Ask HN: Tech-savvy parents, what are the gadget rules for your kids?
What screen time limit do you set? What apps or web sites do you restrict (or allow)? What tools do you use?
How do you describe the dangers of the Internet without making it scary, or sounding dramatic?
How do you respond to "but dad, all my classmates have their phones unlimited and unsupervised"?
For context, what is the approximate age category of your child?
There's a billion articles written about all of it, but I am really interested to hear the crowd here.
158 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadThe only thing I have to say about this right now is that it is shocking to see how quickly and rabidly he becomes absorbed and obsessed with playing the game.
YouTube (and YouTube Kids etc.) is down-right creepy when kids get hold of it.
The kids will watch things like Netflix or Amazon Prime for a bit, get bored, and do something else. They'll play stuff like Minecraft for a bit and move on too. But put them in front of YouTube and they will sit there all day watching banal, repetitive, shockingly obnoxious, and sometimes creepy and disturbing content. Sometimes the younger ones will literally urinate on themselves because they are so transfixed by YouTube.
What's even spookier is that the same content on normal streaming networks does not have the same effect. There's a young kids show called Blippi that they watched on YouTube before we banned it. They'd watch it all day on YouTube. Then after our ban it showed upon Amazon Prime. They found it there and will watch it... occasionally... for a bit.
There is something about YouTube's design and algorithm that's a perfect Skinner box for humans, and it works disturbingly well for children.
P.S. the adult behavior often involves a powerful "rabbit hole" effect where you watch one political or ideological video and you get profiled and served tons more like it. Combined with the Skinner box effect it has and it's like some weird dystopia where you get Clockwork Orange style brainwashing but get to pick what you're brainwashed with. Reminds me of a skit Monty Python would have done:
"Hello sir, I'm here for the brainwashing. Can I see a menu?"
"Certainly, sir! Today's we have a half off special on Leninism and UFO abductee cults..."
"Do you have holocaust denial?"
"Hmm... I think we may be out of that one. Would you like some tankie gulag denial instead?"
The content the kids get hooked on is sometimes down-right weird. My older daughter got hooked on this Minecraft YouTuber called Preston who just yammers for hours at the speed of an old fashioned auctioneer. It's utterly obnoxious to grown ups but the kids will sit there until they're in a puddle of their own urine. A neighbor kid got hooked on weird "meme videos" full of pictures from horror games set to banal nursery rhyme style music. They got obsessed with characters from a game called "Five Nights at Freddie's" even though they've never played it. Some of these videos are 12 hours long and obviously assembled by bots.
It's fucking "kill it with fire" creepy. It's so extreme with kids if I didn't know such things were impossible I'd start wondering about 5G mind control conspiracy theories. (Alas, the link is WiFi not 5G...)
Other parents have told me the same thing. I've helped a few neighbors ban YouTube on their routers. I've read it on parenting forums too.
I've heard TikTok can be this way for teens but have no direct experience.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/
If I had to guess why I would say that it's due to the fact that Netflix is mostly fictions. There is a limit to how much fiction I can consume before having enough.
On the other hand Youtube has a lot of non-fiction content on specific niches. The kind of content that teases the brain just enough to make me feel that I'm learning something and not in fact wasting my time, similar to HN. This is made worse by the very accurate algorithm, which works so well because Youtube has orders of magnitude more content than other platforms.
When our oldest was ~3, he had been potty trained for awhile. We were on vacation and he was on the iPad we had brought for the plane. He was so engrossed in the game that he didn't even notice he was peeing there in the living room. That incident really firmed up our Minimal Screen Time resolve.
Kids are going to spend their whole lives on screens, just like all of us do. IMO there's no reason to get that started early if you can help it.
I lacked the self discipline tools to control my own bed times and screen time, and failed to manage either, impacting my grades.
That was an important lesson for sure, but I do think if we'd done something more phased earlier on, it would have been better. You can tell a 13 year old "You can go on the computer as much as you like on Thursday, but if you don't get your homework done and spend 3 hours doing non-screen things, you will not be allowed to next week". Not so much with an 18 year old.
He thought, as his son is (really) smart, that he will realise by himself it was stupid.
Well, he didn't, his grades fall and now he doesn't even live with my friend, as his mother (ex-wife of my friend) let him do whatever he wants, so he decides to move with her.
We all cross finger that he will at a time have an epiphany and go back on track...
And if they spend most of the time playing, they will adopt values of whatever gaming community they run into. And gaming communities don't tend to think gaming is stupid.
Youtube is 100% banned.
