Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by zdragnar » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

smugma wrote: post #80

mecanicox wrote: post #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…

Does watching PBS Kids or Disney+ count? What about YouTube Kids or YouTube? The point being that almost all content is on the Internet now. I guess your reply can be seen as a good faith response because if you block everything, there’s no need to monitor. It’s just very extreme to disallow content if provided over the Internet, rather than building trust and nuance, which I think is more along the lines of the orig…

I don't know what it is like now, but for a long time YouTube kids was a minefield of wildly inappropriate content- there were a bunch of articles on it a few years back:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...

At least PBS and Disney+ are curated. Anything social or user-generated can be nasty, and not easy to see at first.

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

#122

Post by permo-w » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

enumjorge wrote: post #73

rajin444 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your trust is misplaced. Could you provide some explicit examples to what you linked above? > Weird old guys contacting his son This one sounds a little weird, but the rest could just be the kid isn’t following modern western progressive values (and being obsessed with games depending on how much is just being a kid). > swearing (fine by me, but still), being drawn to the wrong kind of "friends", hate speech I’d ne…

It’s sad that being against hate speech is considered modern, western and progressive. It seemed like the norm not too long ago.

it greatly depends on how you define hate speech

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

#123

Post by alar44 » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

bitlax wrote: post #61

krisoft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 communicat…

And then when they finally have access they are going to binge like crazy because they haven't learned how to manage that access. It's like the sheltered kids that go off the deep end when they hit college because they have no experience with anything.

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

#124

Post by SamoyedFurFluff » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:24 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #117

klyrs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "girl" doesn't want him to mention her, because her dad's possessive and abusive and if he finds out, she's dead meat. Your kid now has a selfless, noble reason to be uncomfortable sharing that information.

Do you have children? If they trust a stranger they just met on the internet more than a parent, that's the problem. No amount of technological redress is going to fix that.

I think you underestimate how children overestimate themselves. I have an exceedingly good relationship with my younger siblings and they will think they can handle situations beyond their capacity, and then when they bring me in sometimes the emotional or psychological damage has already been done.

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

#125

Post by CuriousSkeptic » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

rj111 wrote: post #94

guidedlight wrote: post #6

I have some pre-teen children that have access to an iPad, Xbox, and an Apple TV. My #1 recommendation is NO YOUTUBE, unless it's for education purposes. I don't have the App installed on any of my kids devices (they can access it via the website, but they don't do that). It's just a cesspool of garbage for kids. Even YouTube Kids is bad. Occasionally, they will complain about not having the YouTube app... but I neve…

YouTube is really bad and hard to stop. When kids get curious about something on the fringe, the algorithm pushes them further and further into the rat hole until they are practically brainwashed by the craziest YouTubers. Unfortunately Google has chosen profit over allowing controls that are effective for parents.

My policy always was YouTube only allowed for searched content (or subscribed I suppose, cant do that without logging in though), no recommendations or other passive watching. Not really possible to implement in practice though. Disabling autoplay and such can only do so much, and the new “shorts” thing really threw a wrench into it.

Found a specialised safari content blocker that seems to block most of it though.

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

#126

Post by Tronno » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:33 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #76

thoms_a wrote: post #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.

I realise HN has a disproportionate amount of software engineers, but I know my parents would struggle to afford the likes of skiing, flying, go-karting as regular activities, never mind in sufficient quantities to displace video games and the internet. Even a trip to the bowling alley was a rare treat when I was growing up.

Inexpensive outdoor activities like biking, skateboarding, ball sports, etc, all accomplish the same thing. In purchasing supplies for these activities, you're essentially signing them up for something that will consume their time and energy, leaving little to expend on diving into internet rabbit holes.

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

#127

Post by brightball » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:34 PM UTC

I’m going to go the other direction…it’s your responsibility to violate your childrens online privacy at least up to a certain age.

Block, restrict, monitor. Say no pretty much all the time. They’ll be fine.

There’s so much stuff out there where they’ll have no idea what’s going on but you’ll recognize it immediately.

NextDNS is great for this stuff. Apple Family Manager too. On a phone or iPad just remove safari entirely if you need to.

You’re their parent, not their friend. You can’t be both.

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

#128

Post by heavyset_go » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:42 PM UTC

Teach them internet safety and etiquette. Kids don't fully appreciate that awful people exist or that there are a lot of them, or that they can use the guise of the internet to abuse and exploit people in ways they've never considered before.

> - Do I give them the ability to do online purchases?

Depends on the age, this one I'd say no. Let them spend their own money how they see fit, but also educate them about scams and shitty business practices. Don't give them a blank check to buy whatever they want unless you want to incentivize addictive purchasing habits from in-game and in-app purchases. It often amounts to literal gambling, and kids are easy targets for the unscrupulous.

> - Do I limit their "screen time" (hate that term) or will that prevent them from interacting with their friends in the way they would want to?

You can hobble phones and tablets and force them to only run approved apps. Let them text and video chat with their friends and keep them away from exploitative business models.

Other than that, I appreciate your respect for your kids' privacy. My experience growing up with friends that had invasive parents is that they just learn to hide things well from their parents, and become averse to telling them the truth because they've learned they can't trust their parents. If your kids have a problem, you want them to come to you for help and not avoid you until they can't anymore.

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

#129

Post by MobileVet » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:48 PM UTC

guidedlight wrote: post #6

I have some pre-teen children that have access to an iPad, Xbox, and an Apple TV. My #1 recommendation is NO YOUTUBE, unless it's for education purposes. I don't have the App installed on any of my kids devices (they can access it via the website, but they don't do that). It's just a cesspool of garbage for kids. Even YouTube Kids is bad. Occasionally, they will complain about not having the YouTube app... but I neve…

YouTube is horrible. They use it for school occasionally and so it would have to be available during that Covid year of online schooling. My wife actually noticed that around Feb of 2021, the algorithm had won. Our son was hooked.

‘How can a 6 year old boy compete with a bunch of engineers at Google?’ - wife

Since that time I have been playing with a YouTube app concept that only allows limited access and doesn’t auto play.

I don’t know that it is a full ‘solution’ but it does allow Science Max and Mystery Doug and other great content to learn from without all the negatives.

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

#130

Post by MobileVet » Sun, Jul 17, 2022, 11:49 PM UTC

antics9 wrote: post #33

anibalin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great tips. Agree with the youtube vision you have. How do you deal with banning youtube all together? It's even on the smart tv menu. It's like playin whack a mole.

What we should be doing as a sort of collective parenting is curating Youtube playlists and categorize them with good, informational, fun and inspiring videos. Then we limit the children's access to that curated material only.

How do you limit their access to the curated material?