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Ask HN: What is your policy regarding smartphones for your children?
325 points by eimrine on Sept 1, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 387 comments
Recently, there are more and more studies that smartphones harm learning and not a single study with the opposite results. However, very few parents have the guts not to buy a smartphone for their child. At what age do children in the HN crowd begin to have censored access to proprietary software (personal supervision) and uncensored (smartphone with or without parental controls)? Are there families where children have access to computers with only FOSS before they have access to proprietary software?



[Random parenting advice from the internet]

My child is grown but grew up during the iPhone era.

Anyway, I had a policy.

It lasted until middle school.

Then we had a conversation.

And worked things out together.

That's my recommendation because in the long run, conversation and negotiation are the only tools you really have.

Good luck.

----

Appendix:

1. FOSS is your value. Your child is not you. If your child thinks FOSS is cool, it's cool. If they think it is lame, you are being lame.

2. Parental controls are only as good as someone else's parents. Your child can look at naked people on someone else's phone.

3. Around middle school, your child's peers begin to have massive importance. It is not that you cease to be important. But you are going to have to share influence. Even if you try to forbid such sharing.

4. It is better if parents grow as their children grow. Growing is on you because you are the adult.


To add to that:

1. Technology and screen time aren't the problems; it's the lack of passion and interests that is the root problem. Cultivate passion in your child and expose them to new things. You'll immediately notice a positive change in how they use their screen time to pursue these interests. When they watch gaming videos or unboxing on youtube they do that because that's their current passion.

2. Your control over your children diminishes over time. Build trust early on and allow them to make mistakes; these are invaluable teaching tools. It's better to teach them good habits concerning technology while you still have influence, rather than later when your control is limited.

3. There are real costs associated with not allowing your child largely unrestricted access to technology. These costs include social drawbacks, a significantly reduced ability for them to explore their passions independently, and long-term tension between the child and the parents due to a lack of trust.


> Technology and screen time aren't the problems; it's the lack of passion and interests that is the root problem.

Hard disagree. Many passions and interests take time to develop, and a big way they (used to, at least) develop naturally is through boredom. I remember well when I was a kid in the 80s who would get bored with my friends in the summer, and so we'd go and build forts or explore (illegally I guess) houses that were still under construction. A lot has been written about "the death of boredom" because smartphones are always there to give you that little dopamine fix to keep boredom at bay.

I agree with the general thrust of your post (technology is pretty unavoidable, and I've never seen a case where parents have been successful "hiding their kids from the real world" past a certain age), but I do think technology has had a severe negative impact on the mental development of youths since the advent of the smartphone, similar to how modern diets have had a severe negative impact to the development of their bodies.


Boredom is useless if kids don't have interests and avenues to pursue them. Nearly every child who attends school experiences hours of forced boredom every day, but that doesn't necessarily yield positive results. While I understand your point about smartphones serving as a constant "dopamine fix," I believe that educating kids on responsible tech use is the solution, not artificial limits that don't address the core issues. In addition, boredom is neither the only nor the most effective avenue for discovering one's passion. A more proactive approach involves exposing your children to a wide variety of activities and interests while instilling the right mindset in them.

I'm not advocating for unrestricted technology use; rather, I'm pushing for a more nuanced approach. I acknowledge that technology, when misused, can have negative impacts, much like poor dietary habits can have physical repercussions. However, the focus should be on the quality of engagement over simply counting screen time. Guide your children towards finding their passions and setting corresponding goals. This will foster intrinsic motivation, helping them utilize their time more effectively—whether you are present or not.


The problem, I think, is that in our generation many of us had at least some freedom to leave home and roam and socialize when we were bored. Nowadays bored children don't have the same escape valves as we had.

This is not an argument defending screen time, just recognizing that it is a difficult problem with no easy solutions.


It’s on us to allow our kids to free roam and stop being subject to social pressure that leaving them be is bad or risky.


I totally agree with that. Easier said than done, though, if you live somewhere where this is not the norm and you may get scolded by the authorities (luckily not my case).


Our minds need times of boredom to be creative. Especially children who learn at fast pace. I have seen it multiple times that children without immediate stimulation start solving problems.


> Technology and screen time aren't the problems; it's the lack of passion and interests that is the root problem.

Could not disagree more.

“No dad, I don’t want to go fishing together. I need complete this raid in Clash of Clans.


Not screentime but on a similar thread. My daughter was born in '96 so screentime wasn't an issue when she was young. My story is about alcohol. When my daughter was about 12, I decided to stop drinking. Not that I was a big drinker or anything - I probably had one or two beers a week. But I decided to demonstrate that social drinking - or any drinking - was something that people can choose to abstain from without any downsides. I started to drink beer again some time when she was in high school.

My daughter did get a feature-phone in middle school and then a smartphone in high school. I never set any limits - but I was fortunate to have a child who managed her time exceptionally well. I wonder how much of that came from her not having smartphone exposure when young.

I do feel for parents today.


As someone born in '87, I have no idea what you mean by "screentime wasn't an issue". I think it's more the case that it wasn't an issue for your daughter. I had plenty of fights with my parents about the amount of time I wanted to spend on my computer.


I was born a few years earlier. My mom limited my internet time to 1 hour per day -- which had more to do with keeping us under our allotted ISP hours without getting overages than it did modifying my behavior.

But in hindsight I'm extremely thankful for the limitation. A computer stops being a social channel when it's offline so the hours I spent offline were pretty crucial for me to learn a variety of things - from learning how to code to creating art.

It also really did force me to go outside and learn about the world that way.


Agreed, I was born in the 90s and I spent 90% of my time glued to my pc, tv, psp, gameboy, nokia...


I had really meant preteen smartphone screentime. Smartphones didn't exist when she was a preteen so it wasn't an issue. Also, smartphone screentime is in general much higher thank computer screentime.


I was born around when you were and screen time never came up, the more time I spent on my computer the better, honestly.

I had many problems, but generic “screen time” was never one of them.


I guess technically true, since the only screens we had back then were the computer and TV, and I didn't give a damn about the latter.


I'm with you on quitting alcohol for the kids.

Even though you may not have had that much, health benefits are definitely there.

Especially for any older parent to young kids, taking steps to optimise your own longevity is pretty much acting responsibly the way I see it.

I did it nearly three years ago primarily for longevity reasons, but the role modelling aspect is starting to dawn on me. My 13 year old son has at least one parent (I'm divorced) who doesn't need alcohol to survive various settings - I think he'll have a much more conscious approach to it.

One of my biggest fears is him getting into a car with a drunk kid driving. Have already started to talk to him about it, even though he's likely years away from it being a possible thing.


> And worked things out together.

So much this. Kids are living, breathing, thinking human beings. They are immature yes. But that doesn't remove the value of their opinions or their agency. And it's not to say you give them everything they want, but that you find common ground and aren't seen as dictating things without reason. If you can explain your point of view in terms they understand, compliance is far more likely.

For the most part, my kids have unlimited access to electronics and the internet. Yeah, sometimes they watch stupid TikTok videos or silly toy reviews on Youtube. Other times they are learning how to code or learning how to knit or how to make slime from common household materials, etc. Last week I baked bread with my daughter because she found a recipe on TikTok she wanted to try out. They sometimes watch content I don't like or agree with, but often that's resolved just by talking about why I don't think it's good content or sending a good message. I've talked to both of my daughters about why I don't like SSSniperWolf content as an example. Usually this works out fine, but none of the things they watch are so egregious I feel like I need to cut them off. And who am I to judge the occasional mindless entertainment when I've always done the same and I can readily see it's a small portion of the content they are consuming?

When I hear folks talking about zero access and no smart devices until X years, I have to ask myself where the trust and relationship exists between these parents and their children. I just can't imagine not having enough of a relationship with my kids to not have a good understanding of what they are up to online and how they are perceiving it. I can't imagine not being able to trust the values that I've instilled in my children and having to cut them off from the world to hide that neglect. Further, I feel these sort of blanket bans put kids into a position where they feel they need to hide what they do from their parents online which is the absolute opposite of what they should be thinking.

That said, we do have restrictions. No electronics during dinner or shared entertainment sort of things. People scrolling social media during movie time is a pet peeve of mine. The electronic devices are not an escape from small talk during boring family dinners or the slow part of the show we're watching.


I feel like this is the kind of advice that fits perfect when everything is going swimmingly but becomes much more complicated when other negative influencing factors come in to play.

When they are blind to something that you can plainly see is a net-negative for their life it seems like it would be much harder to not intervene.

I'm not speaking as someone who has lived this but I have observed a close family member who very much has the relationships and parenting style you're describing and I've watched this parent go through incredibly challenging situation after situation as her kids have grown into teenagehood (covid really did a number on kids coming of age). It's not that her kids are bad either, a tad naive perhaps, but genuinely good kids.


> I feel like this is the kind of advice that fits perfect when everything is going swimmingly but becomes much more complicated when other negative influencing factors come in to play.

How is this different from literally any other social interaction in your life? I extend folks the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise as a general rule. The same policy applied to my children has had fantastic results for the past 18 years. Should distrust and suspicion be the default? No thanks, I’d rather like to have a meaningful relationship with them continue long after they become self sufficient.


> How is this different from literally any other social interaction in your life?

I already explained this in the original comment?


How do you know your children are not hiding the parts of their online activity they think you would disagree more strongly with? Genuinely curious.


The same way you know that what anyone is telling you is true and not something they just made up that you'd agree more strongly with. As in, the trust is there until such a time as it has been violated and you have to revisit your priors to reconcile your new world view. My sample size is limited to three, so I cannot claim to be an authority on this. But of those three, one has graduated and the other two are well on their way to do more than that and I've had no reason to suspect they are harboring some secret desires based on things they learned on the internet that they have been patiently waiting for years to put into action. Honestly if they can deceive me for years while watching meaningless TikTok videos that are supposed to corrupt their mind, they are clearly way more prepared for existence in a capitalist society than I ever was.


I.e. you assume they are transparent until proven otherwise? Fair enough, but not exactly the same as knowing they're transparent!

I'm not judging, to be clear. I think that's a healthy policy. I was just curious since humans are great liars and bad lie detectors.


It's the same as I view the relationship with my wife. I'm not going to assume she's cheating and force her to install spy software so I can monitor all of her activity just to make sure. Of course this doesn't guarantee that she will never cheat, but if you presuppose the outcome it'll be far more likely to end up that way I believe.

I've also experienced that this extension of trust is reciprocated. One time my son was hanging out with some of his friends after high school. He's not one to make friends easily and this was one of the few times he went out on an "adventure" like this. They did typical teenage boy hooligan stuff. He was comfortable enough to tell me about what they had gotten up to so we were able to have a discussion around it and I explained the likely outcomes of continuing down that sort of path. At some point that "harmless fun" can become a lot less harmless and have real consequences. I didn't have to ground him or ban him from seeing those kids again. He took the lesson and ran with it. I'd never want my son to feel like he has to hide something like that from me, and I feel if you're going too authoritarian you corrode the trust that let's them be honest with you. When my kids are in trouble, I want them to think of me as a possible solution and not someone they have to hide it from instead.

Again, I won't claim to be any sort of expert on this. I parent like anyone else. As best we can with the tools we're given. My sample size is small with 9, 11 (10 & 12 this month!), and and 18 year old. But I know for a fact I would never have told my parents about any shenanigans I got up to and I'm having conversations with my kids that I couldn't have imagined having with my parents. We never had that sort of relationship.


I will just say that it was widely reported that Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use iPhones and iPads :)


I’d also be willing to put money on the fact that I spend way more time with my children than someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did with their children. I’ve worked from home for the last 10 years. I’ve been to every concert and sporting event. I’ve been to every teacher conference. If you don’t actually have a relationship with your children I’d see why you’d need to resort to more draconian policies to impart your will.


While I agree that your child is not you and FOSS doesn't need to be your child's value, it needs to be said that

FOSS is the software author's value. It correlates with the author's intentions, their incentive and the software's shape and influence on the user – your child. It's a way to delineate content you want your child to see and that which you don't (and thus we circle back to the idea that you imposing a policy ultimately means imposing your values anyway).


I'm still a ways off from needing this specific advice (child is 2 ½), but i feel like the that is exactly how i wish i had been treated as a kid. Not what i wanted back then, which was obviously to just do everything i wanted to do, but what, looking back, i believe would've been great. Thank you.


> Then we had a conversation.

> And worked things out together.

You make it sound so simple. What if your kid simply doesn't listen? They are smart, so they know that if they keep nagging, they will eventually get what they want.


i don't think gp necessarily meant that everything always worked out well and that there never were disagreements. I might be very wrong but what i took away from it was that no matter how much of a plan / how strong a policy you make, you're going to need to make some compromises unless you want to become the sort of parents we had (generalizing greatly).


> Your child is not you. If your child thinks FOSS is cool, it's cool. If they think it is lame, you are being lame.

Yup, don't turn them into a pariah due to the color of chat bubbles (not having iPhone-colored bubbles was recently a major social problem for American teenagers). The color of a bubble might seem stupid to someone dealing with the issues of the adult world, but social issues is basically/hopefully the extent of problems that kids face.

That being said, parents have been successfully imparting values to their children for millennia. If you believe that using FOSS is important (I happen to agree) then you should have no issues convincing your child the same. Maybe they'll end up using Linux on their laptop, while prioritizing the color of chat bubbles on their phones. You can only give them the tools and knowledge to make the right choices, you can't make choices for them.


I don't know if I would say it's a "major social problem", more like a mild negative. Some teenagers primarily use Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger. And outside of the US Whatsapp is very common. All these get around the chat bubble color issue.


I couldn't find anything on this online. Why would you need to change the theme of a chat application as a kid in the United States?

Sorry if I am missing something painfully obvious here.


On iPhones iMessages are blue, but text messages (from non-ios devices) are green and lack some of the features of iMessages, so being green is looked down upon


Have a read: https://archive.ph/RJ7bl it is an article of the wall street journal from last year that explains this pretty well


This cannot be upvoted enough - thanks for posting it!


I was given unrestricted access to an iPad as a 6yo. My dad would always be too busy to do anything so he’d give me his iPad (2) or his iPhone (3gs) whenever I’d ask with almost no hesitation. In retrospect, I do wish he was at least a little more strict. I could sit on a screen for 18 hours in a day with no intervention from my parents… but I wouldn’t. (my parents love me by the way and didn’t neglect me…I think)

I mostly mindlessly watched Minecraft youtube videos, lets play videos, and would occasionally play some mobile game.

Pros: - Developed my vocabulary by listening to adult conversation (commentators) - Became adept with technology by getting familiarity with navigating the internet and jailbreaking the devices - Became a fast typer - Was able to easily make friends who watched similar YouTubers

Cons: - Difficulty focusing - Became impulsive as having instant access to technology is a form of instant gratification that was drilled into me - Learned every swear at 6 years old - Discovered porn at 7 years old

Regardless, I do think I turned out fine. I was a straight-A student throughout my entire K-12 education, made plenty friends, and have maintained an ambitious outlook on my career.


Wow, I feel old that someone can actually post this, but damn, is that illuminating.


I'm almost 50 and could say the same except instead of phones and tablets it was console video games and a personal computer with internet access.

Kids definitely have a different(extreme.. worse..) experience today, I'm not going to argue with that. But I think I was 5 when I started going long stretches of the day with no parental involvement and large amounts of device time. When I was 12 I got a modem, and was suddenly exposed to porn, online socializing and trolling, underground culture, pirated games, etc. For large stretches of time it was basically all I did outside of poorly performing at school.


"Almost 50" and "got a modem at 12yo" doesn't add up...

48yo today means you were 20yo in 1995, so already an adult by the time porn and pirated games were a thing?

Not trying to gotcha, but I'm left with the only possible conclusion: you spent your university years exposed to porn, trolling and pirated games! :-)


In 1987 my grandparents bought me a commodore 128d with a 1200 baud modem at Toys-R-Us. I got online with Q-Link and then discovered BBSes and then quickly discovered underground BBSes.

Around 1990 I started getting on the Internet via a hacked dial-in of a local UC school for which I was eventually caught, charged and did probation for (along with other computer crimes). I had 3(or 3 1/2, I forget) years probation where I was supposed to avoid computers but eventually violated it with a dumb terminal and modem I got cheap(my computers were confiscated when my parents' home was raided).


Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware underground BBSes in 1987 had much "porn and trolling" to be suddenly exposed to as you describe. But you were an actual hacker, parents house raided etc. These details add weight to your version of events! I on the other hand only wished I could use my commodore for hacking WarGames-style, but you actually lived the movie!


You know how much trolling, pirated games and porn predates the internet as you may know it? Just take a look at the BBS scene and Usenet... yeah, it may have been very low res titties but alas... ;-)


There were modems in the 70s, you were just connecting to BBSes, not AOL or local dial-up providers. For porn, I'm sure the BBSes had it, but there was also Leisure Suit Larry by 1987 which was widely pirated and known for its unique age verification system:

http://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.htm...


It does somewhat add up. I'm 42, and got our first 33.6k modem around 13-14yo. And we definitely weren't the first ones in my relatives.


> Became impulsive as having instant access to technology is a form of instant gratification that was drilled into me

i don't see myself as "impulsive" like you describe. I got online when i was 8 and have been online since that day. its been so long...

a few years ago we were talking something and the idea was "internet gets boring after a while" and i responded almost instantly "the buzz i felt the very first time i opened a website, i still get that all these years later, every single time".

instant access to information i'd say. not technology. in the first 5-8 years, there was no facebook or whatever and i had learned the mantra "lurk moar" so it was always a one sided "uh... how about reading about skateboarding" or "what's the nazkca lines" because i saw on TV.

i would read something in books or on tv or newspaper and i could summon the internet and give me more details.

i don't see that as instant gratification but satiety at looking for information and getting it. you have an encyclopedia open at any page so you are being given the data you requested.

instant gratification is in regards to imo the whole social media, twitter, facebook, tiktok.

does anyone become "addicted to wikipedia" for example?


Me and you grew up in different ages of the internet. I was 6yo in 2010

Why read when you can watch. Why play with toys when you can play video games.

Not trying to say that watching YouTube or playing video games is bad - (they can be just as educational imo) but what happens is your overall standard for gratification gets raised. This increased standard makes what should be normal tasks become mundane. The overall effect of which is compulsion to avoid the mundane task.

Sounds like your experience was with the internet as a knowledge tool. Currently, id argue it’s a time-sink and mind-sink for the majority of people.

p.s I don’t have adhd/autism if that’s what you’re thinking.


Similar experience with my kids: 10 and 14 years old. They are comfortable with their smart phones and laptops, they spend hours watching mindless youtube videos. They are good at shopping on Amazon or ordering food, for the whole family. But they are turning out fine. They have ample friends in real life, good at studies and sports. They understand the difference between need and want. They put things in the shopping cart and wait to have a dialog with us about buying them. Of course, all credit cards are protected by OTPs, so they can't even purchase anything by mistake. Most importantly, they are comfortable chatting with their friends on Whatsapp and find it easy to keep up with school life. They also play Minecraft online with their friends.

And yes, +1000 for a larger vocabulary!


How old are you now?


Ya, there we go. Can people who turned out fine yell a little louder so we can drown the alarmists.


When you figure out a way to shout down controlled studies with anecdata get back to us.


huh?


GP means that people running around yelling about their experiences is irrelevant in the face of studies that contradict them (provided the studies are good).


> Discovered porn at 7 years old

I can assure you that he/she is not fine.


What makes you qualified to speak for them?


As opposed to the magazines in the woods literally everyone else discovered pre-internet?

Knowing about sex is not some horrible fate we have to go through, I don't understand this perspective.


What? That's about the same age I found it and I'm fine.


What age is this discovery fine vs not fine to you?


Smartphone in high school, not before.

No social media apps on the phone. Parental control (iOS) so need Parent permission before installing apps

At home most/almost every non-professional social media is blocked via pi-hole

I’m not on FB, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc. I think this is very very important for the above since kids see that parents are also not on social media. Most people, IMHO, run into trouble when they use it but want to restrict kids.

This mostly worked for a kid who just went to college. Will see if it works for the other.

Edit: have Switch and PS5, but multiplayer internet games are not allowed. Offline games only.

Edit2: I occasionally remote login into computers to tell the kids that I can do that. I think/hope it reduces temptation.


As a person who grew up and found very valuable social connections in online spaces, connections that helped me figure out who I am as a person, these feel very controlling and overbearing to be a bit blunt. For kids who don’t fit society’s typical mold, whether they be queer or whatever, being able to meet people who have lived their experience is invaluable.


I hear you. In an ideal world I would have supported that.

Unfortunately in the current social media, the choice is between letting the kids wade in cesspool of crap and hope they find some lotuses, or support them in person till they are mature enough.

It’s a hard decision. I made the one above.

Edit: to clarify, if my kid ever comes to me as queer or whatever, I’ll make sure to find in-person connections that can help. Relying on social media still feels a little iffy. I’m really glad you were able to find meaningful connections. I have a feeling not everyone is as lucky as you.


I think it's important to differentiate social media with social networks. I would vigorously argue that Instagram & TikTok are media setup for doom scrolling, and almost nobody gets anything positive from the experience (unless they're selling something). On the other hand -- and perhaps I'm dating myself but I ran a dial-up BBS in the early 90s -- platforms that lend themselves to formation of meaningful relationships aren't all cesspools. I think it's important to have open conversations with one's children to assess what they need in their lives to become open-minded, rational, compassionate and helpful contributors to society, and that's impossible without cultivating the right relationships.


I agree very much.

Unfortunately, the BBS and even forums of the past (and those that are alive today) were very focused and had less crap. I used to spend a lot of time on Slashdot and find very civil conversations even today in many focused forums (cars, AV equipment, coffee, DPReview, coding related etc etc) Reddit has some corners like thar.


Discord now is very much like that if you stick to small-ish focused servers.


I grew up in the early 2000s and us and other kids in middle school were watching beheading videos and/or porn.

Shit, I talk to other functioning adults in their 20s and 30s and they tell me they too watched the same garbage.

I think you might have rose tinted glasses on to be honest. The Internet was just as wild back then.


Not the OP, I think the main difference between then an now is that the internet in the old days wasn’t designed to be addictive, todays social networks and other apps are. For me it’s not about the severity of the the content but the addictiveness.

I remember two of my classmates being addicted to World of Warcraft. They both got problems, one dropped out, one managed to turn around. Today every smartphone game and the social networks are at least as addictive as WoW. Some people will manage it but some won’t. I don’t know if OPs way to handle it would be the way I handled it but A I don’t have a better idea an B I don’t have kids (yet).


Even if you block everything, they will find their way around it because having a social presence is very important for teenagers, even if you don't consider the content valuable. It's part of belonging and growing with their peers. Limiting access is probably a punishment ("tough love" if you want) but not a lesson. You can help them realize Instagram is full of crap and let them chose to avoid it. Kids are smarter than we think, and trusting them is more powerful than building walls (although it's true that it's more difficult and scary just trusting them).


How old are you? To be a bit blunt — things have changed significantly since those of us in our (late?) 30s and up grew up dialing into BBS Compuserve AOL.


That's part of the issue and why I try not to fool myself that I'm more technically literate and cool / aware dad, than my dad was.i may work in IT but a teenager's experience of online world is a perplexing mystery to me. They use different social media very differently than I did / do. Their online and offline peers and circles are strange to me. Not that they're bad! I just recognize I don't grok their world.

I met my spouse online and a lot of my generation did. I too met a lot of friends online first. But the exploits and weirdness and threat vectors on the interwebs today is just very different.


> I met my spouse online and a lot of my generation did. I too met a lot of friends online first.

At what age though? Were you 18+ or younger?


Fwiw and as requested :)

Re friends - In late 90s and early 2000s I was in my late teens and early 20s. I was on the interwebs since age 15 or 16 in ~1995

Re spouse, age 27 in 2006 on Lavalife. There were a lot of creeps on dating sites then, but not nearly as many professional scammers as today.


I met some people through game modding forums and mailing lists at 17. I think I started participating when I was 15.


It’s ironic that you’re asking me my age and calling me, indirectly, a dinosaur, but used a brand new potentially throwaway account. :)

I guess some of us do value our privacy and want to impart that to our kids.


No, I’m saying you may be younger if you think it’s “safe” to let your kids bop around the internet without oversight.


Ah ok, got it. Sorry, I realized your comment was not for me.

I’m old-er :D


Online acquaintance is not really "meeting people" is it? Maybe seeing people, discussing? Can it not wait until 16-18yo when folks get access to these things regardless of what parents want?

I had a few gay friends in high school, and we all knew it. No one really cared. Didn't require smartphones as they didn't exist.


What don't you like about online gaming?


Behavior from fellow players can range from day-brightening to absolutely appalling. Not taking the risk.

Even in multiplayer games without chat/audio, the other players will find creative ways to exhibit behaviors I find intolerable for my kids.


Online gaming is often a cesspool of DLC, anxiety inducing artificial time constraints designed to give kids FOMO, lootboxes and other forms of gambling targeting children and a constant stream of advertising that isn't seen to anywhere near the same extent in offline/single player titles. Roblox, minecraft, and Fortnite being prime examples.


Minecraft Java edition isn't really that though.

Roblox is in a class of its own compared to fortnite and minecraft in terms of toxic monetisation.

Online gaming is definitely a tough one to navigate though, regardless. I had no problems as subscription was the limit to paying when I was a kid, but now it's a generation raised with mtx.


I'm glad the the Java edition still has none of that. The last time I got the urge to download it they required an account to even get the installer and I feared the worst. It looks like that might no longer be the case... I may give it a try again and kill some time


You do still need an account but (Microsoft Account) but the game itself has no DLCs, no lootboxes and the likes.


Minecraft is definitely without a doubt, not any of those things. It is first and foremost a single player game that can be modded extensively. I have found that multiplayer always comes second at best.

Servers can be bad, but that is entirely optional. Not even close to Roblox or Fortnite.

This is coming from a person that basically grew up with it from the Alpha stage.


> Minecraft is definitely without a doubt, not any of those things.

It's certainly some of those things!

DLC tied to 3rd party IP (bonus advertising!):

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/batman-dlc-swoops-mi...

https://www.eurogamer.net/dungeons-dragons-dlc-heading-to-mi...

Limited time events with exclusive content to make kids feel like shit if they don't/can't login at certain dates/times:

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/discover-summer-cele...

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/star-wars-celebratio...

In-game ads:

https://www.adventurize.com/

https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/news/16967/relentlo-brings-i...

It's unclear to me if any of their events or DLC includes loot boxes (mere chances to acquire certain content) or not. if they haven't done that, I give them credit

I'm also not sure how much direct advertising Microsoft does in-game. Have they worked with ad companies like this to promote third party or non-game content? https://www.adweek.com/creativity/minecraft-built-a-colossal...

I'm sure it's not as bad as Roblox or Fortnite but Microsoft does not have clean hands here either.


But that's not Minecraft. That's MS's shitty non cross platform port.

You want to give the kids Java edition which has none of this crap.


It looks like there is no way to get a version of Minecraft that isn't from MS. I'm glad the Java edition doesn't have the DLC and ads, but I can't test that because it seems even the Java edition needs a MS account/internet connection.

If you know a place to get an offline installer that doesn't require an account though I'd love to give it a try and see how the Java edition holds up!


I didn't realize any of this existed. I play Minecraft Java edition, which is the original version, and has none of these things.

Now I know to be a bit more careful when recommending the game without specifying huh.


This reads like a person that's never really looked at or played a game.


There's a good chance I've been gaming for longer than you've been alive.


(Probably untrue but) Neat. Doesn't really change the content or validity of my post though. It reads like a person that's never looked at or played a video game.


They said online gaming. It's a pretty accurate description of the free to play space.

Buy your kids pay once games with no IAPs. Teach them to keep a wish list and wait for sales :)


Online gaming and f2p aren’t the same thing…


Even WoW has IAPs now don't they? The moment you put even one IAP in you -ck up the design to incentivise people to buy it...


Yeah I just kinda reject this whole line of thinking.


I guess it's unclear what you mean. The problems I mentioned are things I've seen many other gamers express concerns about, especially gamers with kids. It's not only exploitative, but these things make the games themselves worse as well.


I made a rule. Bought most games I was asked for, was never pushed back for online gaming.

So it worked. If there had been much push back for a game, I would have dug deeper.

At the very least, conversations can be rather profanity laden and so can be the user names.


might be obvious - online games much more tempting than offline single player games. I have not played single player games in decade+ but have played several days the latest multiplayer games.

Does it mean online games are more addictive for kids or affect them worse than offline games? probably not. But I have observed (many) kids who can power thru single player games tend to be more unyielding on other tasks.


Sounds draconian af. This would just... make a kid hack into the iPhone and find out ways to remove restrictions.


That’ll be cool. I would love it for my kid to do that. So learn new skills.


You're sincerely a good father. You're showing you care for and want to protect your children. And that's a good insight regarding parents on social media while trying to restrict it for their children.


My son just started middle school, and quickly we were hit with a new salvo of requests for a smartphone. Rather than immediately provide reasons why not, we've decided to turn it around and have him explain what he wants a smartphone for (he already has access to a flip phone he can take to school). Most things were met with "Can't you use your Chromebook or iPad for that?" Very soon he was sort of sheepishly left with "playing games at lunch" and "because my friends have one," which even he admits aren't great reasons.

It's not a fun conversation and he isn't happy, but I feel like this time around it was a bit more productive and less of the vibe that we're just saying no to be mean.


> "because my friends have one," which even he admits aren't great reasons

He’s still feeling left out though. That’s one of the worst experiences for any human being of any age anywhere. Rational thinking and justifications cannot solve or permanently remove these emotions, more so at a younger age (I’m not dismissing your son or implying that younger kids cannot have greater awareness and rationality).

I feel sad that he doesn’t have a smartphone (even a locked down one with some restrictions).


> He’s still feeling left out though.

It’s not just feeling left out. It’s literally being left out. Tons of socializing happens on phones, like it or not. An 8-10 year old will be able to tell you which classmates have a “crappy” phone or no no phone. Just ask them.

I personally think it sucks and it’s a huge burden on people that aren’t well off, but that’s the way it is.


Having an iPad can provide a lot of the same social value, since you can still use social media or instant messaging apps. Only a minority of the social value that you can't get from a flip phone comes from being able to use it during the school day, IMO.

Although a flip phone with a good keyboard would be preferable, so quick typing is easier.


But life is full of being left out. An argument can be made that it's good to learn how to deal with it when you're young.


“Because my friends have one” is one of the absolute best reasons for a middle schooler. It just doesn’t sound like a good reason to an adult. If the other kids are all playing a game the one without a phone is left out.


It's a bit funny that at the same time it doesn't sound good reason to an adult, it is one of the main reasons adults buy all kind of stuff themselves. Keeping up with Joneses...


Nothing like finishing a conversation with your child about the lack of need for a smartphone then jumping into your financed 2023 BMW SUV when a 1987 Toyota would fulfil the requirements.


Because it’s not about the price. And you’re the adult, you earn the money, you’re not required to share a fixed percentage of income with your children.


Still not a reason for parents to follow. Replace "smartphone" with "heroin" or "taser" and ask the same question.


Then it makes no sense. If most middle schoolers have heroin and tasers we are talking about a very different situation.


Another issue is group chats. In my middle school (in US), people started planned events / set up hangouts / got to know people better over group chats. The people who didn't have phones were just heard of less often. I think having some type of phone is useful for that. Then having honest conversations with your kid about the responsibility that comes with it. My parents were relatively free range with me about things, and I respect them for it. They never set parental controls on my devices, never enforced downtime from screens, never stopped me from doing something on a device because I wanted to. By high school I was tinkering with computers and doing tons of side projects just for fun. I think they recognized my love for tech at a young age and let me run with it. Now I'm in my last year of school doing Industrial engineering and computer science, and tech has always been integral to my success.

--

I think you should have honest conversations with the kid about what you think is the good and bad about having phones, then share with them personally how you've felt while using it. There are times tech can be awful, but also times it can be really helpful.


Currently the iPad has been filling that role for the most part. His peers seem to be on iPhone/iMessage, so he’s able to participate in those group chats after school. This seems to be sufficient for now. If anything, I’m hearing from him about the kids who don’t have any access to iMessage as being more left out.


I did no devices at all until kindergarten. I have a tv connected to Plex via appletv in my living area and would watch a few shows with them.

Gave unlimited books and magazines.

