It's tricky -- teachers are in loco parentis, so does that also apply to equipment distributed by the school system? At any rate, I know it annoys the kids, but it gets them off to a good start circumventing technological lockdowns. So at least they're learning a valuable computer skill.
One of my coworkers had a bit of battle going on with his son where the son would figure out how to disable/circumvent the device tracking and he would have to figure out some way of doing it.
I'm not sure how it turned out, but at one point he installed an app on the phone that would let him text his son a certain message and it would silently respond with his location.
Perhaps he should have sat down with his son and asked what important things he was after that kept being blocked, show some understanding and then have some open discussion about the implications.
Or just double-down and play 'how far will he push it...'
Exactly. My first introduction to proxies and VPNs came about because I couldn't access the Sun JavaDocs for my AP CS class on the school internet, because Bess decided to block it for "hacking"
But that really has not much to do with it. It's a trust issue. Build a foundation of trust and mutual respect and you shouldn't need to monitor them, because they'll be asking you for guidance or respecting what is provided.
Unconditional love and all that, rather than discipline or else. If kids don't trust their parents and rely on them being there, they'll turn to friends, and well, other kids aren't generally the best role models or advisers...
>Both studies, which haven’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal, are set to be presented later this month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held in Montreal, Canada. Wisniewski says that the research was peer reviewed prior to its acceptance into the conference, though.
In CS, conferences are considered just as good as journals.
It's even more infuriating to work in a country where the rules for decisions (tenure, periodical assessments, etc) are common between disciplines, so non-journal papers are worth around zero, and your whole subfield pivots around conferences...
Common decision in my career: what do I prefer for this paper? That people actually read and cite it, or that it counts for tenure and other career stuff?
Many colleagues I know just change subfield, or pivot toward multidisciplinary work (e.g. with doctors, to be able to send it to medicine journals) just to avoid this.
The American Mathematical Society has made periodic statements (2004: http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStateme... . 2009: https://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStatem...) basically saying that in math, author order is generally alphabetical, as opposed to the lab sciences where lots of information is encoded in the order of the authors. (I'm not sure how author order works in CS.) I believe the purpose of this statement is to submit it with cases for hiring, promotion, tenure, etc. where non-mathematicians will be evaluating mathematicians.
I wonder if some professional society has made an equivalent "conferences count like journals in CS" statement.
I have searched for this in the past and I haven't seen any official professional statement, which by the way, is a pity. I have seen people submit personal letters from prestigious professors stating it instead.
In my view, the CS community is somewhat US-centric in this respect... it's not a huge problem for US professors (many of them publish exclusively or almost exclusively in conferences and they seem to be fine) so not much is done, unfortunately.
When I was a young boy in the 90s, my libertarian aligned father let me use the computer and access the internet. He explained to me that I shouldn't visit certain type of sites, I should never give out my name or address and that he had software installed to monitor what happened on the computer. He explained that this wasn't a breach of trust between us as I was using his equipment and that I had to abide by his rules. He stated that at any time I was free to get a job or find a way to earn my own cash and purchase my own computer.
It's not so much about the breach of trust than about raising independent, well-functioning individuals. There's good evidence than sheltering kids and not allowing them to experiment on their own terms, including by experiencing the consequences of their own actions, does not create well adapted adults.
Parents who install monitoring systems are prioritizing their own short-term well-being and peace of mind at the expense of their child's future. They're eating their marshmallow right away.
"My house, my rules" arguments are absurd when it comes to raising kids, and totally disregards the end goal of raising independent individuals.
Not quite the same thing, but related: When I was growing up, my parents would make me do all of my homework on their schedule and under their supervision. They reasoned that I wouldn't do it otherwise. That ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy and now I struggle with time management issues and procrastination.
I can relate to that, but it's very possible that your parents wanted you to do your homework on their schedule because they realized you'd fail in school otherwise.
I also struggle with time management and focus and always have. If my parents hadn't put a lot of energy into my doing my homework, I wouldn't have made it past elementary school. It was a mess really, and I'm thankful that I have a lot more resources to look up how to deal with such a thing than my parents, and I hope I can navigate my children through school with less pain.
What consequences could you imagine a parent should allow a 10 year old to experience?
The consequences of an abnormal sexual development or an unhealthy attitude towards females
due to stumbling across hardcore porn and becoming addicted to it at a young age?
The consequences of mistaking someone on the internet as a friend and giving them your full address and name so they could bring you ice cream?
There are things on the internet that a young mind is not sufficiently developed to handle, and the consequences of exposure can last a lifetime. Hell, there are things on the internet that most adult minds are not capable of handling. Some things cannot be 'unseen'.
By installing a monitoring and filtering system and informing my child of this and developing in him an idea of what is acceptable and appropriate and what is not and protecting him from potentially life-altering harm.
> By installing a monitoring and filtering system and informing my child of this and developing in him an idea of what is acceptable and appropriate and what is not and protecting him from potentially life-altering harm.
I think OP's point though is at what cost?
It's a given that protecting kids from harm is good, but to be convincing in your case I want to see that you can enumerate the downsides and state why they're good tradeoffs.
Too often do I see courses of action being advocated for because they're short term "obviously" right.
I don't conduct a fully peer-reviewed study for each parenting decision I make.
It seems to me, for my particular situation and this particular child, that this is the best course of action.
Obviously it may not be the best course for every situation or every child.
Hopefully each parent can make their own decisions based upon their knowledge and values. Nobody can say 'all kids won't be harmed if they watch porn' or 'every kid who watches porn will have developmental issues'. That's what makes a parent. You apply your best judgement to the situation and try to effect the best outcome.
>The consequences of an abnormal sexual development or an unhealthy attitude towards females due to stumbling across hardcore porn and becoming addicted to it at a young age?
Your first link is extremely prudent at drawing conclusions. it may well be that too much consumption of pornography decreases one's ability to get to the same degree of arousal in real life. But the meta-study doesn't say anything about the effects of being exposed to pornography as a teenager, and even suggests that these effects are only temporary: quit watching that much porn, and you'll do better.
Your second link is about correlation between consumption of pornography depicting violence against women, and expressing views supporting violence against women. It does not say anything about causation. It's not very surprising that men who support violence against women would consume pornography depicting exactly that.
The two links you provided say absolutely nothing about porn exposure as a teenager. Even if there was a detrimental effect (which the 2 studies don't say), it doesn't mean that monitoring and filtering is an efficient solution, especially at the expense of a healthy relationship with your kid where they trust you enough to have a discussion about something that shocked them.
The first link is a review paper of research going on in the field and draws reasonable conclusions. It's also full of language like "A 1999 major cross-sectional study reported erectile dysfunction in 5%, and low sexual desire in 5% of sexually active men, ages 18 to 59 [3]. [...] By 2011, ED rates in young Europeans, 18–40, ranged from 14%–28% [6]." and "A 2014 study on Canadian adolescents reported that 53.5% of males aged 16–21 had symptoms indicative of a sexual problem [10]." Teenagers are absolutely covered in this paper, but it's about sexual health in general.
That's a valid argument for the second paper, and unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to address it because most papers I found are behind a paywall and I can't read them.
Regardless, it's implied that poor sexual health and attitudes supporting women violence are both detrimental effects. I also wasn't making the argument that monitoring and filtering was the solution, I was providing citations on a claim because they were requested. If you didn't like those citations, it's why I also posted [1b] and [1c], which are 24 and 25 research papers about porn being linked to poor sexual health, and porn being linked to objectifying feelings towards women, respectively.
If you want to know my opinion on the subject, it's that teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents. But I also think there are real dangers on the internet that are not obvious to children discovering it, and having a very serious conversation with your kids is a very important thing to do.
It might just be a generational thing, but how stupid do you think ten year olds are?
It's silly to think that even an eight year old is as naive as you're describing - you should just tell your child what he shouldn't do, and let him go on those guidelines.
I think most eight- or ten-year-olds of my acquaintance (present or former) would, if simply told, "Don't do X," be strongly inclined to immediately go out and do X.
If, however, they were told, "It's not a good idea to do X, because Y," they'd be much more likely to think twice about it.
tl;dr: 10 year old girl talks to a man on a game, tells him where she lives, leaves a note to her parents saying she went to a friend's house. He picks her up, takes her to a motel and rapes her.
I bet those parents wish they had been paying more attention to what she was doing online.
Not every 10 year old is that naive and not every 10 year old would do something like that. But some 10 year olds are, and someone who does not know the child is not qualified to discern the child's level of naivete. As a parent, I feel I am qualified to discern this and apply the appropriate safeguards to the child's environment to mitigate the dangers until the child is capable of handling the risks himself.
Allowing a kid to experience consequences necessitates open dialogue with them about issues they may encounter. Sadly, many parents choose to monitor rather than discuss because it's easier. Many kids will still run into the things you state above...even with over-protective parents.
That's what makes parenting hard. You have to make those decisions.
Ideally, you protect your child from things that will damage them permanently, but let them enough freedom to experiment and get hurt, so they can have a true learning experience.
For example, I don't think a 10 year old will develop an unhealthy attitude towards females just because of watching porn. I would guess you can talk about gender issues and even porn with a 10 year old to offset the effect of it.
Essentially, if you have good communication with your child and keep him or her busy with healthy activities, he or she won't have much reason to do stupid stuff on the Internet. So your made up scenarios kind of predicate subpar parenting to begin with.
Personally, I am not too worried about porn. What worries me is disturbing news and sometimes gory details along with them. These things bother me for days as an adult. I cannot imagine what would happen to a young developing brain if a child read such things.
> Ideally, you protect your child from things that will damage them permanently, but let them enough freedom to experiment and get hurt, so they can have a true learning experience.
Exactly what I'm trying to do by allowing most things that may be considered inappropriate and only blocking the worst.
> For example, I don't think a 10 year old will develop an unhealthy attitude towards females just because of watching porn. I would guess you can talk about gender issues and even porn with a 10 year old to offset the effect of it.
There are many studies that say otherwise. Also not every 10 year old is the same. There are certainly some that could watch porn without being affected, and others that should not. That's also my job as a parent -- to assess the childs capability to deal with something and tailor their environment to best match that, while addressing any deficiencies.
> Essentially, if you have good communication with your child and keep him or her busy with healthy activities, he or she won't have much reason to do stupid stuff on the Internet. So your made up scenarios kind of predicate subpar parenting to begin with.
