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Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#61

Post by HideousKojima »

nkohari wrote: post #50
benjaminwootton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you guys being serious? It would be a cold day in hell before my children sat at a dinner table with an ipad for entertainment! A 3 year old talking, colouring, playing games etc before food arrives is absolutely normal and acheivable!

What works for some doesn't work for everyone. Parents should do what works for them and their kids, without judgement.

Seeing as parents were able to bring kids with them to places long before screens even existed, it's definitely not just a matter of what does or doesn't work. Kids can be taught to be well-behaved without screens, and if you're unable to do that for your kids then that's on you. And I'll judge you as much as I like.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#63

Post by mrexroad »

agentwiggles wrote: post #23
bcrosby95 wrote: post #15

For our kids the big problem was youtube. Give them a game on their tablet and they are quickly collaborating on it. Give them a show and they will go see what the other person is watching. After not too long (an hour or two) they are completely done and doing something else. But youtube is different. They can sit alone, in a corner, slack jawed, for 8 hours per day, only watching youtube, as they respond to all ques…

Youtube has been essentially banned in my house after seeing the effect it had on my kids. The problem, in short, was that Youtube continuously feeds them new content. Sadly - especially given the huge amount of actually great content on Youtube - everything that it wants to show my kids is absolutely dogshit garbage. A bunch of Gen Z kids with obviously wealthy families just acting like idiots. I couldn't stand it a…

Several kids in my household. YouTube plays a vastly different role for each, which is frustrating.

Oldest goes down rabbit hole of topics of interest - benign useless filler stuff, e.g. mostly pro sports commentary, random things like Disney ride trivia, and other random pop-culture filler. If left unchecked, i wouldn’t be surprised if they spent 8+ hours on YouTube. If moderated, YouTube gives them a fair amount of stuff to talk and connect with others about in real life. Overall impact: neutral to slightly positive if moderated to Younger teen: will consume insane amounts of gaming videos, most of the creators border on toxic personalities. We’ve banned a number of channels for them, but they find other shitty personalities. I can’t stand the content they consume, but I chalk a fair bit of that to my ignorance about teen culture and mostly grit my teeth. Covid was the worst. I hate YouTube because of their content choices. However, it does provide a small basis of connection to their group of friends. [edit: I also stupidly made a deal that w/ straight A’s I won’t be overly restrictive, which they’ve upheld, sigh] Overall impact: toxic to the point where every month or two I’m convinced to ban YouTube across every device in the house. Food/drink equivalent: Natty Light that’s barely chilled.

Pre-teen: by choice, they spend ~3/4 of their YouTube time learning new skills or facts. Mostly learning specific techniques in the iPad app Procreate, acrylic painting (irl), a ton of educational videos about wildlife/animals they love, etc. But more significantly, their YouTube use has created the reflex to “search first” whenever facing a knowledge/skill gap, then ask for help. They’re the only reason i don’t straight up block YouTube at the network level, for all devices. Overall impact: very positive. Food/drink equivalent: natto and rice.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#64

Post by dahdum »

shp0ngle wrote: post #37

I don’t know if I will. I was a computer addicted kid since I was about 8, when parents bought me a computer in 1995. When faster internet came, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was on the internet nonstop. And later on social media - LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, but also some local servers that people here won’t know. I don’t think it hurt me that much? Now I am a developer and making more money than m…

Similar background here. I’ve been Very Online for 25+ years and have made a pretty good life for myself as a result.

However, the modern internet and current trend is much more consumption based and non-technical than it used to be. Toxic content, communities, and celebrities were always around (and always will be) but with so much more overall volume you can easily become encased in a bubble of negativity and hate.

I would curate and limit access for children into their teenage years, say 14 or 15. After that I’d just want to know what they’re generally up to so I could step in if, for instance, I had a son who started following Andrew Tate.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#65

Post by DefineOutside »

aliqot wrote: post #47
shp0ngle wrote: post #37

I don’t know if I will. I was a computer addicted kid since I was about 8, when parents bought me a computer in 1995. When faster internet came, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was on the internet nonstop. And later on social media - LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, but also some local servers that people here won’t know. I don’t think it hurt me that much? Now I am a developer and making more money than m…

This is a different internet than the one we had, is my own apprehension.

I've been addicted to the internet since 2010. I learned a lot and became a developer because of modding communities and general PC building. I've also wasted a lot of time on reddit and youtube. Can't say anything productive has come out of my time on the phone or consoles though.

