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I think FOSS vs proprietary software is sort of orthogonal to what kind restrictions you should probably impose as a parent. It might be more useful to think a

I think FOSS vs proprietary software is sort of orthogonal to what kind restrictions you should probably impose as a parent. It might be more useful to think about what kind of online environments your kids are engaging in. Anything monetized by ads is sketchy. Unfortunately, that's most of the internet. My two sons were born in the early 2000's. When they were in elementary school, they had access to a desktop computer in our living room (running Gentoo Linux). In early elementary school, they had whitelist of web sites they could access, with Wikipedia as the home page. They each had about an hour a day, under parental supervision. In middle school, they had tablets, which we made them turn in before bed time. I installed Minecraft on the desktop. Battle For Wesnoth is pretty good too. In high school, we got them cell phones, and the school handed them laptops. We made them turn electronics in before bedtime, but we relaxed this as they got older. I absolutely recommend setting boundaries. Properly instilling discipline in children takes a lot of self-discipline as a parent, and maintaining these boundaries can be a lot harder than it sounds. Be prepared for arguments. For better and worse, their cell phones are their connection to their peers, much of it mediated by Instagram and Snapchat. It depends a lot on the kid too. Turning in the cell phone before bedtime became a major point of contention with my older son. We never had those problems with the younger one. I don't think we treated them that that differently, it's just how their personalities are. I think the kids turned out okay in the end. The older one is now serving in the US Marine Corps and the younger one just left for college a few weeks ago. Love your kids, and stay involved with them. Then slowly let go.

jackson1442 3y ago
I think this is one of the best comments on the thread. Most are about setting restrictions that, at best, will lead to the kids finding a way around them. If you set restrictions, your kids will almost certainly find ways around them. Maybe they figure out how to do it on their own device, but they almost certainly have a friend with unrestricted internet access anyways. If you reason with your kids and set boundaries (at an appropriate age), they learn _why_ restrictions might be set. This means that after you would have stopped directly applying restrictions, they use self control to moderate themselves. Obviously it depends on the kid. My parents went both routes and _every single time_ they set a hard restriction I found a way around it. When they blocked websites with online games, I learned how to set up a proxy to a computer on the network without restrictions. When they added parental controls on an iOS device, I found out that factory resetting from Find My wipes the restrictions (factory reset on the device is blocked when parental controls are enabled). When a more stringent network block was applied, I learned about DNS and how to bypass DNS-based internet restrictions. But they reasoned with my about social media and generally nurtured my curiosity, so I just don’t find myself interested in any traditional social apps. I’m definitely not immune to digital addiction, but I’d rather be addicted to interesting link aggregators than Instagram. Also- consider setting different limits for different kinds of content. I think video games are probably a better use of time than TV since they’re engaging and typically require thought, but a good documentary is educational and should be considered as such (a strict passive-consumption limit may encourage a kid to watch more “junk food” content while eschewing content that’s actually educational). Maybe defined limits aren’t the way to go, or maybe exceptions should just be the norm. One thing I’d add is that you should apply similar standards to yourself when setting boundaries. Even if I wasn’t feeling obstinate about a particular restriction, seeing my parents flagrantly violate that themselves just made me want to bypass it—and I did! tl;dr at a certain point kids are people and can reason for themselves—to a degree; consider this when setting limits, restrictions, or boundaries.

jackson1442 3y ago

I think this is one of the best comments on the thread. Most are about setting restrictions that, at best, will lead to the kids finding a way around them. If you set restrictions, your kids will almost certainly find ways around them. Maybe they figure out how to do it on their own device, but they almost certainly have a friend with unrestricted internet access anyways. If you reason with your kids and set boundaries (at an appropriate age), they learn _why_ restrictions might be set. This means that after you would have stopped directly applying restrictions, they use self control to moderate themselves. Obviously it depends on the kid. My parents went both routes and _every single time_ they set a hard restriction I found a way around it. When they blocked websites with online games, I learned how to set up a proxy to a computer on the network without restrictions. When they added parental controls on an iOS device, I found out that factory resetting from Find My wipes the restrictions (factory reset on the device is blocked when parental controls are enabled). When a more stringent network block was applied, I learned about DNS and how to bypass DNS-based internet restrictions. But they reasoned with my about social media and generally nurtured my curiosity, so I just don’t find myself interested in any traditional social apps. I’m definitely not immune to digital addiction, but I’d rather be addicted to interesting link aggregators than Instagram. Also- consider setting different limits for different kinds of content. I think video games are probably a better use of time than TV since they’re engaging and typically require thought, but a good documentary is educational and should be considered as such (a strict passive-consumption limit may encourage a kid to watch more “junk food” content while eschewing content that’s actually educational). Maybe defined limits aren’t the way to go, or maybe exceptions should just be the norm. One thing I’d add is that you should apply similar standards to yourself when setting boundaries. Even if I wasn’t feeling obstinate about a particular restriction, seeing my parents flagrantly violate that themselves just made me want to bypass it—and I did! tl;dr at a certain point kids are people and can reason for themselves—to a degree; consider this when setting limits, restrictions, or boundaries.