My kids are under 10. 1. No internet access 2. A tablet with a few select apps and no games. 3. A tv with a Raspberry Pi running xbmc with a few videos I've curated. Access to the tablet and tv are limited to certain times, say when we're driving or when my wife's cooking. At some point I'll probably use a PiHole or something like that to give them whitelisted access to a few sites. Not sure where I'll go after that.…
> I think I'll stress that I don't consider online and messaging communications to be private and they will be monitored. What a wonderfull dystopia we are building here together. And then we wonder why the average people don’t care about privacy. Perhaps because they were conditioned from a young age to expect none?
Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
61–70 of 232 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#62https://github.com/1stOctet/YouWillUnderstandWhenYouAreOlder...
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#63I generally agree with the others who say if you can solve child-rearing, please let me know, we're going to be rich.
That said, the best advice I can offer is exemplify the adults you wish them to become. To the extent possible, raise children through benign neglect.
That said, screen time is the devil incarnate. You don't want your kids to be the first ones with a phone, or the last, but you should try to be as close as possible to last as you can.
The pediatric in-patient psych beds in California were full a decade ago. Californians are now filling all the psych beds in the neighboring states. It seems to hit young teen girls the worst. If you want a peds psych bed and you live in California, start looking at Denver or Omaha. I personally know two teen girls who are seeing psychiatrists or psychologists. Their younger brothers tend to follow. And two other girls in long term, out-of-state psych wards.
It's dose dependent. BEFORE they have devices (which, again, you should avoid like the plague) get Google WiFi and time-limit their access. If you own a TV, throw it away now. My wife threw ours out in 2007. Best decision ever. We eventually bought a projector, but it only works if it's dark enough ... Which is not much of the day.
Get a lockbox. Put it at the front door. Sometimes, shit's gonna get real and you'll need rules like "Devices go in the box when you get home", "Devices go in the box until homework is done", or "Devices go in the box and hour before bed". You should also have them reflect, even journal, on the experience so they concretely incorporate the knowledge of how they feel with and without the phone.
Once they are in either middle school or high school, encourage them to take notes in bound notebooks. My daughter prefers spiral college rule 8x11, my son prefers Leuchtturm A5 color-coded by subject. Tell them you will keep those notebooks for them until they are old enough to store them themselves.
Encourage paper books.
Buy subscriptions and shun any company that serves ads despite having paid for the subscription.
Take long walks. Get a dog. Get two. Take your kids out into the world. A lot. Every weekend.
Fuck kids sports. My daughter's gymnastics coach broke the Nasser story. Fuck kids sports. The adults are awful. High school sports are pretty healthy. JV is fine. Kids need a lifelong love of exercise, not ACL repairs in high school (record I've heard is a girl who got 7 ACL repairs before graduating college).
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#64Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that you're not a naive, inexperienced with life and prime target for predators 13 years old boy.
If a 13 year old is that inexperienced and much of a target... it's probably time to have a conversation about sexuality and the perils of sharing sexual pictures of oneself with random people on the internet. I swear, most of the "But what if?!"isms boil down to "I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with my child to teach them about the world." (Said as the father of a 14 year old)
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#66Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#67My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist who works with children in Silicon Valley, including the some of the uberwealthy (Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley ranch wealthy, "would you just come with us on the jet this week" wealthy). She has also worked in pre- and post Katrina New Orleans, college towns, east coast, west coast. tropical islands. She's been around, seen kids at the absolute top and some versions of…
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#68Do cool shit with your kids. Go skiing, camping, fishing, go-karting, flying (small plane tours), drone racing, etc.
I know most of us here are nerds, but the jocks really do have life figured out when it comes to fun stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that you're not a naive, inexperienced with life and prime target for predators 13 years old boy.
If a 13 year old is that inexperienced and much of a target... it's probably time to have a conversation about sexuality and the perils of sharing sexual pictures of oneself with random people on the internet. I swear, most of the "But what if?!"isms boil down to "I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with my child to teach them about the world." (Said as the father of a 14 year old)
Think of it like security issues where the attackers/researchers are constantly evolving and generating novel ways to hack a system. Your solution is telling fresh out of school developers to be really careful about use after free bugs and spear phishing. Obviously a good start. But it's not enough in a lot of cases.
Re: Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?
#70Other 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.