Ask Lemmy

Education education education.

Explain how the internet works. Explain companies. Explain evil intent and malicious behavior.

Imo, if you put your child under surveillance that's not the right way. If bad things happen despite good education, fine, introduce limits and guardrails.

Don't do things you wouldn't want for yourself. Be consistent.

Basically, do good parenting.

children under 12 should not have one, it has been shown they actually have problems reading and writing in HS, and doing math. 13+ they can have it, assuming they arnt trying to do something illegal, like stealing credit cards and buying games or whatever.

ublock origin, no ads, only libretube or freetube

FOSS

crontab, it's enough to :

• kill any add during specific period
• accumulate usage per app
• check if tabs are opened

and it's pretty straighforward to configure, e.g.

* 8-17 * * 1-5 killall SlayTheSpire && date >> ~/shame
# prevents from playing during weekday working hours

or for accumulation (which can be reset daily, weekly, etc by simply deleting the minutes file)

pgrep mpv && >> mpv_minutes; if [ $(wc -l mpv_minutes) -gt 1000 ]; then echo beyond threshold; fi

That works also for turning up/down network interfaces.

PS: I use this on myself. I'm not a child but I don't have perfect self control. It works.

I have an 11 year old son. He has neutered Internet that can do normal searches on. An hour budget a day for games. An hour for YouTube. Other than that he can talk to his friends on Discord or text. I check his Discord every now and then. He only talks to his buddies or my gaming buddies.

Electronics are for amusement. If he isn't having fun (fussing), time to do something else.

We use it together and communicate during. Zombie mode --> time to do something else.

Great firewall of my house (whitelist). I'm sure he'll figure out how to bypass it one day, and hopefully by then I've raised him well enough to process the horrors of the open web.

I automate school, weekend, and summer schedules with parental controls on mobile devices.

They're just getting into computer gaming so they had to have the internet talk (but most of their games banned chat without ID anyway)

Block every site except itch.io until they turn 13, so as to recreate my childhood on addictinggames.com

Only with my eyeballs in presence. My son is autistic and barely verbal. He also has combination ADHD. I wish I could forbid the tablet entirely but it just doesn't work with a child facing these challenges. For example, he can't sit still through dinner so if we go out, he uses tablet until the food comes. He's obsessed with Legos. All the content he watches is Lego builds. He watches that on YouTube kids with me present to make sure he doesn't slip through the cracks. My eldest is 19 now and we let him access the internet unabated, that was a huge mistake I highly recommend people know exactly what their kids are watching and you should restrict traffic to safe content only.

Access to the Internet is not something that the parents are actually capable of restricting. As soon as one kid in the has a phone, their entire peer group is exposed.

The question isn't about restriction. It's about who will be teaching these kids about the Internet. The first kid learns from their parents; every other kid learns (mostly) from other kids.

If your kid is the last in their class to have a phone, everything they know about the Internet they will have learned from their peers. They sure as hell aren't going to tell you they already know about all the things you've been trying to hide from them.

The internet is for communication. A child has no reason to communicate with anyone independent of their parent. No internet.

Our policy was supervised / filtered only until early teens. Kids sites, educational stuff, games we purchased and approved of, etc. We were also late to give them phones, our son got his first because in his freshman year of high-school his band teacher set up a boiler-room to sell worlds finest chocolate and he was the only kid who didn't have a cell phone.

When we had "the talk" we discussed masturbation and porn, why porn is popular, and all the negatives that go with it without condemning it outright. We talked about online predators and not sharing things with people you didn't know, especially pics, addresses, etc.

My wife and I are firm believers that kids need space to discover who they are, so as they became teens, things went to semi-supervised. We paid attention to them more than their devices, but we had rules such as adding one of our emails as a recovery address to any socials they set up, so we could check up on them if we thought something bad was going down. Never had to use that, and I think just having it there made them think about what they did online.

Around sixteen/seventeen, no filter and no more backdoors into their accounts. Just a couple of long heart to hearts about how shitty things can be on the internet and how we're there to talk with no judgement if they need us.

I'd wait until they're older, 7-8 years of age at least. Then I'd make sure they learn how it functions in some capacity and not just operating it mindlessly.

No social media at all. Heavily curated Youtube, and honestly at the end of the day I'd rather them play outside under supervision than spend all day online. The internet as it is does not go well with developing minds.

A friend had an excellent (but evil) one.

His son had found some more... interesting areas of the internet (aka porn). He collected a selection of his browsing history and sat him down. They then went, video by video, having an open and honest discussion about it. Dad had FAR more tolerance for mortifying embarrassment than his son did. He learnt to clear the history at least.

The 2nd discussion, 6 months later, used the router logs instead.