In the nature vs nurture field, there is far more nature than I ever thought. He has not been significantly involved with his biological father for the majority(95%+) of his life, yet I see many of his father's behaviors in him.
Childrens' behavior is a product of their environment, their parenting, as well as their genes. I can't say whether I'm a good parent or subpar, but I feel like I'm doing a much better job than many others that I see. Sure, I'm not perfect, but none of us are. The child I'm dealing with today is a result of my parenting, his mother's parenting, his parent's genes, and the environment he grew up in.
I don't disagree with much - if anything - you've written. Also I think everyone is aware that different children have different needs at certain milestones in their development. I also agree that you have to tackle parenting on an individual basis because children's natures are so different (everyone with more than one kid knows this for sure). It's just that I'm not particularly worried about porn for exmaple. Certainly not enough to let my child know I'm monitoring him, signaling distrust and make him self-conscious about the things he searches for on the internet. I'd rather have him explore in privacy, and only intervent if that turns out to be a serious problem.
So, no serious disagreements. Although I think your point about nurture vs. nature kind of contradicts your own stance.
Except that (assuming you define "young boy" anything like I do, and you live in the developed world) you were not free to get a job, due to child labor laws and mandatory schooling. I can't be too annoyed at your father, since most people don't even see the need to justify parents or teachers exercising authority over children, but if you ARE going to try to philosophically justify it, pretending that a child is just a member of the market economy with the same economic freedom as an adult strikes me as an obviously bullshit way to do so.
Draconian is defined as a law that is "overly harsh or sever". It comes from a Greek legal scribe to tied severe punishments to minor offenses.
No. That is not what those laws are. Mostly because you can "home school" a kid in the U.S. as a way around the mandatory schooling (there's just mandatory testing...which is what you want, a way to test out of the system)
HiSets and GEDs both require the test taker to be 16 or over in the majority of states, with a few (primarily Midwestern, granted) states not having ways to test out.
I could of babysat, asked neighbors for help with yard work, shovel snow or asked my parents if there were things that I could do on our property to earn an income. I got my first job when I was 15.
I do want to point out that my father never filtered my internet. He just let me know that any site I visited was being tracked and that I should take that into consideration when being online. I maintained complete autonomy online and my parents did not lie or obscure what they were doing. I would say that this prepared me well for what would become 'social media' over a decade later.
This parental tracking actually became a game of cat and mouse and I learned more about computers because of this. I was intrigued about how things could be monitored, how the OS and file systems worked. I ended up going to a vocational school for computer networking.
I was able to purchase a $1,000 computer when I was 14 due to smart saving of my money. While it isn't possible for everyone, I did grow up in a middle/upper middle class family where it was possible.
What I hear from parent around me come straight out of a dystopian novel. 24/7 GPS tracking, Webcam monitoring at random moments of the day, silent alarms when the child visits certain websites, silent alarms when the child enter certain stores and locations, etc.
That's 16-18 years old teens I'm talking about. By that time, the child should be well on its way to becoming an adult. They should be teaching their kids about freedom, the cost of mistakes and the weight of their actions.
Instead, we have kids growing up a bubble. Once they reach legal age, they rip them out of that bubble and throw them into a strange world they learned nothing about.
No wonder you then end up with people that are not very mature or have issues.
that he had software installed to monitor what happened on the computer. He explained that this wasn't a breach of trust between us as I was using his equipment and that I had to abide by his rules.
You do wonder: if the kid was 12 or 14 and bought himself a cheap smartphone from his own money to get away from the parental monitoring apps, would the "libertarian aligned father" be OK with that?
My older brother had 2 kids and he changed the WiFi password weekly and his kids only got the new passwordifnthey did their chores/homework the previous week.
I think that if you have a kid who puts that much value on a device, saves up and buys said device, than that kid is already on the road to responsible behavior.
It strikes me that the parents who install these apps are likely to be parents who are raising more challenging children.
That's not to imply they are bad parents, just that the kid went through a divorce, intense bullying, a change in schools, etc. and that trauma caused them to engage in activities that led to their parents installing the app.
Its also possible the parents are installing these monitoring apps after other more "natural" (non-tech) ways to limit the child's access failed. This could also explain why these kids exhibit the behaviors in the study, as it adds a bias to the sample.
On the flip side, I'd say it's more likely that parents who allow their kid to experience trauma caused by the parent's choices generally are more likely to have an authoritarian outlook on parenting.
1. MS Family Safety: can be easily turned off by the child
2. Kaspersky Safe Kids: doesn’t really work at all.
3. Qustodio: doesn’t block apps, so kinda useless. It blocks some, but not others.
I would pay good money for something that does work. As things are now, my 14 yo can only use his computer under adult supervision to do his homework. Otherwise he doesn’t do it at all. I don’t even care what sites he goes to as long as homework is done on time, but he totally lacks any self control, and left to his own devices he will spend all his time playing Minecraft and watching bullshit on YouTube. If he hates me for not letting him do that, so be it.
Are you saying when you're out all your 4G traffic are still re-routed to home network via VPN? what about they just disable VPN app on the mobile device?
They could disable the VPN, it's not a bulletproof solution, but good enough, for now.
I agree it wouldn't work for all children in all situations, but it works for us for now.
I'm not trying to 100% block access, I'm just trying to make things a little more difficult.
Kind of like when people put a tiny padlock on their suitcase. It's not going to stop a determined person with wire/bolt cutters, but it's going to stop the curious person who might just take a look and grab something.
Sure, he could go to a friends house and use their computer. I can't stop everything, but I can at least reduce the influence, possibly prevent a pop-up or something from giving that little nudge towards temptation.
An open pile of cash on the ground is far more tempting than a safe full of cash on the ground.
A proactive approach might get better results than a prohibitive one. Minecraft modding and making Minecraft videos seems like an obvious route for this given the interest.
>> I take it you are not a parent. Or at least a parent of a more compliant child.
There are too many awful parents out there for me to believe having kids makes one uniquely qualified to make suggestions. Dismissing ideas with a variation on "you must not have kids" is a huge red flag. It's usually done by people who see kids as things to be controlled and made subservient instead of as adults in progress.
We were all kids once. We all had friends whose parents had different styles, and often we got to see how that turned out. We all have a set of relevant experiences to pull from on the subject. Maybe it won't work for you. That's fine, but maybe you could actually say something about what's wrong with the suggestion instead of issuing a blanket dismissal. Or do the polite thing and ignore it.
You can spare me the condescending "so you don't have kids" that always follows this and just move on if you have nothing better to say.
>> having kids [does not make] one uniquely qualified
That is true. But the reverse is not. NOT having kids pretty much guarantees you have mostly romanticized notions about how things should be, and vastly underestimate the issues that parents have to face on a daily basis. Non-parents also seem to universally think that all kids are the same and merely talking to them is enough discipline. It will be enough for a small minority of kids, and nowhere near enough for most. Left to their own devices (if you pardon the pun) most kids will totally veg out and they will be unprepared to face the challenges of adulthood. The goal of a good parent is to make sure it doesn’t happen, even if the kid hates everything you do to make sure of it. Good parents don’t play “friends” with their kids. They’re more of a mix between a close confidant and a demanding manager who is totally prepared to make their kids lives unpleasant if it helps them in the long run.
You will be very quickly disabused of your romanticized notions when you have a child of your own. Until then you should probably refrain from giving parenting advice.
How is suggesting your kid might get into programming by modding a game a romanticized notion? That's one of the most common "how I got into programming" stories. It's completely non-controversial.
But that's not what you suggested. You suggested a "proactive" approach by which I take you mean letting the kid hack on this stuff at least partly on his own.
That _is_ a romanticized notion in our particular case. On his own, he quickly runs into obstacles, gets bored, and then fires up YouTube after about 5 minutes, in order to veg out.
I do teach him programming, though. He also does some more with his math tutor that comes in on weekends. He is kind of frustrated with our efforts at educating him. He thinks he should be writing grade-A 3D games right away, even though he utterly lacks both the programming and the math skills to do so. My advice to start with something much simpler has been falling on deaf ears so far.
Without structure, this particular 14 year old would not bathe, would not brush his teeth, would not do homework, would not properly eat, would not go outside or exercise, would not properly sleep, and would substitute all of the above with watching YouTube and playing Minecraft. So you can see why this is a concern.
I think we just had a misunderstanding. Had my parents listened to all the advice given to them about me, I'd have ended up in conversion therapy, so I do understand. When it comes to advice, some people (maybe most) just want to bloviate, not elucidate.
It sounds like you are being proactive (acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes).
The reason I suggested Minecraft modding and video-making in particular is:
1: It turns his current passive engagement with it into an active, creator role. Most Minecraft mods and media seem to be made by kids, or at least people who started when they were kids. I've read more than a few accounts from people who ended up in CS careers because of Minecraft.
2: Java and A/V are great skills to learn for a variety of possible career paths. Java also translates easily enough to C# and .NET, which also has plenty of career paths.
I don't have kids, but I know enough parents to know how insecure they get when they realize how woefully unprepared their parents and society left them for it, and how often people give lots of useless unsolicited advice. I tried not to do that, but I can see how it might come off that way if you're constantly fending off useless, unwelcome advice and criticisms.
Sounds like we did misunderstand each other then. But still, regarding #1: in order to meaningfully, actively engage with something non-trivial like programming, it is necessary to overcome the initial learning curve. Most kids naturally have problems with that. Those problems are vastly exacerbated by having access to unlimited supply of bullshit online, which doesn't require any effort to consume. Dopamine response wins 100% of the time.
This goes back to the Suzuki method, sort of. In order for a kid to actually enjoy a complicated endeavor he/she must have some baseline set of skills to not suck at it. Acquiring it is often not a pleasant thing even for adults, with lots of effort needed to get to anywhere near where a complex activity can become "fun", and a source of enjoyment.
This is another one of those things I didn't have any problems with: I naturally started very simple and worked my way up. I was only able to do that because I didn't really have much else to do. My father threw away our TV when I was 10 years old and he never bought another one. :-)
What would you have done at his age? Would you have done your homework promptly or played video games first? Did you ever skip your homework altogether? Be honest.
Computers were primitive when I was his age, but I did have one. I never had any problems with homework. The context here is that I did not grow up in the US, and not doing one’s homework and having shitty grades was not “socially acceptable“ in the peer group. My son is not as fortunate.
Heh. I grew up in South Africa, where “didn't do your homework” was met with a choice (if you were lucky) between caning (getting hit with a thin bamboo rod) and essay-writing.
