I saw a post recently about someone setting up parental controls – screentime, blocked sites, etc. – and it made me wonder.
In my childhood, my free time was very flexible. Within this low-pressure flexibility I was naturally curious, in all directions – that meant both watching brainteaser videos, and watching Gmod brainrot. I had little exposure to video games other than Minecraft which ran poorly on my machine, so I tended to surf Flash games and YouTube.
Strikingly, while watching a brainteaser video, tiny me had a thought:
I’m glad my dad doesn’t make me watch educational videos like the other kids in school have to.
For some reason, I wanted to remember that to “remember what my thought process was as a child” so that memory has stuck with me.
Onto the meat: if I had had a capped screentime, like a timer I could see, and knew that I was being watched in some way, I’d feel pressure. For example,
10 minutes left. Oh no. I didn’t have fun yet. I didn’t have fun yet!!
Oh no, I’m gonna get in so much trouble for watching another YTP…
and maybe that pressure wouldn’t have made me into an independent, curious kid, to the person I am now. Maybe it would’ve made me fearful or suspicious instead. I was suspicious once, when one of my parents said “I can see what you browse from the other room” – so I ran the scientific method to verify if they were. (I wrote “HI MOM” on Paint, and tested if her expression changed.)
So what about now? Were we too free, and now it’s our job to tighten the next generation? I said “butthead” often. I loved asdfmovie, but my parents probably wouldn’t have. I watched SpingeBill YTPs (at least it’s not corporatized YouTube Kids).
Or differently: do we watch our kids without them knowing? Write a keylogger? Or just take router logs? Do we prosecute them like some sort of panopticon, for their own good?
Or do we completely forgo this? Take an Adventure Playground approach?
Of course, I don’t expect a one-size-fits-all answer. Where do you stand, and why?
When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.
I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.
Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.
(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)
That makes a lot of sense! Definitely much less friction in that approach – clearly delineated boundaries, decently low pressure, and secure trust without the ethical quandary.
…don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems.
Good advice.
Kids will happily brainrot away for hours and hours. Adults have the capacity to get themselved to stop. But kids will watch Spiderman and Elsa shit on YouTube all day if they can
Of course you need to limit it some, then again I wouldn’t give an ipad to a 5 year old
Or you can be like those people on TikTok that pull their kids out of school and let them “guide their own learning.”
I don’t remember what they called this cutting edge method.
Radical unschooling?
There it is.
They probably don’t have ipads
Kids are people who deserve freedom and privacy. Teach them internet safety and common sense, and make sure they can always talk to you without the fear of punishment if they saw something they shouldn’t have.
It’s a tool, like any other.
Like, our kid did some abysmally stupid shit online a few years ago. They did it despite having been warned about how things can wrong and being told specifically not to do the thing they did, and what the consequences would be if they did.
So, parental controls. That started out absurdly strict, and lessened over time to supervision only. Now, the only limit they have is for bedtime. But supervision can still happen at any time. Kind of a trust but verify thing.
However, they also know that I’m not going to go poking my nose where it isn’t my business. It’s about the kind of activity, not the specifics, if that makes sense? I’m not giving details because what they did is between us and them, and I don’t give out anything about them in a direct sense even if it was something they were okay with me discussing. That’s about privacy, and that’s where the boundary is.
And I think that’s the key to using parental controls as a tool instead of a weapon, if that makes sense. The goal is to guide them, give them a chance to learn. You don’t take a kid out in the woods and just drop them off with no training. Parental controls are the digital equivalent of letting them learn in your back yard first. We can’t be over their shoulders all the time, so we use fences and keep an eye out the window. As they grow and learn, you move the fences a little.
A good example is porn. We all know damn good and well that at some point, our kids are going to run into it. The job is to prepare them for that. Doing so takes time; you can’t explain why xhamster isn’t about pets to a six year old. So you block things until their individual development makes it a reasonable conversation. You give that information in stages, chunks broken up as the kid is ready for the next one.
But! You play fair. You tell them that there’s things they aren’t allowed to access because they’re not for kids. This requires building trust first. They have to know that they can come to you with anything and not be treated like they did something wrong for asking. You have to give them honest answers, and do the dance of making it age appropriate. That way, by the time they’re at the stage where they’re chomping at the bit and doing dumb teenage stuff, you can trust them to come to you with things before they dive into some internet cesspool.
When shit happens and they run into something ahead of when they’re genuinely ready for it, you turn it into an opportunity to guide them and keep the trust going both ways.
We’re lucky as hell with our kid. That trust is there. They’ll come ask about some weird shit, and if I say “you don’t want to know”, they shrug and ask when they should ask again. And they come back down the road and ask again. So far, anyway lol.