In short I treat over-use of devices as a symptom and not a cause of social problems ... and they have their share of social problems but they're managing.
Their mom is more strict with phone time on them but they watch unlimited TV. I limit TV and let them have unlimited phone time. At this point their idea of social networking is trolling people in Among Us.
Their mom, my partner and I have helped them build a healthy skepticism for social networks. They basically think they're "stupid" so even though their friends have instagram, and I have instagram, they still think they're dumb and they don't mind that they aren't allowed a social network like that. We're lucky there.
The three of us (especially their mom I feel) have done a thorough job explaining the dangers of connecting with strangers on social networks and they just don't as far as I know. It doesn't hurt that they're fairly anti-social to begin with.
They are paranoid about passwords, the family has our own bitwarden server, and they understand why. Beyond that though they have no concept of internet privacy and don't care what data is being hoovered up by alphabet, apple, etc. I want to try to link privacy and security more closely together but so far I'm not doing great. They spend a lot of time with youtube recommendations and also a lot of time ironically listening to pop music? I don't get it but they love to blast the worst pop they can find and then make gagging noises. I have no idea what the algos are making of that.
They keep secrets from me on their phones. That worries me but my feeling is that if I respect their privacy and focus on building their self-respect then if they have a problem they'll come to me. They spill those secrets to me and my partner occasionally to get revenge on each other and the secrets are harmless. My oldest daughter screen-shotted her sister's browser tabs and made it her background. My kind of petty and I'm proud.
So thanks for this question, I've wanted to get this down in writing to see if it makes sense for ages. Still not sure it does but so far the kids are alright.
Lol me too.
15 year old does his own thing, not a lot can be done there, but he's not stupid with it. Mainly just playing xbox with his friends, watching other people play games on youtube.
Younger ones have a Fire tablet each, 1 hour a day limit (unless they ask for more) - mostly seems to be learning games/lego cartoons. Browser disabled, can only use stuff in their age range. They aren't allowed to watch youTube unless one of us is in the room with them (Too often it just changes to some random advert/show that is very different to what they were watching ...)
I have a separate Pi-Hole for the kids vlan which blocks gambling/porn/mining stuff as well as adverts.
Every now and then we all sit and play xbox/PS4 together - Disney games/(Train|Farm) simulators etc
Edit: The youngest also like to sit with me if I'm playing a game on my PC, and I let them use the mouse/keyboard to try and get them used to the control of it.
(I'm thinking of setting them up a Pi that is 'theirs' to get the mouse/keyboard control going)
I'm 3 months out from becoming a parent. This stuff isn't a big deal yet, but in 3 years or so I'm going to need it. I'd love to learn from you. I know what vlans and pi-holes are, but I've never set them up like that and I want to be able to.
And if there's me wanting it, I'll bet there's a lot more parents or future parents who might also want to know about it.
I have a Mikrotik hAP ac² that I setup the VLANs on, and then some NAT rules that force DNS requests to go to the kid specific raspberry pi if its their VLAN
I also have a Unifi AP for WiFI, which uses radius auth to set the VLAN for devices. So everyone has their own user/password for WiFi, and it sets the VLAN based on that.
Each room also has a network socket in (I ran a load when we bought this house - they aren't used yet in their rooms) which goes back to a netgear managed switch, so if they were to plug into their room, they would get their VLAN also.
At some point I need to sort out a way to limit the speed after a certain time on their VLAN, but it's not super important at the moment.
Edit: Just to add, this was also done as a learning exercise for me, but I think it kinda makes sense. As the youngest get older, we can talk to them about being safe online, and what not to do etc. But at the moment I figure it's the same as locking the cabinet under the sink, or not letting them use the big sharp knives. Sure as they get older we can change it, but at the moment it means they can enjoy the new funky technology without being hassled by some dodgy advert or troll hassling them lol
Resist baby einstein and other things like it for as long as you can
TL;DR: we're way stricter than other parents I know both in the UK and other western countries.
For example: we allow them WhatsApp, but no other social media apps on their phone (including YouTube). Devices automatically switch on at 08:00 and off at 20:00. Certain apps, like browsers, have maximum time limits of two hours.
Like me, they're both gamers, but aren't allowed games on their phone - only on tablets and consoles.
This sounds harsh when I write it down in black and white, but as a consequence they both read a lot and are really into sport (both represent the county at football and athletics).
The reason this stuff is so hard is that we're the first generation of parents having to deal with all this. And there are no accepted rules in wider society yet...
* https://dougbelshaw.com/thesis/
Why no games on their phones? Is this a way to control the time spent on games or to prevent the time wasted on games when out and about?