It makes me wonder how the shift towards mobile and consoles will affect how useful internet addictions can be. I would have never become a developer if I remained a console or mobile gamer.

The communities that I was in are still around but I'm unsure whether young people will actually find them. Why learn how to mod games when you can scroll tiktok, browse reddit, and watch youtube for the entire day.

especially games, modern games aren't as supportive to modders than older games - it's more profitable to not provide modding tools and just to run any multiplayer servers officially with microtransactions.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#66

Post by vz8 »

We changed DNS for all devices to use OpenDNS familyshield [0] for starters. It's a passive way to throttle some of the worst of the worst out there.

Of course setting some limits on how much / how often helps a bit, and frank discussions about what too much of an addictive thing does to you.

Our youngest is developmentally delayed and will absolutely ignore any guidelines and follow the path of least resistance / most enticement, so their bedroom connection runs through a proxy running Squid [1] where I've whitelisted school and certain entertainment (that took a bit of time running Telerik Fiddler[2] to gather the many domains necessary for the whitelist)

Spotify was a bit of a problem, again with our youngest who went straight for the podcasts with the most adult content, which Spotify gleefully recommended the first moment we turned the service on. Could never find a way to turn podcasts off - never wanted them.

We run our own Emby[3] server that everyone has access to with curated music tv and movies (and also have the usual streaming video services, but those are reserved for common areas).

Looked at other options like walled garden family services (e.g. Amazon Kindle Fires with subscription), but there seems to only be content ranging up to ~12 year old tastes.

[0] https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/articles/228006487-Fami... [1] http://www.squid-cache.org/ [2] https://www.telerik.com/fiddler [3] https://emby.media/

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#67

Post by gattanimell5 »

theonething wrote: post #10

My kid's almost three. From day one, we've implemented a zero screen policy. That means no phones, tablets, computers, TV (don't own one), etc. We've read to her since day one and she loves books now and her spoken/listening language skills are way ahead for her age. Wife speaks to her in her native language so she's growing up bilingual too. Wife takes her to parks, mommy and me classes where they have story time, s…

the thing that really kickstarted my passion for it was when i was left some hours alone with a old netbook, 5-6, and it was very slow, but i wanted to to something cool with it, and I followed some tutorials on YouTube to make small programs in visual basic

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#68

Post by limbicsystem »

shp0ngle wrote: post #37

I don’t know if I will. I was a computer addicted kid since I was about 8, when parents bought me a computer in 1995. When faster internet came, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was on the internet nonstop. And later on social media - LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, but also some local servers that people here won’t know. I don’t think it hurt me that much? Now I am a developer and making more money than m…

I wonder if we should tolerate hypocrisy a little more? I always liked this section from "the diamond age" https://www.likevillepodcast.com/articles/2020/8/14/our-obse...

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#69

Post by pea »

adaml_623 wrote: post #21
theonething wrote: post #10

My kid's almost three. From day one, we've implemented a zero screen policy. That means no phones, tablets, computers, TV (don't own one), etc. We've read to her since day one and she loves books now and her spoken/listening language skills are way ahead for her age. Wife speaks to her in her native language so she's growing up bilingual too. Wife takes her to parks, mommy and me classes where they have story time, s…

What do you do with her when you are out with friends? Restaurants, etc?

One of the nice things about going to southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy, etc.), is the lack of expectations of kids to sit quietly at all. From my experience over the last few years, you go to a restaurant at 10pm and everyone's kids are running around, playing together with strangers, or asleep on their parents.

As a parent of a 3 year old in the UK, with friends and restaurants we'd just talk to them or they'd colour, read, etc. Maybe cultural, but it would be seen it as pretty unusual/rude to have a kid with an iPad at a table in a restaurant; although I agree it's a lot to ask of 3 year old to sit there for hours.

Re: Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?

#70

Post by mixmastamyk »

nkohari wrote: post #50
benjaminwootton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you guys being serious? It would be a cold day in hell before my children sat at a dinner table with an ipad for entertainment! A 3 year old talking, colouring, playing games etc before food arrives is absolutely normal and acheivable!

What works for some doesn't work for everyone. Parents should do what works for them and their kids, without judgement.

I do agree that different kids are different. Ours were often good. However I absolutely did not tolerate poor behavior either. If things got dicey (rarely) I escorted one outside until the storm passed. Never took longer than five minutes. Turning them into zombies instead never occurred to me.
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