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In regards to screen time management and as a tech enthusiast dad of two kids--I have learned that simple low tech solutions work much better than most other mo

In regards to screen time management and as a tech enthusiast dad of two kids--I have learned that simple low tech solutions work much better than most other more complicated methods. For example to limit screen time at night... we have a rule that all of the kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen. I have a charging station setup in the kitchen for all their devices. Also during the week devices are only allowed upstairs for homework use only.

gunshai 5y ago
>allowed upstairs for homework use only. How are you enforcing that one?
aprinsen 5y ago
Along these lines, I just purchased a low tech solution called a KSafe for personal use and I love it. It's basically a safe with a timer and no override, so you can say, lock up for 2 hours, put your (de)vice inside, and push the button. The only way to open it early is to break the safe. As someone who has struggled with impulse control, especially around technology, I have used it to great effect. Spent an uninterrupted two hours playing guitar and reading physical books for the first time in ages. I use it personally, but I could see it being useful for families as well.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Is the safe fragile enough that anyone can break it with just their bare hands? If not, then what if you need to call 911 while your phone's in there?
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    It's plastic. You could throw it on a hard floor, or hit it with a hammer, and it would break open. They sell replacement bases because people breaking their own safe open isn't terribly uncommon, and the locking part is all in the lid. https://www.thekitchensafe.com/ https://www.thekitchensafe.com/
  - gpvos 5y ago
    Have a landline?
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      A lot of people don't these days.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
        I would say a strong majority don't. I don't know anyone personally with a land line other than my mother
      - nelgaard 5y ago
        Then just use one of your old cell phones and keep it charged. Even if it does not have a subscription, it can still dial 911/112
        josephcsible 5y ago
        Don't most people trade in their old phones to get their new ones for cheaper?
        gpvos 5y ago
        Yeah, except they're turning off 2G now so my old Nokia 3210 can't connect anymore. The two newer phones I have had since then actually broke down.
  - aprinsen 5y ago
    You could break the safe with a hammer or by smashing it on the ground, as others have mentioned. You know though, you are mostly using the safe in your own home or office, for increments of 30 minutes to a couple hours. For many folks I think the risk is very low. I guess, I find this emergency access sentiment really similar to something my wife's students say when there phones are taken away: "what if my parents need to contact me in an emergency?" It's a really sincere worry they have that seems totally foreign to me, having grown up in an era when my parents often couldn't contact me for hours at a time. Food for thought.
- boplicity 5y ago
  When I was young (late eighties, early nineties), we had a device that controlled power to the TV. You had to type in a code to be able to turn it on; each kid in our family had a code, and each code had a certain amount of time allowed per week. Sounds similar -- but for a different era!
  - lilyball 5y ago
    I had one of these too! Though parents could override it if needed (which was generally done if e.g. we had a friend over, so we could play games together without using up all our weekly time).
- eh9 5y ago
  My wife and I both have ADHD and we couldn’t recommend this enough. So far, it’s helped us cut down on our weed habit and now I’m throwing the Xbox controllers in there because of my terrible impulse control.
alistairSH 5y ago
Yep, the only sure way to keep a kid off a screen is to physically remove the screen. My son is grown and out of the house, but when he was a kid, he was eventually able to defeat just about anything I installed on our PC. With friends younger kids, removing iPads and suchlike is much easier than maintaining software limits.
- hinkley 5y ago
  We keep asking for wireless charging but if we ever actually get it then we are going to discover all the ways we made a liability into an asset. This being prime amongst them. I could also see a black market of kids selling each other their old phones so that the kid can have a 'prison phone' they use at night.
  - quacked 5y ago
    I've been reading some of your comments elsewhere in the thread--I think you're one of the few people commenting that has some serious respect for how kids actually think and behave. I'm curious for my own sake if you've ever read a certain pseudonymous psychiatry blog--you will immediately know what I'm talking about if you have, and if you haven't I'd like to ask how you learned what you did about child behavior and consistent parenting.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      I have not. I could say that I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life doing root cause analysis, how you can steer people away from self-sabotage, how you can empower people to help themselves instead of being reliant on you for everything, but that's only the book jacket version of the real story. The real story is sadder and I'm still actively dealing with the consequences of feeling like I needed to become an autodidact at the age of 8 to ever have any success at anything. Which necessitated spending a lot of time thinking about thinking. Self-teaching morphed into self-mentoring, self-doctoring, and self-parenting. Me, me, me (what could go wrong?) I watched my parents (from my perspective) abandon Discipline almost entirely with my kid brother, who has struggled his entire adult life, and even at 14 I could see this road ahead of him. I wish I had been like some stories where the eldest child takes care of the younger ones, but unfortunately he spent most of his childhood finding ways to push my buttons and we were never close (something my mother has pointed out as a mistake that is playing out now between his own kids, to which I responded, "Tell him this is why I never call.") That story about my friend's kid reminds me a lot of my little brother and as you can imagine by the length of that reply, was a little triggering.
