It's practically fucking impossible to have a normal amount of tech in the house and keep it under control, while also keeping things not-annoying for the adults. It's so much work, all because the tech is bad at providing simple and powerful solutions.
Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.
Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.
[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.
The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.
Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.
I pretty much subscribe to your list, with the further caveat the router I got for Comcast service has a USBA network drive port that can run a 64GB thumbstick of content. A single piece of content can serve 5 devices this way before you start seeing buffering issues. Great for car trips.
A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.
Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
alabastervlog|10 months ago
Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.
Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.
[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.
The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.
Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.
plussed_reader|10 months ago
basch|10 months ago
A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.
bippihippi1|10 months ago
throwanem|10 months ago
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
hahajk|10 months ago
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.