[yamtaddle]

Parent here trying to straddle the line between still having convenient tech in our house and keeping the kids from e.g. vegging out on creepily-targeted Youtube videos or stumbling on something terrible. It's a hell of a lot less simple than I thought it'd be. One wrinkle is the goddamn schools sending home devices I can't administer. Hate, hate, hate that.

[Manuel_D]

You can just not give your kids smartphones, and manage access to computers? Sorry to break this to you, but if kids have access to internet connected devices they will find pornography, flash games (well, not anymore, but I'm sure modern HMTL5 games are just as addicting), and various other stuff to "veg out" with. If there's a domain blacklist they'll find VPNs. I know I did back in the 2000s. Government regulation will mean jack shit, they'll just find a way to bypass whatever filter gets implemented [1].

If you don't want your kids to view such content, the only realistic solution is to not give them internet access. Supply them with a library of books, DVDs, etc. of your choice. The only way to manage the content your child sees, is to manage the content your child has access to.

> One wrinkle is the goddamn schools sending home devices I can't administer. Hate, hate, hate that.

This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/teen-cracks-au84-million-porn-...

[yamtaddle]

Well most of this is stuff I already know and/or do (my kids aren't getting smartphones until they can pay for the phone and plan themselves, for one thing—shared dumbphone for emergencies since payphones don't exist anymore, probably, but not personal smartphones), but:

> This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.

Yeah, they do need them to do homework and check assignments and shit at home. Schools have made things like that more complicated and computer-dependent in the name of progress. Another way this whole computerize-everything craze has been a step back, I suppose.

Overall I'm not sure landing at "literally be someone with college training and work experience in network security and still find all this a needlessly-complex pain in the ass" is going to be where people end up wanting the state of things to settle. Here I am running an extra router on my side of my ISP's because Google's router doesn't give you MAC-level time-bounded blocking, which is pretty much what you need with school devices. And it's less porn than mindless not-actually-educational faux-edutainment web games that the school's introduced them to, for god knows what reason. I'd rather they be in the Switch than playing that crap.

... except maybe other parents they actually won't care how hard this is, since they mostly seem to have given up. Most parents seem to be giving their 3rd graders smartphones anyway. Then act like I'm the weirdo when I suggest maybe letting kids have such phones and carry them at school is batshit crazy, even in high school. Though not, I've noticed, at the not-quite-fancy private school we have some affiliation with, where smartphone ownership among even 6th-graders probably doesn't even hit 20%, way under local public schools (I have insight into several of those, mostly the middling-nice suburban sort)—I think we may be looking at a whole new kind of "digital divide" in the coming generations, and it's the ones who didn't have unlimited access to the Internet at a single-digit age that'll have the advantage. That certainly seems to be what the Fussellian upper-middle is favoring: later, more-limited access to electronics and the Internet. IDK if the climate's similar at actually-fancy private schools and among those parents, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, and maybe even more pronounced. Meanwhile at the public schools "your family must be poor" if you don't have a smartphone by the time you hit middle school. LOL.

[Manuel_D]

Eh, I and most of my classmates had unfettered access to the internet since at least the 4th or 5th grade and it didn't seem to screw us over. TikTok can't be more addictive than World of Warcraft, can it?

I think the bigger distinction is that I had a desktop PC not a smartphone. Parents can much more easily regulate computer use with the former, and withhold access if their kid isn't getting good grades. I think desktop PC use also lends itself to hacking and promoting exploration of technology. Modding and cheating in games is how I got into tech. What I'd do is give my kid a desktop and a USB drive with Gentoo and let them do whatever they want - I'm mostly joking, but only mostly.

And yeah, giving kids smartphones for use at schools seems extremely bone-headed. When I was in school, teachers were all about keeping phones out of the classroom not brining them in.

[mrguyorama]

Surely you can administer the network connection those devices use when they are in your home?

[Ajedi32]

That's getting harder as software continues to get better at bypassing network-level snooping or content blocks (which are often done by entities like malicious Wi-Fi operators or the user's ISP, neither of which have any business deciding what content the user is allowed to see).

[yamtaddle]

I can. Good luck to people who aren't paid to make computers jump through hoops as their day job.

I'm not even necessarily saying the government should step in with heavy-handed regulation, but "parents should just manage it and leave the rest of us alone" gets less reasonable with each passing day.