Elementary school- bought an iPad with screen time and “no devices upstairs” (all bedrooms were upstairs). 30 minutes on school days, 60 minutes on weekend. Wi-Fi rules to shut off at night. Pihole to block porn and YouTube.

Middle school got laptops with same controls. And a gaming pc in the living room.

No instagram until 13. This was hard because all other kids got at 10 or earlier. Am trying to push this to 16 with later children.

High school- same laptop, little more screen time and later Wi-Fi turnoffs.

Phones with data when they have jobs and can afford to pay directly.

Hard to tell if this “works.” Have done some tests of how much screen time and apps and behavior was very different for the worse with more screen time. Things like more arguments. Less time creating art or playing in person with friends with more screen time.


I think by middle school it’s probably okay to not turn off the router.

Maybe I’ve got brain worms because I had more or less unrestricted internet access since the time I was able to use a computer, but it feels like it wasn’t overly harmful.

I spent far more than an hour behind a screen and I think I’m better off for that time. I spent a lot of time learning to program, learning mathematics, and consuming general knowledge content via things like vsauce, scishow, minute physics, cgp grey, crash course, etc.

However, I also spent a lot of time on reddit which I’m certain wasn’t ideal for my social development. I understand this case may not be typical and maybe not even reproducible given the addictive content machines like tik tok, reels, and shorts, but I think having the freedom I had was a net positive.


I had unrestricted access to the internet too from maybe age 10 or so, but it was a different time in the late 90s/early 2000s. Massive social networks, YouTube, etc were not much of a thing until I was in my mid teens. No smartphones, and PCs were clunkier to use than today. Playing videogames, hanging out on forums and reading news & Wikipedia were about the most engaging things I could do at the time.

I saw plenty of violence and sex earlier than I should have, but like you said I feel the internet is a different beast these days. At the time, it was merely an unrefined double-edged sword of time wasting and free information. Now it is more addictive, filled with experiences designed by morally degenerate PhDs to prey upon our basest psychological weaknesses to make money for megacorps.


> I had more or less unrestricted internet access since the time I was able to use a computer, but it feels like it wasn’t overly harmful

I have the opposite experience.

  - I've been addicted to pornography since I was 12.
  - Late computer use caused me to never get enough sleep.
  - Programming early started my career, but it also isolated me socially.
YouTube and Tik Tok scare me; as a grown-up, I can still waste hours just swiping and swiping. I suspect that getting this behavior early on will make you more docile. My siblings raise their kids with tablets, and it impacts their learning ability and sociability tremendously.


or maybe its like other easily abused substances: having a social circle navigating the same thing makes people not be maladjusted and have moderation

different set of norms but just different

abstinence only education doesn't work, no need to become your parents just because of a new thing to have a knee jerk reaction to


10 & 12, both have iPads with restrictions - 2 hours/day with certain apps excepted, e.g. drawing, coding, other educational apps. No smartphones yet, but both have cellular Apple watches. Texting only with contacts, I manage the contacts. We've consistently drawn the line at 9th grade for their first smartphone, which is fairly late compared to our contemporaries.

They have lots of other things to do, too, of course. We have a Switch, Xbox, trampoline, swimming pool, hot tub, and a neighborhood full of other kids their age. They would probably spend more time on YouTube than I'd prefer if I didn't put a cap on it, but it's been basically fine so far. We do have a rule against iPads in bedrooms with closed doors, though that is starting to relax a bit with the 12 year old.

Kids grow, you kinda have to roll with it and adjust to fit the situation. You can't keep them innocent forever, and if you try, you will not get the well adjusted adult you're aiming for. We have some family who are hard core home schoolers (for religious reasons) and it turns out a disaster more often than not. They're so worried about public school indoctrination but are then surprised to find their own kids refuse to be indoctrinated at home.


My daughter is much younger, but I'm curious, did you found a way to restrict youtube to healthy stuff? I tried using youtube kids, but I got shocked by the amount of insane kids selling toys videos... honestly preferred to use regular youtube.


Same here. There’s great stuff for us to watch together, but the mindless stuff keeps getting thrown up over and over again.


I use yt-dlp to download approved videos and put them on my plex server; no direct youtube on kid ipas.


I've thought about cellular apple watches, as a way to know where the kid is, and so the kid can call in an emergency. Seems better than a phone, which encourages scrolling.

But my kids' school doesn't allow kids to wear smartwatches (and I can imagine why — distractions, possible cheating, etc.). Have you dealt with restrictions like these?


We have only had one incident with the smartwatches. My daughter texted us during class, which got it taken away. Probably she wouldn't have gotten caught aside from the fact that she was using voice recognition to dictate the message. We had a chat with her teacher and the principal, and they agreed to give her a second chance provided she agreed not to text during class. This was in 5th grade, at her elementary school. My son still goes there.

The middle school has a no smartphone, no headphone policy, but they don't single out smartwatches. From their discussion points on why they have the rules they do, I imagine it won't be a problem as long as my daughter continues to abide by the 'do not text during class' rule. They're not trying to lock down the school, just eliminate distractions during class.


I went to school in Central Europe and it was partially pre-cellphone times, so please excuse my ignorance.

These days we have a lot of medical apps from calorie counters to continuous blood glucose monitor apps for diabetics, which prevent a lot of deaths.

What is the take on kids that need a phone for these things at school in the US?


Most public school rules have clearly identified exceptions and guidelines for how to apply them. Someone who has a medical need will be allowed the devices they need. It's a fairly small fraction of students that require accommodation.


I wonder if they tolerate basic cellular watches, like GizmoWatch? We have one for our 9 y/o and it seems like good value. We can know where she's at and can reach each other, but that's about it.


I'm not sure where they draw the line. For now, we just have an AirTag in the backpack for crude location awareness when the kids are on the bus.


That made me think, what about a dumb phone? We had those old Nokias that they still make that have calling, text and a few other things but are painful for most anything else


My father provisioned to me a Nokia brick phone around the age of 14 (circa 2008). It was a prepaid Tracfone, SMS messages counted towards minute usage so I had to learn to be conservative in my usage. I was eventually gifted an iPod touch, which I promptly jailbroke, and later installed Google Voice to text more freely (over WiFi). My father set strict boundaries when it mattered - he would only finance that which he endorsed.

I didn’t have custody over my own bank account or a debit card until I graduated high school. I purchased my first smartphone, a Google Nexus 4, and prepaid data plan after my first semester of community college (circa 2012).

The first iPhone was released in 2007 when I was 13. I’m 29 now. My family never had to confront the question OP prompted in a social climate like we have today and I’m thankful for that.

My father’s parenting style was fantastic but it wasn’t ideal (given that ideals are unattainable). But his handling of the phone situation is something I intend on recreating with my own children some day.


> Recently, there are more and more studies that smartphones harm learning and not a single study with the opposite results.

1) It's much more nuanced than you're making it out to be. There are a lot of studies that show overuse of phones ("phone addiction") is bad for academic performance. Going beyond that runs into some serious correlation/causation problems. For example, children in lower income families spend significantly more time in front of a screen than middle-class families.

2) Is "learning" the sole issue you're concerned about? There are studies that show cell phone bans are harmful in other ways: reducing social interaction, student happiness, and feelings of safety.

If you look at the above two points together I think you can draw a conclusion that smartphones, like most other things, are fine in moderation and potentially problematic at the extremes.

Here are the AAP recommendations about screen time: https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/cente... AAP has a reputation for being conservative and evidence-based in what they recommend.

EDIT: I found a high-quality study from just last year that should no association between the age a child acquires a phone and depression, grades, or sleep quality. https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13851


Presumably safety could be addressed with a dumbphone; I don't think that's an argument for smartphones.


Sure, though I'd note that feeling safe is potentially about more than just having the means to make a phone call.


Feeling is an individual thing, though. I think it's better to define safety and try and achieve it (e.g. we want an emergency button to push that pings a location-aware SOS out), rather than making people feel safer (e.g. self defence classes).


Why do you assume making children feel safe isn't itself a worthwhile goal?


Another option in the same vein is a watch with cellular. One advantage is that it's harder to lose.


Some things to think about:

* Commenters here are a highly selected sample. Many people are saying "I got lots of screen time as a kid, and all I did was learn computer programming." Well, sure, they're on HN! But your kid may not be like that.

* This is equally true for any parenting strategy. "My parents did X and I turned out great" is not necessarily informative because most people who are reading HN probably turned out OK.

* People's own parenting strategies are also non-typical ("I set up squid and created a whitelist..." is beyond most people). But maybe that's ok because you the reader are from the same atypical sample.


Indeed. We learned computer skills because we had to. Computers were a buggy mess. I still remember how big of an upgrade windows 98 felt like. That is no longer the case. We now have devices, apps, and services meant for the specific purpose of effort-free consumption.

I didn’t get my first smartphone until I got a job, but I really wish that my parents had never let me have a personal computer, in hindsight. It caused significantly more harm than it did good.


I have a whitelisting proxy for my kids at home (squid based). Later I will change it to blacklisting, then just logging before eventually giving them uncontrolled access. I don't have a timetable for it and will change it whenever it feels appropriate.

I also use Wireguard to route my own mobile phone traffic through my home network. When the time comes to give the kids smartphones (which I'm in no hurry to do) I will initially give them managed devices with always-on wireguard to the home network, so traffic goes through the same proxy. The set of available apps will also be restricted.

We talk a lot about the complexities, opportunities and dangers of the internet and the kids are accepting of the restrictions.

The technology exists to manage this. It's the same stuff companies use for byod. It's just that nobody makes it easy for parents to do it.


Can you share any resources on how you set this up exactly?


+1 here. Would love to see how to set this up.


I built a very similar setup for my kids. Mine operates per-system, some are white listed with individual settings, and my oldest are on a blacklist only for problem sites.

Thanks for sharing.


I think FOSS vs proprietary software is sort of orthogonal to what kind restrictions you should probably impose as a parent. It might be more useful to think about what kind of online environments your kids are engaging in. Anything monetized by ads is sketchy. Unfortunately, that's most of the internet.

My two sons were born in the early 2000's. When they were in elementary school, they had access to a desktop computer in our living room (running Gentoo Linux). In early elementary school, they had whitelist of web sites they could access, with Wikipedia as the home page. They each had about an hour a day, under parental supervision.

In middle school, they had tablets, which we made them turn in before bed time. I installed Minecraft on the desktop. Battle For Wesnoth is pretty good too.

In high school, we got them cell phones, and the school handed them laptops. We made them turn electronics in before bedtime, but we relaxed this as they got older.

I absolutely recommend setting boundaries. Properly instilling discipline in children takes a lot of self-discipline as a parent, and maintaining these boundaries can be a lot harder than it sounds. Be prepared for arguments. For better and worse, their cell phones are their connection to their peers, much of it mediated by Instagram and Snapchat.

It depends a lot on the kid too. Turning in the cell phone before bedtime became a major point of contention with my older son. We never had those problems with the younger one. I don't think we treated them that that differently, it's just how their personalities are. I think the kids turned out okay in the end. The older one is now serving in the US Marine Corps and the younger one just left for college a few weeks ago.

Love your kids, and stay involved with them. Then slowly let go.


I think this is one of the best comments on the thread. Most are about setting restrictions that, at best, will lead to the kids finding a way around them.

If you set restrictions, your kids will almost certainly find ways around them. Maybe they figure out how to do it on their own device, but they almost certainly have a friend with unrestricted internet access anyways.

If you reason with your kids and set boundaries (at an appropriate age), they learn _why_ restrictions might be set. This means that after you would have stopped directly applying restrictions, they use self control to moderate themselves.

Obviously it depends on the kid. My parents went both routes and _every single time_ they set a hard restriction I found a way around it. When they blocked websites with online games, I learned how to set up a proxy to a computer on the network without restrictions. When they added parental controls on an iOS device, I found out that factory resetting from Find My wipes the restrictions (factory reset on the device is blocked when parental controls are enabled). When a more stringent network block was applied, I learned about DNS and how to bypass DNS-based internet restrictions.

But they reasoned with my about social media and generally nurtured my curiosity, so I just don’t find myself interested in any traditional social apps. I’m definitely not immune to digital addiction, but I’d rather be addicted to interesting link aggregators than Instagram.

Also- consider setting different limits for different kinds of content. I think video games are probably a better use of time than TV since they’re engaging and typically require thought, but a good documentary is educational and should be considered as such (a strict passive-consumption limit may encourage a kid to watch more “junk food” content while eschewing content that’s actually educational). Maybe defined limits aren’t the way to go, or maybe exceptions should just be the norm.

One thing I’d add is that you should apply similar standards to yourself when setting boundaries. Even if I wasn’t feeling obstinate about a particular restriction, seeing my parents flagrantly violate that themselves just made me want to bypass it—and I did!

tl;dr at a certain point kids are people and can reason for themselves—to a degree; consider this when setting limits, restrictions, or boundaries.


I'm honestly shocked by the amount of restrictions some parents in this thread enforce.

I had unlimited access to a PC since I was about 10 (no Internet until I was 16). 3 years later I knew the operating system inside out because of course back in the day of DOS and Windows 95 stuff broke easily and I'd try to fix it. I'd just tinker with it endlessly, started to read books about computers and tried to find out how it all worked. I started coding when I was 14, just learned it on my own by having a book and with curiosity.

I never would have made it in this industry if it wasn't for spending endless hours with my computer for years before I had less and less time when I got older.

A few years ago my parents told me that the best thing they ever did for me is to buy me a computer. I agree.

I'm no genius by any means but every once in a while young hackers with incredible skills appear out of nowhere. I'm sure that all of them have a similar story to tell you.

I can get behind the idea of limiting social media and video time. But screen time in general - not so much.


It's not the 90s anymore—things have significantly changed. Be shocked at the sophisticated teams of PHDs at BigTech with million dollar salaries figuring out the best ways to create psychological addiction in their product... er subjects.

Start with the docs "The Corporation", and "The Social Dilemma". If you are interested in some more of the history from the government surveillance side, "The United States of Secrets."


> I never would have made it in this industry if it wasn't for spending endless hours with my computer for years before I had less and less time when I got older.

The amount of people that had the same upbringing but just became addicted to the internet/gaming instead of becoming a programmer is staggering though.

edit I'll add, I don't think blanket rules do much good either. The amount of "I won't let my kid do ____", where ____ is a pretty normal and mostly harmless thing, in this thread, is pretty wild. You have to teach kids to be reflective and thoughtful people, not just afraid of everything and/or unable to assess when something's good and when it's bad.


I think it really depends on the child, and the parents. My wife thinks games are invented by the devil (figuratively) and starts complaining after my son plays them for half an hour, but she’ll happily have him watch hours of youtube without blinking an eye.

I’d rather have him do something that stimulates his mind. But I’d still not want it to be all day long. There’s slso the fact he gets incredibly cranky when playing them because he feels like he should always win.


I'm more or less in the same place, but been moderately successful in convincing my wife that certain games are very good and much better than watching tv (or any other passive thing). My kids hates to loose, and especially in the beginning would have very bad reactions which would feed my wife's point that games are bad. I just started picking better games (low-level challenge, more fun and exploration)


This is one of those funny things... my wife will rant about Japanese anime being garbage and then watch Korean drama for an hour. You have to pick your battles, friend!


It was the same for me. I had access to computers for as long as I can remember, and they had internet access with no restrictions. For the first few years my dad made me use some kind of sandbox so I didn't brick the PC if I downloaded malware on accident, and we would talk about what I was doing and interested in, etc. Time on the computer would be spent playing some learning or creative games we had, eventually discovering online communities and programming. Programming stuck as the most interesting thing to do, I moved from games to modding to learning C++ and reverse engineering and now quite successfully working remotely as a programmer.

But consider: we had no idea what YouTube or Facebook were, there was no Twitter, no TikTok, no Instagram, no Discord, no Reddit, there were no phones with internet in schools.

Times really have changed since then, and I feel like our experience is not that useful to compare with anymore. Every second activity you can do on the phone now is some kind of infinite algorithmic doom scrolling funnel optimized to make it as addictive as possible, to make you view as many stupid ads as possible while learning absolutely nothing.

Worse, social media makes you always available to all your peers so if there is any kind of drama or bullying going on you have no escape anymore, not even at home. I don't have personal experience with it, but I've heard Instagram is particularly terrible at this for teenage girls - due to it showing everyone who interacted with any post, it generates an insane amount of pointless drama and group pressure along the lines of "you didn't like my post in 30 minutes wtf", "you liked that person's post wtf", almost like some cult.