kaiby 5y ago
> kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen How do you prevent them from going downstairs after you've fallen asleep?
- behringer 5y ago
  You don't. You just teach them self control through reinforcement.
  - kept3k 5y ago
    You're lucky, and must have a typical child. When my oldest child was 2, he snuck an allen wrench in his diaper and disassembled his whole crib. He is atypical with aspergers syndrome. You "just don't know" how difficult it is for some children to learn self control through reinforcement.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      > When my oldest child was 2, he snuck an allen wrench in his diaper and disassembled his whole crib. I have to tell a colleague/friend about this, his kid is quite similar to yours in that respect.
clarle 5y ago
I think as a parent it's also important to set the standard for your kids by doing the same thing. If they need to charge their phones overnight in the kitchen, then you should do the same too. I think leading by example is a good parenting technique in general, kids figure out when their parents are being hypocritical pretty fast.
- irrational 5y ago
  >then you should do the same too. No. My phone is my alarm system. It is what wakes me up at 5:20am every morning to start things going. My wife uses hers for white noise.
  - danieljacksonno 5y ago
    I use my apple watch for this. That said, you can easily buy a simple analog alarm for a few bucks.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Ok, but why shouldn’t your kids be able to also use them in similar ways?
    - amflare 5y ago
      Because they are children. They get to have fewer responsibilities in return for having fewer freedoms while they grow up and gain experience.
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        I know if I was a child, I would be upset that you get to take your phone into your bedroom and use it for useful things. I understand that this is OK for some parents, but the whole point of the comment above the one I was responding to was that children react positively to consistent applications of the rules, and the comment was basically "I have valid uses for my devices (but this is not true for my children)".
hinkley 5y ago
I wish I'd been wise enough to see this solution on my own, but in our case what happened is that charging cables kept disappearing, and it came down to the fact that when the kids broke a cable, they would throw it away and take another one without telling anybody. This same pattern was how I ended up having to put stickers on all of my laptop chargers because I had posession of 1-2 despite having 3 laptops and bought 2 extras when I dropped below 3. Shit just walks off. And the reason the cables broke is that the distance from their bed to the nearest outlet was 2m, and they would lay in bed on their screens, with the cable stretched to its limits. Eventually you'd reach crisis mode when we simply couldn't find a cable anywhere and someone was trying to call a plumber or talk to grandma with a dying phone. Anker charging stations came to a partial rescue, The Rules were that the cables in that charger should stay there. But kids (and sometimes my partner) rationalize 'needing' things and eventually I had to zip tie a daisy chain across all of the cables to make it easier to ask for a new cable than to try to take one. It wasn't perfect, but about half of the devices ended up living at that charging station, because spare chargers [were] still in short supply.
- watwut 5y ago
  I bought 3m and longer cables for myself and kids. Best purchase ever. One is 6m, but that one is truly excessive.
  - mwint 5y ago
    I did the opposite thing: everyone in my family kept ruining the standard length lightning cables by smashing them against something while using their phone, so I found a 10-pack of literally 4 inch cables on Amazon. Now their options are to use the phone or let it charge (or squat inches from the outlet). Haven’t had to buy any more cables.
    - watwut 5y ago
      My daughters tablet will go down the battery in like 15min of minecraft or roblox. And I don't mind her using it for longer then that. Plus, especially during covid, I was glad that they occasionally socialized with friends when at home. I don't want to intentionally cause discomfort to them or me either.
irrational 5y ago
> we have a rule that all of the kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen Tried this, didn't work. The problem is that we go to sleep earlier than the kids, so the kids will go get their devices after they figure we are probably asleep.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> I have a charging station setup in the kitchen for all their devices. Isn’t that considered a fire hazard? I mean to charge gadgets overnight when there are no one close by in case something catches fire.
- alxlu 5y ago
  But there are many other battery powered things like UPSes in an office, teslas, roombas, or Dyson vacuums that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to charge in your bedroom but tend to stay connected to a charger when not in use.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  As long as you have a proper smoke alarm system and maintain it, why would it be? I have multiple exits upstairs, all bedrooms have a chain ladder, alarms go off all over the house.
spaceisballer 5y ago
Basically the exact same thing in my household. But for their iPads I do have screen time to be off over night after I happened to find out if my kids woke up early (like 3/4am) they would just go hop on a device. I used to have all kinds of time limits but then I was having to always adjust for exceptions.

