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|2 years ago
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|2 years ago
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.