
Ask HN: Do you censor your children's internet? - xal
If yes, what age and what technical approach.<p>If no, what's your alternate approach if any?
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auganov
As I teenager I can say I have never had my internet censored. As a matter of
fact it has never been controlled in any way whatsoever. My mum would never
even mention anything at all about the so called "dangers of the Internet" or
any inappropriate content. Of course I visited few sites I "shouldn't" have.
But no tragedy happened.

Fast forward a few years and now it looks like I am one of the few men that
doesn't visit adult websites or perform the act of self-sex at all. Sometimes
I actually wonder if my mum thinks I'm doing that stuff.

Coincidence? For the most part definitely. But I don't see how such censorship
can work at all. Unless of course you're home-schooling your child.

And the worst approach would be to monitor what they do. If I knew my parents
were monitoring what I put in google I know there's a lot of things I wouldn't
search for even if there's nothing inappropriate about them, it simply might
be simply embarrassing. Whenever someone comes to my room I minimize my
browser, there's no secret in there, I just don't want people to see what I'm
doing. I love my privacy.

Given how lives of many people nowadays are spent in a large part on the
Internet controlling your child's Internet is very close to controlling their
lives.

~~~
maxbrown
I'm a 20-something without children, and I completely agree with privacy and
not controlling your child's life, but I wonder how you would respond to the
issue of internet predators. Children without oversight HAVE talked with
predators online and agreed to meet them in private.

Being so against privacy, how do you respond to that? Isn't just 1 enough to
justify some oversight? Or do you say "It's not _my_ kid"?

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jnorthrop
Yes and no. I have a 10 and 13 year-old boys and there are two things we do to
limit what they can do on the internet. First, we only allow a certain amount
of screen time. We're somewhat flexible with that but when I see that my
oldest has been playing Doom for 45 minutes, I'll tell him that's been long
enough.

The other thing we enforce is that the computer can't go into their bedrooms.
They can use the desk in the kitchen, sit on the sofa in the living room or
spread out on the floor, but while we don't monitor what they are doing,
whatever they are doing is somewhat public.

This seems to be a good mix for us now. The kids are comfortable on the
computer and we're comfortable with what they are using it for.

