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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?

#221

Post by closeparen »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #195
closeparen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children's privacy with respect to freedom to experiment and become their own people would generally mean private interactions with their peers, not corporations or adults.

I disagree with your assessment of that this is what is generally referred to WRT children's privacy -- but I also disagree that privacy and freedom apply to play dates. My parents largely let me play with whoever I wanted to. But there was at least one occasion I was not allowed to go and play with one family. Though play time was largely unsupervised, there was still no veil of privacy. If my parents asked me what…

I can assure you that children from middle school onward absolutely do not give complete and truthful accounts of their interactions with friends. True, this can be a point of family tension! It’s a natural and probably healthy push and pull, children wanting privacy and independence, parents wanting access and control. That’s the process of growing up into your own person. There would be something developmentally wrong with a child who didn’t try & succeed to some extent. And something inhuman about a parent who didn’t resent and resist it. Children get ahead of themselves and parents slow them down. But the kids are supposed to win in the end, ideally before their 18th birthdays.

I worry that digital surveillance gives such an asymmetric advantage to parents’ natural helicoptering impulses that future generations never win. Worse, that they realize they are overmatched and give up. What kind of adults will they be, when their agency has been broken on the wheel in this way?

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

#222

Post by mixmastamyk »

killjoywashere wrote: post #176
mixmastamyk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some good info in here, but drowned out by hysteria. Might want to tone it down a notch.

I thought about that when I posted it. Here's the issue: "Hey bro, stay away from the edge" is not the advice you need to hear while walking blindfolded toward a cliff. "Stop! Stop! Stop!" is the correct advice. No matter how hysterical it might sound to the blind-folded person. The magnitude and irreversibility of the consequences matter.

Screentime and blocking/filtering are easier than a lock box, no? I don't understand the last paragraph, sounds like kid sports equals molestation.

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

#223

Post by mixmastamyk »

closeparen wrote: post #180

The wide open internet is a pretty serious threat environment and it makes sense that parents want to protect their kids from strangers and horrific content. But one thing I find pretty disturbing is parents monitoring the digital footprint of their children's real-world relationships. Most people would find it pretty creepy if you made your child wear a tape recorder to school or a friend's house, but the digital eq…

Schools have adult supervision already and don't need parental surveillance. Kids are most often molested/influenced by someone close, and internet only expands that reach. If you think parents doing their job is the primary problem here, I'm frankly a bit surprised. The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it.

I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back in the slightest.

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

#224

Post by mixmastamyk »

throwaway2214 wrote: post #218

i have a daughter(11) * i check her feed (together with her) on youtube/instagram once a week for toxic videos, and teach her how to manipulate her feed; either she modifies the feed or the feed modifies her * i encourage her to pay for the apps/games, for skins, battle passes etc, and if there is 'pay to remove ads' functionality i always pay * i have a good pi-hole setup at home blocking malware/adult sites etc * i…

~4 hours a day? What about homework and fresh air?

I like the lessons however.

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

#225

Post by harpersealtako »

nemo1618 wrote: post #115
s1k3 wrote: post #110

I kind of don’t understand all the crazy concern around kids and tech. Was like every current parent negatively impacted by their computer and internet use when they were younger? Is this simply a concern around social media usage which has ballooned in the past 10 years? I sometimes feel like I’m in the minority here when I’m going to give me children wide latitude in their tech/internet usage. And only intervene if…

I had a strange epiphany around age 16 when I realized that, thanks to 4chan, I had probably seen more ghastly shit within the past few months than my parents had in the entire lives -- and that I was already completely desensitized to it.

I'm definitely in the weird minority that feels like that phase of edgy internet counterculture diving was an overwhelming positive thing for me. It gave me perspective as a sheltered suburb kid as to how fucked up things can be in the world. I feel I have a lot more empathy now whereas before I struggled to internalize the problems and suffering of people around me as "real" (things like war or crime were things that happened on television and in fictional novels, not in real life). Even now I feel like some people, especially in my parents' generation, have trouble seriously understanding the lives of people outside their immediate ingroups.

I would not recommend it as a method for anybody though, there are a dozen other routes that kind of journey could have gone down and most of them lead to terrible conclusions.

