Education education education.

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

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

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

Basically, do good parenting.

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

ublock origin, no ads, only libretube or freetube

FOSS

crontab, it’s enough to :

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

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

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

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

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

That works also for turning up/down network interfaces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend had an excellent (but evil) one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working great.

/Swedish