[blatherard]

By middle school most kids are effectively required to be on their computers and/or phones on a daily basis to even just do their homework. And their friends are going to be texting. These kids are going to be on screens, regardless of playtime outside. I already have a pretty good understanding of "the importance of moderating and monitoring electronics use", and would really like the tools that help me do just those things to work better.

[hotnfresh]

This is what makes me irritated when folks (like, say, on this very site) are all, “LOL just do your job, parents.”

Yeah, I’m fucking trying, but all the tech features for this are defective and this is a whole pile of extra crap that prior generations of parents didn’t have to spend time and attention on. Maybe help? By not writing software with defective or absent parental controls? Please?

God help parents who didn’t grow up doing stuff like configuring OpenBSD routers for fun. They have no hope of figuring all this out.

[jonhohle]

This is the truth!

When you have a motivated child, they have way more free time and energy to circumvent any restrictions in place. I’ve had to restrict outbound DNS, block traffic to devices at hours when kids should be asleep, and move to an allow list for web content that must get approved for time. And then we lock up devices at night.

And if I didn’t have those things in place? My son would literally stay up all night playing games, figuring out ways to bypass content filters, and who knows what else.

If you’re a parent and think, “not my kid!”, that might be true, but it probably isn’t for their friends.

And Apple’s “One more minute” feature that requires understanding undocumented, incoherent Screen Time config, screw that. If I set limits, I don’t expect my kids to be able to on-more-minute their game playing for multiple hours in a row.

[wvenable]

I got my son a phone with an actual phone plan so blocking things at the router is sadly no longer an option.

iPhone parental controls are not sufficient. He's figured out he can just message himself videos so he can watch them when all other app access is disabled and the messages app can't be blocked.

There are so many obvious ways in which it could be improved and made easier for parents to control.

[jonhohle]

We ended up with a TCL My Flip that has a paired down Android build that allowed me to disable the browser using ADB and very limited minutes, data, and text ($25/yr on Tracphone). Our son is a middle schooler, so we like that he can contact us, but know he couldn’t handle anything that could be remotely entertaining to use. If we eventually go the iPhone route, it will probably be wireguarded back to our house or other service.

Apple does support making your own MDM profiles which provides more options than Screen Time, but the complexity is also much higher. That allows locking down DNS, apps, etc.

For Messages, you can restrict who can be contacted to just known contacts (via Screen Time) and then I think you can restrict the ability to manage contacts (though maybe that doesn’t work for the “self” contact.

After thinking about the above some more, I should point out that all of our kids are very different (both our as in my family and the greater community of parents). I have one who we could trust with anything and never have to worry about rules being broken (except by siblings who figure it out they have less restrictions than they do). We have two who might get into a little mischief or sneak some screen time here and there without controls in place. And then one who will boil oceans to bypass restrictions and break rules. Are we better parents to some than others? I don’t think so. We have a lot of different “nature” via adoption, and different early childhood “nurture”, but otherwise think we’re meeting everyone’s needs as best as we can as individuals. And the result is four very different, wonderful kids who all need slightly different guard rails in different areas of life (some behavioral, some academic, some social, etc.).

At the end of the day I often wonder if we should move to the woods and homeschool everyone but ultimately that won’t prepare them for leaving our house and going out into the world.

[pleoxy]

Move him to a phone intended for the purpose, Gabb has options.

[wvenable]

The phone is right for all the purposes; it's not what it can do -- it's when it can do those things.