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Parental controls aren't for parents

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Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#41

Post by f1shy »

Aurornis wrote: post #22
zaphar wrote: post #4

I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop. It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.

Advice like this only works for specific age ranges. When I was a kid I had a friend whose parents, or mom rather, went to similar lengths to ensure all gaming was monitored closely by her. She would turn the game console off if she saw anything she decided was not to her liking. This was all fair when we were 7-8, but she insisted on doing it well into his teenage years. This level of extreme control and micromanage…

I frankly would prefer just not gaming at all, than being ashamed in front of all my friends.

Also you have to consider the ramifications of such behavior if that gets public, I mean could possibly be the source of bullying and what not.

As a child we were de incentivized to playing games with the computer. The schema was:

A) computer you can have, because is useful beyond playing, consoles, no way. Forget it “that is stupidizing BS”

B) No money for games. Other SW would be bought, but rarely games.

That moved us to start spending time with other things in the computer, like programming our own games.

Of course today that is all difficult to impossible, by design, without ostracizing the kids.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#42

Post by GaryBluto »

zpeti wrote: post #35
GaryBluto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can block by age rating quite easily it seems. https://help.disneyplus.com/en-GB/article/disneyplus-parenta... If you don't want your child watching specific shows despite an appropriate age rating, have you considered only letting them watch it while you're with them?

age rating is not how I would categorise shows. It’s also extremely hard saying no to certain shows to my kids, and it would be much easier to just not have them there. I’m pretty sure the politically oriented people at Disney want this to your kids watch as much of the content as possible, and especially the new ones.

Although it's a lot more effort, if you care a lot about specific things being shown to your children, you could set up your own media server.

You could digitize an existing BluRay or DVD collection and allow your kids to view films and TV using a streaming service-like interface. These days most of the solutions don't even require you to transcode the films, you just RIP them to an ISO and put them on an accessible Samba share and as long as you rename the files to something approximate to the title of the film it'll fetch the metadata for you.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#43

Post by Someone1234 »

nicoburns wrote: post #21
jameskilton wrote: post #9

My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one. As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust pare…

My parents did the no phone until 16 rule, and it was awful. Completely cut me off socially.

The "socially" part is the problem though. A lot of bullying occurs via those social media platforms that teenagers are using.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#44

Post by krosaen »

Assuming you go down the path of allowing online anything, seems like, after doing your best with parental controls, the most effective thing is time boxing screen usage. Only so much can happen in, say, 2-3 30 minute sessions throughout the day, and the chances of a kid deciding to blow their precious minutes responding to some random person seems much lower than if bored and checking messages idly. Being nearby during a healthy sample of sessions to have a pulse on what's going on helps too - usually pretty obvious what they are doing.

But I share the frustration of the author with how unreliable the controls are. Apple screen time controls routinely stop working - especially the one that only allows access to a finite list of websites. I need to check the browser history every week or so to confirm it is still working, and do some dance where I turn off controls, reboot, then turn back on every once in a while. The reason this particular control is important to me is that, even starting with something as pure as neil.fun, ads on that site have proven to be a few clicks away from semi-pornographic sites - it's terrible! And yet, turning off all internet access is such a coarse decision that limits access to things that are generally informational / fun / good (like neil.fun, or sports facts sites).

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#45

Post by jonathaneunice »

The complexity and frustration are in no way accidental. A carefully designed, obfuscated, and Byzantined process designed for exactly this effect.

> You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. [...] You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.

Exactly so. Parental controls, privacy settings, permission to show ads and collect infinite tracking data… The machine is working exactly as intended. Maybe there are sentiments that "the parents should have some control" and maybe there are some laws about protecting children or protecting consumer privacy. But hey, what if actually using any of those mechanisms was mind-bendingly difficult and annoying? What if your control were only available downstairs, in the unlighted cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." We'd still be in compliance, right? Heh heh. Yeah. That's the ticket!

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#46

Post by atoav »

When I grew up my parents literally had no understanding of what the internet was, nor what I was doing on it. That wasn't a problem because all the rest of the upbringing they did prepared me well to handle every situation I encountered there. There approach was to let me and my brothers learn early how to judge situations and risk ourselves and trusted us to set those boundaries ourselves.

This meant while other kids were constantly insecure how to handle a specific situation, we knew quite well (in comparison) what was totally harmless and where you had to get careful. Thus we were the only kids who jumped into water from bridges, but also the only kids in my village who never broke any bone during our entire childhood.

If you want your kid to be safe, isn't the best way to do it to teach your kid how to make the decision what is safe themselves? Otherwise they have to always rely on a parents (or other figures of authority) to make that judgment for them. But the parents aren't always around and if they call everything unsafe, potentially nothing is.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#47

Post by f1shy »

miroljub wrote: post #11
zaphar wrote: post #4

I don't know if this works for anyone other than our family but when we were raising our kids we solved this by the simple of expedient that gaming and computer use was done with us as parents present. Full stop. It was not a solo activity for our kids. We could directly view everything they were doing online the entire time.

And then, we pretend we are surprised why the majority of adults don't care about privacy. Why would they? They grew up being 100% controlled with 0 privacy. They don't even know it doesn't have to be like that. Then, it was their parents violating their privacy, now it's government and corporations.

I was never controlled in any way that may remotely violate my privacy. In fact, glad that nothing ever happened to me, because it could have. But for a long time I was not worried about my online visibility…

I do not agree at all with this conclusion.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#48

Post by squigz »

Someone1234 wrote: post #43
nicoburns wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents did the no phone until 16 rule, and it was awful. Completely cut me off socially.

The "socially" part is the problem though. A lot of bullying occurs via those social media platforms that teenagers are using.

A lot of bullying occurs in any environment teenagers exist en masse.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#49

Post by f1shy »

AdamN wrote: post #40
losthobbies wrote: post #18

The Roblox ones are a bit of a minefield too. I age restrict, block chat with everyone and monitor friend requests weekly. They are not allowed to play in their rooms. Education is the biggest thing. They come to me if someone asks to be their friend. They don’t accept gifts from strangers and I explain that it’s the same as real world. It’s a constant process that is always changing. Same as any other parenting job…

Roblox is hostile to these controls - best not to even enter the ecosystem.

Ideally (in the broad sense, meaning not realistic) is to not enter any “ecosystem”.

But yeah… easier said than done.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#50

Post by squigz »

hnlmorg wrote: post #34
jameskilton wrote: post #9

My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one. As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust pare…

16 is too late. You can’t teach your kids good maturity with communication devices through abstinence. You just have to watch what they do online. Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed. Yes there will be some problems created from them having devices, but parenting isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be educational and supportive for the children. Which forced abstinence…

> Which means reading their WhatsApp et al messages after they’ve gone to bed.

Do they know you do this? Otherwise this seems like a very effective way to create trust issues in your kids.

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