gunshai 5y ago

>allowed upstairs for homework use only. How are you enforcing that one?

aprinsen 5y ago

Along these lines, I just purchased a low tech solution called a KSafe for personal use and I love it. It's basically a safe with a timer and no override, so you can say, lock up for 2 hours, put your (de)vice inside, and push the button. The only way to open it early is to break the safe. As someone who has struggled with impulse control, especially around technology, I have used it to great effect. Spent an uninterrupted two hours playing guitar and reading physical books for the first time in ages. I use it personally, but I could see it being useful for families as well.

josephcsible 5y ago
Is the safe fragile enough that anyone can break it with just their bare hands? If not, then what if you need to call 911 while your phone's in there?
- dangrossman 5y ago
  It's plastic. You could throw it on a hard floor, or hit it with a hammer, and it would break open. They sell replacement bases because people breaking their own safe open isn't terribly uncommon, and the locking part is all in the lid. https://www.thekitchensafe.com/ https://www.thekitchensafe.com/
- gpvos 5y ago
  Have a landline?
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    A lot of people don't these days.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I would say a strong majority don't. I don't know anyone personally with a land line other than my mother
    - nelgaard 5y ago
      Then just use one of your old cell phones and keep it charged. Even if it does not have a subscription, it can still dial 911/112
      - josephcsible 5y ago
        Don't most people trade in their old phones to get their new ones for cheaper?
      - gpvos 5y ago
        Yeah, except they're turning off 2G now so my old Nokia 3210 can't connect anymore. The two newer phones I have had since then actually broke down.
- aprinsen 5y ago
  You could break the safe with a hammer or by smashing it on the ground, as others have mentioned. You know though, you are mostly using the safe in your own home or office, for increments of 30 minutes to a couple hours. For many folks I think the risk is very low. I guess, I find this emergency access sentiment really similar to something my wife's students say when there phones are taken away: "what if my parents need to contact me in an emergency?" It's a really sincere worry they have that seems totally foreign to me, having grown up in an era when my parents often couldn't contact me for hours at a time. Food for thought.
boplicity 5y ago
When I was young (late eighties, early nineties), we had a device that controlled power to the TV. You had to type in a code to be able to turn it on; each kid in our family had a code, and each code had a certain amount of time allowed per week. Sounds similar -- but for a different era!
- lilyball 5y ago
  I had one of these too! Though parents could override it if needed (which was generally done if e.g. we had a friend over, so we could play games together without using up all our weekly time).
eh9 5y ago
My wife and I both have ADHD and we couldn’t recommend this enough. So far, it’s helped us cut down on our weed habit and now I’m throwing the Xbox controllers in there because of my terrible impulse control.

alistairSH 5y ago

Yep, the only sure way to keep a kid off a screen is to physically remove the screen. My son is grown and out of the house, but when he was a kid, he was eventually able to defeat just about anything I installed on our PC. With friends younger kids, removing iPads and suchlike is much easier than maintaining software limits.

hinkley 5y ago
We keep asking for wireless charging but if we ever actually get it then we are going to discover all the ways we made a liability into an asset. This being prime amongst them. I could also see a black market of kids selling each other their old phones so that the kid can have a 'prison phone' they use at night.
- quacked 5y ago
  I've been reading some of your comments elsewhere in the thread--I think you're one of the few people commenting that has some serious respect for how kids actually think and behave. I'm curious for my own sake if you've ever read a certain pseudonymous psychiatry blog--you will immediately know what I'm talking about if you have, and if you haven't I'd like to ask how you learned what you did about child behavior and consistent parenting.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    I have not. I could say that I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life doing root cause analysis, how you can steer people away from self-sabotage, how you can empower people to help themselves instead of being reliant on you for everything, but that's only the book jacket version of the real story. The real story is sadder and I'm still actively dealing with the consequences of feeling like I needed to become an autodidact at the age of 8 to ever have any success at anything. Which necessitated spending a lot of time thinking about thinking. Self-teaching morphed into self-mentoring, self-doctoring, and self-parenting. Me, me, me (what could go wrong?) I watched my parents (from my perspective) abandon Discipline almost entirely with my kid brother, who has struggled his entire adult life, and even at 14 I could see this road ahead of him. I wish I had been like some stories where the eldest child takes care of the younger ones, but unfortunately he spent most of his childhood finding ways to push my buttons and we were never close (something my mother has pointed out as a mistake that is playing out now between his own kids, to which I responded, "Tell him this is why I never call.") That story about my friend's kid reminds me a lot of my little brother and as you can imagine by the length of that reply, was a little triggering.