I imagine most people don't want to limit the kids access to technology and learning, but are trying (and likely failing) to protect them from the latter. Even as an adult I sometimes fall for it and chain watch pointless videos or scroll Twitter for hours on end... if that had been available back then, oof.


I grew up the same way as you and GP. I have two kids now (8 and 4 years old) and I’m sadly resigned to the fact that computers will probably never feel like the awesome mystery boxes that they were back then. I spent so much time with memmaker and HIMEM.SYS and had no idea what I was doing. In comparison, today‘s environment feels much more focused on content consumption/distraction.


You might not had made it if you spent all your time watching YouTube videos about things you can do with Prime TM.


And I agree with that, I get very little out of videos. I have to try on my own to learn. Books are much better resources.


I was quite similar, asking just programming books for birthday/christmas presents since I was 10, but my parents took a different route. I'm neurodivergent so I behaved different from other people, and coming from small town conservative family they just wanted me to be "normal" and blamed the computer on my differences. For me it was crazy as it was obvious I'm different way before the computer and I just couldn't understand why they wouldn't want a kid that's spending his free time studying programming (and science). The constant stress of somebody coming to my room and whining that I'm sitting on computer (and behaving weirdly) made concentrating on programming really hard and my life really anxious and stressful. Some point at my teens I noticed that going to drinking with my friends was way more relaxing, even though I hated drinking and just wanted to study. The anxiety+stress+drinking really left a mess in my life.

Now I have my own kid and I'm finding it hard to put limits on phone usage as her peers are on tiktok etc. all the time. But the most important thing I'm trying to do is have these discussions and then that's it, try to act on what we've agreed, but not arbitrarily whine about too much usage or anything else that would make her constantly stress about it. And try to guide her to spend the screen time in better ways, like spending time playing Factorio / Minecraft multiplayer with her so we get creative time together instead of her looking short videos.


Regardless of what rules we choose, one thing I don't see here in the comments much is the practice of setting a good example for your kids. Kids can easily identify hypocrisy. A parent can't tell their child to not get addicted to a smartphone if the parent himself is addicted to a smartphone. So as parents we set ground rules for our own conduct before even thinking about policy for the child: We should not sit there mindlessly scrolling, especially in front of the child. If we need to use the phone for some task, take it out, do the task, and show the child that you're using the smartphone as a tool to accomplish something, not for passive consumption.

If you limit your kid's screen time to some arbitrary amount that you yourself cannot even achieve, you're transparently sending the message that you're full of shit and kids know when you're full of shit.


I have a 2 year old daughter and even though I intuitively know it's important to set a good example, I've already been shocked to the extent this is true.

My daughter loves grabbing our phones and watching whatever she can pull up on them, dialing people. If you take it away she gets upset. At first I was thinking, wow phones are very addictive on a primal level, she's addicted to just the flashy screens.

I think the flashy screen being tempting might be a little true, but then I came to a different conclusion about why she was so fascinated with the phone.

I noticed she also "changes" her stuffed animals diaper including pretending to apply rash cream, pretends to read books laying around she's seen me read, fidgets with the same household items she's seen me fidget with. That's when I realized what may be obvious to people experienced with kids - they constantly imitate the adults in their lives.

So my daughter was probably obsessed with staring at a phone because she saw her parents obsessed with staring at their phones and wanted to imitate them.

Of course this may be more relevant for very young kids moreso than teenagers, where the smart phone addictions work at a higher more cognitive level. But it did drill home the message that our children can be a reflection of ourselves so if you want to improve their lives, improve your own.


Kids aren't addicted to the flashy screen first. The first order issue is they want to be like you. That want to be like you soooo much. With every fiber of their being.


Nah, they're super enticed by it. For the first two years of my kids life, we had no screens in the house that he ever saw. We had old Nokia brick phones, no TV, and we only used a computer when he was sleeping.

Regardless, the moment he saw an iPad in the library, he wanted to stare at it and fiddle with it for an hour. Even to the point of completing ignoring the model train set which he loves.


You’re describing the first time i saw a giraffe.

Of course if anyone has never seen a screen like that, the second they see it they’re going to get fascinated by it.


Considering the scale interpretation differences, it would be impossible for a child to not be enamoured with an iPad. Like us seeing a giant sized 4k screen for the first time, except even better for them since they can walk around with their portable giant screen!


Kids were already super attracted to computers even when their parents had no idea what they were.

Source: own experience and I bet most of the HN population's


Today's devices and apps are designed to be addictive in a way that my old Commodore wasn't. Of course it was designed to be appealing, I don't deny that. But I doubt that ProTracker or Sensible Soccer had marketing teams focused on maximising "screen time".


The point of the post I replied to was that kids are attracted to tech because they see the parents absorbed in it. I don't think this is the main reason.

The way the commodore 64 was so addictive even while not being designed to do so helps prove that point. Most of our parents thought we were wasting our time and should read a book or watch TV depending on the parent in question. Of course we didn't. In fact those other things were more time wasting IMO. We were learning to create.

That this obsession turned into great careers and changed the world (sadly not always for the better as you describe!) was overlooked back then.

But kids just love tech just like they love rockets and dinosaurs, they don't need their parents setting the example.


Definitely. My children loved phones even at an age where they couldn't care less about the screen.

I pictured it in my mind like the 2001 monoliths -- these black rectangular things that hold all of the knowledge, and around which all sorts of social behaviour arise. Of course they're fascinating!


The good news, young parents, is you have a couple years to get it together. A infant wants to see your smiling face, but also won’t be scarred for life if you sometimes look away at a screen. Commit yourself to setting a good example, work on it, and know that while you will slip, you’ve also got time to improve.

Some good steps are zero phones at family eating times, kid book time, and kid bed time. I personally also think it’s important you are visibly alone when you are on a screen, in other words don't let your kids see you ignoring another adult for the screen. Like a modern smoke break.


I find my mobile capable Apple Watch to be useful for this. When I come home, I can put the phone on the ledge where I put keys and wallet, and still be reachable.

Or when playing outside or going for a walk. No phone in pocket means it is harder to get distracted.


Interesting, I would assume a smartwatch on your wrist would make it way more easy to get distracted. But I've never worn a smartwatch so maybe I'm wrong.


My experience (as someone who spends too much time on my phone) is that a smartwatch helps avoiding me getting sucked in by my phone.

It’s much less usable and I hate constant notifications on my wrist, so I’ll usually have it on mute and do a quick check at my notifications occasionally to see if there’s anything urgent (usually work or a message from my wife).

I’ll mostly ignore my group chats on WhatsApp and emails, and there’s no risk of me getting sucked into group coversations with friends, YouTube or the Internet (I don’t have social media apps on my phone so that’s not too much of an issue), which is where the real time sink is for me.


Concur with parent post. I find the watch (Samsung here) to provide me with reassurance that servers aren't all down, CEO isn't sending bat signals, etc. I leave my phone in the cat when I go to dinner with wife and other attention-sensitive scenarios.


That can’t be pleasant for the cat…


Cats took over the internet a few years ago, now they are going after the phones


My main distraction/entertainment is reading on the internet (like HN), and I cannot do that on the watch. And it’s difficult to message back and forth, plus I have those notifications off.

Same thing when going to sleep, I don’t take phone near the bed, just have the watch on which has my alarms to wake me up with vibrate function.


I keep my smartphone plugged in whenever I'm not traveling away from home for exactly this reason. I know there are Android watches that don't require an Internet connection to a powered on phone, but the Apple Watch has been awesome for reducing my screen usage in general. I'm never tempted to "play" or "consume" on it, except for podcasts or music; it's just a very task-oriented device.


+1. "because I said so" and "when you're an adult..." are short-sighted non-fixes.

I'm an uncle to a 5 and 7 year old. They call you on your bullshit all the time! And even as a non-parent I get that it's hard to always have to debate a 5 year old, but they DO recognize and intake consistency, even if they don't have the capacity to understand logic and rationality. yet.

You gotta set a consistent and reputable example. Or else you're just making a human that understands power.


How about "I'm already a mindless consumer drone addicted to tweet dopamine but it's not too late for you" ?


The honesty might have some value but ultimately I think it might not suffice


On top of that, if kids think you're a hypocrite, or even judgmental, they won't be transparent with you. They'll go behind your back and you'll lose the majority of your influence on them.


I love this. I believe it’s the only correct answer after reading and thinking hard about many.

The ability for young children to recognize hypocrisy is incredible, and the aptitude among teenagers to leverage hypocrisy to enable their own bad behaviour and use yours against you isn’t something worth contending with. You can only win by force, and your kids will resent the hell out of you for it. And for what? To look at your phone more?

Do any of us find ways to use our phones in worthwhile ways more than 15m in a day, truthfully? I sure as hell don’t. But I can sink a lot more time than that if I don’t think about what I’m doing.


That's just it. I put my smart phone in the cupboard with my wallet and keys when I come home and don't touch it unless I have to. Sometimes I'll be in the middle of something with my kids and I tell them what I'm going to do, even though they are just 2 and 4, before doing it. Then I put it back as soon as I'm done. Just tonightz for example I needed it to doubke check a recipe. So I told them I was going to look at a recipe, checked it out, and then put it back in the cupboard.

Having a designated place for your phone helps. Another thing I found to make phone use at home less appealing when I first wanted to get away from it was to have a personal rule that I always had to be stabding up in the corner. I don't allow myself to sit down with it, which actuality helps a lot.


Keeping it out of the bedroom is another good one— get an old school clock radio and leave the phone charging on the kitchen counter.


I hadn’t heard of the designated location idea before. I like that, thanks. I might do the same and see if I can get my family to use the same spot.


Wait, what? Absolutely!

I speak with my friends on my phone. Sometimes I may speak and laugh for two hours with an old friend I, for family/life reasons, haven't seen for years but with whom I have this ability to instantly resume our customary banter.

I read books on my phone. I do prefer a physical book but after I started a job where I travelled a lot I actually started buying the electronic versions, and once I got a phone with an OLED display it is quite okay to read on it in the dark. I read at least an hour a day.

I think the "problem" is that any phone usage looks the same. If you are sitting with your calculus book you look "usefully busy", but not if you're studying on your phone. If I read a thick novel I look serious and smart, but with the book on the phone I look like I'm scrolling on Facebook or whatever people use nowadays. If I watch a lecture on computer science I appear the same as if watching anything else. Is "phone" itself bad, or is it just that it looks the same as if one is being "lazy"?


You’ve changed my mind. I was talking in extremes, but you’re right, some people use their phones very socially and that’s often a good thing. There’s a grey area where it’s “social”, but not very directly or healthily in my opinion, but if you’re in the white area where you’re having direct connections with people you care about, that’s great. It just happens to be that I only do that for 5-10m in a day, but if I did more, I’d totally think that’s fine (or good, even).

I think the issue is that a lot of us don’t use them to stay connected in a healthy manner, but I shouldn’t assume that includes everyone.


Very true. Be honest with your kids.

Also, talk to them. Tell them what the dangers are, tell them what they need to talk to you about.

I just had a conversation with my 15 year old about who she talks to online, how she decides what is trustworthy, the fact that conmen and paedos might play a long game etc.


I agree very strongly with this. Honesty with the kids and clear explanations and options are a big help.

I did this once in the 90s with my first kids. I'm currently raising my granddaughter and it's a much different scene. So far I'm still figuring it out but I have a couple of tips I could share.

One that seems to work the same is to make sure they've got options. Now what I mean by that is they need to be able to bring it to me rather than me find out about it or get it from them. So what i did, is make damn sure that when they bring something to me we talked through it work it out and it's going to be less painful, if it has to be painful at all, then it would be otherwise. So the incentive is clear take that shit to Papa let's find out what we have to do.

Another one, that appears to be a little bit harder today is to give them safe computing options. One really easy example is typing a URL into a browser, rather than the address bar. There are many others, you get the idea.

Local devices seem to complicate this, but in the 90s I made sure the internet facing computer gear wasn in common rooms. That way it was a family activity, and that was really good for building trust sharing experiences and all the other good things that need to happen to have a healthy dialogue between parents and child.

I may have more to say on this later, but I'm off to read all the other great comments.


> Kids can easily identify hypocrisy. A parent can’t tell their child to not get addicted to a smartphone if the parent himself is addicted to a smartphone.

You can’t tell people “don’t get addicted to X” (I mean, you can tell them anything, but telling people not to get addicted isn’t an effective measure to prevent addiction, generally, and hypocrisy isn’t the main reason.)


I've been following this "good example" for both my kids who are 10 and 2 years old and I can say it works very well. At least for the addictive behavior. We still allow them to watch movies and cartoons plus games in TVs and iPads but no phones for them.

My wife and I have a policy that when we're eating no screens are allowed unless it's an emergency. I think this probably has the biggest effect of all. Also we have zero social networks (except professional ones).

I'm so tired of going to restaurants and seeing the entire family looking at their screens. The bigger the kid the bigger the screen. Technology really has killed social interaction and I try my best to raise my kids out of this mass hypnosis everybody seems to be in.

When we go out to eat my table is always kind of a mess because my two year old is all over the place. And that's fine. We can deal with it and we have some fun. I really don't buy he argument to giving kids a screen during meals so the adults can talk. Kids must engage in any conversation they want or simply sit and listen to adults talking. That's how they learn. If they're constantly zooming out then they won't learn how to behave properly.

I find it too convenient that adults who never had problems with this kind of addiction (because those devices did not exist) continue to feed their kids with algorithms.

Once my kids get to an age that they are more responsible I'll handle them a device and set boundaries. Since we (the adults) have been showing boundaries since the beginning I think it will work just fine.

So yeah, lead by example!


We were sitting at the table, I was responding a work message on the phone. My son took a phone from my hands and put it aside, because I wasn’t paying attention. It happened more than once, during non-work hours and there was no urgency to respond tbh. Then when I had to take an ipad with cartoons he was watching away, I felt how hypocritical it was. I actually was glad he threw a tantrum, because had he been a little older and called out my hypocrisy, it would corner me.


My rules is we don't touch our phones while our kid is awake. He's almost 2 now. I'm not sure when to change this, but it won't be any time soon.


Setting a good example shouldn't be the only tool in the toolbox, and it's possible to not set a good example and still do OK, but it's probably the best single thing you can do.


This was the message I got with alcohol. Over a glass of wine, hey, don't drink, like ever. For what it's worth, I followed the advice.


This is something I think about a lot, whenever I'm holding my infant and trying to maneuver my phone into my other hand -- what behavior am I modeling? It's made me more cognizant of how I'll pull out the phone at any free moment, even just for 20 seconds, so I can occupy myself by opening the browser and seeing something, anything.


YES! Exactly, the same for cocaine and meth!

Seriously, adults have a hard time resisting, kids have zero chances.

While we had the chance of growing up without this, they don’t. Our entire social fabric and kids developpement is gone.

This summer there was very very few kids playing outside, even if my kids were out, there no one out there. It took us two years to realize that our front neighbor had two kids!


Yes buts it’s inevitable that the child at some point will notice other adults/people who use the smartphone in that manner so the belief that it’s okay to passively consume will be reinforced no matter what the parents behavior is


that's a strange take to me, like why say it? the kid will spend 99% of their formidable time with the parents. sure, baby sitting, grand parents, and over time other external influences creep in, but why turn this into a "yes, but"?

especially when these influences absolutely don't have equal weight.


It’s his opinion because it excuses his own poor behavior. It’s impossible to get it perfect and everyone else does it so why would I even try?


This is true. But if everyone else in the world is using smart phones and you and your kid are the only people in the world NOT using smart phones... your kid will still think you're full of shit.

Clearly.


What makes you think I don't have "screen time" on myself and wifi scheduled at the router already?

And why is this antagonizing "full of shit" comment at the top of an important post?


Nah, that’s self-defeating bullshit. As parents we are flawed broken humans, just like all the other flawed broken humans. Just because a parent has a problem with alcohol, or excessive phone use, or any other vice, does not absolve them of setting reasonable restrictions for their children. Is it hypocrisy? Probably. Is it less effective than if the parent did not have said vice? Certainly. Is it better to set limits for your kid and explain why? Definitely.


Children learn by example. There are exceptions of course, and if you believe in exceptions rather than rules then go spend all your income in lottery tickets.


