Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#261

Post by svnt » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

temporary22 wrote: post #248

baron816 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving them responsibility I am not a parent, so maybe don't listen to me, but if I were (especially to boys), I would try to deeply instill a value of responsibility into them. Boys are naturally going to have a higher tolerance for risk, and that can be a very good thing, but it needs to be directed and they need to learn to differentiate good risks from bad ones. But more generally, building up an identity of be…

just a random thing: girls are more "responsible" because the societal bias is to teach women to be responsible from a young age. from the perspective of a woman, I missed the possibility to make dumb mistakes because "responsibility" (and not even because my parents taught or encpuraged it, but from friends and family's pressure). Let your kids make dumb stuff and dumb mistakes, please.

Having worked very closely with numerous toddler and preschool children continuously from 2-6 and still observing many others doing this:

The base state of the child is absolutely evolutionary (at a population level): male children are less responsible/compliant and female children are more responsible/compliant from the outset.

This makes girls easy to (even accidentally) make responsible.

Teachers and parents generally easily spend 10x to 100x the effort trying to make boys responsible but do not succeed at nearly the same rates by the same ages. Girls learn faster.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#262

Post by liamtuohyff » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

When i was 5 i was given a gameboy color, i got additcted to it, so my parents banned everything "computer related" until i was 14, depending on their mood this also included tv. When i was a kid i hated it because my parents were never able to explain why they did. But looking back, i think it was the right move. Many people i grew up with became dopamine slaves and cant stop themsevles from indulging in socialmedia/ videogames/ hedonism every day. From 14-18 i played videogames everyday as much as i could each day. I dont consider it a relapse because im antisocial and will naturally gravitate to an activity i can do alone. If i never had the childhood without tech, i could see an adulthood without anything else. If you have never lived your life without freedom, you really dont know it's value. If you always had it, you either over value it or under value it. I became a software engineer, but generally have grown a dislike for 70% of all tech on the market. I will probably end up raising my kids as close to amish as possible. Will the pendulum swing the other way and they rebell? Maybe. But a rebellion into a worse solution is temporary and I'll always support my kids in a low tech household when tech burns them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#263

Post by tester756 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

svnt wrote: post #261

temporary22 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just a random thing: girls are more "responsible" because the societal bias is to teach women to be responsible from a young age. from the perspective of a woman, I missed the possibility to make dumb mistakes because "responsibility" (and not even because my parents taught or encpuraged it, but from friends and family's pressure). Let your kids make dumb stuff and dumb mistakes, please.

Having worked very closely with numerous toddler and preschool children continuously from 2-6 and still observing many others doing this: The base state of the child is absolutely evolutionary (at a population level): male children are less responsible/compliant and female children are more responsible/compliant from the outset. This makes girls easy to (even accidentally) make responsible. Teachers and parents gener…

>Girls learn faster.

you meant mature faster? probably until the mid 20s where gap closes, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#264

Post by vz8 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

gattanimell5 wrote: post #74

vz8 wrote: post #66

We changed DNS for all devices to use OpenDNS familyshield [0] for starters. It's a passive way to throttle some of the worst of the worst out there. Of course setting some limits on how much / how often helps a bit, and frank discussions about what too much of an addictive thing does to you. Our youngest is developmentally delayed and will absolutely ignore any guidelines and follow the path of least resistance / mo…

i hope some of your childrens manages to bypass family filters and starts his passion for the magical world of cybersecurity this way

One of them knows how but plays along. Cicada 3301 here we come.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#265

Post by kaesar14 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:54 PM UTC

friedman23 wrote: post #194

kaesar14 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more important thing is fostering your children to have other interests - when the electronics are given just to make a kid shut up it can eventually become their "real" parents. When parents are active and make an effort to show their children other activities and find what they're interested in, the electronics won't be as enticing. Maybe that requires a child having some built in proclivity towards som…

Like I said in another comment, phones and tablets are portable slot machines. Gambling wins over "other interests" every time.

That’s just not true for every child. Children are not so reductive.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#266

Post by kaesar14 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #229

kaesar14 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more important thing is fostering your children to have other interests - when the electronics are given just to make a kid shut up it can eventually become their "real" parents. When parents are active and make an effort to show their children other activities and find what they're interested in, the electronics won't be as enticing. Maybe that requires a child having some built in proclivity towards som…

Those other interests don't have a real chance to compete against endless YouTube etc, real life is just slower and gives less stimulation per second than the output of a whole industry trying to play their mind.