kaiby 5y ago

> kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen How do you prevent them from going downstairs after you've fallen asleep?

behringer 5y ago
You don't. You just teach them self control through reinforcement.
- kept3k 5y ago
  You're lucky, and must have a typical child. When my oldest child was 2, he snuck an allen wrench in his diaper and disassembled his whole crib. He is atypical with aspergers syndrome. You "just don't know" how difficult it is for some children to learn self control through reinforcement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > When my oldest child was 2, he snuck an allen wrench in his diaper and disassembled his whole crib. I have to tell a colleague/friend about this, his kid is quite similar to yours in that respect.

clarle 5y ago

I think as a parent it's also important to set the standard for your kids by doing the same thing. If they need to charge their phones overnight in the kitchen, then you should do the same too. I think leading by example is a good parenting technique in general, kids figure out when their parents are being hypocritical pretty fast.

irrational 5y ago
>then you should do the same too. No. My phone is my alarm system. It is what wakes me up at 5:20am every morning to start things going. My wife uses hers for white noise.
- danieljacksonno 5y ago
  I use my apple watch for this. That said, you can easily buy a simple analog alarm for a few bucks.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Ok, but why shouldn’t your kids be able to also use them in similar ways?
  - amflare 5y ago
    Because they are children. They get to have fewer responsibilities in return for having fewer freedoms while they grow up and gain experience.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I know if I was a child, I would be upset that you get to take your phone into your bedroom and use it for useful things. I understand that this is OK for some parents, but the whole point of the comment above the one I was responding to was that children react positively to consistent applications of the rules, and the comment was basically "I have valid uses for my devices (but this is not true for my children)".

hinkley 5y ago

I wish I'd been wise enough to see this solution on my own, but in our case what happened is that charging cables kept disappearing, and it came down to the fact that when the kids broke a cable, they would throw it away and take another one without telling anybody. This same pattern was how I ended up having to put stickers on all of my laptop chargers because I had posession of 1-2 despite having 3 laptops and bought 2 extras when I dropped below 3. Shit just walks off. And the reason the cables broke is that the distance from their bed to the nearest outlet was 2m, and they would lay in bed on their screens, with the cable stretched to its limits. Eventually you'd reach crisis mode when we simply couldn't find a cable anywhere and someone was trying to call a plumber or talk to grandma with a dying phone. Anker charging stations came to a partial rescue, The Rules were that the cables in that charger should stay there. But kids (and sometimes my partner) rationalize 'needing' things and eventually I had to zip tie a daisy chain across all of the cables to make it easier to ask for a new cable than to try to take one. It wasn't perfect, but about half of the devices ended up living at that charging station, because spare chargers [were] still in short supply.

watwut 5y ago
I bought 3m and longer cables for myself and kids. Best purchase ever. One is 6m, but that one is truly excessive.
- mwint 5y ago
  I did the opposite thing: everyone in my family kept ruining the standard length lightning cables by smashing them against something while using their phone, so I found a 10-pack of literally 4 inch cables on Amazon. Now their options are to use the phone or let it charge (or squat inches from the outlet). Haven’t had to buy any more cables.
  - watwut 5y ago
    My daughters tablet will go down the battery in like 15min of minecraft or roblox. And I don't mind her using it for longer then that. Plus, especially during covid, I was glad that they occasionally socialized with friends when at home. I don't want to intentionally cause discomfort to them or me either.

irrational 5y ago

> we have a rule that all of the kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen Tried this, didn't work. The problem is that we go to sleep earlier than the kids, so the kids will go get their devices after they figure we are probably asleep.

avgcorrection 5y ago

> I have a charging station setup in the kitchen for all their devices. Isn’t that considered a fire hazard? I mean to charge gadgets overnight when there are no one close by in case something catches fire.

alxlu 5y ago
But there are many other battery powered things like UPSes in an office, teslas, roombas, or Dyson vacuums that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to charge in your bedroom but tend to stay connected to a charger when not in use.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
As long as you have a proper smoke alarm system and maintain it, why would it be? I have multiple exits upstairs, all bedrooms have a chain ladder, alarms go off all over the house.

spaceisballer 5y ago

Basically the exact same thing in my household. But for their iPads I do have screen time to be off over night after I happened to find out if my kids woke up early (like 3/4am) they would just go hop on a device. I used to have all kinds of time limits but then I was having to always adjust for exceptions.