices, but we had rules such as adding one of our emails as a recovery address to any socials they set up, so we could check up on them if we thought something bad was going down. Never had to use that, and I think just having it there made them think about what they did online.
Around sixteen/seventeen, no filter and no more backdoors into their accounts. Just a couple of long heart to hearts about how shitty things can be on the internet and how we’re there to talk with no judgement if they need us.
What in the world is a boiler room to sell chocolate
Boiler room is slang for a room filled with shady stock brokers using high-pressure tactics to sell crappy stocks for fraudulent reasons.
When fund raiser time came around, his band teacher told everyone to take out their phones, call relatives, and try to get them to commit to buying x number of candy bars. It was like a little boiler room full of kids begging grandma to shell out $50 for mediocre chocolate.
A friend had an excellent (but evil) one.
His son had found some more… interesting areas of the internet (aka porn). He collected a selection of his browsing history and sat him down. They then went, video by video, having an open and honest discussion about it. Dad had FAR more tolerance for mortifying embarrassment than his son did. He learnt to clear the history at least.
The 2nd discussion, 6 months later, used the router logs instead.
I’m not sure I would use this particular method. However, it was apparently highly effective at making his kids think things through (for better or for worse!).
this is good because it teaches the kid the importance of privacy and the entire lack thereof online.
it’s also nice to not freak out at porn viewing and to teach them it’s ok in moderation.
Not until they’re 14, sharp.
As far as phones go, probably 14 too.
But I’m not going to get them high fancy shit like IPhones. It’s going to be a basic dumbphone.
You sit at a desktop in the kitchen to use the computer. If you have shown yourself to be responsible you know your password.
The wifi shuts off at bedtime.
My 11-12-13 year old kids have Apple Watches for communication purposes but no smartphones. These are charged all together in a locked pantry at night.
This is where we keep it more or less. Everything done where I can hear and see it if I want. Network settings adjusted so that it’s not pure unadulterated internet that he can stumble onto.
I do allow an iPad, but same rules. Used in common areas and no screens at night. Being able to FaceTime his friends has been awesome for all of them lately with summer coming up.
That sounds pretty draconian.
You sound very twelve.
A shared computer and no Internet when they are supposed to be sleeping is draconian?
It only sounds draconian compared to the completely unsupervised access that I think most of us grew up with.
I had porn at 13. Shock videos shortly after. 4chan at 16. Outside of being able to discover my own media tastes through piracy and late night binges, I struggle to identify a lot of good that came of my unfettered access.
This was my exact experience and the exact same reason I won’t be repeating it for my family moving forward.
I totally agree, and I’ve had the same experience. I just don’t think that it needs to be a choice between free roaming Wild West tiktok brainrot and some sort of panopticon. I believe that the internet is a legitimate space for learning, discovery, socialisation. I get the many many dangers, but I don’t think that prison rules will produce good netizens.
I agree, but I think there’s less spaces for that then there used to be, and I don’t think 13 is a particularly unreasonable age for access to still be restricted. It’s probably the older end of when I’d be trying to teach a kid proper online safety and behavior before starting to loosen the reins, but every kid is going to be different. Some would be ready earlier, and others later.
I think we just disagree on where the middle ground might lie, which is probably to be expected on complicated topics like this. Everyone’s going to have their own take.
I definitely wouldn’t be comfortable tossing a hypothetical kid into the deep end, so to speak, at 13.
On top of that, kids are resourceful with a ton of time on their hands. Sufficiently motivated kids will find ways around restrictions (I sure did, locked doors without a deadbolt are not a real lockdown, lol) or friends with less restrictions anyway, and there’s some value to allowing them to think they’re getting away with things and navigating on their own, regardless of whether I as a parent would really be aware of it or not.
It’s not. No devices at night is super normal for kids who haven’t learned to regulate yet. It’s maybe a bit tighter than I would choose, but I still think it’s a fair balance at that age.
Have you been on the internet lately?
The ipad is fine I have a secure network no porn and no voice over roblox. The trick is not to just take it but give them the 10 min warning and they will just bring it to you. We always check his communications and remind him not to share any personal information with anyone online. He has a healthy relationship with the internet and his devices. Sometimes to get his ipad he needs to go for a walk with me which makes for good conversation and it’s good for his health.
When they figure it out and become capable of reading and writing. Tablets, phones and computers are not locked down. Parental guidening and open communication means they know what it is, that there’s good and there’s bad content and people etc.
Working great.
/Swedish
Same.
Similar mentality here.
I’ve got some basic parental controls in place. They are intended at emergency buffers, rather than to stop a concerted effort however.
The best method is to teach and train. No security is going to be invincible, without being very problematic to work within. Children also learn fast, when motivated.
I like this