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

#226

Post by closeparen »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #223
closeparen wrote: post #180

The wide open internet is a pretty serious threat environment and it makes sense that parents want to protect their kids from strangers and horrific content. But one thing I find pretty disturbing is parents monitoring the digital footprint of their children's real-world relationships. Most people would find it pretty creepy if you made your child wear a tape recorder to school or a friend's house, but the digital eq…

Schools have adult supervision already and don't need parental surveillance. Kids are most often molested/influenced by someone close, and internet only expands that reach. If you think parents doing their job is the primary problem here, I'm frankly a bit surprised. The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it. I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back…

>Schools have adult supervision already

Students have a great deal more privacy at school than in digital-surveillance households: conversations at lunch and recess are not normally monitored or reviewable by staff members, for example.

>The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it.

I think this kind of defeatism is bad, but even as far as it goes, the sense in which "nothing is private" refers to, like, the NSA and advertising bots. That is a very different thing from disclosure to people who have personal relationships and power dynamics with you. I would hope that kids don't "get used to it" and go on to perpetrate or accept that kind of behavior in their future relationships.

>I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back in the slightest.

While most kids using computers have nothing to do with technology careers, it is pretty clearly the case now that programming for the first time in CS101 would put you at an extreme (though not necessarily insurmountable) disadvantage.

> parents doing their job

Parents are reinterpreting "their job" to be much more intense over the last few decades already (helicopter parenting, stranger paranoia, driving everywhere, etc). In a remote-first world, they are poised to have essentially total visibility and control over every aspect of life. At some point their job has got to be to produce adults.

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

#227

Post by mixmastamyk »

closeparen wrote: post #226
mixmastamyk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools have adult supervision already and don't need parental surveillance. Kids are most often molested/influenced by someone close, and internet only expands that reach. If you think parents doing their job is the primary problem here, I'm frankly a bit surprised. The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it. I never used the internet until my mid-twenties, and it hasn't held my technology career back…

>Schools have adult supervision already Students have a great deal more privacy at school than in digital-surveillance households: conversations at lunch and recess are not normally monitored or reviewable by staff members, for example. >The truth is nothing is private, so better get used to it. I think this kind of defeatism is bad, but even as far as it goes, the sense in which "nothing is private" refers to, like,…

> Students have a great deal more privacy at school

Not really. Maybe out on the school yard for a few mins, that's expected. You may have not read up on this, but schools have already turned into a surveillance dystopia: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/schools-are-spying-studen...

It's almost as if an advertising-surveillance-company is in charge of our school's IT.

> The truth is nothing is private --> defeatism

One of my most painful career lessons was never put sensitive things in email! Wish my parents could have taught me that over something inconsequential a decade earlier.

Never was and never will be private. That is the lesson.

> CS101

Computer science is not software engineering, right? That one trips up a lot of folks. But this comparison stretches even farther, it is not even in the same neighborhood as social media, friends, or fomo.

It's often an applied science class (aka programming) where it is very helpful to know a bit of algebra, typing, and the basics of computer hardware. CS theory often starts the second year. The two sets don't overlap at all, but lay folks tend to think so because computers are "magic":

http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

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

#228

Post by fleddr »

tmaly wrote: post #100
fleddr wrote: 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…

What does your friend use for monitoring?

Pretty much for all online accounts his son has, he has access. So he regularly logs in and checks activity. He also has some special app to monitor Playstation chat/voice but I don't know what it's called.

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

#229

Post by fleddr »

thih9 wrote: post #29
fleddr wrote: 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”.

I didn't mean it that way, but even if taken literally "don't trust your kids" is solid advise. Meaning, you cannot trust on them to navigate an online world full of harm and bad agents.

It's not the kid being unhealthy, instead its environment.

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

#230

Post by throwaway2214 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #224
throwaway2214 wrote: post #218

i have a daughter(11) * i check her feed (together with her) on youtube/instagram once a week for toxic videos, and teach her how to manipulate her feed; either she modifies the feed or the feed modifies her * i encourage her to pay for the apps/games, for skins, battle passes etc, and if there is 'pay to remove ads' functionality i always pay * i have a good pi-hole setup at home blocking malware/adult sites etc * i…

~4 hours a day? What about homework and fresh air? I like the lessons however.

its school vacation now, and its like 40 degrees outside

watching youtube and crunchyroll for 4 hours is not the worst

i remember at this age when i was not ouside i could watch cow and chicken marathon for like 8 hours straight :)

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