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

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

#61
post #48
post #45

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?

Maybe my wording wasn't precise enough. My kids have a reasonable amount of privacy which is less than the amount of privacy I expect them to be granted by other people. The internet grants access to literally every type of content and image if you try hard enough and there are obvious things I don't want my children exposed to. My idea of a dystopia involves children being exposed to rotten.com, porn, and communicating with pederasts in any way. And honestly it doesn't seem like people are building much of anything, just abdicating responsibility for the most part.

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

#63
My 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 the very bottom (families living in shipping containers). I'm a physician informaticist. our kids are now 17 and 20. One is going to UCLA, the other is going to run out math at the local community college before he graduates high school.

I 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?

#64
Never allow a children below 12 access to internet, a not give to they cellphones until the 14 or until they needed, in my experience as father, I give him 4 or 5 hour in videogames or videos in the computer monday-saturday, sunday is for family time, everytime he ask for buy something, I tell him that he must work for obtain that as reward or compensation, not let them take the monitor outside of your range, even in his room my son has the monitor close the wall but in front of the door so I can see what is he doing when I pass to his door, our family policy is that all the rooms are with open doors, is forbiden stay in a closed door, constantly I ask what is he doing in the computer, sometimes he lies but is ok, I not cross certain limit, sometimes I stay with him looking him playing his videogames, talk a lot with them, tell all the good and bad things that are in the internet, tell about the scamers, and all the bad actors in the social networks, but most important, show they that you love them and you care them and those are the reasons why are you doing this things.

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

#65
post #52

Earlier 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)

You should, but at the same time kids are naive and sometimes do things they know they shouldn't

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

#67

My 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…

I see posts like this about all the rules and pitfalls or raising (functional?) children these days, and I just wonder - why are people doing it? What do they want for their children to do in the world? I couldn't enforce this level of discipline on myself, let alone a child. I suppose I'm happy someone is raising the future laborers and tax payers that I might rely upon someday, but the whole thing just looks very dreary and grim to me.

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

#68
Expose your kids to activities that are more compelling than screens. Trust me, once you take a kid go-karting, they aren't going to be as excited playing a video game.

Do 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?

#69
post #52

Earlier 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)

I think you underestimate the problem space.

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?

#70
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.

Crime is down everywhere relative to when we were kids. Throw the kids outside and lock the door behind them.
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