I'm not sure that is a relevant question. What I did might very well have been just the wrong thing. Of course they have urges and preferences they have difficulty controlling. That is the entire point of locking something down.
If I was born just five or so years later, I'd be that guy's kid.
My mother didn't know how to discipline me. She would try and then I would convince her to give up. She never put any controls on anything I did-- consequently, I didn't learn what life could be like with those controls in place.
Parenting is mostly a guessing game, but I honestly believe that no matter what, one has to teach discipline in some form or another. Once you see the kid disciplining him/herself, then you cut down on the discipline you provide. The human brain is not necessarily designed to be naturally disciplined. Your kid will veg out if you don't teach and enforce rules that show them what can happen when rules are in place-- things like graduating high school, for example.
I would consider getting an android tablet or chrome book or linux laptop for him. They can actually be locked down. My daughter was spending waaay too much time watching some buffoon on youtube, so I explained to her, after numerous warnings, that since she couldn't control herself she was off internet. I leave internet access for her apps, but not the browsers, etc.
What about thin clients in the house? I know this is an old concept but with a thin-client the PC can be used only for homework, it's low power for gaming, and kids can not install anything on it, and they can use safe-browser with google...I am facing similar challenges at home.
or maybe just chromeOS on chromebooks? schools are using that, maybe that's a good fit for kids surfing at home (for homework etc)
We started monitoring his internet after we caught him looking at inappropriate videos on youtube.
He knows he is being monitored and I only block actual porn sites. Neither of us like it but until he has earned our trust back, the situation will not change.
I'm his parent, not his friend. My job isn't to make him like me, it's to raise him with proper values and protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand.
When I was 15, I discovered Usenet and the various binaries subgroups. This was beyond what my folks understood was on the PC. Your son will access content beyond your current understanding as well. Additionally, you might have a monitor on the PCs you own, but you don't have a monitor on his friends PCs either. The monitoring game is already lost. You indicate a loss of trust, but it goes both ways. There's absolutely no way he's going to tell you anything now that you've dealt the monitoring card. He's not going to thank you in the future. He's simply not going to say anything about it.
I disagree, as we are not doing anything sneaky. He is well aware of it and it actually was his suggestion.
I often ask him for advice on how he things I should handle a situation, and after reasoning things out, he usually comes to the same or a similar conclusion as me.
He has impulse control issues, and while he needs to learn to control them, he also needs to be protected from any significant harm as a result. I'm okay if he gets burned because he touched the stove after I said it was hot. Some things he needs to learn the hard way.
I'm not okay with him getting 3rd degree burns because he was playing with a lighter and accidentally set his clothes on fire.
And making things forbidden won't encourage a 12 year old to find a way to get to it anyway? The hormonal boy will just say "porn is blocked here, I won't look at titties until my parents says it's ok"?
So you're saying I should just let my 12 year old do as he pleases?
Just remove all of the rules? No rules, no consequences.
Sounds like a great idea.
Unfortunately real life doesn't work that way. I agree, the best way to make sure a 12 year old boy does something, is to tell him not to do it. Hell, that's about the best way to get me to do something.
But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a rule with consequences. That's how our society works and he has to learn how to function in it.
I always give him explanations for each rule we have. He's free to ask any questions and I will do my best to get him to understand. He's free to disagree but he is not free to break rules we have set. Many of the rules he has were his idea as a result of a conversation with him asking him what he thinks we should do about a situation.
I'm not going to give every example but a couple were some excerpts from Saw, some animated FNoF skits that I felt taught the wrong values. Some with some inappropriate sexual content. (As in sibling comment, I won't delve into the morality of sex. We could be here all day discussing that)
When I was growing up, I delighted in breaking all of the layers of security my parents loaded up the computers in the house with. I never relented when they tried to block something and they only escalated things, including physically locking away electronics (which also didn't work, I learned how to pick locks and gained access to electronics in other ways), then even further escalations ensued. The main effect of this was not that I couldn't access content they didn't like, but that our relationship soured to the point where I moved out two days after turning 18 and none of us spoke for a few years.
Blocking things will only encourage your son to try harder to get at them and to become more secretive with you, and will have lasting damage on your relationship, especially if you double down when he inevitably works around your blocks. You cannot control him, and he is not yours to control. Remember, your son is an entirely independent person who is growing up much faster than you realize.
Your story saddened me to read. Reminded me of one of my favorite poems:
Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which
you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make
them like you.
Each situation is different. Even though things turned out the way they did for you, can you say they would have been different if they had just allowed you to blatantly disregard their rules? Can you say with certainty that none of the stuff they blocked that you accessed regardless did not harm you? Could they have had the foresight to know for sure if you would or would not have been harmed?
I won't get into a discussion on whether things such as nudity or pornography are truly harmful, that's a can of worms. But they are not accepted in the society we live in, and my son has to be able to function in that society, with its rules, controls, and monitors. We have collectively decided on these and I would be failing as a parent if I didn't try to give my child the tools to function in this environment.
Would you care to elaborate on these things that your parents didn't like that were blocked? Did they explain to you and try to get you to understand why they didn't like them? And why you didn't respect them enough to abide by their rules(not saying that you should have respected them, they may have not deserved it)? It sounds like there may have been some deeper issues there.
>Could they have had the foresight to know for sure if you would or would not have been harmed?
There are endless things in this world that can harm your child. It's natural to be scared of these things, but folly to try and address them all. Each one you address adds another layer of restrictions to your child's psyche, but barely moves the dail on how dangerous this world is. The tradeoff is steep.
>I didn't try to give my child the tools to function in this environment
You didn't give your kid the tools to function around pornography, you did the opposite. You futily attempted to remove pornography from the equation entirely without giving your kid any tools with which to face it. He will seek it out and he will find it, you've only made that fact certain. Only now, you have become the adversary, and when your son does seek these things out he won't ask you for help in understanding them for fear of retribution for breaking your rules.
Remember this axiom: you cannot stop your kid from viewing this content. He is smarter than you. If you cannot block this content but try to anyway, all you're left with is the negative effects.
>can you say they would have been different if they had just allowed you to blatantly disregard their rules?
You don't respect your child's autonomy by setting these rules. You can make endless excuses for your rules being just, but step into your son's shoes. "Dad says 'my house, my rules' but it's not like I can move out." What is your kid's recourse in this situation? Again, if you think your filters are effective you're delusional. All you do is disrespect your child by doing this.
>Would you care to elaborate on these things that your parents didn't like that were blocked? Did they explain to you and try to get you to understand why they didn't like them? And why you didn't respect them enough to abide by their rules(not saying that you should have respected them, they may have not deserved it)? It sounds like there may have been some deeper issues there.
I would be happy to discuss this privately, my email is in my profile.
> We started monitoring his internet after we caught him looking at inappropriate videos on youtube.
Yeah, that's a great move. You are uncomfortable with something, so you limit his freedom to perceive it. That's going to lead to a great relationship where he will trust you with real problems in the future.
> Neither of us like it but until he has earned our trust back, the situation will not change.
The thing is, you won't earn his trust back unless you stop that bullshit.
> My job isn't to make him like me, it's to raise him with proper values and protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand.
You being uncomfortable is not a danger to him, it's a danger to you, and you are abusing him to help yourself.
> If I do it right, he will thank me later.
Problem is, you aren't doing it right, and he certainly won't thank you later, at least not for that. He will keep a distance to you and avoid you for advice because you make him solve your problems, so you are not a reliable source of advice in his interest.
I welcome criticism as it often helps adjust perceptions and behaviors.
It has nothing to do with what I'm comfortable with him seeing. As a parent I try to instill my perception of good values in my child, while allowing him to develop his own take on them. Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not. But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework, preferably before he is an adult and consequences are things like fines and jail.
You've made an assumption that the issue here is my problem with being uncomfortable with something, which I feel is not an accurate assumption. The rest of your argument is based on that assumption.
I'd be happy to discuss the accuracy of this assumption, perhaps I can learn something.
> As a parent I try to instill my perception of good values in my child, while allowing him to develop his own take on them.
So ... how does that "developing his own take on them" work if you prevent him from perceiving the world?
> Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not.
And equally, your child may not. There is a fine line between helping your child navigate the world and decide what they value and why and forcing them to adopt your values.
> But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework
Actually, no, and that approach to understanding interactions with the world is toxic, as it is essentially learning to submit to authority, rather than learning to live as a citizen in a society among equals who share a space.
Rules and consequences should be the last line of defence for a society as far as preventing anti-social behaviour is concerned, not something that teaches you how to live. You learn to live by understanding how fairness works, how reciprocity works, how cooperation helps everyone achieve more, essentially by understanding how to make society work. Because that is the only way a citizen in a democratic society can be expected to participate in defining the rules and consequences that then are enforced as a last line of defence against the minority who would otherwise ruin it for everyone. In a democracy, the citizens have to make the rules. You cannot make the rules by following the rules.
Following rules is not a virtue. Behaving in a way that is in accordance with a possibly hypothetical fair and balanced set of rules is. But you can't learn that by being forced to obey a rule that you don't see as fair or balanced.
> You've made an assumption that the issue here is my problem with being uncomfortable with something, which I feel is not an accurate assumption. The rest of your argument is based on that assumption.
Well, yeah, it is somewhat of an assumption, but it still seems likely to me.
I mean, what is the value that you are trying to get your child to accept by limiting what he can look at on the internet, and is there anything besides porn that you try to prevent him from accessing?
> > As a parent I try to instill my perception of good values in my child, while allowing him to develop his own take on them. > So ... how does that "developing his own take on them" work if you prevent him from perceiving the world?
I only prevent him from perceiving what I feel is the most harmful parts of the world to an undeveloped mind. I solicit his input, and my reliance on that will increase as his maturity does. I wouldn't ask a 3 year old if they felt they should watch porn. But have asked my 12 year old that. And them for him to explain his answer.
>> Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not.
>And equally, your child may not. There is a fine line between helping your child navigate the world and decide what they value and why and forcing them to adopt your values.
Agreed. One the many fine lines a good parent has to toe.
> > But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework
> Actually, no, and that approach to understanding interactions with the world is toxic, as it is essentially learning to submit to authority, rather than learning to live as a citizen in a society among equals who share a space.
A valid point, but only if my execution was in a manner to be repressive or authoritarian. I don't use the 'my house, my rules' approach. I use the 'lets sit down and discuss this' approach. When he was younger I would always kneel down so that we were at eye-level with each other.
