Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 232 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#21
When my kids were small, I was fighting with crazy Youtube videos. Kids started with something innocent and soon were watching sick and disturbing pieces.

So I built an app to control their Youtube consumption, which later turned to a cool small business https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1431645198

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#22
post #7

Other replies already addressed the screen time/hanging out together aspect, so I will comment on being unsupervised. I was a kid on the early-ish internet and I was free to "surf the interwebs" unsupervised. The internet is not the same anymore but I think the general rules still apply. This was a very valuable learning experience for me. Based on my own experience (anecdata, I know) what I found really helped me is…

Great advice. I'm not a parent (yet) but reading your comment it strikes me that playing outdoors is safer than it was when I was a kid in the 90s, but is more discouraged. Playing online is actually more dangerous than it was in the 90s/00s but is more encouraged.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#23
post #7

Other replies already addressed the screen time/hanging out together aspect, so I will comment on being unsupervised. I was a kid on the early-ish internet and I was free to "surf the interwebs" unsupervised. The internet is not the same anymore but I think the general rules still apply. This was a very valuable learning experience for me. Based on my own experience (anecdata, I know) what I found really helped me is…

This pretty much mirrors my experience as a kid on the early web. Ultimately there's nothing new under the sun that wasn't there in the 90s. It's pretty easy to avoid being roped in to a scam or ill-intentioned person's orbit if you teach your kids to be skeptical and stay alert. Biggest difference perhaps about today's net is that a decent amount of online communication is done over video/audio nowadays.

The greatest difference is probably on predatory practices by companies. Even adults are vulnerable to loot boxes, gachas, addiction mechanics and other shady skinnerboxy traps.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#24
post #14

All I can say is, I grew up in the 80s and that means no internet. I come from a working class family. The neighbor was an architect who had a C64. Because of that I got interested in computers at the age of 8. Age 10 my dad bought me a CPC 464. I learned that BASIC and wrote a graph that displayed a static set of numbers, kind of a stock exchange graph. I had a deal with my dad that he'd pay me if I managed to write…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#25
post #21

When my kids were small, I was fighting with crazy Youtube videos. Kids started with something innocent and soon were watching sick and disturbing pieces. So I built an app to control their Youtube consumption, which later turned to a cool small business https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1431645198

I'm curious, can you elaborate what kind of disturbing pieces popped up?

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#26
post #25
post #21

When my kids were small, I was fighting with crazy Youtube videos. Kids started with something innocent and soon were watching sick and disturbing pieces. So I built an app to control their Youtube consumption, which later turned to a cool small business https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1431645198

I'm curious, can you elaborate what kind of disturbing pieces popped up?

Giant plastic spiders chasing kids. Momo. Kids behaving silly in front of camera and playing silly games. Kids with masks of superheroes. Something about SCP.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#27
As a tech worker with kids, what I see is an all out war being waged on their attention span, motivation to consume, and healthy self-concept with zero regard for their healthy cognitive development. I let my kids watch certain specific shows on YouTube Kids and Netflix, and that's it. About 30 minutes a day, tops, and I am almost always in earshot. Articles that came out in the last 5 years or so about Silicon Valley execs keeping their kids away from the very products that make them rich was a very telling indicator. Much good as the internet has done or my life, I was also blessed to have grown up with a childhood that was not permeated by it during my early formative years. There is some great content out there, but the data is coming down firmly on a negative correlation between screen time and a variety of child health measures. Kids deserve their innocence. When they are older, I will definitely be installing monitoring on my router for their IP traffic.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#28

#1 Recommendation is no Roblox. It destroys kids. Not to mention, exploration by the game itself, and pedos. Kids who play are unable to do anything else. Maybe your kid will be able to regulate, but I’d guess not. Ask an elementary school teacher about it. #2 is no devices in their own bedroom. Edit: Exploitation not exploration

You mean exploitation, right?

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

#29
post #10

I have friends with children in the age of 12-14, one of which excessively monitors his son's online behavior. He's shown me results of his monitoring and it pretty much ended the debate. Weird old guys contacting his son, excessive cyberbullying, swearing (fine by me, but still), being drawn to the wrong kind of "friends", hate speech, general addiction and obsession with games and in-game items, the list goes on. D…

> Your trust is misplaced.

This way of approaching the topic feels unhealthy to me. I’d put less focus on “don’t trust your kids”, and more on “make sure your kids have a responsible adult they trust”.

Post reply on HN