Of course they learn by example, but show me the perfect parent? Do you want to doom your kids to all of your own failings? Kids also learn by seeing the flaws in their parents and having the parent explain how they got there and how not to repeat the mistakes.

He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.


Yeah... no one wants to hear that.

Big point of fights between me and my wife: me using my phone. Alternative in my view is being bored, providing the opportunity to talk to her.

I don't use it when we are at dinner or doing an activity. When she is doing something (more constructive eg dealing with our Airbnb) I'm tempted to use my phone. What do I do? Well this. Read HN, twitter (follow fantasy football, economics, politics).

It's come to me even just wanting a bath each night after work because it is a guilt free 30-60 mins doing what I want on my phone.

Kids policy: 2 aged 7 and 10 (I trying to see again via lawyers, another story). Policy for them was 1hr day on weekdays after homework, 2-4 hours on weekends. Usually they play Minecraft on their tablet.

I think this is reasonable. What the hell do I know...


I live in Finland, and have a child who will soon turn seven. Finnish children start school "proper" around this age, and this is the first time they're able to make their own way to/from school.

(Some children walk, some cycle, and others take the regular busses and trams, depending on the distance involved. In our case the child has to walk a few hundred meters, and not cross any roads at all, so it's an easy walk for him.)

Because school finishes around 2pm we've just recently given him a phone so he can say "I'm going to play outside", "I'm coming [to the empty] home", or "I'm going to friend XXX for a couple of hours". It isn't a proper smartphone, but it does allow more than an old-school Nokia.

We've generally allowed 30 minutes of "screen time" a day, sometimes that has been watching selected youtube videos, sometimes playing Super Mario Bros on the nintendo, and sometimes it has been watching TV. I expect the dynamic will change a little more now, but not hugely.

Parental controls will be setup to allow more access between 1pm and 6pm, but I expect that we'll not allow access in the mornings or "late" at night, just to ensure there's not too much obsessive use.

When/If the child can route around the parental controls I think we'll "reward" that creativity with more access. Need to encourage the hacker-mindset :)


What does your child do when he is not on the screen? I'm kind of struggling with this with my child (also Finland) (similar age).


It varies, to be honest.

When he's left to his own devices he reads a lot of Aku Ankka, plays with lego, pokemon cards, and toy cars.

He's quite interested in designing simple board-games, and role-playing character sheets. I think he gets that from his mother, and also from Minecraft. He'll show me a sheet of paper with a bunch of weapons (bows, swords, guns, etc) with "points" associated with them, and then tell me stories.

He goes to play with kids in the garden, the park, or at their houses often, and every weekend I take him swimming, then to sauna. Or sometimes just sauna.

We're doing a bit more "adult" stuff these days, now he's a bit older and has an attention span. For example in the past few months I've taken him to a 90 minute-long circus show, Linanmäki, his first metal gig (hevisaurus), and to the cinema to watch the Mario film. I expect it is only a matter of time until I take him to watch a hockey match, but I don't think he'll be so interested so I've held off for the moment.

I guess other recurring things include going to the allotment (palsta) to weed, harvest berries, and random walks in the forest. He's been really interested in that this year, especially.


I have an 8 year old and this sounds lovely.


Our kids are ages 5-8, and we limit them to 1 hour per day of screen. When not on a screen, our kids play with toys, draw pictures, draw/write stories, read books, make stuff out of garbage (cardboard, cans, bottles, etc), make mud pies in the backyard, and so on.


I never understood restricting screen time, can you explain the reasoning for me?

My parents did this when I was growing up but it only handicapped me because I was interested in coding and didn’t have enough time to learn to go to the competitions I wanted. And I learned that coding was bad because my parents kept a strict time limit on it while other things were encouraged.

Maybe it’s difficult for me to see the benefits of a time limit when I think it has done more harm for me than good. It would make more sense to limit harmful apps and websites but not time from my perspective. But everyone is taking about time-restricting.


Mostly its a matter of making sure he runs around, and doesn't just sit on the floor staring at a screen. I mean sure they go outside for a few hours a day at school, but I expect children to be "active" in whatever way they enjoy.

Later if he has interest I'm sure I could talk to him about coding, but I know he's seen me do enough that he'll not consider it bad..

(It has to be said that a lot of people who talk about bad content are also saying they don't trust that youtube, and apps, will have appropriate content. And a lot of the time kids want to play with phones and the internet they want to do it alone..)


Physical activity and exercise is a good point and I think it's safe to say that exercise is a good, or at worst, a neutral pastime for kids. Probably good, as it would be for adults as well.

What about getting them involved in a physical hobby like a sport, and not restricting screen time? Would that be more beneficial for the kid?


As a dad also in Finland who has a child around the same age... I think I struggle with this wrt my son because I am honestly ambivalent. There is part of me that feels as you do. "Why not? He's active, popular, does sports, spends time with friends, is doing well in school, even has a girlfriend." On the other hand, I know that he would happily give that all up to play Zelda endlessly. When he's not on the screen at home he is restless and bored, which is a conundrum.


I'd say that "screen time" is just a convenient categorization since, for the most part, kids are so drawn to addictive and arguably low-value content that once those things are off, there is no interest in the screen. I've given unlimited time to my kids for more learning-centric stuff, but they hardly use it.

I can tell you if my kids were coding, making music, reading, or otherwise engaged in something more productive with their screens, I'd absolutely whitelist those apps for much more time. But it is, sadly, more YT Kids shit, Roblox nonsense, etc.


> I'd absolutely whitelist those apps for much more time.

I think this is a much better approach than blanket screen time restrictions.

By the way, I got into programming when I was about 10 because an informatics teacher at school showed me how to do it and encouraged her students to compete in school programming competitions. I think it's very difficult for kids to engage with learning-centric stuff on their own, so an incentive (even a very basic one) helps a lot.


What do competitions have to do with learning to code? Also algebra is needed before getting really good at it.


There are very many programming competitions for school students in most countries. Algebra isn't needed much, they are more like LeetCode.


1) I put manjaro on a desktop. Our first and second grader haven’t found the web browser yet (I need to figure out how to ban their accounts from accessing the network; currently, I unplug the network cable because minecraft is a festering pit of privacy violations).

They did find the games menu, which is full of OSS educational stuff.

2) Dosbox: The 1990’s were the golden age of educational software. Abandonware sites are your friends.

3) The parents at school recently held a bit of an intervention for the parents of the 2nd grade kid with a tablet, cell plan and youtube.

4) The switch is a surprisingly good product. Game builder garage is well done.

5) iPad’s guided access mode lets you lock it into a single app (eg; Kahn Academy Kids, PBS kids, etc). If that’s too spendy, Alcatel (of all companies!) makes landfill-grade android tablets with extremely good parental controls. (Google’s built in parental controls include mandatory account sign in and tracking, so screw that). This model is good enough (It’s $100 for a renewed one on Amazon). https://us.alcatelmobile.com/alcatel-joy-tab-2/


I haven't bought smartphones for my kids. Some of their friends have smartphones and this sometimes leads to complaints and longer conversations, for now they accept my list of reasons, I'm yet to see what will future bring.

As for computer access, I gave my kids access to my old PC running arch linux with some open source games, like minetest or supertuxkart. There are complaints that games are not as slick as they have seen when visiting other kids, but similarly to smartphones- they tend to accept my reasoning.

I don't let my kids to watch youtube unattended, I'm not happy with youtube recommendation system and more importantly with ads they serve. Luckily I got to the point where each time my kids see something weird on the internet they are either turning off or switching with some funny comment about the content.


Could you share the reasoning that you provide your kid? This is a concern of mine as a future parent and would love to know what effective reasoning looks like.


I talk with my kids about addictive effect of different things, one of them are smartphones- they currently are interested in games but I already talk with them about other products that bring same addictive effect. We talk about mechanisms that lead to addiction, and why is it bad for them to be addicted to anything..

As for youtube ads I think many are inappriopriate for kids, when I see them I chat with my kids about things that should not be shown to them and why.

I sometimes relate to my experiences, as I was heavily addicted to games, social media and to tech in general (in unproductive way), I see how this addiction changed my personality and I don't want my kids to go and make same mistakes. But even when they do at least they will be aware..


>I gave my kids access to my old PC running arch linux with some open source games, like minetest or supertuxkart

I do wonder why you aren’t okay with mainstream games like Minecraft.


Minetest is both free and fairly comparable to Minecraft, if you use (Minetest) mods.


I am fine with the concept and minetest is available through pacman on arch. I sometimes play with them on local server


The kids in my family attend a school where the parents have all verbally agreed to not get their kids a smart phone until 16. This removes the peer pressure element of owning a phone/instagram/etc. When that’s removed there is little downside and huge upsides to the kids not having phones.


Can I ask what type of school, and do you know if this is commonly done? The main difficulty I have with restricting phone use is that these days it can entirely isolate the kid socially. If the kid had a good number of friends who knew how to interact without in person I'd be a lot more comfortable.


How big is the school, if you don't mind me asking? And was it something pushed by the parents or the school itself? Would you mind sharing the papers/mails regarding justification & such?


In this fight, you loose. Entertainment machina is 24 hours there, millions of other adults engage to keep your child staring at the screen. What you can d is being an example. Show your child you're not addicted to it. Show that it's not so important. Your child will get the phone someday and it will take you child's attention. But there inside your child will have the feeling, the understanding that it's not really important. Because you were a good example.


10 y/o - No phone, tablet, computer of any type. (Combination of Reggio Emilia and Montessori schooling, so almost no technology at school either.)

We're right on the cusp of giving her a laptop w/ some flavor of desktop Linux and LibreOffice. She has expressed interest in typing versus hand-writing schoolwork. I'm also considering giving her an offline copy of Wikipedia, and perhaps a typing drill app. Edit: No network access, though. Strictly an offline machine.

She has sent text messages to me with her mother's phone a few times and had a lot of fun. I wish she had a phone for emergency calls and perhaps text messages only with specified contacts. (There are times I find myself wishing I could email or text her... >smile<) Her mother and I are Apple phone users, albeit w/o iCloud accounts and minimal interaction w/ the Apple "mothership". I wish their parental controls didn't require using iCloud.

Edit: Her mother and I already had a "no phones in restaurants" policy before we had the child. Having her around has helped reinforce that since we didn't want to be rude and effectively ignore her at restaurants. (Although once she learned to read she'd just read her book and ignore us. >smile<)


> I wish their parental controls didn't require using iCloud.

I don’t believe they do unless you want to be able to configure them from your own phone. It actually seems to be more reliable[0] if you do an entirely offline screen time setup. You can also use Apple Configurator to create configuration profiles that definitely do not require Apple IDs to use (though installing Configurator on your laptop does require an Apple ID since it’s distributed though the App Store).

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2023/08/05/apple-io...


Thanks for the note. I haven't used the configurator in years. I didn't even think about it. I'll take a look.


Got three kids. They all got a smartphone at 11. But a locked down iOS device initially. As trust and responsibility is built they get given more capability.

I am 100% against completely banning them from using it as it excludes them from important social situations and an anti-technology policy hurts them in the long run.

They're here to stay: be a responsible parent and help them use them safely. Reward what they do well, don't punish them up front.

Edit: my eldest is 2nd year at university now. Without the technology focused upbringing she would have the burden of learning that on top of the education. Now she zooms around on her iPad Pro / Apple Pencil as an extension of herself. No technology is a barrier to her.


> Without the technology focused upbringing she would have the burden of learning that on top of the education.

I don’t see it as a big burden. Do you think it took 18 year olds in 2010 who got an iPad when they first came out a long time to learn how to use them?


Toddlers are great with ipads, even if ipads are bad with them.

Kinda silly that it takes a long time learn how to use one.


My child (now sixteen) has had unfettered access to technology and the internet since he was about four years old. He's had old tablets and laptops, and a mobile phone (since about the age of nine). I don't monitor his use, or use parental controls. He's familiar with macOS, Windows and Linux, and can build his own PC. I fail to see any negative effects with my attitude towards his use of tech.


It really depends on what actually happens.

I raised my kids on a sailboat. Literal death was just a matter of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, or falling off when no one would notice for 5 minutes.

They all survived.

They survived because they had a deep understanding of the dangers involved and how to avoid them, not because raising 6 towards old children on a sailboat is perfectly safe.

Was it worth it? Sure. They are all amazing people with a global culture, strong risk taking and management skills, and a broad range of skills.

If one of them had died, my answer would probably be no, not worth it.

With screens at a young age, There is a risk of dopamine-short loops and damage to attention mechanisms in brain development. If they don’t do the thing’s that are damaging, they won’t be damaged.

To be perfectly clear, I am not criticizing your choice. Sounds to me like it was the right one. But it’s definitely a YMMV situation, like sailing the ocean with young children.


> Literal death was just a matter of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, or falling off when no one would notice for 5 minutes.

Danger can be a good thing if it's visible and apprehensible https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/24/why-germany-is...


Open and unfettered access to the internet since age 4 has probably given him a warped sense of reality.


Not necessary true, it all depends on how much time the parents have for their children and how well they educate them. But I would say that letting your child to be exposed to porn at early ages can be mentally damaging and the same applies to trolling communities that can plant unhealthy ideas into your child's mind


I kinda wonder if you could find out when they first encountered the worst parts of the Internet. That's basically the main thing I worry about (my 5 year and 3 year old current have laptops, but we have eyes on the screens all the time so far)


Aren't there quite good DNS filters (like what OpenDNS provides) for the worst parts of the internet? You don't want them looking at porn, gore, extreme politics, social media, self-destructive behaviours, drugs, and at particular sites -- that kind of stuff, right? A DNS filter sounds like a better tool for this than time restrictions with all that content available for 1 hour a day or whatever.


From a high schooler: Beyond elementary school, I'd recommend staying relaxed about what's allowed. In middle school, sure, block some stuff. Maybe no CoD, to be honest I'm not really too sure about what to do at this stage. I had no parental controls at all, and I didn't do anything that parental controls would've blocked.

But at high school, there's a good chance your kid will be hearing the n word on a weekly basis, at least, and the f bomb multiple times per day. And if not, it'll just be variations to avoid punishment at school. They know plenty of swears by that point, there's no point trying to censor it. And if you block tons of stuff, they can and WILL find a way around it. For example, a neighboring school district blocks very little, besides what is specifically intended for circumventing blocks, while my school blocks quite a bit (thanks, in part, to me using dozens of GBs in a day, and other adventures) and I'd bet $100 that they have way less students trying to circumvent their blocks. People will accept some restrictions, up until a certain point, and after that, there's no censorship, no blocks, and no control. There's tons of proxies, and they likely have access to much less limited computers at school. So at most, I'd recommend limiting social media to, say, an hour a day, and leave everything else unblocked. *They know plenty, and can circumvent, whatever you put in place, so just make your terms acceptable.*

And as for games, I don't really have a problem with vetting your kid's games, just don't pay attention to the ESRB ratings, look stuff up yourself. And don't let be a cheapskate and let your kid get sucked into addictive f2p games designed to exploit them, get them some decent games that'll last them a while.

Sorry for this being so long, I'll take another look at it in the morning and try to shorten it down a bit. But for now, good night HN.


Children 10 and 7. We are very anti screentime as it always seemed to send ours kids crazy and create behavioural issues.

We started loosening it for the 10 year old, but within 6 months of that we had a few incidences of early online bullying so we are pushing back again.

I personally hate to see kids and young people zombified looking at phones and want to delay, delay, delay.


They only do that if there's sod all else to do that's interesting. Mine get bored with the phone after 30 minutes. The youngest is currently making a necklace, the middle one is reading a book and the eldest is getting drunk with her boyfriend.


Not sure why downvoted, your comment made me smile. I wish to be as chilled parent as you are!


Kids are 11 and 15. Both have phones, laptops and share a switch and Quest. No limits. They watch and play as much as they want so long as they do homework, maintain hygiene and get some physical and social activity. They're both healthy and well-adjusted. My oldest is at an elite STEM school, younger one is doing well enough. The STEM kid in particular, they literally use their phones in class. Teachers tell them to look things up, use calculators, text classmates for group projects, find links on Google Classroom or watch lectures on YouTube. The war on phones is over and phones have won.

There are, in fact, studies showing that smart phone usage isn't bad:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/kids-smartphon...


I have two 13-years-old kids. No mobile phones. Most friends have phones. Pressure is high. Kids can use their mother's phone to answer some class group messages. Kids still surviving and thriving. Parents still resisting. Good luck everyone.