Mutual respect should be the driving principal for all behavior. I teach the 'Platinum rule' -- Treat others the way they want to be treated.
I mostly agree with the rest of the post. To answer your last question: "...is there anything besides porn that you try to prevent him from accessing?" -- Sites tagged by Sophos as VPN, proxy, ad networks, and malware. VPN and proxy as they can make the porn filter ineffective. Ad networks and malware just for the general protection of the devices.
Well, that mostly sounds good ... except your actions seem to contradict your words?
From what I can tell, he wants to look at porn, and he thinks there is nothing wrong with it. Whatever the conclusion of your conversation with him was, he is obviously not convinced that he shouldn't, at best he ends up expressing agreement because he is dependent on you. The only reason why he now does it without you knowing and without any possibility of discussing with you when he sees something that disturbs him is that you force him to, not because he agrees with you. You say that you are not authoritarian, but your actions say the opposite. Either you are exercising power or you are not, whether you dress it up in nice words, doesn't change whether it is authoritarian.
Now, you constantly repeat that you want to protect him from danger, and I guess some of your authoritarian behaviour may hinge on that. After all, authoritarian action is somewhat justified if you know that without it, harm will follow. The problem is that based on what you have written here, you don't know that. You have referenced some extremely unscientific ideas and sources and shown some biases that suggest that you are not rationally evaluating the actual risks and dangers of your child's wishes and your authoritarian responses, but are probably more acting based on your own emotional response. The danger that you are imagining most likely isn't there, but the damage that you do by restricting your child in order to protect him from this imaginary danger is real, both in that it is damaging his trust in you, and in that you are making him internalize that his probably perfectly healthy sexual curiousity is a problem that he has to fight against.
Is blocking it more because you don't want to think about him looking at it, or because you actually think he will be damaged by looking at it? I'm sure I found porn at age 12 (now 30). Did you not?
I have no problems thinking about him viewing it. Maybe because he is my stepson? I do not seem to have the typical aversion that causes most parents to prefer to just put on blindfolds and pretend their child isn't growing up.
I don't feel its appropriate. I certainly found porn when I was about that age(actually a bit younger) and feel like it had a negative impact on me in general.
> protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand
This is the big one for me. My job is not primarily to protect my children, it's to prepare them to be functioning adults. To that end, I protect them from dangers that they're not yet ready to face, while teaching them skills to recognize and handle the dangers eventually.
Have you discussed pornography with your stepson? If you haven't seen it already, https://fightthenewdrug.org/ is a good resource.
Absolutely, we've had several discussions about it, mostly surrounding the unrealistic expectations of women and sex in general that it promotes and its effect on emotional development of your brain.
It does no good to tell someone they can't do something without explaining why. I encourage him to ask questions when he doesn't understand something, and will never give "because I said so" as an answer.
My goal is for him to understand why these things are harmful while protecting him from them until he has the facilities to manage it on his own.
Just like a bike with training wheels. Teaching him to ride while protecting him from falling, until he can ride on his own.
Monitoring Apps attack the symptom and not the cause. I used to argue a lot with my parents when I was growing up because I wanted to code websites and teach myself to code.
This came at the expense of my IT homework and schoolwork, which wanted to teach me how to use Word, Access and PowerPoint. Like a lot of people my age, my first exposure to code was hacking at a MySpace profile and a Geocities page.
I ended up getting a good degree but owe much more of my current career to that early tinkering than anyone forcing me to learn Word Processing software. I wonder if the same mistakes are being made now trying to keep kids from using Minecraft.
> researchers then looked at 736 online reviews left by parents and kids (ages 8 to 19) of 37 parental control apps available on Google Play
Wait, so their source of data is Google Play reviews?!
The title of the article makes it seem that there is a one-to-one correlation between the app and the impact on the relationship, but the author herself says "The takeaway here is that parents should not treat parental control apps as a magic bullet to keep their teens safe online". So, this is really about parents who use these apps as the sole parenting device without doing any parenting and interacting with their child themselves. I mean, if you don't try to have a relationship with your kid, you're not going to have a good relationship with your kid.
I'm having a daughter soon and plan on white listing websites through the router. I don't plan to monitor anything but I do know there are things out there that would be detrimental for her to see.
We will add sites to the white list as we go.
Just to be clear, at a certain age I will give her full access.
I haven't really decided yet. Right now I'm leaning toward 15. Hopefully by then we have mapped out a vast majority of the sites she actually uses and it's not much of a transition.
I imagine it's less about the number -- her age -- and more about her maturity and personality. I think your approach would work well, though she may need wider access to Google search results when doing homework.
I would think that is way too late unless she turns out to be an idiot without any interest in anything. You cannot reasonably research anything with a whitelist.
After they've gone through puberty and we've talked about difficult topics like safe sex. A lot of filters cannot help but block access to USEFUL sex ed information while aggressively trying to limit pornography access.
While I'd prefer they limit their porn access as a teenager, plenty of well adjusted people didn't and came out fine. I am far more concerned about "sexting" (and having it shared around at school/used to bully), and authorities trying to prosecute underage kids for having pictures of their own (and their love interest's) bodies on a device they own.
The whole "porn is a public health emergency" thing is largely bullshit. Unhealthy attitudes to sex and an overreaction by authority figures might be a "health emergency" though.
Particularly as a lot of parents will happily let teenagers watch people get blown apart in movies and on TV, but suddenly two people lovingly touching each other naked is just a step too far! It is hypocritical. Particularly with shows like GoT that they're going to watch because everyone else is (and we are).
A lot of this seems so much later than I would expect. My parents discussed most of this stuff with my siblings and me at like five years old. What happened? 3/4 happily married, the fourth engaged. No STDs, no rapes, no children out of wedlock.
I've got a kid and I am not an expert. That said, I don't know about the concept behind "The Talk". Anymore then saying waiting until a kid has gone through Puberty. My thought is that this isn't a light switch - it's a process. And the really important information you need to convey isn't mechanics. I mean, if the kid has mechanic questions go ahead and answer them but despite what everyone says I don't think that's what causes problems. The things you really teach your kid - the things they really need to learn - are the things that you say to them and do in front of them over and over and over for years. It starts when they come into your life. And you keep teaching them when you want to. And you keep teaching them when you don't want to.
This is a terribly depressing world view I realize. I'm more or less convinced that there's nothing I can do to stop screwing up my kid. My one hope is that my wife is pretty competent and luckily enough to the degree that she's not I think I compliment her. We'll see.
You should have ongoing talks with your daughter about sex long, long before puberty.
Contraception should be a conversation you have with, approximately, a six year old, when they ask you how babies are made exactly, and why they were born (it’s not just “your parents had sex”, it’s “your parents stopped using contraception” that caused you to be born).
Safe sex, as in, “STIs exist, be cautious but not terrified”, and “intimate partner violence exists, don’t stand for or create cruelty or boundary crossing in intimate relationships” is a conversation for eight or nine year olds.
Young children aren’t yet embarrassed about their bodies or your body, it is much easier (and healthier for all concerned) to get open, loving, accurate information about sex and relationships at the moment it’s requested, well before puberty. Before and during puberty, when the urge to separate from parents is beginning and body shame frequently begins to set in, is a much worse time to have such conversations.
As a parent of four little kids, my biggest concern is really that they understand consequences of online activity (sharing data for example.) An app generally doesn’t teach that — it’s called “parenting.”
“Find my Friends” on iPhone is also nice, just for safety but not as a tool for helicopter parenting. My wife and I have it enabled on our devices for each other, but it’s rarely used — it’s just an additional layer of safety. It’s especialy great if I am out in the hills climbing — if I get hurt, at least she has my last known location.
You have to strike a balance between being a worried parent, and letting your child experience individual freedom. Parents who go out of their to make sure their kids know every single action they make is monitored will absolutely drive a wedge between them. It's not a bad idea to install location monitoring apps, but going as far as reading every communication your child makes to peers or knowing every single website they visit can be crossing the line. Granted this is more of a problem with modern generation teens and children, teens and children born in the early to mid 90s didn't really need this level of restriction. It seems as the new generations come about, the level of irresponsibility and poor decision increase. Kids learn from experience, negative experiences do teach lessons and shape decision making. If you go out of your way to block every potentially negatives interaction a child can have on the internet or amongst friends, they won't know how to deal with those harsh reality situations come time when their parents aren't around to protect them anymore. I'd imagine most of us had experiences as a child/teen where we typed in the wrong URL in the early days of the internet and bam, breasts suddenly all over the screen. That's a learning experience. My experience with this was in the middle of a 6th grade history class, mistyped 1 letter and the teacher about had a heart attack from what popped up.
Parent's who block porn websites for their teens for example, why? You know very well that at 13,14,15 your child is going to start getting curious, and outright blocking their access to that content online is only going to make them look for it elsewhere. I'm not saying don't, but casting an iron curtain over their activities and making them feel like they have to constantly look over their shoulder for your monitoring is going to build distrust and disdain. It's all about balance. Older parents that were born in the mid 1900s didn't place many restrictions on their kids because I believe they knew kids had to learn how to experience life for what it had to offer. Modern generation parents who were born just in the late 80s/early90s are getting too heavy handed with moderation and restriction.
I would genuinely pay Pornhub to provide a curated selection. The value in having the type of pornography teenagers find being biased slightly towards say, the X-Rated sex ed content and dropping a lot of the outright sexist stuff way down the list, would probably be one of the most effective sex ed tools that could be provided.
Apple doesn't make it possible to have reasonable controls on an iOS device, unfortunately.
There is no fine-grained way to say what apps can be used when, what web sites can be used or not used, etc. Even things that seem like they should work (e.g., "Allow the Amazon Kindle app but not Safari") don't, because of hidden features that breaks Kindle when Safari isn't enabled.
I've tried many apps, including Qustodio. I can't do MDM or any of the enterprise-level stuff because guess what, I can't get Apple to give me an Apple ID account that Apple Configurator 2 will accept - despite being a 25+ year industry veteran - and I'm not about to use my company credentials on my personal devices.
Not all kids need these features, and not all parents want them, but for those of us who want our kids to have iOS devices for communication purposes, plus also occasionally allow them for other purposes, we have no choices here. We can lock it all down to near uselessness or leave it open, but there is no in-between.
> There is no fine-grained way to say what apps can be used when, what web sites can be used or not used, etc.
