9 year old.
He started coding when he was 7. JS. He maintains an online website with all his JS code. Updates his own website. No screentime limits. No restrictions. I bookmarked developer.mozilla on his pc but he still prefers that dirty w3schools. I help out sometimes but that shitty language truly drives me up the wall. Sometimes out of spite I code up 1-liners in R and tease him that it'll take 100 years to do the same in JS. But he doesn't take the bait. I think kids are stupid in general. When I was his age I was a huge qbasic freak. My teachers told me then to use Turbo CPP for my pictures but qbasic was just so much simpler. I see my kid making the same mistakes now. oh well.
Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#621) For M-F, they are allowed 1 hour a day.
Go to Settings->Screen Time->App Limits.
2) For Sat and Sun, 3 hour limit, but a time window of 6am-9am. So if they're going to use the time, it'd better be in the morning while we're sleeping in. :)
Go to Settings->Screen Time->Downtime (enable scheduled).
3) I've always curated their Youtube subscriptions, without their knowledge, unsubscribing from the 100's of Minecraft channels they subscribe to (leaving a few) and adding Science and discovery type channels. :)
Manage Youtube subscriptions here: https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels
4) Lastly, my wife and I have decided to start curating the apps that that they can use with extended hours. If they want to use their iPads longer than the daily hour, they will have utilize one of the following:
- iMovie
- Garage Band
- Epic Game Maker ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epic-game-maker-sandbox-craft/... )
- Pokemon Go (since that would still get them out of the house.
The above app limit exceptions can also be managed with: Settings->Screen Time->App Limits.
The above curation idea was taken from a Billie Eilish - she said that her parents let her stay up as long as she was doing something creative (which was always writing or composing music).
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#638 year old and 5 year old. Same for both of them. No TV. 25 mins each of video games every other day. We occasionally (maybe once every 6 weeks) watch a film together at the weekend. No tablets. Perhaps once a week they might ask to use the (Windows) laptop to go to a website they use at school, such as Mathletics. We'd normally let them use this. 8 year old has a Kindle (not a Fire but the eReader type) that is used…
Personally I would say this sounds mega-restrictive in a non-constructive way. To each their own with parenting of course, but I hope others don't imitate this person's choices. This sounds limiting to the point that the kids might grow up having limited tech skills and no familiarity with the shows, movies, and games that their peers will be talking about.
I remember growing up watching Discovery channel specials like Steve Irwin, learning a ton of history playing Age of Empires (that led to me having a love of reading historical biographies years later), and just watching movies in general that led to me loving writing stories.
However I have also seen young kids do nothing but waste 7+ hours a day on youtube watching imbeciles splutter about their opinions on tabloid drama or reaction videos.
So my point is that I think it's less about total restriction and more about guiding the content.
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#64OK, well I wrote my doctoral thesis* on digital literacies, so this is a hot topic for me as a parent of an almost 15 year-old boy and almost 11 year-old girl. TL;DR: we're way stricter than other parents I know both in the UK and other western countries. For example: we allow them WhatsApp, but no other social media apps on their phone (including YouTube). Devices automatically switch on at 08:00 and off at 20:00. C…
Why no social media in particular? Is it a blanket ban because there isn't time to talk to them about it or is it simply, in your opinion, too toxic for teenagers, or something else?
Why no games on their phones? Is this a way to control the time spent on games or to prevent the time wasted on games when out and about?
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#65This topic makes me glad I'm not a kid anymore and strengthens my antinatalism - if the world is so fucked that you need to watch your kids all the time and restrict them then what’s the point of bringing them here. Most of my psychological harms come from going to public school, I don’t think that unsupervised screen time harmed me that much.
"that you need to watch your kids all the time and restrict them" This is not new. Parents have always done this.
I’m inclined to believe that we’re doing it a fair bit more now than in the past.
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#66YMMV, but we have a four year old daughter and have liberally allowed screen time throughout her life with some minor restrictions via parental controls.
She's learned so much from the content. We're a non-english home and a lot of her early english words/conversations were absorbed from Word Party (Netflix). Additionally we've found that Daniel Tiger via the PBS app is a great children's show. She also has a couple educational games (Khan Academy, etc) and she's really excited whenever she learns something new.
Contrast that to my upbringing where I wasn't allowed to watch tv or use the computer at all until High School, and only with strict supervision. For a long time I was able unable to control myself as I had never developed that skillset. My daughter is already controlling herself and has lots of other interests where too much "screen time" hasn't been a problem. I think she doesn't view screen time isn't a limited resource contrasted to some of her friends where "screen time" has now become a scheduled and limited part of their day.
All that being said, each child is incredibly different and I'm sure our son will have a radically different set of challenges.
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#679 yo. Gets 90 min of TV/movie time on the weekend days (45+45)
For all other uses (morning/afternoon responsibilities/chores done first). Has to write a log of start time/purpose (max 45 minutes at a time) . No browsing (Search + single article is okay).
The logging part my wife came up with is great, it helps with responsible use and requires thinking/planning first. (Good as a mental gate - it asks, do I really need to use it?)
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#68I'm not a parent, but I was somewhat recently parented. Consider holding yourself to the same standard you set for your kid. My parents are mental health professionals and did this with me. I think it was incredibly valuable and I respect them a lot for it now that I'm older. I don't think its wise to restrict usage, watch over their shoulder, or block websites if you aren't willing to submit to the same restrictions…
At what point do you see this starting? I certainly don’t expect or trust a 3 year old to act as responsibly as I do
And I’m already a fairly irresponsible person.
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#69Two boys, 9 and almost 7. They get 40 minutes a day (mon-thur) of tv that they watch together. On Friday and Sunday, we have family movie night. Age appropriate, which is getting harder. 2 hours a week of games (mostly switch, but they sometimes play minecraft or approved games on mobile devices). This happens over Sat/Sun, and we let them manage how they want to allocate time over the two days. One observation is th…
Woah, these limits are just... brutal. Like excruciatingly low.
Depends on this kids, obviously, but we let ours to stay on pads/computers for (pretty much) as long as they want IF all homework's done, they make occasional breaks, do other things (like read books) and they don't get zombified in process and can quit on a short notice.
No Tiktok, IG or any other doomscrollers. We had a chat about them, they know the party policy, so it's not really enforced, but they don't really crave these either.
Age-restricted stuff tends to sort itself out, but we track what they play. Again, it's all based on the party policy rather than enforcement and we have gentlemen's agreement that they ask if we may consider some game off limits.
Been like that for several years. One is a teenager now, another is on the way. So far so good.
Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't quite figure it out, but I think the colors and flashiness is part of it. Combine that with the tightness and apparent effectiveness of the engagement-maximizing algorithm and how quickly it moves you along to the next thing and I think you have something. The content the kids get hooked on is sometimes down-right weird. My older daughter got hooked on this Minecraft YouTuber called Preston who just yammers f…
I'm repeating myself, but that's so weird. From personal experience, I've only ever thought of the YouTube algorithm as crap. Every time I check YouTube everything there is just irrelevant to me, and the recommendations next to any video are just as random and pointless that I rarely watch more than one video at a time. It might help that I'm actively repelled by clickbait, and a lot of YouTube has (had to?) go down…
Right, same, but we're adults. I also find clickbait repulsive, am extremely conscious of what youtube is trying to do, and constantly tell it "I'm not interested in this channel" when it starts showing me a ton of content to match something I just watched. But I've seen young kids (6-11) behave EXACTLY as OP has described here, word for word. Just pointlessly watching assemblages of Five Nights of Freddy footage for hours, despite not having the game.