I think this is something that has not been well integrated into smartphone devices & computers

Here is what I would want.

- Access to my child's browsing history

- Access to my child's YouTube watch history

- Require my (remote approval) before a child wants to install an application

- Give me the remote ability to turn off acess to certain applicationsy child use for a certain period

- The ability for me to block certain sites from my child browser like shock sites


Unless we're talking about very very young children, I have an extremely hard time with this. I had none of that as a child, and I assume neither did most adults here. Because I had none of that, I'm a software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In no world would I be where I am today with those limitations.

- What am I going to do with my child's browsing history except snoop? Are we still worried about porn in 2023?

- What applications are they going to install that I'd want to override that couldn't be solved by not giving them a credit card number?

- What are they going to watch on Youtube that can't be solved by simply limiting device time?

- Shock sites? Surely every one of us experienced that at some point in our childhood, and I haven't thought about them in years. And are they even in vogue these days?

- Stories like strangers trying to meet up with children seem on par with poisoned halloween candy. It happens incredibly infrequently, often ends up being a known family member anyway, and people forever fear it as if it's actually something to fear in their daily lives.

I think communication, education, and limiting screen time at certain ages is the only healthy thing to do. Giving children (yes, even young children) some privacy is important. Your suggestions I believe fall into the "helicopter parent" territory.


> Are we still worried about porn in 2023?

Every, and I mean every one of my male peers uses porn more often than he'd like...and at least a third of the women.

"Not worrying about it" in that context sounds like "conceding defeat," not like having overcome a problem such that it's no longer worth concern.


This might be a surprise to some, but the highly paid engineers who invented the internet did not have access to the internet when they were children. Correlation is not causation, and in this case I can't even imagine the causal link in your claim.

Also until extremely recently, almost no one saw adult material unless they found a magazine of utterly tame (by today's standards) printed nudity.


You can't become a highly paid engineer today with just books and punch cards. I don't know why any of that is relevant.

So porn is part of the issue? Really?


No one mentioned just a book and punch cards.

> So porn is part of the issue? Really?

Isn't that your claim? You needed access to sites your parents wouldn't have allowed to become the engineer you are today?


See my other comment below for a more detailed answer but: no, my claim is not that I needed porn to become the engineer I am today. But the level of restrictions proposed by the top level comment in this thread would have, and it seems blocking porn is a driving factor in those decisions.

Social media addiction, etc. can be helped by restricting time without restricting access.


What would you reply to the person here[1] who wishes they had restricted access instead of restricted time, because restricted time hindered them learning to code?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37357463


I thought I felt the same as you, but I have nieces and nephews who have a variety of "no screen time" to "screen is default" aged between 2 and 10. The online world is very different now to what it was when I explored it.

When I was 15, YouTube was music videos, shitty flash animations, and people doing bargain basement myth busters. Now it's content farms, conspiracy theories, cleverly crafted dopamine hits.

Similarly, online multiplayer games when I was 10-15 were warcraft 3, neverwinter nights and diablo 2. Compare those games to Roblox, Fortnite and co - it's just not the same (and I say this as someone who now works in this space).

I don't have a good answer, but the landscape has changed so wildly in the last decade that I thin it's incredibly naive to think that it's safe to allow unrestricted unmonitored access to devices.


> Are we still worried about porn in 2023?

I guess that the percentage of people who approve of their preteen children watching porn is still a rather small minority. In fact globally I'd bet the majority of adults don't even approve of themselves watching porn.

More broadly speaking, assuming we're roughly of the same generation, I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation.


I'm a millennial, for context.

So much to unpack here.

These restrictions just don't make sense to me. I was a pretty reserved child, so I can't imagine getting over all the hurdles needed to grow as a person and foster my love for programming/tech:

- Asking for permission to read all the random Perl forums or IRC chats I stumbled upon just wouldn't be a thing I would have done.

- My parents probably wouldn't have understood what it all was and denied my request. Early on I probably wouldn't have even been able to explain why I needed that access.

- Remember installing linux for the first time? Sorry, not going to happen because the stalkerware doesn't work on linux.

- You want access to a website called "hacker news"?? No way! (HN wasn't really a thing I think back in my childhood but you get the idea).

-----

Second, I was a latchkey kid. Having two working parents is neglectful? What would have been the alternative?

And my point with the porn is that it's not worth locking everything down for fear that your child is going to see some boobs. It's not worth it, and it seems that it's the driving force or a lot of these restrictions.


> see some boobs

That's either a stupid or a dishonest description of the Internet pornography we're talking about here.


Please focus on the core message of my post rather than three words.

If you're so concerned with Internet pornography that you want to lock down your child's digital life and know every single thing they say and do, then so be it. We probably won't change each other's minds.


Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?

For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.

Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.


> Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?

They shouldn't. Fight the ISPs.

> For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.

Again, trust what? Do all roads lead to porn?

> Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.

Really grasping at straws here. What laws are you worried your child will break that would reasonably reach the level you're worried about?


> Again, trust what?

Trust that they aren’t harming themselves or others. The Internet is an extremely powerful tool and all powerful tools are potentially dangerous.

The pen is mightier than the sword and the Internet is to the pen as the sword is to the thermonuclear bomb.


>> I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation

Latchkey is a little after I grew up, mid Gen X, I think the premise is that these kids with working parents would run home alone and lock themselves inside in terror because some kid somewhere got abducted and it made the news. I don't know what statistics there are around it, but that's my memory of the phrase latchkey. I don't remember locking the door when I was a kid, we didn't live in a great neighborhood.

But I was a beneficiary of the borderline neglectful approach to children, and I'm certainly glad I grew up that way. I got kicked out of a bar for the first time when I was 10 or 11, and when I was 14, I would go to hardcore punk shows a hundred miles from home and my mom had no idea where I was. "I'm sleeping over at Joe's house tonight". Maybe "Joe" existed, maybe he didn't, but either way, I am at a show learning how to stage dive.

So it's weird reading how closely people watch their kids these days, and I'm not criticizing, people raise their kids how they raise their kids, none of my business. But I am reminded of one friend whose house I stayed at a couple times, he actually had two parents, if you can believe that, and they monitored everything he did, asked him questions about everything, listened to his answers, and he had to ask for permission for everything. On one hand I could tell he was lucky he had parents who cared about him and wanted the best for him, but I also remember feeling so, so sorry for him.


> Because I had none of that, I'm a software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In no world would I be where I am today with those limitations.

You've commented plenty throughout your replies. But this bit uses very concrete, casual language. I'm not sure how you could possibly know such a thing and therefore write the statement you wrote. So much of your success as a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars engineer is luck, timing, and other things that are not so clear in nature.

I otherwise agree with most of what you wrote.


I mostly agree with you, or at least I think you're providing important pushback that needs to be considered. Porn is largely a weird religious boogeyman, and scary stranger kidnapping stories seem to be a form of lucrative fear porn to attract conspiracy minded types. My access to the internet as a teen fueled my curiosity and computer technology exploration in a way that was crucial for where I've ended up today. I actually installed a keylogger to get the internet password that my parents guarded, and I've never regretted it. Blanket luddite rules for kids seem to me to be lazy at best.

That being said, here are some of the things I worry about:

- The internet is no longer a niche playground for nerds, and much of it has become a mainstream entertainment megahub, very highly cultivated for your bland engagement. When I was growing up, I had to constantly fiddle with and troubleshot several layers of software in order to explore, interact with friends online, and play games. It was almost like a barrier to entry. These days, I'm not entirely sure I would have fiddled with anything and might have just skipped to the gaming & media consumption part. After all, it just works now, and the media is more engaging than ever. There seem to be fewer incentives for learning and creativity.

- I'm more concerned about bad behavior modeling than I am about the moral panic nonsense. I want to make sure that whatever personalities my kids are having a social/parasocial relationship with aren't encouraging trollish and abusive behavior.

- I'm also concerned about misinformation. Most people generally are very bad at gauging the trustworthiness of information online. Ironically even the people who cry the most about how media distorts your worldview tend to have that exact problem. I want to teach my kids critical thinking and how to evaluate information based on several important criteria. This will have to be an involved process, and I want to be able to contextualize heavy sources of misinformation while they're being exposed to it.

None of these problems are well addressed with a luddite approach, but they do need careful attention.


My kids share an iPad and you can enable screen time and parental controls to do everything you’ve mentioned. Also for YouTube just install YouTube Kids it has no ads and prescreened content for kids 8 and less. Parents can also block channels on it.


FYI: YouTube Kids does have ads, although a lot less so than YouTube. It also mainly shows an ad at the start, and often only after one episode (for me at least).


- use a DNS profile, this gives you the websites they visit. Eg. NextDNS

- block YouTube. Mirror content you approve of locally. Yt-dlp + Jellyfin

- iOS has these last three built in to screen time. DNS can help with the last one too.

I’d urge you to resist attempting total control. Trust and verify can go a long way.


if you and your kids use Chrome, you can log into the same email id as their device (in a separate chrome profile on your device). You can access browsing and YT history. Believe there's a way to turn off incognito also. Might work on other browsers too.


I believe there's plenty of apps which will give you most of that, but generally they are termed "stalkerware", and the app stores will remove them based on their utility to abusive domestic partners and the like.


I don't want to install 3rd party software.

I want these features to come with Firefox, Chrome, MacOS, Windows & Linux


Well have you looked into Google Family Link? https://support.google.com/families/answer/7680868?sjid=9290...

Google offers you the ability to set up children's accounts with parental controls. I believe it offers some or all of this functionality. It appears that you actually need to access the child's account to view their history (doesn't seem different than an adult's in that respect) but you can definitely enact parental controls and whatnot. You can block or whitelist websites and apps for sure.


macOS and iOS have it built in. Look for “parental controls.

Windows has it built in but I’ve found it pretty non-functional.


You know what's really funny? The government of the United States has a complete list of everything you have listed. As a topikstarter, I want to tell you that you missed the point of the question asked. Not to mention that you want to re-test what is already being checked by competent people, instead of wanting to positively influence learning.


>The government of the United States has a complete list of everything you have listed

Is this a logical conclusion/hunch/feeling, or is this documented somewhere?


Hasn't Snowden documented enough of it?


Most of these exist on android.


My child is 11 and starting middle school next year (US). They walk to and from school. They have an iPad and a PC at home, with a lot of freedom, but I also have pretty solid DNS filtering for ads, malware, and some other junk. Social media isn’t allowed, and their email account is forwarded to us. iMessage is allowed contacts only but it’s just a matter of asking us. We want some oversight. But no phone - the iPad stays home, and they have an Apple Watch that lets us keep in contact, know where they are, but has no real distraction apps and no camera. We don’t really know when we’ll allow a smartphone but not soon.


I, for one, would never buy a child for my smartphone. Kids cause reading problems for smartphones with even as little as one year of exposure, with cracked screens and chewed-to-death pixels. And how well do you think FaceID works with a sticker over the front camera? No thanks.


I have no kids but this is why I read the comments :')


I have a "minimal screens" policy. What screens they do get are creative. For example, KidPix. I don't allow games or video watching. This puts the screen squarely in the "arts and crafts" space, where it belongs, and I don't need to put limits on it because they limit themselves.

They won't have smartphones or tablets of their own until high school. And even then it will be for creative things, comms with friends. No social media.

I will allow them to play some online games, like Fortnite and Rocket League, with the chat/mic turned off. My daughter loves Astro's Playroom (great game BTW) so she's gonna be a gamer. Game consoles aren't the problem. The always on pocket screen that's constantly beeping with promises of a dopamine hit is a HUGE problem. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it's crystal clear to me (and to them). I make a point to show them what screens have done to groups in the world, when you see people all looking at their phones instead of each other at dinner. We laugh at them and pity them, and this is correct.


My daughter is two, so we just have a daily, timeboxed ritual for looking at screens and that's it - modern equivalent of watching TV if you will[0].

I think the important part is to never, ever let this be a substitute for parental attention.

My plan for the future is to:

-Start with a quiz on online safety/dark patterns and grant privileges based on the knowledge she acquires and internalizes.

-Give data allowance. It so happens that the most addictive online behaviours are the most data-hungry. You can browse Wikipedia or even text with your friends on 32kbps. On the flipside, you can blow through gigabytes in one evening with TikTok.

[0] Regarding that I found that it's difficult for me to figure out where to put boundaries because I wasn't given any, since both of my parents were addicted to screens - just their 90s equivalent - television. My dad would get home from work, turn on the thing and watch it until past my bedtime.

I settled for boundaries that I'm familiar with, so timeboxing, allowance and competence tests similar to e.g. a driving license.


Your thread focuses on harm to learning, and you say there is not a single study with the opposite results. Naturally, most of the replies have been drawn to debating screen time, probably influenced by the CDC and NIH recommending screen time limits in the very early 2000s in the post Y2K panic fallout.

This article dives deep into screen time, citing research that indicates that there is no causal proof between the quantity of time children spend online/on social media and any specific outcome.

https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/

To me, it seems we might be echoing the technology panic cycle that has existed with penny novels, the cinema, the radio, comic books, role-play games like DnD, the internet, video games, and now smartphones and social media.


The "family computer" of long ago ages seemed to attenuate the kinds of addiction we see today. It also made computing more social since the only resource was shared.


Likewise the old home phone provided some monitoring of phone use. We've gained and lost so much.


9 and 12 boys.

They carry dumb phones for calls only (we gave them one when they started going on multi day trips from school or outside of it at age like 6/7).

They both have laptops and can game on and communicate with friends and classmates.

They have old iPhones they sometimes use at home (with no sim cards). Those don't leave the house and are very rarely used (mostly to chat in friends groups).

They don't watch youtube (except for music sometimes). They know what TikTok is (because all their friends watch it), but they don't (currently) have interest in it (mainly because we've had long talks about how terrible doom scrolling social sites and short videos is).

If at some point we give them smart phones with sim cards, we'll heavily restrict social media sites and apps, but I plan on keeping the dumb phones in use for as long as possible (hopefully until 15-16).


Thank you for sharing! Music is a pesky topic because all the really good music is always on torrents. There are no good music on yt because of at least lack of organization of tracks/albums/discography, lack of lossless and of course lack of a decent search. But as we perfectly know, there is no way in exposing the child to the torrents but not to a porn.


> There are no good music on yt because of at least lack of organization of tracks/albums/discography, lack of lossless and of course lack of a decent search.

I don't think children care too much about any of those problems, though. I used to listen to music on a cheap radio player with an usb stick and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.


It depends on your child. That's it.

My kids are 9 and 6 and the older is impulsive/adhd, so I am very careful with her. She used to want to watch kids playing with toys / unboxing videos when they were in vogue years ago and I shut that down quickly. I want her to play with those things, not watch someone else.

We allow a <2hours of screentime a day; TV or Chromebook. But it's mostly the former.

I have adguard at home where I sheepishly block things when they find sites I don't like and they use their schools Chromebooks at home which already is pretty restrictive. Only Roblox on the tablet.

Their friends have smart phones, which I find abhorrent. Although her friends are breaking them and parents are just not replacing them, so at this point it's moot. The unrestrictive iPad time I hear from her that other kids get is annoying and won't happen here.


After having raised a child to maturity with no policy I would recommend no devices at all for as long as you can maintain sanity. Eventually you will have to break down simply because they do provide a certain utility but until the utility to distraction ratio exceeds 1 don't do it.


11,9,5 year olds.

The 11 year old is addicted to his phone/switch. But he constantly plays with friends so when we block it he ends up being somewhat isolated. Seems like a can’t win situation but he is also pretty active with sports and does great in school.

9 year old doesn’t have restrictions but seems to get sick of it after an hour most days (more on weekends). She only games with her brother usually watches YouTube.

5 year old gets 1-2 hours of tv time a day. Usually because she wakes up first and turns the tv on herself, and then right after daycare while one od us is preparing food.

It’s really challenging. The younger ones get jealous of the older one if he gets more screen time. The older one is very social and suffers when he’s isolated from his friends when we turn off his screens.


>The 11 year old is addicted to his phone/switch. But he constantly plays with friends so when we block it he ends up being somewhat isolated. Seems like a can’t win situation but he is also pretty active with sports and does great in school

Just looking around the room I’m in, I see 3/5 of the people with laptops/iPads but also on their phones. I think phone addiction is common, but maybe addiction isn’t quite the right word if it’s not negatively impacting their life as you mention with school and sports.