I'm surprised to hear that. We've had the smaller model iPod for a couple of years now. I have parental restrictions on and my daughter can't install (thus, not use) apps that I do not approve, nor can she visit any websites that I do not whitelist. Both features are stock, no third party app needed. The former only required adding the device to my family sharing group and ticking a box requiring her to ask permission before downloading an app.
My opinion is that there is definitely an in-between, but you're correct in saying that time limit enforcement would be quite useful.
You're right about how iOS restrictions work. My statement about an in-between is that there is no way for me to say "allow this app from time X to Y, for at most Z minutes" - it's all or nothing. You can have this app, or not have this app.
Additionally, there is no way for me to remotely manage it. If a child refuses to turn the phone off, I cannot hit a management tool and lock it down (at least, not without using an MDM profile, as Qustodio and other solutions can be trivially defeated by deleting their management profile which requires no permissions). If I want to monitor where they go and how much time they spend on each app, there is no way to do it.
So, I can do super-basic things, but nothing fine-grained or interesting from my parenting perspective.
So, it all gets turned off and is basically a Find-my-Friends, phone/FaceTime and iMessage tool for $700. Not exactly a good value and not something I will be sending any more money to Apple for.
I would be happy if Apple could at least implement time restrictions like the Parental Controls on MacOS. That's been available for what, almost a decade now?
The closest thing that's available is something that blocks traffic at the router level, like Circle. But even that isn't perfect, since kids can still use local apps that don't need full network access.
I've also tried some of the MDM programs like OurPact, but the UI is awful and they do a lousy job of implementing it on the client side, probably in part because of what Apple allows to be turned off and what they do not.
The article (and some comments here) seems to not be distinguishing between monitoring and blocking. The title says “monitoring” which is kind of a solved problem. I monitor my family's network regularly, looking for bandwidth spikes, evidence of viruses & malware, outages, etc. I’m not going to sit there monitoring content or where my wife and kids are at all times.
Blocking content, on the other hand, is destined to fail. Whitelisting will always be too strict, blacklists will never cover everything you might find objectionable, and heuristics will be inexact. If you want to block out the world from your kids my advice (as a parent myself) is don’t—instead invest the time and effort into establishing a trusting and understanding relationship and instilling the right values. Values drive motivation which drives actions.
As a parent I’m not my kid’s friend but I’m also not house dictator.
I think the most important thing a parent can do for a child is develop a strong bond of trust. Be consistent in what you say and do and be honest about any questions they ask. If you're going to make a rule, stick to it, but also show them at an early age that you think they can be trusted. If they trust you and you tell them that going to x site is bad, they will be much more likely to believe you and avoid the site. If they do go to x site and discover that it's bad, they'll tell you about it as long as you don't have a track record of punishing your kid for telling the truth, and you have the opportunity to talk it out and make sure your kid is okay.
If your kid just doesn't want to listen, then maybe install a monitoring/blocking program. Also, especially do that when they are very young. You don't really need to do it above age 8 or so, as hopefully by then they will have developed a rhythm with the Internet that suits them.
Speaking as a father of a large family ranging from 1 year to 14 years, to understand the child and their weaknesses and exposing them to the child at the appropriate time is paramount.
When a toddler looks in the cabinet for toys and finds poison, we find that as an issue. So, we put the poison up, and/or install a lock. The same goes for the dangers of teens. They aren't ready for some things of internet, including porn and cyber bulling. As parents, we use parental controls to limit access to xrated channels on our tv. It makes sense to limit content to internet connected devices that do the same. We don't need a formalized study to see what access to porn can do to a person. It's been documented many times.
My experience has been, at this point in a childs life, you need to have, or establish a good relationship with your child and help them understand that you are protecting them from harm that they don't fully understand yet. They need to understand this protection is a joint effort between you and them for their best interest.
Some may say this is overprotected parenting. Let's not go overboard here. I've seen so many uninvolved parents, which is far worse than overprotected. I've found the middle ground is the most effective. Add controls to obvious problem sites and apps. Watch remotely from time to time (as sathackr said, trust but verify). Then, periodically, sit down with your child to see how they are doing and how you can help do the right thing online.
Making sex into an illicit thing, rather than just a private thing, frequently leaves teens with damaging relationships to their sexuality and others.
The idea that a teen or pre-teen who’s interested isn’t finding porn through someone else’s computer is very likely mistaken.
By forbidding access, you are losing your child’s trust, which likely forecloses on the opportunity to honestly and openly discuss healthy body image, respect, mutual pleasure, and the fact that porn star bodies are (often) to normal human bodies as toy soldiers are to human soldiers.
Finally, forbidding access to something humans have an innate drive for is liable to make it into forbidden fruit, over-emphasizing, rather than de-emphasizing, the target.
So you're suggesting the solution is to encourage watching porn or others while they have sex?
How does watching others have sex enable more discussion on healthy body image? Why can't this conversation be started with images seen anywhere that have been altered?
Let's discuss the negatives. Porn is anti-woman. It turns the woman into an object. You mention 'damaging relationships' by not watching sex. It is exactly the opposite. Porn damages current and future relationships by turning the woman (or man in some cases) into an object for personal pleasure, similar to a toy. A relationship founded on using each other for personal reasons, and not mutual respect and love, will only fail, and fail painfully. Not to mention any 'baggage' such as STDs, pregnancies, etc.
These are the mistakes are what we aim to prevent our children from making until they reach a point of maturity to where they can reliably prevent them on their own.
I am certainly not suggesting that you push porn on your child.
Rather, you seem to be suggesting you have to prevent your child from watching porn. I am suggesting forbidding porn, in private, is very likely to be counterproductive, because it is unlikely to succeed, it makes a reasonable human desire into something illicit, and is likely to instead result in a loss of trust + cause porn to be seen as forbidden (and thus attractive) fruit.
Separately, I am suggesting that when a child is interested in porn, that’s an opportunity for a conversation about the problematic aspects of porn, respect, and fantasy vs. reality. Loss of trust makes that conversation less likely to be accessible, or at least less likely for that conversation to involve your child actually listening to you.
This is false. Mainstream porn may have failed to appeal to mainstream women, but many women watch porn and many categories of porn are not "anti-women".
> So you're suggesting the solution is to encourage watching porn or others while they have sex?
That is a dishonest interpretation of what OP said.
> It turns the woman into an object.
Does it? I find a lot of porn to be empowering as a woman. I find a lot of time they commoditize the man as just a thing the penis carries with it into the scene where the woman is the star of the show, showing us that we too can be involved in the act, we're allowed to express ourselves. We don't have to just lay there and let the male do his business until he's done. We can get nasty and just have fun. We can even be in charge. You usually can't search mainstream porn by male actor, he's just a prop.
By making sex a super strict taboo while sex is a biological imperitive, you exaggerate dangerous behavior. Having your son not treat women like objects comes from a strong moral foundation in upbringing, not sheltering him from porn and assuming he'll figure out women are people on his own. My dad raised me to be aware of the ways men are likely to trick me, but he also made me aware that the majority of people in general have extremely flawed upbringings. He raised me to be a critical thinker, as such I realize that male sexist behavior is both an individual act and a part of a larger systemic problem. I don't need cheap scapegoats like porn to understand poor behavior in males, I don't need to blame all males when I encounter a really bad one.
Education has been and will always be more effective than zero tolerance policies.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadI'm not sure how it turned out, but at one point he installed an app on the phone that would let him text his son a certain message and it would silently respond with his location.
Or just double-down and play 'how far will he push it...'
Unconditional love and all that, rather than discipline or else. If kids don't trust their parents and rely on them being there, they'll turn to friends, and well, other kids aren't generally the best role models or advisers...
In CS, conferences are considered just as good as journals.
Common decision in my career: what do I prefer for this paper? That people actually read and cite it, or that it counts for tenure and other career stuff?
Many colleagues I know just change subfield, or pivot toward multidisciplinary work (e.g. with doctors, to be able to send it to medicine journals) just to avoid this.
The American Mathematical Society has made periodic statements (2004: http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStateme... . 2009: https://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStatem...) basically saying that in math, author order is generally alphabetical, as opposed to the lab sciences where lots of information is encoded in the order of the authors. (I'm not sure how author order works in CS.) I believe the purpose of this statement is to submit it with cases for hiring, promotion, tenure, etc. where non-mathematicians will be evaluating mathematicians.
I wonder if some professional society has made an equivalent "conferences count like journals in CS" statement.
In my view, the CS community is somewhat US-centric in this respect... it's not a huge problem for US professors (many of them publish exclusively or almost exclusively in conferences and they seem to be fine) so not much is done, unfortunately.
Edit: This was a lame joke based on the original, broken title of this submission. I do not condone teen monitoring apps in any way.
Parents who install monitoring systems are prioritizing their own short-term well-being and peace of mind at the expense of their child's future. They're eating their marshmallow right away.
"My house, my rules" arguments are absurd when it comes to raising kids, and totally disregards the end goal of raising independent individuals.
Not quite the same thing, but related: When I was growing up, my parents would make me do all of my homework on their schedule and under their supervision. They reasoned that I wouldn't do it otherwise. That ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy and now I struggle with time management issues and procrastination.
I also struggle with time management and focus and always have. If my parents hadn't put a lot of energy into my doing my homework, I wouldn't have made it past elementary school. It was a mess really, and I'm thankful that I have a lot more resources to look up how to deal with such a thing than my parents, and I hope I can navigate my children through school with less pain.
The consequences of an abnormal sexual development or an unhealthy attitude towards females due to stumbling across hardcore porn and becoming addicted to it at a young age?
The consequences of mistaking someone on the internet as a friend and giving them your full address and name so they could bring you ice cream?
There are things on the internet that a young mind is not sufficiently developed to handle, and the consequences of exposure can last a lifetime. Hell, there are things on the internet that most adult minds are not capable of handling. Some things cannot be 'unseen'.
By installing a monitoring and filtering system and informing my child of this and developing in him an idea of what is acceptable and appropriate and what is not and protecting him from potentially life-altering harm.
I think OP's point though is at what cost?
It's a given that protecting kids from harm is good, but to be convincing in your case I want to see that you can enumerate the downsides and state why they're good tradeoffs.
Too often do I see courses of action being advocated for because they're short term "obviously" right.
It seems to me, for my particular situation and this particular child, that this is the best course of action.
Obviously it may not be the best course for every situation or every child.
Hopefully each parent can make their own decisions based upon their knowledge and values. Nobody can say 'all kids won't be harmed if they watch porn' or 'every kid who watches porn will have developmental issues'. That's what makes a parent. You apply your best judgement to the situation and try to effect the best outcome.
