This post makes it clear to me that you should not be giving devices such as the Switch to children.
Parental controls aren't for parents
101–110 of 476 posts
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#102Dear All, As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing. There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old. Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online. Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, che…
Why would a 15 year old warrant a mobile phone, much less an unrestricted one?
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's essentially the rule in our house. No screens not visible to other members of the family. In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
It's so bizarre to me that in "The Land of the Free", 18 year olds, who are considered old enough to go to war, are not allowed to drink. Especially because this isn't some archaic law from the 18th or 19th centuries but instead from 1984 and only came about after the federal government withheld funds to force the states' hands over a period of 4 years.
It's not a federal law, you can buy and drink alcohol at 18 in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico for instance, so definitely possible to drinking at 18 legally in the USA. I don't know if there is a federal drinking age but it's definitely not above 18.
Also in I want to say about half the states (could be wrong here, but at least a few), it is legal to drink well below 18 in a private home.
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Example, wisconsin:
>Can an underage person possess and consume alcohol beverages on licensed premises? Yes. Persons under age 21 may possess and consume alcohol beverages if they are with their parents, guardians or spouses of legal drinking age; but this is at the discretion of the licensee. The licensed premises may choose to prohibit consumption and possession of alcohol beverages by underage persons. (Sec. 125.07(1), Wis. Stats.)
The drinking laws in at least ~half the USA are a lot looser than most people think. If the parents are ok with it the kid can generally drink somehow.
https://www.revenue.wi.gov/Pages/FAQS/ise-atundrg.aspx#undrg...
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#104The issue is, and always will be, 3rd party trust. You cannot assume your child is safe using XYZ until you thoroughly audit the app/game/device and enumerate all their loopholes, plug-ins, and rushed updates. The sensical method would be a device-wide deny all firewall rule, where no TCP connection is allowed in or out without explicit parental consent. E.g. Alice wants to chat with Bob via chatmonkey. Approve this one time connection? Good luck finding anything on the market that supports and enforces this very sane level of parental control.
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#105Assuming 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 dur…
neil.fun is porn ads neal.fun is what I think you meant to link
Well that’s a bit ironic in regards to the pro-Parental Controls argument. Pornography is just a typo away…
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#106Your son is talking to his friends in this book chat, and playing Minecraft with them. How do other parents go about governing this? Sounds like either they’ve figured out these parental controls, and might have some tips for you. Or they trust their kids with fewer controls.
Do you have kids? I'm guessing you don't, because the answer is pretty obvious to those of us who do - the vast majority of parents seem to give not one single fuck about what their kids do with technology. I've known families who have a cell phone - a dedicated device - for their four year old . My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't g…
My kids (4 and 6) have a "dedictated" iPhone, a iPad with the pencil, and a MacBook Air. But they were just hand me downs. They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.
They also call or text aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents. I feel like it has helped them with reading and just the exercise of trial and error to figure out how it works is beneficial.
Haven’t needed to delve into parental controls yet though.
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.
Yet in the broader sense online bullying targeting other teenagers is a commonly cited problem, including in incidents of teen suicide. "It didn't make it worse for me" doesn't counteract what we provably know is occurring[0][1][2]. Young Teen suicide (10 to 14) has increased from roughly 1 per 100K in the early 2000s to now nearly 3 per 100K in the last five years. Older teen suicide (15-19) has increased from 6 per…
1 and 2 do not seem to suggest that cyberbullying is more harmful in this regard than other forms of bullying - and in fact only 3 seems to contrast these concepts at all.
> Sensitivity analyses suggested that cybervictimization only and both cyber- and face-to-face victimization were associated with a higher risk of suicidal ideation/attempt compared to face-to-face victimization only and no victimization; however, analyses were based on small n. In prospective analyses, cybervictimization was not associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later after accounting for baseline suicidal ideation/attempt and other confounders. In contrast, face-to-face victimization was associated with suicidal ideation/attempt 2 years later in the fully adjusted model, including cybervictimization.
In fact, reading 3, it looks like the highest prevalence of cyberbullying capped out at a whopping.... 16% of 15 year olds, with a sharp drop down to 7% just 2 years later.
I have to say, there's lots of things to worry about with kids going online. I just don't think bullying in particular is one of them.
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#108What was the punishment for the 12 year old? This will tell us everything we need to know about this story.
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes. The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
It's the parents obligation to educate their child. It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely. There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. T…
You were loose with a gun at age 7?!
Re: Parental controls aren't for parents
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the parents obligation to educate their child. It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely. There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. T…
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely. I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators. I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in…
Children are not wise compared to online predators, but they will notice when things are getting fishy. Maybe that's after they've made their first few silly mistakes (maybe they've given the predator their home address, several photographs, all their friends' contact details, and the one password they use for everything), but they will notice before anything seriously bad happens. But just because they'll notice, that doesn't mean they'll take an appropriate action; and it doesn't mean they won't be convinced that actually, it's fine. The child needs to know that they can come to you for advice, and that there will be no repercussions if the situation is benign, even if they've broken the rules: the concrete threat of (even mild) parental punishment for rule-breaking will be more salient than a mild situational suspicion.
"These are the rules, you are to follow the rules, breaking them would be foolish and breaking them in secret would be even more foolish, but they are always up for discussion, and if you do break them you can still come to me for advice without getting in trouble, and I'd much rather you tell me than that I find out on my own" is a principle that can be imparted to a child. You do actually have to tell it to them, though, in several different ways over a period of time, and you have to be consistent about it. Children aren't wise, but they are clever, they can spot patterns, and they'll tend to believe your actions over your words if the two conflict.
You do not want to set up a situation where a predator can blackmail a child using the threat of your punishment. Parent, yes, but parent consistently enough and well enough that such threats are an obvious bluff that the child knows to ignore (and report to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465829), and going online can be as safe for your child as playing in the local neighbourhood.
The rules for young children safely using the internet unsupervised would be extremely absurd for an adult: they include things like "do not use any search engines (ask me if you want a new website)" and "do not create accounts on services (without permission)". Young children must also be kept away from content aggregators, or anything with an automatic recommendation system (e.g. Pinterest, YouTube, modern news sites, Reddit, HN). But hyperlinks on proper webpages are perfectly safe: a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't by clicking on hyperlinks if they check the URLs first and avoid the places they aren't allowed, just like a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't, wandering the high street, if they know to avoid roads and building sites. You don't need to tell a 6-year-old "stay away from porn sites", just like you don't need to tell them "don't go in that sex shop", because (a) they won't find it; and (b) even if they do, there are more general rules ("never tell a computer system that you're over 13 if you're not, and ideally not even if you are") that'll prevent any harm from occurring.
And just as you'd have conversations with a child about "where have you been?", and have them show you their favourite spots occasionally, you should also do so with unsupervised internet activity. Unsupervised does not mean ignored, after all.