4 ms·

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 shou

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.

eesmith 3y ago
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.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  Thank you for writing this!
- autoexec 3y ago
  > 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.

eesmith 3y ago

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.

fifteen1506 3y ago
Thank you for writing this!
autoexec 3y ago
> 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.