Do you have evidence/sources to back this claim?
To someone without a sex drive, porn is yucky and boring
Example of porn linked to abnormal sexual development
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/
Example of unhealthy attitudes towards females
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38041887_Pornograph...
[1a] https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
[1b] https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/studies-reported-relationshi...
[1c] https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/studies-linking-porn-use
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/
[EDIT] Formatting is hard
Your second link is about correlation between consumption of pornography depicting violence against women, and expressing views supporting violence against women. It does not say anything about causation. It's not very surprising that men who support violence against women would consume pornography depicting exactly that.
The two links you provided say absolutely nothing about porn exposure as a teenager. Even if there was a detrimental effect (which the 2 studies don't say), it doesn't mean that monitoring and filtering is an efficient solution, especially at the expense of a healthy relationship with your kid where they trust you enough to have a discussion about something that shocked them.
That's a valid argument for the second paper, and unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to address it because most papers I found are behind a paywall and I can't read them.
Regardless, it's implied that poor sexual health and attitudes supporting women violence are both detrimental effects. I also wasn't making the argument that monitoring and filtering was the solution, I was providing citations on a claim because they were requested. If you didn't like those citations, it's why I also posted [1b] and [1c], which are 24 and 25 research papers about porn being linked to poor sexual health, and porn being linked to objectifying feelings towards women, respectively.
If you want to know my opinion on the subject, it's that teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents. But I also think there are real dangers on the internet that are not obvious to children discovering it, and having a very serious conversation with your kids is a very important thing to do.
I've read many studies, of which I didn't catalog, but the above link should get you started.
It's silly to think that even an eight year old is as naive as you're describing - you should just tell your child what he shouldn't do, and let him go on those guidelines.
If, however, they were told, "It's not a good idea to do X, because Y," they'd be much more likely to think twice about it.
tl;dr: 10 year old girl talks to a man on a game, tells him where she lives, leaves a note to her parents saying she went to a friend's house. He picks her up, takes her to a motel and rapes her.
http://www.theledger.com/news/20180329/polk-county-sheriffs-...
I bet those parents wish they had been paying more attention to what she was doing online.
Not every 10 year old is that naive and not every 10 year old would do something like that. But some 10 year olds are, and someone who does not know the child is not qualified to discern the child's level of naivete. As a parent, I feel I am qualified to discern this and apply the appropriate safeguards to the child's environment to mitigate the dangers until the child is capable of handling the risks himself.
Monitoring and discussion are not mutually exclusive.
Ideally, you protect your child from things that will damage them permanently, but let them enough freedom to experiment and get hurt, so they can have a true learning experience.
For example, I don't think a 10 year old will develop an unhealthy attitude towards females just because of watching porn. I would guess you can talk about gender issues and even porn with a 10 year old to offset the effect of it.
Essentially, if you have good communication with your child and keep him or her busy with healthy activities, he or she won't have much reason to do stupid stuff on the Internet. So your made up scenarios kind of predicate subpar parenting to begin with.
Exactly what I'm trying to do by allowing most things that may be considered inappropriate and only blocking the worst.
> For example, I don't think a 10 year old will develop an unhealthy attitude towards females just because of watching porn. I would guess you can talk about gender issues and even porn with a 10 year old to offset the effect of it.
There are many studies that say otherwise. Also not every 10 year old is the same. There are certainly some that could watch porn without being affected, and others that should not. That's also my job as a parent -- to assess the childs capability to deal with something and tailor their environment to best match that, while addressing any deficiencies.
> Essentially, if you have good communication with your child and keep him or her busy with healthy activities, he or she won't have much reason to do stupid stuff on the Internet. So your made up scenarios kind of predicate subpar parenting to begin with.
In the nature vs nurture field, there is far more nature than I ever thought. He has not been significantly involved with his biological father for the majority(95%+) of his life, yet I see many of his father's behaviors in him.
Childrens' behavior is a product of their environment, their parenting, as well as their genes. I can't say whether I'm a good parent or subpar, but I feel like I'm doing a much better job than many others that I see. Sure, I'm not perfect, but none of us are. The child I'm dealing with today is a result of my parenting, his mother's parenting, his parent's genes, and the environment he grew up in.
So, no serious disagreements. Although I think your point about nurture vs. nature kind of contradicts your own stance.
No. That is not what those laws are. Mostly because you can "home school" a kid in the U.S. as a way around the mandatory schooling (there's just mandatory testing...which is what you want, a way to test out of the system)
I do want to point out that my father never filtered my internet. He just let me know that any site I visited was being tracked and that I should take that into consideration when being online. I maintained complete autonomy online and my parents did not lie or obscure what they were doing. I would say that this prepared me well for what would become 'social media' over a decade later.
This parental tracking actually became a game of cat and mouse and I learned more about computers because of this. I was intrigued about how things could be monitored, how the OS and file systems worked. I ended up going to a vocational school for computer networking.
What I hear from parent around me come straight out of a dystopian novel. 24/7 GPS tracking, Webcam monitoring at random moments of the day, silent alarms when the child visits certain websites, silent alarms when the child enter certain stores and locations, etc.
That's 16-18 years old teens I'm talking about. By that time, the child should be well on its way to becoming an adult. They should be teaching their kids about freedom, the cost of mistakes and the weight of their actions.
Instead, we have kids growing up a bubble. Once they reach legal age, they rip them out of that bubble and throw them into a strange world they learned nothing about.
No wonder you then end up with people that are not very mature or have issues.
You do wonder: if the kid was 12 or 14 and bought himself a cheap smartphone from his own money to get away from the parental monitoring apps, would the "libertarian aligned father" be OK with that?
I think that if you have a kid who puts that much value on a device, saves up and buys said device, than that kid is already on the road to responsible behavior.
That's not to imply they are bad parents, just that the kid went through a divorce, intense bullying, a change in schools, etc. and that trauma caused them to engage in activities that led to their parents installing the app.
I guess in a phrase have they shown causation?
1. MS Family Safety: can be easily turned off by the child 2. Kaspersky Safe Kids: doesn’t really work at all. 3. Qustodio: doesn’t block apps, so kinda useless. It blocks some, but not others.
I would pay good money for something that does work. As things are now, my 14 yo can only use his computer under adult supervision to do his homework. Otherwise he doesn’t do it at all. I don’t even care what sites he goes to as long as homework is done on time, but he totally lacks any self control, and left to his own devices he will spend all his time playing Minecraft and watching bullshit on YouTube. If he hates me for not letting him do that, so be it.
It filters based on site category and does SSL interception.
We have a VPN on the mobile devices that funnels all traffic through the home network so that it is monitored and protected no matter where they are.
They could disable the VPN, it's not a bulletproof solution, but good enough, for now.
I agree it wouldn't work for all children in all situations, but it works for us for now.
I'm not trying to 100% block access, I'm just trying to make things a little more difficult.
Kind of like when people put a tiny padlock on their suitcase. It's not going to stop a determined person with wire/bolt cutters, but it's going to stop the curious person who might just take a look and grab something.
Sure, he could go to a friends house and use their computer. I can't stop everything, but I can at least reduce the influence, possibly prevent a pop-up or something from giving that little nudge towards temptation.
An open pile of cash on the ground is far more tempting than a safe full of cash on the ground.
There are too many awful parents out there for me to believe having kids makes one uniquely qualified to make suggestions. Dismissing ideas with a variation on "you must not have kids" is a huge red flag. It's usually done by people who see kids as things to be controlled and made subservient instead of as adults in progress.
We were all kids once. We all had friends whose parents had different styles, and often we got to see how that turned out. We all have a set of relevant experiences to pull from on the subject. Maybe it won't work for you. That's fine, but maybe you could actually say something about what's wrong with the suggestion instead of issuing a blanket dismissal. Or do the polite thing and ignore it.
You can spare me the condescending "so you don't have kids" that always follows this and just move on if you have nothing better to say.
That is true. But the reverse is not. NOT having kids pretty much guarantees you have mostly romanticized notions about how things should be, and vastly underestimate the issues that parents have to face on a daily basis. Non-parents also seem to universally think that all kids are the same and merely talking to them is enough discipline. It will be enough for a small minority of kids, and nowhere near enough for most. Left to their own devices (if you pardon the pun) most kids will totally veg out and they will be unprepared to face the challenges of adulthood. The goal of a good parent is to make sure it doesn’t happen, even if the kid hates everything you do to make sure of it. Good parents don’t play “friends” with their kids. They’re more of a mix between a close confidant and a demanding manager who is totally prepared to make their kids lives unpleasant if it helps them in the long run.
You will be very quickly disabused of your romanticized notions when you have a child of your own. Until then you should probably refrain from giving parenting advice.
That _is_ a romanticized notion in our particular case. On his own, he quickly runs into obstacles, gets bored, and then fires up YouTube after about 5 minutes, in order to veg out.
I do teach him programming, though. He also does some more with his math tutor that comes in on weekends. He is kind of frustrated with our efforts at educating him. He thinks he should be writing grade-A 3D games right away, even though he utterly lacks both the programming and the math skills to do so. My advice to start with something much simpler has been falling on deaf ears so far.
Without structure, this particular 14 year old would not bathe, would not brush his teeth, would not do homework, would not properly eat, would not go outside or exercise, would not properly sleep, and would substitute all of the above with watching YouTube and playing Minecraft. So you can see why this is a concern.
It sounds like you are being proactive (acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes).
The reason I suggested Minecraft modding and video-making in particular is:
1: It turns his current passive engagement with it into an active, creator role. Most Minecraft mods and media seem to be made by kids, or at least people who started when they were kids. I've read more than a few accounts from people who ended up in CS careers because of Minecraft.
2: Java and A/V are great skills to learn for a variety of possible career paths. Java also translates easily enough to C# and .NET, which also has plenty of career paths.
I don't have kids, but I know enough parents to know how insecure they get when they realize how woefully unprepared their parents and society left them for it, and how often people give lots of useless unsolicited advice. I tried not to do that, but I can see how it might come off that way if you're constantly fending off useless, unwelcome advice and criticisms.
This goes back to the Suzuki method, sort of. In order for a kid to actually enjoy a complicated endeavor he/she must have some baseline set of skills to not suck at it. Acquiring it is often not a pleasant thing even for adults, with lots of effort needed to get to anywhere near where a complex activity can become "fun", and a source of enjoyment.