As far as spying, that’s a hell no from me. We’re up front about it all. They know I keep a check on the traffic in and out across the board. They also know I won’t be a dick if they explore some. The most I’ll do if they’re exploring something that’s not age appropriate is directly sit them down and talk about it. No bullshit, they’ll get the best answers I can give, there’s no “punishment” at all, there’s no ranting and raving or arbitrary pronouncements. It’s all about making sure they understand what they’re getting into, and guiding them to better things.
It’s fucking hard though. There’s been times I want to just wield the dad hammer lol.
I dunno if that’s the kind of thing you were looking for or not. But it’s a thing I was looking into well before the kid had any internet access that wasn’t on our laps, literally. We adults thought it out, talked it out, and came up with as much of a plan as is realistic to make when a kid is going to be an agent of chaos lol.
You sound like a good dad. I’m in the process of becoming one to a tween and I appreciated reading your post. Thank you.
Thanks :)
Fwiw, the tweens aren’t that bad. A lot of hormonal ups and downs, but it’s when kids really start becoming who they’ll be as an adult. It’s a beautiful thing to see, despite the regular urge to pull out your hair lol.
Thanks for that. A couple of years ago I taught English overseas, from way too young through HS seniors and the 10 - tween age was my favorite. Old enough to be actual little people, but young enough to still think I’m cool. I loved that “start becoming who they’ll be as an adult” phase, it really was a beautiful thing.
I know it won’t all be sunshine and roses, but I’m excited for this opportunity!
You nailed it. It’s a part of the solution and shouldn’t be a weapon. Trust, guide….verify. You’re raising a “being” hopefully with the intention of being a self sufficient adult, not an over grown child. We have to help prepare them for this world.
I log DNS on all devices. This helps me see if stupid stuff is happening, or if somehow the refrigerator managed to obtain an internet connection.
very reasonable, but i think one should keep in mind that sometimes seeing things by mere accident can mess a child up. not going into details, but when i was a kid i wanted to torrent flash (the program to do animation stuff). well, it wasnt flash what i downloaded, it was a collection of photos. photos which haunt me to this day.
Thanks for the in-depth response!
My parents “let health class do the job” and kept their eyes closed – regarding porn – so your punishmentless one-on-ones are new and interesting to me. Trust is definitely the most vital here.
Man, I was lucky in a lot of ways with my parents. They were generally laissez-faire, but they made sure I had as much in the way of information about sexual health as I wanted. Same with drugs and alcohol, none of the bullshit “just say no” that was the default back in eighties.
They made plenty of mistakes, but good info was always the default.
I’m trying to avoid the same mistakes, and the ones my grandparents made with them. If I screw up, I want it to be new mistakes.
My upbringing was extremely “do what you want, but deal with the consequences.”
“You can watch an R-rated horror movie, but don’t come to me if you can’t sleep at night”-type of situation.
My impression has generally been that my freedom to do what I want let me learn a lot about decision making, responsibility, curiosity, and modern survival skills like Googling things. I’m genuinely baffled by how poorly some people my age use the computer and find things on Google, and I somewhat suspect many of them probably simply haven’t had the opportunity to explore technology on their own. And a lot of my hobbies were developed exactly because I allowed to do what I wanted when I was a child.
As for children doing stupid shit and searching up things that aren’t appropriate for their age, my thought has generally been, why is it the parent’s role to keep that from the child? I strongly believe that a parent’s role is to prepare the child to be a functional adult, not to baby them.
I acknowledge that all children are different, and perhaps there are some cases in which having parental controls would help. But I think my life would be duller if I were raised with parental controls.
Edit: having read some of the other comments, I think there’s 2 aspects to the question of parental control. The first is the aspect of children learning about age-inappropriate things, which I’ve mainly been focusing on. The other is the aspect of discipline and management (ie, preventing your children from spending 12 hours on YouTube). I think people have made interesting points about this aspect, and I respect their opinions. I personally agree with BananaKing’s take that parental controls is the wrong tool for the job. Train your children properly and you shouldn’t need to use parental controls to control their screen time.
Train your children properly and you shouldn’t need to use parental controls to control their screen time.
Exactly! I’ve always thought that kids should be taught to exercise healthy limits on their own, because after all, some day they are going to be adults and won’t have anyone but themselves preventing them from eating nothing but ice cream, running into traffic, and playing Minecraft for 14 hours.
Your stance on the age-inappropriate reminds me of what @southsamurai commented! I’ve definitely seen a lot of “Don’t protect your child too hard by concealing the inappropriate from them” lately. I wonder how many modern parents are shifting to that ideal.
“Kids respond well to being treated seriously.” (from Vox, “Why safe playgrounds aren’t great for kids”, 3:17)
You mention that there are some cases where parental controls would help, but you also mentioned that, (1) regarding inapproriacy, you shouldn’t baby children and (2) regarding screen time, BananaKing’s take is the best route. Doesn’t that cover both aspects of where parental controls would be used? What cases would you say parental controls would help with?