My policy is no phone until middle school (11). Even then I intend it to be strictly for family comms while away from home, no social media or texting with friends.

Re. FOSS the problem isn't the software, it's what they can access through it. Instagram, tiktok etc are horrible for self esteem, education, emotional growth.

Even with something as simple as a Kindle (which we don't restrict as much) I've had to drop Kindle unlimited because my kid was reading age inappropriate material on it. Children have very very poor impulse control and all that the online stuff does is basically exploiting that.

We show example by putting cell phones away at 8pm when at home and not using phones while eating.


No parent has ever told me they wished they had given their kid a phone sooner.

My mind turns to milestones. Maybe puberty is the key, when social groups get more complex. Maybe it’s when they get a driver's license, and can travel a city away at the drop of a hat. Maybe it’s when they start attending parties, and you want them to be able to get out or home the moment they feel unsafe. It probably depends on the kid and their peers, but all those are around 13-15.

Screens aren’t themselves bad; my kid has great fun playing crosswords and code deciphering games, and it’s practically no different from the paper versions.


High school. We were able to keep our oldest from having a smartphone until then. She’s in college now.

The external pressures are nuts. It got to where she was just staring at the screens of her friends phones.

My next oldest starts middle school next year. She has a smartwatch set to “family mode” for when she wants to walk to her friends or the park without an adult. She has access to the internet on a home computer. I think that better because she just ends up researching her curiosities over “engaging” with some mobile app. I get a report of her search history to make sure there’s nothing that is a code red.


I don't have kids, but I do want kids some day, and I think about this kind of thing a lot.

I didn't have a phone of any kind until I was 18, and I didn't have a smartphone until I was 23. I had restricted internet access up until I was 16.

Personally, I want to wait as long as possible before giving my kids smart devices. I see little kids with smart phones and it just rubs me the wrong way. But I'm totally willing to admit I might be in the one in the wrong here, and maybe I'm being too cautious. I don't know. The internet is a very different place than when I was a kid.


I didn't use the internet until I was about 25 or so and took to it like a duck to water. Stayed "surfing" late at work and realized how addictive it was quickly as well.

When people say things like "kids need it so they don't get left behind," I laugh inside. It's not hard to learn how to use the internet these days, in fact toddlers are being pacified on tablets at this very moment. The idea that you need ten years to learn it is silly. Sure, have kids take an online safety class, since they apparently cancelled drivers Ed.

I'm glad I got to face it when already mature, not sorry.


You can only learn through play.

Play involves accessibility, low stakes (cost of fault is little), freedom and some sense of excitement and arousal. Maybe a sense of community should be added as well to this list.

Early video games from the SNES era, the early internet, Linux, programming etc. all have that.

Smartphones can have that as well, but they give access to all the things that don’t have that, and it is questionable whether parental limits are creating authentic spontaneity that is necessary to safety also necessary to be able to learn how to handle with these things.


We got our kids smartphones when they started middle school -- for our convenience, not their entertainment. I control what they install and I set time limits on when they can use them. They are not allowed to have social media accounts, and thus far my only bugbear is the fact that I have to allow browser access but that then allows unfettered access to Youtube.

I generally trust my kids and they're pretty responsible, but there's a lot of stuff out there they could inadvertently wander into, and while they probably aren't at elevated risk, I don't want it to happen sooner than necessary.

They have Android phones, btw, and are practically the only ones in the school who do. The result has been that they use Messages + Telegram for chat. They barely acknowledge the fact that their Google accounts mean they have email accounts, and even if anyone sends them anything they don't read it. App-based push notifications are a requirement if you want tweens'/teens' attention.

We bought them phones as a safety precaution because they 1) ride their bikes to school, and 2) we're all over the place in the evenings with sports practices, some of which don't end until 9:15pm. We appreciate them being accessible -- by us -- and giving them the ability to communicate with us and their friends, too.

Phones are not allowed in bedrooms or bathrooms in our house, either, for adults or kids. :)


Can Android not block specific websites with parental controls? I know that’s possible in iOS, with Screen Time at least.


As a slightly different perspective. I live in Christchurch on my child's 7th birthday we had a 7.2 earthquake in the middle of the night. A few months later a 6.8 hit much harder in the daytime. More than a hundred died. Kids were at school. After that event people prioritised empowering their children with communication tools.

More recently when much of the inner city was in lockdown, those tools proved invaluable. Even if it were just for kids communicating to other kids in lockdown in the room next door.


I have an 8 and a 6 year old. They obviously don't have phones. They've never used a tablet. To them a phone is for mom and dad to call people and a computer is where dad does his work.

We are very anti screens. And we try to set the example. My wife and I never check our phones in front of them.

I dont know how long we'll wait until getting them a phone. They go to a private school that tries to push the "wait until the 8th (grade)" rule and we're OK with that.


My child is still too young but my policy is that it should learn to use a real PC first before switching to tablets and smartphones. The core concepts of how to use a mouse and keyboard, what are files and folders, how to use actual desktop software gets lost on smartphones.

I will also start with harsh restrictions and parental controls first and then allow more and more. It is easier to limit access right away than applying restrictions afterwards.


As someone who spent _a lot_ of time playing video games in elementary and then every waking moment on computers/the internet when I was in middle school, but still had friends, got good grades, and have a fine career, I have mixed feelings about electronics. I'm old enough to see that clearly some children are addicted to their tablets/phones/videogames to the detriment of everything, but I also see what impact having no exposure can do and it's not great either but in a different way. I think a middle grade and understanding your child is called for.

My daughter is only 4, but she's had access to a tablet since 1. She's far less addicted than any of her cousins. She will give it up in a heartbeat to do anything else. Sometimes just cartwheels down the hallway. Her tablet is wall garden locked to amazon, so no access to youtube which was honestly a good move looking at some of her classmates. I've some apps outside of Amazon's garden like Disney Plus. All her stuff has parental controls and her tablet operates at my pleasure and before bedtime.

I think that some this is just parenting. I saw a study that stated that screen time only correlated with bad outcomes if your kid would have been doing something else. So if your kid could have been interacting with you, but instead was play games or watching streaming then that's where it's bad. If they would have just been home doing nothing, then the tablet doesn't hurt and can sometimes help.

I've taken this to heart and from a young age I've tried to just do stuff with my kid and have her so stuff and make sure she understood that while riding in the car with her tablet was okay, using it at the park was not okay. Replace park with literally anything. I think this is why now, her tablet is more of a boredom thing for her and she's doesn't need it every moment of every day. She'd rather run outside.

I'm just a sample of one and I know I'm more strict the more addicted the child seems to be (I have many niblings). I do think that screens are dangerous, but so is sugar and I think like sugar you a balance is best. You don't want a kid sneaking sodas because you never let them have one, but allowing soda every day is probably bad idea. That's my stance about screens. If you feel more attached to your phone, etc beyond it being a tool, you probably need a longer break from one is my thinking.


> I think that some this is just parenting

and probably predisposition which is being selected against in real time

as in, yes, its an additional distraction that undermines a group of human’s productivity for the next few generations, but not all


I keep talking to my older kid (pre teen) about the harmful effects of phones and screens. Kid seems to get it(for now) But the real test is yet to come - middle and high school where most kids have a phone. I am hoping that my kids will be ok being mavericks. I realize that hope is not a plan but the reality is that my environment is against me so there isnt a sure fire way to protect children unless you are ok with sheltering them to a point where it eventually becomes debilitating for them to operate in the real world.

To the OP: people typically have a herd mentality. HN is no different in that way. All you can do is try to instill trust between you and your kids and hope they will listen to you. You should also be super transparent with them about why you take the position you take. Give examples of people’s addiction to their screen/social media and how it’s distorts their view of reality to only make them feel bad about their existence. I am sure you can find a few in your own extended family or surroundings. Generally speaking , going against the grain takes a high degree of belief in something. Overcoming one’s minds transient desires requires strong intellect. That can be developed but it’s not an overnight thing and it’s certainly extremely hard when most People barely have any time to themselves or their kids - at least in USA (where real wages have been stagnant for 30+ years but cost of living has not[1]. The US deserves the birth rate decline it’s facing. It’s going to be a while before free markets and capitalism can evolve to solve this one)

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...


As long as I see that my kid understands and can demonstrate responsible limits, apps are fine.

The only thing I require is that device usage has a purpose (ie write what you are going to do down) and is not just a distraction.

I don't have a policy for a personal device, but if most of time spent is with parents or or at school, they don't need one. I'm probably thinking middle or high school at least.


good info here: https://www.waituntil8th.org/


They can have one when they get a job and can afford to purchase it (and a data plan) on their own. So far that has happened around 17+ years old.

At home we use Circle. If they want their phone to be on our wifi, it has to have the circle vpn installed. I assumed they would just want to use their own data, but so far all of them have voluntarily chosen to have the circle vpn installed.


There have been a couple similar posts recently.

But in those similar posts and this one, the OPs never mention how they were raised.

I think it’d be interesting to know.

Even if it’s not a smartphone. It could be a Nokia trac phone or whatever. It could be video games. It could be their own personal laptop or pc or their own AOL kids or teen account.

It’s hard to provide advice when we don’t know the baseline.


Children don't get their own phones till they are ~16 and have more independence. They need them at some point, but too early is like giving a child crack.

We have a family flip phone that I can give out as needed when a child is going somewhere and we want to be able to contact them and vice versa.

Gabb wireless is also a good option.


I have two older teenagers. They got a phone when they were 14-ish, fist year of French collège (mid school).

We had conversations and whatnot and there were times when they were giving the phones to us so that they are not distracted when working.

These times are long gone and their phones grew into their palms it seems.

The older one is 19 and when he has lots of work he manages to disconnect.

I think that between 15 and 19 yo the battle is lost and I gave up. I preferred to keep a close link and contact with them rather than fight all the time.

There are probably better parents though, more strict and systematic. I am not without fault as I use my phone all the time as well.


I have 12 YO. I have given him both laptop and phone with restrictions.

YouTube = 30 min a day Roblox = 30 min on weekends General browsing = Enforced by Kaspersky Safe Kids with all adult content blocked

Total device time = 1.5 hour per day

Anything that takes more time, like scratch programming, school projects, research on topics, etc. is done on my laptop under my casual supervision (I reading a book and he using my laptop and filling his word doc with what he wants to write or doing Scratch programming for example).

Family link for Android works great. Kaspersky Safe Kids works great for Windows Laptop.

I can enforce device use time, content, app time limits, etc. Has been working like a charm since Covid days.


The issue is not the phone the issue is how you use it. The problem are not books the problem is what you read. The issue is not tv te issue is what choose to watch. The issue is not sugar the issue is what choose to eat


No phones until 13 or 14.

Yet, I don't have the courage to make a peep when I see friends handing their phones to their kids so they'll let us talk at the restaurant.

In my day (back then) they'll send me to buy cigarettes or some other errand.


the good ol days when the pizza hut had pac man, guantlet, and a cigarette vending machine right next to each other.


Quite little except lots of education/dialogue, app approval/setup, and parental oversight on demand (i.e. we can ask to look at their devices up to a certain age). We have had zero problems of overuse, misuse, attitude, or the like. They do have lots of extracurricular activities and clubs to keep them busy/social though with little spare time (something I don't wholeheartedly agree with - being "bored" made me quite inventive as a kid - but my wife's methods seem to result in good kids so I'm going with it!)


My 9 year old nephew has a phone, but without cell service (so it's more like a wifi-only tablet) and he doesn't have access to it all day -- I can't remember what the schedule is, but he gets like a hour a day of use on school nights and more time on weekends. He mostly plays video games and watches video game walkthroughs on youtube with the phone. For schoolwork he uses the family computer in the livingroom.

There's some kind of content filter on it to help keep him from the worst of the internet.


I use Android, and it has Family Link. Basically parents can (remote) control their kids' phone. No 3rd party app required.

You can set very granular things, like which apps they can open, for how long, and what permissions are allowed. For app installs, the parents can remote-approve it, or allow kids to download only free apps (not good idea).

You can see adjust the restrictions on the fly, like oh you've done your homework, I'll give you extra hour. You can see usage report.

My kids are still using it to watch youtube. So I'm not successful yet.


My oldest was born two weeks after the first iPhone was announced. When she was 7 I let her buy an iPod (the one that looked like a thin iPhone) after she saved half the money.

My son is about 18 months younger and I did the same for an iPad Mini when he saved up for it.

They've been very responsible with their devices and we have talked about the potential dangers. Still, if I were to do it all over again, they wouldn't have touched those devices until they were 14. To this day I question how badly even I need one.


My kid is 5 and we don’t do small screens at all. Plenty of age appropriate tv programming so certainly not screenless. But it’s limited to home and only in 2 rooms. We teach him to be bored but also try to carry a backpack of books and toys. It’s work but if you commit to it, it’s really not too hard. We’ve caved in and let him play on phone a couple times while traveling, etc. he’s addicted instantly and we have to say no for a few days after but we shut it down.


We have a 2 year old and we don't use our phones or devices when she's around unless it's a video call from family or an important phone call.

We're happy with the results so far since she's turned out to be a very patient, intelligent, and attentive child. She finds enjoyment in books, puzzles, drawing, cooking, gardening, cleaning, unloading/loading the dishwasher, laundry, and all sorts of activities her overstimulated peers would find boring nowadays.


WiFi tablet / Chromebook before then say 5th or 6th grade.

I’ve 4 kids, so you can imagine that once it’s on the house, it’s in the house and anyone can access the device.

Phone with a SIM card in 8th grade.

If they create a social media account (including chess.com and TikTok) they have to “friend” us - their parents.

This is working well for us, especially on the family logistics side: shared calendaring, family iMessage thread, shared shopping lists.

I’ve also enjoyed seeing how each kid uses the device differently.


I have a 12 year old and a 9 year old. They pretty much grew up during the smartphone age. We teach them to understand smartphone is not a toy but a gateway to information, knowledge and communication. When we use our personal smartphones around the kids - it is primarily for work purposes and that is the explanation. iOS implementation of screentime, when properly configured is great. It is like a real information firewall.


I’d say smartphone privilege should be awarded upon graduating elementary school. Unless the parents really need them to have it beforehand for some odd reason.


The mental health issues our youth are facing have significant roots in smartphones/social media. The longer you can delay it without having your child be ostracized from their peers the better. Each child will likely need a different approach, but I'd encourage heavy involvement and oversight by parents. The bad far outweighs the good, but if monitored you can hopefully mitigate the bad.


If any of the kids are like the way I was they have two phones, a fake phone for the parents to see and control, and then a real phone I keep to myself


useful skillset on its own

as long as you dont really expect to have any control, lower your expectations and act surprised


There was a book written a few years ago and I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was about the effect of devices on children. The takeaway is they don't learn to read people's expressions and get easily offended, they don't develop healthy skills for in-person relationships, and they don't develop passive learning skills. I fear remote work has the same effect.


I have 2 boys, 10 & 12. The 12YO has an Apple Watch which is useful to keep track of where he is and being able to reach each him (or him reach us). No social media or games, which is what most people are worried about at that age. So it seems like a decent trade-off. You can set it up to not allow phone calls or messages from unknown numbers, which means no scam calls/messages.


Got Chromebooks during the pandemic cuz they were needed for remote school. Still in heavy use for school but closely supervised.

Oldest daughter received a phone for her birthday shortly before starting 8th grade. We have Android locked down with Family Link so it only does voice, text, Spotify and email. It's working pretty well but there are still battles over excessive screen time.


Would love to have a rule like no phones until 15 but our son has type 1 diabetes so he has had to have a phone since he was 2 and a half. I anticipate him texting us about his treatment as soon as he can write, especially during school so we are going to have to navigate appropriate use early.

This is also going to make it tricky having any rule for our younger daughter.


My kids (11 and 13) both have iPads and laptops but neither has a SIM. My eldest daughter has an Apple Watch SE which had cellular connection and a Nokia 4G phone. She can have a real phone when she is 15. We have apple family set up with screen time password requests for all apps. There are some struggles but by and large they are pretty good.


My kids are too young, tech will advance too much to know. I'll report back in about a decade about my policy around how much they're allowed to meld with F̵̡͇͈̬͍͈͉͛͗͌̓̂̊̅̓̀͆͝Ṟ̵̣̳͎̽̈́͘İ̴̛̞̹͉̲͎̿̌̇̋͑͗̒̅̚͜͝͝Ȩ̷̻͖͓͍̙̲̮̰̹̖̥͙̤̺̏͒̃N̸̛̛͈͎̖̩̲͔̫̫̗̲̆̍̌̀̾̽͐́̈́̓̚͘D̵̡̡̯͙̦̎̈́͝.