This is another one of those things I didn't have any problems with: I naturally started very simple and worked my way up. I was only able to do that because I didn't really have much else to do. My father threw away our TV when I was 10 years old and he never bought another one. :-)
My mother didn't know how to discipline me. She would try and then I would convince her to give up. She never put any controls on anything I did-- consequently, I didn't learn what life could be like with those controls in place.
Parenting is mostly a guessing game, but I honestly believe that no matter what, one has to teach discipline in some form or another. Once you see the kid disciplining him/herself, then you cut down on the discipline you provide. The human brain is not necessarily designed to be naturally disciplined. Your kid will veg out if you don't teach and enforce rules that show them what can happen when rules are in place-- things like graduating high school, for example.
That is 100% true. I don’t want my kid living under a bridge when robots take over all the burger flipping jobs.
or maybe just chromeOS on chromebooks? schools are using that, maybe that's a good fit for kids surfing at home (for homework etc)
Step-father of a 12 year old boy here.
We started monitoring his internet after we caught him looking at inappropriate videos on youtube.
He knows he is being monitored and I only block actual porn sites. Neither of us like it but until he has earned our trust back, the situation will not change.
I'm his parent, not his friend. My job isn't to make him like me, it's to raise him with proper values and protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand.
If I do it right, he will thank me later.
I often ask him for advice on how he things I should handle a situation, and after reasoning things out, he usually comes to the same or a similar conclusion as me.
He has impulse control issues, and while he needs to learn to control them, he also needs to be protected from any significant harm as a result. I'm okay if he gets burned because he touched the stove after I said it was hot. Some things he needs to learn the hard way.
I'm not okay with him getting 3rd degree burns because he was playing with a lighter and accidentally set his clothes on fire.
Just remove all of the rules? No rules, no consequences.
Sounds like a great idea.
Unfortunately real life doesn't work that way. I agree, the best way to make sure a 12 year old boy does something, is to tell him not to do it. Hell, that's about the best way to get me to do something.
But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a rule with consequences. That's how our society works and he has to learn how to function in it.
I always give him explanations for each rule we have. He's free to ask any questions and I will do my best to get him to understand. He's free to disagree but he is not free to break rules we have set. Many of the rules he has were his idea as a result of a conversation with him asking him what he thinks we should do about a situation.
Blocking things will only encourage your son to try harder to get at them and to become more secretive with you, and will have lasting damage on your relationship, especially if you double down when he inevitably works around your blocks. You cannot control him, and he is not yours to control. Remember, your son is an entirely independent person who is growing up much faster than you realize.
Each situation is different. Even though things turned out the way they did for you, can you say they would have been different if they had just allowed you to blatantly disregard their rules? Can you say with certainty that none of the stuff they blocked that you accessed regardless did not harm you? Could they have had the foresight to know for sure if you would or would not have been harmed?
I won't get into a discussion on whether things such as nudity or pornography are truly harmful, that's a can of worms. But they are not accepted in the society we live in, and my son has to be able to function in that society, with its rules, controls, and monitors. We have collectively decided on these and I would be failing as a parent if I didn't try to give my child the tools to function in this environment.
Would you care to elaborate on these things that your parents didn't like that were blocked? Did they explain to you and try to get you to understand why they didn't like them? And why you didn't respect them enough to abide by their rules(not saying that you should have respected them, they may have not deserved it)? It sounds like there may have been some deeper issues there.
There are endless things in this world that can harm your child. It's natural to be scared of these things, but folly to try and address them all. Each one you address adds another layer of restrictions to your child's psyche, but barely moves the dail on how dangerous this world is. The tradeoff is steep.
>I didn't try to give my child the tools to function in this environment
You didn't give your kid the tools to function around pornography, you did the opposite. You futily attempted to remove pornography from the equation entirely without giving your kid any tools with which to face it. He will seek it out and he will find it, you've only made that fact certain. Only now, you have become the adversary, and when your son does seek these things out he won't ask you for help in understanding them for fear of retribution for breaking your rules.
Remember this axiom: you cannot stop your kid from viewing this content. He is smarter than you. If you cannot block this content but try to anyway, all you're left with is the negative effects.
>can you say they would have been different if they had just allowed you to blatantly disregard their rules?
You don't respect your child's autonomy by setting these rules. You can make endless excuses for your rules being just, but step into your son's shoes. "Dad says 'my house, my rules' but it's not like I can move out." What is your kid's recourse in this situation? Again, if you think your filters are effective you're delusional. All you do is disrespect your child by doing this.
>Would you care to elaborate on these things that your parents didn't like that were blocked? Did they explain to you and try to get you to understand why they didn't like them? And why you didn't respect them enough to abide by their rules(not saying that you should have respected them, they may have not deserved it)? It sounds like there may have been some deeper issues there.
I would be happy to discuss this privately, my email is in my profile.
Give it as a gift. But sell it.
AKA, you are contradicting yourself.
> We started monitoring his internet after we caught him looking at inappropriate videos on youtube.
Yeah, that's a great move. You are uncomfortable with something, so you limit his freedom to perceive it. That's going to lead to a great relationship where he will trust you with real problems in the future.
> Neither of us like it but until he has earned our trust back, the situation will not change.
The thing is, you won't earn his trust back unless you stop that bullshit.
> My job isn't to make him like me, it's to raise him with proper values and protect him from the dangers he doesn't yet know exist or may not yet understand.
You being uncomfortable is not a danger to him, it's a danger to you, and you are abusing him to help yourself.
> If I do it right, he will thank me later.
Problem is, you aren't doing it right, and he certainly won't thank you later, at least not for that. He will keep a distance to you and avoid you for advice because you make him solve your problems, so you are not a reliable source of advice in his interest.
I welcome criticism as it often helps adjust perceptions and behaviors.
It has nothing to do with what I'm comfortable with him seeing. As a parent I try to instill my perception of good values in my child, while allowing him to develop his own take on them. Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not. But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework, preferably before he is an adult and consequences are things like fines and jail.
You've made an assumption that the issue here is my problem with being uncomfortable with something, which I feel is not an accurate assumption. The rest of your argument is based on that assumption.
I'd be happy to discuss the accuracy of this assumption, perhaps I can learn something.
So ... how does that "developing his own take on them" work if you prevent him from perceiving the world?
> Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not.
And equally, your child may not. There is a fine line between helping your child navigate the world and decide what they value and why and forcing them to adopt your values.
> But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework
Actually, no, and that approach to understanding interactions with the world is toxic, as it is essentially learning to submit to authority, rather than learning to live as a citizen in a society among equals who share a space.
Rules and consequences should be the last line of defence for a society as far as preventing anti-social behaviour is concerned, not something that teaches you how to live. You learn to live by understanding how fairness works, how reciprocity works, how cooperation helps everyone achieve more, essentially by understanding how to make society work. Because that is the only way a citizen in a democratic society can be expected to participate in defining the rules and consequences that then are enforced as a last line of defence against the minority who would otherwise ruin it for everyone. In a democracy, the citizens have to make the rules. You cannot make the rules by following the rules.
Following rules is not a virtue. Behaving in a way that is in accordance with a possibly hypothetical fair and balanced set of rules is. But you can't learn that by being forced to obey a rule that you don't see as fair or balanced.
> You've made an assumption that the issue here is my problem with being uncomfortable with something, which I feel is not an accurate assumption. The rest of your argument is based on that assumption.
Well, yeah, it is somewhat of an assumption, but it still seems likely to me.
I mean, what is the value that you are trying to get your child to accept by limiting what he can look at on the internet, and is there anything besides porn that you try to prevent him from accessing?
>> Everyone's values are different and what I value, you may not.
>And equally, your child may not. There is a fine line between helping your child navigate the world and decide what they value and why and forcing them to adopt your values.
Agreed. One the many fine lines a good parent has to toe.
> > But there has to be a framework of rules and consequences and he has to learn to operate in that framework
> Actually, no, and that approach to understanding interactions with the world is toxic, as it is essentially learning to submit to authority, rather than learning to live as a citizen in a society among equals who share a space.
A valid point, but only if my execution was in a manner to be repressive or authoritarian. I don't use the 'my house, my rules' approach. I use the 'lets sit down and discuss this' approach. When he was younger I would always kneel down so that we were at eye-level with each other.
Mutual respect should be the driving principal for all behavior. I teach the 'Platinum rule' -- Treat others the way they want to be treated.
I mostly agree with the rest of the post. To answer your last question: "...is there anything besides porn that you try to prevent him from accessing?" -- Sites tagged by Sophos as VPN, proxy, ad networks, and malware. VPN and proxy as they can make the porn filter ineffective. Ad networks and malware just for the general protection of the devices.
From what I can tell, he wants to look at porn, and he thinks there is nothing wrong with it. Whatever the conclusion of your conversation with him was, he is obviously not convinced that he shouldn't, at best he ends up expressing agreement because he is dependent on you. The only reason why he now does it without you knowing and without any possibility of discussing with you when he sees something that disturbs him is that you force him to, not because he agrees with you. You say that you are not authoritarian, but your actions say the opposite. Either you are exercising power or you are not, whether you dress it up in nice words, doesn't change whether it is authoritarian.
Now, you constantly repeat that you want to protect him from danger, and I guess some of your authoritarian behaviour may hinge on that. After all, authoritarian action is somewhat justified if you know that without it, harm will follow. The problem is that based on what you have written here, you don't know that. You have referenced some extremely unscientific ideas and sources and shown some biases that suggest that you are not rationally evaluating the actual risks and dangers of your child's wishes and your authoritarian responses, but are probably more acting based on your own emotional response. The danger that you are imagining most likely isn't there, but the damage that you do by restricting your child in order to protect him from this imaginary danger is real, both in that it is damaging his trust in you, and in that you are making him internalize that his probably perfectly healthy sexual curiousity is a problem that he has to fight against.
I don't feel its appropriate. I certainly found porn when I was about that age(actually a bit younger) and feel like it had a negative impact on me in general.
This is the big one for me. My job is not primarily to protect my children, it's to prepare them to be functioning adults. To that end, I protect them from dangers that they're not yet ready to face, while teaching them skills to recognize and handle the dangers eventually.
Have you discussed pornography with your stepson? If you haven't seen it already, https://fightthenewdrug.org/ is a good resource.
It does no good to tell someone they can't do something without explaining why. I encourage him to ask questions when he doesn't understand something, and will never give "because I said so" as an answer.