I don’t know, I see it with the children around my family all the time. They’d rather play with one another then sit around on their phones. You’re not giving the children enough credit :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#267

Post by baron816 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

temporary22 wrote: post #248

baron816 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving them responsibility I am not a parent, so maybe don't listen to me, but if I were (especially to boys), I would try to deeply instill a value of responsibility into them. Boys are naturally going to have a higher tolerance for risk, and that can be a very good thing, but it needs to be directed and they need to learn to differentiate good risks from bad ones. But more generally, building up an identity of be…

just a random thing: girls are more "responsible" because the societal bias is to teach women to be responsible from a young age. from the perspective of a woman, I missed the possibility to make dumb mistakes because "responsibility" (and not even because my parents taught or encpuraged it, but from friends and family's pressure). Let your kids make dumb stuff and dumb mistakes, please.

It's not a societal thing. Men are more risk tolerant. I believe there have been studies to show this transcends societies and cultures. That doesn't mean women aren't risk tolerant, or that they can't be taught to take calculated risks. Think of it as a distribution curve--men's curve is shifted a bit to the right. The median man is more risk tolerant than the median woman, but there are still lots of women who are more risk tolerant than the median man.

This means there are more male extreme athletes and entrepreneurs, but also more inmates and gambling addicts.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#268

Post by dnissley » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

comfypotato wrote: post #242

sowbug wrote: post #98

Parent of three ranging from tween to college age. We have never had limits on anything. Screen time/content unrestricted. Probably dozens of times, maybe hundreds, we have had "the talk" about how there's a lot of weird shit in the world, internet included, and it's better to know about that stuff and how to deal with it than to create a temporary secure enclave at home where it doesn't exist. We especially didn't w…

As a friendly counterpoint, my parents limited the time that I watched TV when I was young (mostly pre-ubiquitous-internet, so it probably implies limiting internet time somewhat). I’m just sharing my experience. I got to pick what I watched and when; I just got 30 minutes or an hour a day. I mostly tried to catch the latest Dragon Ball Z episode. The general strictness of my parents lead to severe rebellion, and tha…

I have no idea exactly what cocomelon is like, but just from googling around it seems like the video equivalent of a playground where everything is padded and it's almost impossible to hurt oneself in the smallest way. There is no mischief in the thing. No kids getting into things they shouldn't. No adventure. No danger. No thinking. No agency. Just antiseptic, ostensibly "educational", 100% wholesome content.

Of course, it also seems to be for much younger children than something like Rugrats, so maybe that's where this reaction of mine is coming from.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#269

Post by dham » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

We've been using the excuse that the internet "turned off" for now. It does actually happen around here, because I guess running an ISP in 2022 is harder than in 1999?

Anyway, my son is 7 and that probably won't work too much longer. We generally don't have imposed limits but if it's getting pretty late we'll just kill the internet on the device. This works pretty well because he plays all games on Xbox Play, mainly Fortnite. I honestly don't care if he sits and plays for hours because I did that around his age. The problem is, games were much harder back then because you played something like Contra 3 and lost and you basically wanted to throw the controller in the garbage. Now games are too easy.

He has been discouraged to play the Solo/Duos/Trio's in Fortnite because it can be a hard game. He mainly plays the "custom games" now and if he's on too long I'll just connect and go into the game and beat him a bunch of times until he's discouraged and turns it off. haha.

I don't know what to do when he's older, because I had no time limits on anything. I just generally balanced it out myself

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#270

Post by verdenti » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

temporary22 wrote: post #248

baron816 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving them responsibility I am not a parent, so maybe don't listen to me, but if I were (especially to boys), I would try to deeply instill a value of responsibility into them. Boys are naturally going to have a higher tolerance for risk, and that can be a very good thing, but it needs to be directed and they need to learn to differentiate good risks from bad ones. But more generally, building up an identity of be…

just a random thing: girls are more "responsible" because the societal bias is to teach women to be responsible from a young age. from the perspective of a woman, I missed the possibility to make dumb mistakes because "responsibility" (and not even because my parents taught or encpuraged it, but from friends and family's pressure). Let your kids make dumb stuff and dumb mistakes, please.

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