My oldest is 9. He has a used iPhone that my wife and I manage. It's is wifi only and has a limited selection of apps. He primarily uses it to listen to audiobooks, and occasionally makes video calls with family members. No web browser and no social media.


Complete restriction of iPhone until the age of 18. Every app that is gonna be installed needs to be allowed by me. Accessible domains are whitelisted. There are time limits on everything.


Thread is depressing af. I wonder how many people here had unrestricted access to computers and internet growing up ( I did ) and I am thankful for that. If a kid wanted to do what they wanted to, no amount of restrictions are gonna help.


I think the only reasonable point is maybe don't let your young kids have social media accounts on global platforms. That makes sense. Otherwise there's so little difference between now and ~20 years ago, which I assume is when a lot of us grew up.

Like, 99% of the porn out there is boring mainstream hardcore stuff which was readily available as soon as internet video became a thing. The only important thing to instill in your kids here is that porn is not normal sex, which is something I figured out pretty quickly.


One might argue that developing proper filters for garbage content is much more beneficial than being sheltered from it.

Of course, you can’t just throw everything at a kid and expect them to figure it out. But kids are smarter than most people on this thread seem to think. With a little guidance, they can develop a sense of what’s what in technology and use it well.


My kids are two years old and find them fascinating. Not sure when they'll be getting phones if their own. About the only thing I've decided is that I'll be blocking access to the Meta and CCP apps when they do.


My daughters are too young to have a phone, but old enough to play games. Our general rule for gaming is simple. We only do it on the weekends, and we do it together. We make it a family thing.


IDGAF what other humans do or don't have the intestinal fortitude to do or not do. Smartphones are provably damaging to children and mine does not and will not have one.


My kids are grown now, but my policy was that they could have a phone if they could buy it and cover the ongoing bill with their own money.


Whatever age you decide I recommend coming up with a contract you both sign. Start with it being too strict and you can always remove rules later.


I grew up in the pre smartphone era, but please don't do this. You are forcing the kid to sign something in a power imbalance.

When I was 13-14, I signed a "contract" with my dad that I would write a song for him if he bought me the guitar I wanted. I'm in my 30s and it still haunts me that I never came through on my half of the deal, but playing the guitar is a huge part of my life, probably because of that arrangement.


Find me a study saying TV was good for us back in the day. But did it really "rot the brain"? No. Old people just fear technology.


It's better to talk about boundaries and why they exist rather than set up arbitrary ones for seemingly no reason (imo).


My policy has always been to not have children.


Always wireguard children’s phone to your gateway coupled with firewall, IPS, ICAP, transparent HTTP.

Whitelist all the things.


We are delaying as long as possible. Right now it is ‘let’s evaluate when you are 13’.

Many peers have a locked down apple watch.


My daughter has a heavily locked down iPad mini. She will get a smartphone when she turns 45.


As a child brought up by screens, I've never believed that screen time is a problem, so much as what's on the screens.

I wish I could find the clever comment from the parent who talked about "playing defence" with smart phones, which this thread is about, vs "playing offence", finding competing interests and distractions! I try to "play offence" and do trips and social things. But our capitalist hellscape makes it hard for other parents to get that time. So we look for total control or total abstinence, right? I am just optimistic about technology and want my kids to be masters of it.

So my 10yo has had mostly free rein of a laptop & phone since he was about 5, maybe a bit of TV and kids Youtube channels before then. He was reading before 24 months and is a bit of a sponge (& parrot) for whatever he finds interesting. We have lots of weird and interesting conversations about internet culture. I wish he was more interested in long-form things, but he gets great reports from school, so I have no concerns about his ability to learn.

I see his various internet histories, and I've quietly poked on some parental controls: YouTube time limits on long days, or blocking obnoxious bro channels. He likes to draw, spend time with his family, organise play with his friends, but he's published Roblox games too. I spent a lot of time helping him understand addiction, loot crates, pay-to-win and algorithmic horrors (particularly during the pandemic). It took a few months but he's worked out how to deal with all of that - I guess that's a "better under my roof" policy.

My 4yo has a tablet, no particular restrictions but she can kindof forget about it for days in a way that my 10yo wouldn't. She's learning about boring games that suck until you pay for a subscription, and has learned why flicking between new games every single day isn't actually fun. She is just as capable of changing content on YT Kids but sticks with videos. Unlike the 10yo she likes watching long movies, particularly musicals where she will rewind and learn songs. Again I block the odd obnoxious channels: product placement, gender stereotypes, whiny voices or just general artistic bankruptcy.

So (on this thread anyway) it looks like I'm in a minority in being laissez-faire, a little reactive maybe. There are potential harms but I think I'm active and knowledgeable enough to keep them at bay.


What do you use to block obnoxious YouTube channels?


YouTube lets you block channels, so I just have his login open somewhere else.


You read too much.


Gizmo watch has worked well


iOS only, strict controls on screen time


Funny, this post appears now, we should receive the sim card for our daughter today. And before that, we had a long discussion with my wife, and here's our decision, rules, and approach. Our daughter has still no idea she will get one. She will be 12 in 2+ months.

The first thing we laid down was the various possibilities :

- no phone yet - a very basic phone (no smartphone) - a smartphone, but with no internet (except Wifi) - smartphone with internet (4G/5G/etc)

We quickly decided that a smartphone with internet was out of the picture, but we also decided it was time to have a phone.

The main reason for that was regarding the organization. Last year, she had to use her friend's phone to ask us what she could do based on calendar changes, like a sick teacher. When I was her age, I used a phone booth to do the same, but they all have been removed today. That mean she needed to rely upon others to contact us (or ask the school). This gave an argument to have a phone.

The second reason was that she had a great year last year ("6ieme", in France), great results and she is serious, honest and reliable. We can trust her with a phone.

So we had to choose between a basic phone and a smartphone with only wifi. We had an old smartphone that was still working fine, and she likes to do video montages with our tablet, so we thought going the smartphone road was a good option. Plus, I gotta admit, if I'm being honest, a bit of peer pressure. (Many people we discussed it with told us it was a low blow to give her a basic phone where all her friends would have a smartphone. It's not about the material for me, but mostly about not being on specific apps (Telegram/Signal, etc.)).

But having a phone is just the beginning. There will be rules that come along, and a lot of them.

First, we have a rule at the house for all our kids; they can not watch "screen" anytime they want. We are broad with the term screen as it means what it means : any screen: TV, Computer, Tablet, and now phone. They can only have screen time at 11:30 and 18:30. The idea is to have around 2 hours per screen - at most - per day. Of course, this varies based on when we eat (we tend to eat later on Saturday evening, for instance), and we allow for more screen time on Sunday and the occasional Movie night.

So it will be the same for her phone.

But also, phones will be absolutely prohibited when at the table and in her bedroom. That was the second argument for the Wi-Fi; she will have to use it in the common space, where we can see a bit over the shoulder.

Installing apps will be reviewed by us; some are already on the no-list, like Snapchat.

She could definitely install apps without asking us, or waking up at 3 a.m. to search her phone downstair. But as I've said, she is honest, and I'm confident that's not something she will do.

Finally, and this might be the most important part. While handling the phone to her, there will be a talk. A long talk. We'll explain to her the risk, the pressure, the temptations, and all we can think of to help her understand this is not something to be taken lightly, but we will also insist a lot on the fact that we are always here if she has any problem (this applies more broadly of course).

So here's our approach: Clear rules, a well-defined environment that doesn't restrict her much, but with the knowledge that she can always rely on us if anything happens. Bonus tip I learned via a friend this weekend: We'll tell her that if something difficult she can't share with us, there is always her godmother she can talk to, who will take the appropriate action. We are her parent, not her prison guard.

Now, we'll see how this evolves in a few months/years...


I think the survivorship bias is strong in this thread. This is a normal flow though when we consider where we are. Because of this, my suggestion is not to let the opinions of people online (whoever well-read and educated they might be) to act as a guide on defining a smartphone policy that suits you and your children.

I also would advise that what I see here are a lot of straw man arguments - "discovered porn online? we had magazines and we turned out fine thus porn is fine". This is also a great example of where the two meet and create a very dangerous and incorrect (in my opinion) argument. The porn someone used to watch in a magazine would be limited to just that - a magazine. Static content that wouldn't change, that wouldn't gather information about you and at the end, you would be stuck with it for the foreseeable future until you would get your hands on another magazine. Online porn on the other hand watches what you watch, it creates recommendations and reinforces whatever behaviours you show to it in order to keep you engaged. It also has the nasty superpower of being there all the time, at any hour in any day and creating a self reinforcing cesspool that cannot and is not good for your development [1].

We're very quick to brush off that children just watch a few videos online and that those videos seem to only yield positive things, but the simple act of being always connected has negative downsides that have been studied. I feel like we're dealing with climate change discussions where we're still doing studies to figure out if it's really there. It is. It's really there. And so is the damage this always online society is doing to children, from their sleep [2], to their learning abilities and retention [3] as well as damage to self and body image [4].

These were all found in a quick search but the literature on this discussion in particular, the effects of technology and screens on younger people speaks for itself. It is damaging and just because we have 50-100 people who were fine, doesn't mean that the rest will be. They might be! Nothing might happen but that does not mean that the result is guaranteed and we should be so cavalier about dismissing any possible negative discussion around the topic.

It's also crucial to remember that in the end you cannot control what kids do. You can't. Just think of all the things you hid from your parents successfully. Now imagine that the thing they need to hide is just a browser tab.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/08/sexual... [2] - https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... (there are other studies on this, this is just a review of existing studies) [3] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pen-and-paper-beat... [4] - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/02/social-media...


None.


I'm in midtown Manhattan, in a very small apartment, so the kid has been under our noses until now. He's 14.5, Iphone XR and his own self assembled gaming rig, almost no restrictions. He's a nearly straight A student, he chose to avoid the big magnet schools and is going to a cool collaborative public High School that Steve Wozniack funded thirty some years ago. I was born in 68 the Mrs in 65, so I understand what he's doing she doesn't almost at all, it's like we are from different generations. I spent lots of time watching him use tech, including watching what he watches on Youtube and what games he plays. I only placed soft limits on like I didn't want him playing war games and the like, that has softened a little as he and his crew go on GTA missions sometimes. We actually know his peer group from scouts, school, and a few get togethers, and one freind of a friend has famous parents so no contact with those parents other than a few text msg when that dad took his kid and my son to Great Adventure on a Vip thing, which is an incredible value, we've met the rest of the parents. I even got his Discord ID and have his Mom on there too, so we all have both ways to be in contact. We did severely limit TV his first few years. Funniest moment was during some live thing he asked to forward through the commercials. We gave him a button phone in maybe 2nd or 3rd grade when he started having a button phone for contacting us. He started with a LeapSomething with the buttons. maybe a couple of grades later he started using a laptop independently. Funniest moment was in Kindergarten he was in the side room with the computer and asked "how do you spell gold & silver", he was searching for a specific chess set he'd seen at school. Grades later I guided him on a research project, in 5th grade all the kids in the state do Native Americans. I guided him to research the Lenapie as they were the local group, including where I grew up, so he was able to do something different than most of the kids. He did the work I just guided the information search. He's been using the library his whole life and is aware of it's use as far a serendipity of being around things you aren't actually looking and the reference sections go. Mom covered the basic safety like no stranger will reasonably need your help or have anything good to offer you. She pushed the independence thing, where she left him a Union Square NYC playground while she shopped the green market. We had him take the bus to elementary school and signed the waver to let him off at like 8 years old, the bus driver had never seen the waver even once. the stop was around the corner from us no streets to cross, and he'd hang with a friend and nanny at first but by 3rd grade he was walking to the stop in the AM and always coming home solo or going over a neighbor friend's. As to booze and such, I emphasize it's best to wait, as it can get him in trouble while underage, etc. I also explained that the ones who start with the drugs in Middle School and High School first are likely to include the ones going Skitzo and that it would be hard to go through watching a friend go down that spiral, he knows grass isn't some scary thing but he has an idea it will be best to wait. I suggest that he should focus on dating before he drinks and smokes as that is something he can't get a do over on, where he can start with those later in college or beyond. Mom is pushing the notion that street powders can be laced.


Not until 15


I'm making him read the Linux kernel line by line (he shouldn't run any software he can't audit). So far it's not working out very well, but I have hope.


If you want to promote good practices and critical thinking, maybe sprinkle some Haskell learning in there. That's advanced though, so maybe wait until he reaches kindergarten. If he gets disheartened, just emphasize we all learn at our own pace, and being a little slower here is nothing to be ashamed of, and 1st grade is not too late.


At a young age, perhaps start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Opera....


I bought my first son a VAX. Other than lying on it as a baby he's never touched it. Currently studying Economics..


Was he anti- or just generally skeptical?


Rare sighting of humor on HN.


Honestly, I kind of appreciate that HN tries to keep things serious. I'd hate for this site to turn into reddit where the top 5 comments in most threads are just people reciting the same played out jokes over and over.

I wouldn't mind a little more humor here, but it's hard to moderate something subjective like that.


I agree and I am saddened by the number of low effort comments on HN in recent months. It feels like they have become much more prevalent.


I've only been on Hacker News for a year, and I couldn't tell any change in comment effort


I find it funnier that I didn’t read it as a joke.


The real humour of HN is in the sincere comments.


My parents did this for me, and it worked like a charm.


My parents put login time restrictions on our home Windows computer. That's how I learned to live boot Linux.

Then they started changing the wireless network password. That's how I learned to set a wireless card into monitor mode, capture a bunch of packets, and crack WEP keys.

Then they started locking the router in a closet, and plugging it into a "timer" outlet (that itself plugged into a regular outlet) and just stopped letting electricity pass through at certain times. That's how I learned to pick locks.

Now I work on a red team. Thanks for the free training, mom and dad!


Given the thread context, I can't tell if you're serious, but I'm totally stealing this as a training strategy. They'll never be in trouble for circumventing my restrictions. I'll just have to up my game!

I've gotten in big arguments about a similar idea with my brother. I've told him I intend to monitor all internet traffic and phone activity in my house because I want my kids to grow up understanding that anything they aren't extremely careful to encrypt and protect can and will be read by the people they least want to see it.

He thinks I'm evil and children deserve privacy. I think he's neglecting a duty to teach his the hard truth that you are responsible for your own privacy.


100% serious.


It was really just the electrical socket in the closet that threw me. I don't think I've ever seen that, and I can't think why else anyone would want one there, but clever of them to take advantage of the situation--and you too!


That was one that came a little later on, after my dad was getting stumped trying to beat me on the technical measures.

I don't remember the specific product he used, but it was something very similar to this: https://www.amazon.com/Techbee-Countdown-Programmalbe-Electr...

The lockpicking was addressed with a more sophisticated lock, which was in turn met with a crowbar, which was in turn met with an increasing number of locks on the closet door, which was in turn met with me noticing the hinges were on the outside of this door and simply taking the door off the hinges without ever touching the locks.

I'm sure whoever buys my parents' house when they sell it in a few years will be a little curious about the one reinforced basement closet door with three pick-resistant 7-pin deadbolt locks, upgraded strike plates, and which is also the only closet door in the house with hinges on the inside, lol.


Did he have an outlet installed in the closet (or a closet built around an outlet) just to use that device, though?

At least the hinges should make it clear they were trying to keep someone out, not keep someone in...


The closet already had an outlet.


My parents did something similar, limiting my computer usage to 1hr/day and they'd sometimes enforce it by confiscating the laptop from me etc..., I remember one day my dad went to do a call so I ran mimikatz on his PC and dumped the windows password. so I can use it whenever he's asleep/away.

Not my proudest moment but I used to do anything to get extra time on the computer, I work full time as a security engineer now.


They say he's never going to finish. I say he's got 17 years to finish it before he's an adult and can make his own decisions.


Honestly it’s a good idea. When many of us were kids we had something like a internetless terminal that you could program or draw or write basically. Maybe a few simple games. It certainly teaches you a lot more about computers than a shiny little addiction slab


I trained my little ones to decode fiber optic signals with the naked eye.


Our policy is we don't have children




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