Say you were a guardian or parent and get to decide when a child can get a phone or use a computer and get internet with it. If you wish you can also install software and change router settings to what you see fit.
Some parents decide to forbid the internet completely, others are more relaxed. Some go the helicopter route, and some do not care whatsoever what their kid does online.
What is your policy on letting a child use the internet?
I wouldn’t allow them to have a phone at all until they’re around 12 to 14 (just like my parents). When it comes to the internet on a computer, the same thing would apply, but they can when supervised. If possible, their only web browser on their internet device will have uBlock Origin installed with custom block lists to prevent them from accessing websites they aren’t supposed to. I would also like software (whether I’d have to program it if it doesn’t exist or not) to prevent them from using their devices at bedtime. Not a father, but those are the basics of what I’d imagine I do. Expect one last thing: Roblox is completely out of the question. I don’t care how much they beg. It’s a predator nightmare so it would be completely banned
As someone whose parents attempted to deny technology, this is an excellent way to make sure that your kid has a secret life that you know nothing about, can’t influence at all, and you’ll be the last person they come for help to if needed.
This is unfortunately true. Despite having an IT admin as a dad, it only taught me how to more effectively circumvent censorship. I went as far as using the 3DS browser to access stuff I wasn’t supposed to
Mine were more hardware-oriented, so I had to learn soldering early on to get replacements for all the cables they were withholding (terrible firehazard now that I remember it), but there was no opportunity for me to learn safety when it came to online, and boy was I close from falling into some unpleasant rabitholes.
No access until teenagers. If it was like when I was a kid probably younger but it’s so fucked rn
Limited time and very limited access to content, only content that is age appropriate.
Use the device’s parental controls to limit apps, downloading, purchases, sites, hours available and total time allowed. Doesn’t matter if it’s a phone, tablet, or PC. LAN parental controls if available as a secondary layer of site blocking and overall internet blocking at internet curfew time.
Been doing this for years. It’s a must. Parents are responsible for limits on mobile devices and content. Having the software do the limits is far, far easier than physically demanding the phone from the kid, shutting it off, or looking over their shoulder to see what they’re using it for.
You couldn’t stop them if you tried, which instead will result on them using dodgy methods to access it, which puts them at even higher risk than if you gave them unrestricted access.
Teach them, teach them that the internet is both fucking terrifying and fucking terrific
Yeah, deliberately view the pain Olympics and one man one jar with them.
Give them the trauma they were looking for.
Tell them to meet you on the back patio, and bring just one cup.
Mostly the former.
What’s so terrifying about 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.
As much as I hate the idea of exposing kids to the ideologies and mass propaganda of the internet, I hate the idea of incompetent adults even more. Plus, exposure builds resistance to some extent. How are they gonna learn to think for themselves if they haven’t seen a wide range of views? Also, do you want your child to fail out of college the first time they play a video game? Or only start learning to code in their twenties? if ever since they won’t think of a computer that way.
No way, if I was gonna have a brat, the little bastard would be damn competent at everything.
No unsupervised access to any techno-gizmo until they’re like 7 or 8, besides a dumb phone to call me or mom or watching me play/do things, maybe play together sometimes or limit it to formative things. Ain’t no hypothetical child of mine gonna be raised by an iPad and cocomelon, and since I don’t necessarily trust other parents to raise their kids decently I would get them a dog or 2 to play and bond with.
Then, once they start being old enough I will give them their own tower computer, obviously with Linux, privacy-redirects, limited access to the internet (I’m mostly gonna let them access games, wikipedia and stuff that is formative) and their access to YouTube is gonna be via FreeTube with channels I think they’d benefit from watching as already subscribed (plus whatever interest I know they have). Throughout the time I will be teaching them things, indulging their curiosity and gradually explain, reveal and open up things to them. Of course I’d also secretly monitor what they’re doing, not to judge but to make sure they’re safe, until I know they can safely navigate on their own. As for phones they’re getting something locked down with some custom ROM like /e/OS or whatever and just the bare minimum they need to function (Signal to talk to me and mom, calendar, alarms, etc). No social media for them, they at most get to see some of it via privacy frontends. I want them to grow up in a way that the internet is a place they can leave.
Once they’ve teenagers and understand things I’d start gradually letting them do their own things and gradually giving them more access, allow them to make mistakes and be sure to be there for them to learn rather than just punish. The goal is that by 18, when they’ll have full access, they’re digitally literate and can safely navigate on their own, or at least be as careful as 18yos can be. At that point they’ll also have to gradually start paying for their stuff on their own.
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
I like this
Same.
Similar mentality here.
I’ve got some basic parental controls in place. They are intended at emergency buffers, rather than to stop a concerted effort however.
The best method is to teach and train. No security is going to be invincible, without being very problematic to work within. Children also learn fast, when motivated.
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 hoursor 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; fiThat 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.