I'm not sure I would use this particular method. However, it was apparently highly effective at making his kids think things through (for better or for worse!).

When they figure it out and become capable of reading and writing. Tablets, phones and computers are not locked down. Parental guidening and open communication means they know what it is, that there's good and there's bad content and people etc.

Working great.

/Swedish

You sit at a desktop in the kitchen to use the computer. If you have shown yourself to be responsible you know your password.

The wifi shuts off at bedtime.

My 11-12-13 year old kids have Apple Watches for communication purposes but no smartphones. These are charged all together in a locked pantry at night.

Start educating them on what internet is and how it works early, before they even get to use it. Allow them to observe how you use it. Explain the good and the bad it can provide. I feel like a lot of how you should use the internet is just how you should generally live your life - stranger = danger, don't give your personal information to anyone at all (even if they claim to be me/my friend/police/whatever), understand how content engagement works and who benefits from it (ads and manipulation are everywhere, not just online), and so on. Ngl I'm kinda baffled how we navigated a much more dangerous real world "just fine" up until the internet has apparently become some unfathomable evil. By not allowing your kids to learn early, you are just gimping their future, they will have to go up against people who often literally don't know a life without the digital world. Not to mention - if you don't teach them the basics of understanding how to navigate the world and its dangers, they can get hurt whether the internet still even exists.

My one opinion that might be controversial is that I believe that by enforcing arbitrary blocklists (outside of just generally useful stuff like uBlock Origin) and restricting content without explaining and demonstrating anything you are simply conditioning your kids to be ok with surveillance and censorship.

The ipad is fine I have a secure network no porn and no voice over roblox. The trick is not to just take it but give them the 10 min warning and they will just bring it to you. We always check his communications and remind him not to share any personal information with anyone online. He has a healthy relationship with the internet and his devices. Sometimes to get his ipad he needs to go for a walk with me which makes for good conversation and it’s good for his health.

So I am a parent, and while my daughter is still a toddler (3), I've thought about it a lot. These plans may not hold as time goes on, but it's what I'll be working from at least.

We have an old Android tablet that is "Daddy's" where I've used ADB to remove almost every app from it, and hide the others. It has Disney Plus (some kids shows), Newpipe (set to open right to a playlist of pre-vetted stuff, mostly Sesame Street), and VLC (Mr. Rogers, Muppet Movies and Specials, some Looney Tunes). It only comes out on long trips (car rides more than two hours long), use is always supervised, and we lock the touch controls as much as we can once the content is playing so she can't stray into other YouTube content or the more grown up stuff on Disney.

I'm already working on a Kodi setup with just content for her on it as well, which is reach-able from the living room TV and will be on the play room TV if it gets one. All of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood is up on archive.org, and she loves it. Wife doesn't like piracy though, so I can't just get baby girl's Disney shows on it and make it a one stop shop.

As she gets older, we may set her up with an old laptop and edutainment games, but it would be entirely offline. Maybe a Minecraft server for her and friends we've met IRL. A co-worker runs one for his tween and it seems to do well used that way.

I don't think we'll be allowing internet until 12 years old or so. Even if she needs it earlier for school, she'll start on an isolated network segment to reduce chance of any malware spreading to the whole house. Use will be in a common area of the house where Mom and I can see what she's into at a glance. It will be filtered with PiHole or whatever the modern equivalent ends up being, to block both ads and inappropriate content. Ad blocker on the device itself with similar settings if possible to help catch any strays.

As she gets older, start teaching media and advertising literacy, as other comments have suggested. As we do that, we slowly scale back the training wheels/filters. Depending on how well we think she's ready, I can see unattended, still filtered, but somewhat monitored at 14 maybe. Cut the content filters at 15 maybe. Cut the ad filters at 16 maybe. That's all going to be super-dependent on her own "internet and ad literacy" though.

I want her to get enough of an idea of the unfiltered and ad-ridden internet that it's not a danger to her, but I do hope she'll decide to use ad blocking for her own sake.

17 or 18 it's completely hands off. Can't protect them forever, and she'll need to learn one way or another.

My goal is to protect her from creeps, protect her from exposure to stuff she's too young for, and to make sure she's prepared for the wider internet hellscape before dropping her in the deep end unsupervised like I was.

I'd be very interested in hearing the experience of any parents who have already been through this.

Fuck that, kids shouldn't be on the Internet unsupervised. No access when they're little and restricted access until they're an adult or close it it.

kids get YouTube for 15 minutes a week.

everything else comes from Plex which has been vetted by myself or my spouse.

no internet access other than a school sanctioned chomebook.

I have a windows XP (sp3) system setup with encarta, local Wikipedia, and a bunch of other early learning computer software/games. it connects to the network for intranet, but no internet access at all.