My goal is for him to understand why these things are harmful while protecting him from them until he has the facilities to manage it on his own.
Just like a bike with training wheels. Teaching him to ride while protecting him from falling, until he can ride on his own.
This came at the expense of my IT homework and schoolwork, which wanted to teach me how to use Word, Access and PowerPoint. Like a lot of people my age, my first exposure to code was hacking at a MySpace profile and a Geocities page.
I ended up getting a good degree but owe much more of my current career to that early tinkering than anyone forcing me to learn Word Processing software. I wonder if the same mistakes are being made now trying to keep kids from using Minecraft.
Wait, so their source of data is Google Play reviews?!
The title of the article makes it seem that there is a one-to-one correlation between the app and the impact on the relationship, but the author herself says "The takeaway here is that parents should not treat parental control apps as a magic bullet to keep their teens safe online". So, this is really about parents who use these apps as the sole parenting device without doing any parenting and interacting with their child themselves. I mean, if you don't try to have a relationship with your kid, you're not going to have a good relationship with your kid.
We will add sites to the white list as we go.
Just to be clear, at a certain age I will give her full access.
While I'd prefer they limit their porn access as a teenager, plenty of well adjusted people didn't and came out fine. I am far more concerned about "sexting" (and having it shared around at school/used to bully), and authorities trying to prosecute underage kids for having pictures of their own (and their love interest's) bodies on a device they own.
The whole "porn is a public health emergency" thing is largely bullshit. Unhealthy attitudes to sex and an overreaction by authority figures might be a "health emergency" though.
Particularly as a lot of parents will happily let teenagers watch people get blown apart in movies and on TV, but suddenly two people lovingly touching each other naked is just a step too far! It is hypocritical. Particularly with shows like GoT that they're going to watch because everyone else is (and we are).
This is a terribly depressing world view I realize. I'm more or less convinced that there's nothing I can do to stop screwing up my kid. My one hope is that my wife is pretty competent and luckily enough to the degree that she's not I think I compliment her. We'll see.
Contraception should be a conversation you have with, approximately, a six year old, when they ask you how babies are made exactly, and why they were born (it’s not just “your parents had sex”, it’s “your parents stopped using contraception” that caused you to be born).
Safe sex, as in, “STIs exist, be cautious but not terrified”, and “intimate partner violence exists, don’t stand for or create cruelty or boundary crossing in intimate relationships” is a conversation for eight or nine year olds.
Young children aren’t yet embarrassed about their bodies or your body, it is much easier (and healthier for all concerned) to get open, loving, accurate information about sex and relationships at the moment it’s requested, well before puberty. Before and during puberty, when the urge to separate from parents is beginning and body shame frequently begins to set in, is a much worse time to have such conversations.
“Find my Friends” on iPhone is also nice, just for safety but not as a tool for helicopter parenting. My wife and I have it enabled on our devices for each other, but it’s rarely used — it’s just an additional layer of safety. It’s especialy great if I am out in the hills climbing — if I get hurt, at least she has my last known location.
When they're out on 4G network, then you do need those apps to help, unless the 4G operator has a safe-filtering-for-kid-phone-numbers
Parent's who block porn websites for their teens for example, why? You know very well that at 13,14,15 your child is going to start getting curious, and outright blocking their access to that content online is only going to make them look for it elsewhere. I'm not saying don't, but casting an iron curtain over their activities and making them feel like they have to constantly look over their shoulder for your monitoring is going to build distrust and disdain. It's all about balance. Older parents that were born in the mid 1900s didn't place many restrictions on their kids because I believe they knew kids had to learn how to experience life for what it had to offer. Modern generation parents who were born just in the late 80s/early90s are getting too heavy handed with moderation and restriction.
There is no fine-grained way to say what apps can be used when, what web sites can be used or not used, etc. Even things that seem like they should work (e.g., "Allow the Amazon Kindle app but not Safari") don't, because of hidden features that breaks Kindle when Safari isn't enabled.
I've tried many apps, including Qustodio. I can't do MDM or any of the enterprise-level stuff because guess what, I can't get Apple to give me an Apple ID account that Apple Configurator 2 will accept - despite being a 25+ year industry veteran - and I'm not about to use my company credentials on my personal devices.
Not all kids need these features, and not all parents want them, but for those of us who want our kids to have iOS devices for communication purposes, plus also occasionally allow them for other purposes, we have no choices here. We can lock it all down to near uselessness or leave it open, but there is no in-between.
I'm surprised to hear that. We've had the smaller model iPod for a couple of years now. I have parental restrictions on and my daughter can't install (thus, not use) apps that I do not approve, nor can she visit any websites that I do not whitelist. Both features are stock, no third party app needed. The former only required adding the device to my family sharing group and ticking a box requiring her to ask permission before downloading an app.
My opinion is that there is definitely an in-between, but you're correct in saying that time limit enforcement would be quite useful.
Additionally, there is no way for me to remotely manage it. If a child refuses to turn the phone off, I cannot hit a management tool and lock it down (at least, not without using an MDM profile, as Qustodio and other solutions can be trivially defeated by deleting their management profile which requires no permissions). If I want to monitor where they go and how much time they spend on each app, there is no way to do it.
So, I can do super-basic things, but nothing fine-grained or interesting from my parenting perspective.
So, it all gets turned off and is basically a Find-my-Friends, phone/FaceTime and iMessage tool for $700. Not exactly a good value and not something I will be sending any more money to Apple for.
The closest thing that's available is something that blocks traffic at the router level, like Circle. But even that isn't perfect, since kids can still use local apps that don't need full network access.
I've also tried some of the MDM programs like OurPact, but the UI is awful and they do a lousy job of implementing it on the client side, probably in part because of what Apple allows to be turned off and what they do not.
Blocking content, on the other hand, is destined to fail. Whitelisting will always be too strict, blacklists will never cover everything you might find objectionable, and heuristics will be inexact. If you want to block out the world from your kids my advice (as a parent myself) is don’t—instead invest the time and effort into establishing a trusting and understanding relationship and instilling the right values. Values drive motivation which drives actions.
As a parent I’m not my kid’s friend but I’m also not house dictator.
If your kid just doesn't want to listen, then maybe install a monitoring/blocking program. Also, especially do that when they are very young. You don't really need to do it above age 8 or so, as hopefully by then they will have developed a rhythm with the Internet that suits them.
When a toddler looks in the cabinet for toys and finds poison, we find that as an issue. So, we put the poison up, and/or install a lock. The same goes for the dangers of teens. They aren't ready for some things of internet, including porn and cyber bulling. As parents, we use parental controls to limit access to xrated channels on our tv. It makes sense to limit content to internet connected devices that do the same. We don't need a formalized study to see what access to porn can do to a person. It's been documented many times.
My experience has been, at this point in a childs life, you need to have, or establish a good relationship with your child and help them understand that you are protecting them from harm that they don't fully understand yet. They need to understand this protection is a joint effort between you and them for their best interest.
Some may say this is overprotected parenting. Let's not go overboard here. I've seen so many uninvolved parents, which is far worse than overprotected. I've found the middle ground is the most effective. Add controls to obvious problem sites and apps. Watch remotely from time to time (as sathackr said, trust but verify). Then, periodically, sit down with your child to see how they are doing and how you can help do the right thing online.
That's extremely dubious. Teenagers aren't being harmed by seing people having sex, they're mostly being harmed from being sheltered from it.
Also, explain to me what benefit do they gain by seeing people having sex?
The idea that a teen or pre-teen who’s interested isn’t finding porn through someone else’s computer is very likely mistaken.
By forbidding access, you are losing your child’s trust, which likely forecloses on the opportunity to honestly and openly discuss healthy body image, respect, mutual pleasure, and the fact that porn star bodies are (often) to normal human bodies as toy soldiers are to human soldiers.
Finally, forbidding access to something humans have an innate drive for is liable to make it into forbidden fruit, over-emphasizing, rather than de-emphasizing, the target.
How does watching others have sex enable more discussion on healthy body image? Why can't this conversation be started with images seen anywhere that have been altered?
Let's discuss the negatives. Porn is anti-woman. It turns the woman into an object. You mention 'damaging relationships' by not watching sex. It is exactly the opposite. Porn damages current and future relationships by turning the woman (or man in some cases) into an object for personal pleasure, similar to a toy. A relationship founded on using each other for personal reasons, and not mutual respect and love, will only fail, and fail painfully. Not to mention any 'baggage' such as STDs, pregnancies, etc.
These are the mistakes are what we aim to prevent our children from making until they reach a point of maturity to where they can reliably prevent them on their own.
Rather, you seem to be suggesting you have to prevent your child from watching porn. I am suggesting forbidding porn, in private, is very likely to be counterproductive, because it is unlikely to succeed, it makes a reasonable human desire into something illicit, and is likely to instead result in a loss of trust + cause porn to be seen as forbidden (and thus attractive) fruit.
Separately, I am suggesting that when a child is interested in porn, that’s an opportunity for a conversation about the problematic aspects of porn, respect, and fantasy vs. reality. Loss of trust makes that conversation less likely to be accessible, or at least less likely for that conversation to involve your child actually listening to you.
You seem to assume that people do not have sex for fun?
This is false. Mainstream porn may have failed to appeal to mainstream women, but many women watch porn and many categories of porn are not "anti-women".
> So you're suggesting the solution is to encourage watching porn or others while they have sex?
That is a dishonest interpretation of what OP said.
> It turns the woman into an object.
Does it? I find a lot of porn to be empowering as a woman. I find a lot of time they commoditize the man as just a thing the penis carries with it into the scene where the woman is the star of the show, showing us that we too can be involved in the act, we're allowed to express ourselves. We don't have to just lay there and let the male do his business until he's done. We can get nasty and just have fun. We can even be in charge. You usually can't search mainstream porn by male actor, he's just a prop.
By making sex a super strict taboo while sex is a biological imperitive, you exaggerate dangerous behavior. Having your son not treat women like objects comes from a strong moral foundation in upbringing, not sheltering him from porn and assuming he'll figure out women are people on his own. My dad raised me to be aware of the ways men are likely to trick me, but he also made me aware that the majority of people in general have extremely flawed upbringings. He raised me to be a critical thinker, as such I realize that male sexist behavior is both an individual act and a part of a larger systemic problem. I don't need cheap scapegoats like porn to understand poor behavior in males, I don't need to blame all males when I encounter a really bad one.
Education has been and will always be more effective than zero tolerance policies.