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!).
kid needs a vpn
this is good because it teaches the kid the importance of privacy and the entire lack thereof online.
it’s also nice to not freak out at porn viewing and to teach them it’s ok in moderation.
Wow, I’m not sure if I am more impressed at him pulling it through or shattering the adult trust by stabbing him in the back like this.
I mean, if you (parent) didn’t tell him, how should he know? It’s essential to know in advance.
Yeah, I honestly think that initial “Hey, don’t do this” talk is better in advance. I remember getting my ass whooped for saying “Fuck” as a kid when I literally didn’t know what the word meant and my parent put the video on in the first place.
Educate your kids on what isn’t allowed in the first place. If they do something bad that you didn’t tell them in advance, then explain why the action is bad, not to do it again, and that you will be checking/monitoring for that behavior. Then you can at least be fully justified in any future punishments because you gave a warning.
Punishments for initial mistakes and unknown wrongs just suck, and they kinda stick with you 🫤
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.
What in the world is a boiler room to sell chocolate
Boiler room is slang for a room filled with shady stock brokers using high-pressure tactics to sell crappy stocks for fraudulent reasons.
When fund raiser time came around, his band teacher told everyone to take out their phones, call relatives, and try to get them to commit to buying x number of candy bars. It was like a little boiler room full of kids begging grandma to shell out $50 for mediocre chocolate.
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.
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.
if you are a h4x0r you also know your password
This is where we keep it more or less. Everything done where I can hear and see it if I want. Network settings adjusted so that it’s not pure unadulterated internet that he can stumble onto.
I do allow an iPad, but same rules. Used in common areas and no screens at night. Being able to FaceTime his friends has been awesome for all of them lately with summer coming up.
That sounds pretty draconian.
A shared computer and no Internet when they are supposed to be sleeping is draconian?
Isn’t this how us kids in the 1990’s and 2000s grew up? (Minus the phone because we didn’t have them, or just a flip phone)
Calling it draconian to not be able to stay up all night on the internet sounds kind of like an iPad kid as a teenager lol
Yep. And even then, our desktop computer was upstairs - which was out of the way, nothing up there except my sister’s bedroom and a living room that wasn’t really used - so arguably that was too isolated lol. We weren’t allowed laptops until we finished high school! Even my friend who did have a laptop wasn’t allowed it in her bedroom.
The internet was also restricted to go off at 9pm because I was staying up on msn and Myspace all night otherwise 😅
Yeah, I don’t want to be like “kids these days” but lol
It only sounds draconian compared to the completely unsupervised access that I think most of us grew up with.
I had porn at 13. Shock videos shortly after. 4chan at 16. Outside of being able to discover my own media tastes through piracy and late night binges, I struggle to identify a lot of good that came of my unfettered access.
This was my exact experience and the exact same reason I won’t be repeating it for my family moving forward.
I totally agree, and I’ve had the same experience. I just don’t think that it needs to be a choice between free roaming Wild West tiktok brainrot and some sort of panopticon. I believe that the internet is a legitimate space for learning, discovery, socialisation. I get the many many dangers, but I don’t think that prison rules will produce good netizens.
I agree, but I think there’s less spaces for that then there used to be, and I don’t think 13 is a particularly unreasonable age for access to still be restricted. It’s probably the older end of when I’d be trying to teach a kid proper online safety and behavior before starting to loosen the reins, but every kid is going to be different. Some would be ready earlier, and others later.
I think we just disagree on where the middle ground might lie, which is probably to be expected on complicated topics like this. Everyone’s going to have their own take.
I definitely wouldn’t be comfortable tossing a hypothetical kid into the deep end, so to speak, at 13.
On top of that, kids are resourceful with a ton of time on their hands. Sufficiently motivated kids will find ways around restrictions (I sure did, locked doors without a deadbolt are not a real lockdown, lol) or friends with less restrictions anyway, and there’s some value to allowing them to think they’re getting away with things and navigating on their own, regardless of whether I as a parent would really be aware of it or not.
It’s not. No devices at night is super normal for kids who haven’t learned to regulate yet. It’s maybe a bit tighter than I would choose, but I still think it’s a fair balance at that age.
Have you been on the internet lately?
You sound very twelve.
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.
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.
Even so, less is better. Being exposed X hours per week through friends is still better than giving them direct access to a dopamine drip feed for 56+ hours per week (avg for teens in 2025). If they really want it, you can set limited access via a home desktop/tablet and teach the same digital literacy.
A kid doesn’t need a smart phone in the same way that they don’t need their own car. They don’t need to go far distances with bulky items and passengers; they don’t need pocket access to banking apps and Slack. A dumb phone/watch can keep them in contact with anyone they could possibly need to talk to.
Block every site except itch.io until they turn 13, so as to recreate my childhood on addictinggames.com
I only go to itch.io for erotic games.
Plan scrapped. The only proper way for sexuality to be developed is through large fantasy novels with terrible politics.
I thought that’s what itch was for
For both of us:
block every site but phrack.org