Well, I’m just covering my bases. I can’t personally imagine an instance in which it would be helpful, but human nature (and especially human nature of children) can be really hard to predict and I won’t deny that I might have missed a case in which it could be helpful.
I have mixed feelings on this front. On one hand, a locked down computer encourages either extreme compliance (so no learning how to do new things) or encourages the kid to figure out a bypass which might be far worse than if they had an unmanaged computer to begin with.
Right now my oldest isn’t reading yet so I have controls primarily to enforce a time limit particularly for dopamine-heavy media apps, and to prevent how much she can accidentally do by clicking without a clue of what she’s clicking on and just clicking the colored button. I’ll play it by ear for how much control is necessary to ensure my kids can develop to be the best adults they can be. The one thing I’m not looking towards is that my oldest is only about 4 years away from the window where I’ll need to have “The Talk” with her, because many men in this world suck.
I’ve never understood screentime that works like, 1 hour of computer+TV+phone allowed per day. You can’t even finish a movie in that… I’m glad my parents were lenient on me in that sense, and I was trustworthy too since I didn’t do anything bad.
My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.
They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.
I’ve got an 8 year old with a 20 minute timer for YouTube on the tablet, but a bunch of other things wide open. If they want to watch YouTube more, the TV will let them just as much. I’ve got timers on the tablet, keeping it locked out until 5:30am, because they’ll wake earlier to use it more in the morning otherwise and be a grumpy butt throughout the day. (It’s just what happens when there’s too much in the morning)
As for apps, permission is required, but I’ll just ask what it’s about and install it anyway.
You prevent them from waking up earlier, huh? Youngsters definitely have infinite energy at the odder times. I sure did my fair share of waking up early to increase the fraction of the day I gamed for.
This is a pretty convincing stance in favor of timers, actually. The idea of transferring video-watching from the iPad to the television is a friendly way to prevent an unchecked iPad-kid situation. My opinion shifted a little. :P
Do you have timers on the iPad for any mobile games, or just YouTube?
None in the mobile games. It’s mostly strategy and puzzle games, with a few that are just silly for being silly. The Android tablet has decent family controls.
Minecraft is not on the tablet. Yet. (They know it can be installed, but like using the switch for it right now.)
I’ve noticed how kids seem to get into far nastier dopamine drip addictions with a tablet/phone than the same kid does with a TV where there’s more friction to changing videos. I’ll probably do something like this to encourage healthier content consumption habits once mine are old enough to do more that pause/unpause the TV
I think we should give parents the tools to raise their children as they see fit and the freedom to be able to make that choice.
That’s fair. Subscribing to a singular doctrine doesn’t make sense, and there are lots of culture gaps to acknowledge.
What about for you specifically? To what extent would you/do you digitally monitor your kids (if you have any or not)?
Me specifically?
I don’t think digital monitoring is needed and I think it’ll stop a lot of teachable moments that will help out later in their lives but I do have friends who monitor their child’s cell phones to the extent of using GPS to see if they are speeding.
I always want to teach those kids what a faraday cage is.
Hah! Faraday Cage, nice. Location spoofs too!
Interestingly, the route my mother took was, when I went off to college, she asked me if she could track me. We discussed privacy (who has my location?) and security (Is the protection endeavor proportionate to the threat chance?), and I demonstrated a basic location spoof (I am in control of my data).
In the end, we agreed to allow some monitoring.
That’s different of course – it’s a rare (I think) circumstance and consent, and isn’t quite parental control, as both parties had equal grounds to form said consent.
I wonder if such a conversation could happen among younger children. 12 to 13 y/os maybe? Depends of course.
This right here. Every kid is different and parents should know what they need and be allowed the freedom to choose what’s right for them.
We have a 11 and 13 year old and neither are capable of disconnecting. I mean literally. They will skip sleep, meals and restroom breaks if given that level of freedom. So we have time limits. Reasonable ones in my opinion but still limits.
Also, I work in tech and one of the kids is extremely savvy at pushing boundaries and getting around my security , so I make it a game and give them the freedom to break limits in a controlled environment. This builds trust and teaches them at the same time.
Trust but verify and provide what’s best for your own kids.
As a kid I was effectively given unlimited screentime, and that definitely shaped me into adulthood for better and for worse. My wife has severe insomnia so she often sleeps until 11am, and my 4 year old always gets up around 7:30am so before she started school we setup an old phone with a managed google account with a 2.5 hour screentime limit, and a 30 minute limit for the YouTube Kids app (grandma got her hooked on YouTube of course so no putting that cat back into the bag) to encourage more enriching content (I preinstalled the PBS Kids apps, as well as a number of age-appropriate games) She’s at an age where she’s extremely impressionable and without locking things down will end up installing things by clicking ads or watching weird stuff she probably shouldn’t be watching.
