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Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

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Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#101

Post by rhn_mk1 »

sneak wrote: post #39
bennyp101 wrote: post #18

4,5,15 15 year old does his own thing, not a lot can be done there, but he's not stupid with it. Mainly just playing xbox with his friends, watching other people play games on youtube. Younger ones have a Fire tablet each, 1 hour a day limit (unless they ask for more) - mostly seems to be learning games/lego cartoons. Browser disabled, can only use stuff in their age range. They aren't allowed to watch youTube unless…

Why do you block minors from accessing content designed for miners?

I think "mining stuff" means scripts that secretly mine cryptocurrencies using your browser.

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#103

Post by alfor »

Most kid don’t play outside anymore. In my neighborhood I took us more than one year do discover than our some of our neighbors had kids!

We limit the time to 7h/week of gaming (minecraft and roblox) but they also watch some youtube (about minecraft mainly)

Most kids are already in the metaverse, their experience of building things, of challenge with other are all through online games.

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#104

Post by gdubs »

3,5,7. They have an iPad they’re allowed to use to watch shows we’ve already approved. We let them try new shows / movies if they look OK, and we’re always around to make sure they’re not watching anything we’re not OK with. They discovered my music making app on the iPad, and sometimes play with that.

They have cameras — 7 year old has graduated from the toy plastic digital cams to a real Kodak digital camera, and takes picture of wildlife, nature, etc. The toy cams have some games like “snake game”, etc, and they’re allowed to play those occasionally.

Generally we don’t limit screen time for shows because they tend to turn it off after a while and go play with physical toys, or pretend games.

7 year old now has access to a laptop running Scratch and now Kahn Academy coding lessons. Spends hours creating little scenes with code.

We have a real piano in the house they like to play — not much in terms of formal lessons yet. My 3 year old got to play with my analog drum machine, which they all want lessons on.

No web access for any of them other than the stuff mentioned above.

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#105

Post by screentimethrow »

Throwaway for reasons that will become clear. My eldest is 13, she had a phone from about 5 which for a long time seemed like a perfectly fine decision - it wasn't this unobtainable shiny object that only grownups have access to, it was a boring thing with no games on it, so she never had that device addiction. We have all Facebook domains blocked on NextDNS, she has no desire for a Twitter account, or Snapchat or anything else. It helps that she has a rabidly anti-surveillance-capitalism parent who can talk through the real world meaning of having one of these accounts. These days she does have a few games on there, but none of that pay to unlock rubbish. We use Apple Screentime for what it's worth (it's not worth much), but have had to restrict device use to the ground floor of the house as it turned out recently that she'd been self harming and sharing photos of the results when using it in her room. I think that's stopped now, and I don't believe it's related to actually owning the device at all - just a conduit for sharing it.

Overall I think our policies have been successful, but with retrospect I would have banned devices from bedrooms from the start.

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#106

Post by ksec »

She is Eight and due to staying home a lot longer the rules for gadget had relaxed a lot.

No FB, IG, Tik Tok or any other Social Media. Some in their age group are already "following" certain idols on Social Media. Ugh.

Only allow Gaming on Nintendo Switch at home. Basically I do allow them to a curated selection of games. But not those Stupid Mobile Game where they trick you to pay, or watch Ads. I have been complaining about the one min Game play and one min Ads for a long time and Apple doesn't give a shit.

Allow Youtube. She can watch Anime in Japanese. Kids Channel.

But that is about it. My general rules is for them to avoid all Digitalisation if possible. Books is better than E-Books Reader or Tablet. Writing is better than typing. She is not interested in Tech Creation ( Photoshop ) or Coding anyway. So my view is that she doesn't and shouldn't be in front of the computer / tablet.

And she seems to be the type that prefer to go out and social anyway. She is VERY chatty. So not much of a problem. ( For now )

> "but dad, all my classmates have their phones unlimited and unsupervised"?

I worry about this a lot. But so far hasn't happened yet. Although a funny thing I discovered was that they all brag about having their own phone at home to their school mates and using it freely, in reality when talked to other parents none of them actually have one. I still find this quite funny. :)

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#107

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Other discussions:

Ask HN: How do you watch over your kids digital gadgets? (Parental Control) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535229

Ask HN: What rules do you set for your kids screentime? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473657

Ask HN: Are there technical measures you take to protect your children online? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100396

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#108

Post by thunderbong »

dxbydt wrote: post #61

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 th…

"Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions."

— Mark Twain

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#109

Post by reitanqild »

Unless explicitly agreed, devices are to be used in the living room down stairs.

Roughly the rest of rules are as follows: Two oldest get some social media under the condition that they do not do anything that identifies themselves. One exception: accounts that are closed and only shared with closest of close friends.

If anything comes up they can contact us parents, their aunt/uncle or a teacher according to who they feel more comfortable contacting. I have promised to defend them, and even if they have done something stupid they are kids, and even if it is really dumb, telling me will always be the safe and comfortable way out as I prefer knowing. So far it has worked well and we have already sent one report to the police together because they came to me with a rather nasty recruiting attempt that we managed to document. (Yes, this is of course obvious to many of us but I have taken time to spell it out because I want to be ahead of nasty people telling them: what if your Dad finds out?)

I have 5 kids age somewhere below 15, the youngest one is less than 4 and too young for devices.

Re: Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?

#110

Post by pawelmurias »

rsync wrote: post #38

7,12,14. I find that rules and firewalls and schedules and blocking are a fools errand - it is a cat-and-mouse game that you can't win. So we just turn off the Internet. We have a different wifi network for the children that has a very restrictive schedule. Basically just Fri/Sat night and 15 mins on weekday evenings to send messages to friends and check school assignments. The 7 year old gets his Nintendo Switch on…

> The other reason this works so well is that our children are not our friends. We don't have a peer relationship with them and we don't owe them explanations as to why our family is different from other families or blah blah blah.

You are aware that if you don't become friends with them as they grow up it's very likely you will very likely have a very limited relationship unless you continue to send them money?

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