In the near future my plan is to gift my 4 year old an old ewaste laptop I acquired off a friend and a Minecraft account since she’s really been getting into Minecraft when she gets to play on my or my wife’s computers, and I’ll probably play it by ear for when to raise the parental controls, but right now she’s simply not ready for unrestricted internet access. I probably won’t limit screentime on the computer other than telling her its time to do something else when she’s been on the computer for too long, but we’ll play it by ear.
If I were a parent; I’d only install a DNS filter against malware/ads to any device my kid uses until my kid is capable of understanding how to detect one. While I can teach them how to use the internet; it should be up to my kids to determine what they decide to do with it in the end.
But I do know the risks of having an infiltrated device on my local network; and I’m not having that.
I’m in the process of adopting a tween and that was my plan. DNS filter to block malware, ads, and I think I have it set to block gambling sites (which probably isn’t necessary, but eh, it shouldn’t also cause a conflict). My plan is to let him do his own thing, but know he can come to me to talk about anything he finds or doesn’t understand.
i dont have children, but the “patental control” feature of nextdns improved my own mental health a LOT. probably would not use it on my kids tho, they wouldnt even know something like the internet exists lol.
You gotta ride the wave and you can’t let the dragon drag on. The best “parental control” is a helpful and active parent in the life of their child.
I think watching over kids without them knowing is the key. Time limit is stupid in my opinion. Obviously porn sites and other appropriate sites will be blocked network wide and when the time comes I’ll slowly teach the child how to circumvent the measures and even create their own.
As you have pointed out, feeling under pressure will definitely detrimental for the child development so it’s best to avoid that.
Someone downvoted you but I’d like to hear differing opinions, so I upvoted.
By teaching the child how to circumvent these measures, what do you mean by that? Do you teach them to break your router rules? And when would you do that – when they appear mature enough to you? Of course, there’s the chance that they don’t like tech.
Imaginarily, my kid and I could have some arms-race fun, but I don’t know how realistic that is.
What do you mean by that?
Literally teach them how to! When I deem them mature enough, of course.
Of course, there’s the chance that they don’t like tech.
I’m pretty confident that they will. If I get to raise the kid as I see fit. But you know I’m not expecting them to be a hobbyist or anything. Knowing small things like circumventing network blocks might be important in the future weather that would in a school enviroment or an oppresive regime. The latter of which is getting closer in my country to reality each passing day.
The internet isnt what it used to be. Sure it was never perfect but the neo-nazi pipeline is very real and is embedded into the “fun” kids content. Id say that controls to prevent seeing that content is required. Let them have fun content just make sure it isnt turning them into a monster. This is no simple task tho.
Yeah, the Hitler Youth propaganda is what I’m afraid of. Hopefully, I can counteract that in day to day life, but the thought still scares me.
Maintain a good relationship with them and talk to them about stuff. In the world we live in kids are gonna have to grow up fast sadly. Explain to them that lots of people are hateful, but trans, gay, immigrant, black, etc people are human beings just like us and that people will try to tell them otherwise but not to fall for it.
Teach them about history. Watch movies like Schindlers List, and the sound of music together and honestly answer any questions they have during them.
Help them find fun online content that isnt laced with neo-naziism. Try to explain why they shouldnt watch that poison and just like with real poison if they dont listen dont hesitate to put your foot down and block stuff.
Thanks for that, that was helpful and encouraging. My parents never talked to me about anything and I was planning on being the exact opposite. But watching those kinds of movies together is a great idea.
I appreciate you taking the time to write that.
I definitely agree. Back then, the bad stuff was often more… innocent, grassroots-ish? (With exceptions.) Like, if you stumbled on a cartel beheading then no one was trying to sell anything to you.
Nowadays it’s markedly more corporate – there is ad revenue in constructing an extremist pipeline, and anyone can see how content has sprung up to assume that vacuum. (Try opening a private browser tab and watching only Ben Shapiro videos. The algorithm will eventually point you to Trump conspiracy videos with AI voiceovers. Last time I did this was before Cambridge Analytica changed their name to Emerdata though so I’m not sure if it’s the same.)
One thing: you mentioned that there was a pipeline in “‘fun’ kids content”. I’ve only seen stuff like that directed at early, questioning teens (the Discord offensive-jokester type) – does this “‘fun’ kids content” thing target even younger ages now? Because I’ve yet to hear of that.
A lot of it starts to get them pretty young. Like 10-12. Its embedded in video game content a lot. The ages are getting younger and younger as kids tend to be influenced by other kids a bit older than them. So it trickles down that way. Altho i see early teens as kids too so i was talking about them too when i said that. A lot of it comes from socializing with other kids that have been influenced by it too.
I have a host list on my router. That always seemed like plenty (I block gambling and malware)