This is not new. Parents have always done this.
Over time they just learn how to wear you down.
When they were younger we could set limits and keep it enforced, but as they get older they just kept find ways to get around them. We tried Google's Family Link (poor quality and mostly useless with ChromeOS), per-device time limits on the wifi router, whatever, but there's always some new battle and COVID just threw a wrench in everything.
In the earlier days it was easier to make the argument because we had very tight bandwidth caps on our (rural) Internet. So there was simply no streaming video for them. But that's gone, and now my son (11) sneaks into the living room, puts on YouTube with the volume turned down and the closed captions on and just watches Minecraft and Terraria videos as long as he can. If that gets shut off, he paces around in his room talking to himself about the same video games.
And now my 14 year old is in high school and a phone is just a part of life for teens now that is really hard to separate them from.
And there's always some friend with parents who've set no limits that they can point to and tell you what a fascist you are, too.
(IMHO the really dangerous period is especially in teenage girls from ages 10-13, because there's all sorts of content out there to access that can have damaging mental health effects. For us it was Tumblr and all sorts of self-harm content and I ended up having to DNS block all of Tumblr and a few other sites for a while. With maturity and discussion they learn to differentiate and critique and talk to you about things, but it's really hard to keep them away from The Bad Stuff. I imagine with teen boys it's more about porn, and that's a battle I'm sure I'll have to face soon, too)
Her school, extracurricular and free time with her social circle were already taken out from her and now the phone? And we all know whatever social life her friend circle has won't stop. She's just going to be left out. Once again.
I get that this is HN and a lot of people here probably didn't care to be left out (or convinced themselves they didn't).
I believe the key there is the fact that my parents made it clear why I was being grounded and spent the time explaining it to me.
Have you really sat down and discussed why these are in place? What's the issue with Minecraft and Terraria videos that make it a Constant. Battle? That seems quite harmless.
I would hate having you as my parent, to be completely honest.
That's not a battle your child should win.
The oldest used to want devices so bad I was really worried about how we were going to handle screen time, but then COVID-19 happened and he had to basically get his own iPad for school, plus all sorts of exceptional situations in a pandemic, so he effectively unlocked unlimited screen time early.
The most exciting thing to him was being able to message us, and for a while he didn't want to talk directly but only text us. And he searched for all sorts of things on Google, but mostly just educational stuff (strongest metals, tallest person, etc). But he quickly got used to the iPad just being there, and forgot to be obsessed with it.
To this day, the iPad just sits around and he can grab it anytime to look up stuff. He uses it to show us stuff they talked about in school, look up questions he has, listen to music, etc. Basically using it like a responsible adult would. Occasionally he asks to get a game he's heard about, but we just say no and he seems fine with it.
He is not a particularly well-behaved kid otherwise, so I'm don't want to give the impression I'm humble-bragging about him. I just wanted to share that not everyone needs strict limits to develop a healthy relationship with technology. If the pandemic hadn't blown the doors open, we might still be struggling with limits on an assumed obsession, but we stumbled into the much easier solution of no limits and it worked for us.
You can't really help them until they want out. So my trick is to make them want to stop and then help them.
Games are hard (she is 3),will either get very frustrated or bored. Otherwise she has fun and it's slowly making progress.
It's really hard to find well-suited videogames. All of them expect you to read.
I do have to pull her away occasionally when SHE doesn't want to be there anymore and it's extra tired/bored. This is thankfully rare and it's usually connected to me neglecting her for the day (harsh truth), so I just try to just make a point of playing with her once throughout the day and it just doesn't happen. God it's hard though. Some days you are just so drained you want to be braindead but you can't, you have kids!
30 minutes of social media per day (tiktok, insta, snapchat), all accounts are private, and we meet once per week to look together at the feed and moderate it. (e.g. follow more things like https://www.tiktok.com/@zippycode and less things like Charlie whatever)
Unlimited whatsapp, but we still look at it from time to time to see there is no bullying going on.
Using 1.1.1.1 family (1.1.1.3) always connected so there is some basic malware/adult site filtering.
During dinner phones go in a bucket, and we avoid phones until bed time (as a family).
Between 8pm and 10pm we design and code pgzero video games or turtle graphics, or read books, or play fortnite depending on the day.
Oh, I like this one. Making it a sort of ritual sounds like something that I could actually hold to.
Same for both of them. No TV. 25 mins each of video games every other day. We occasionally (maybe once every 6 weeks) watch a film together at the weekend. No tablets. Perhaps once a week they might ask to use the (Windows) laptop to go to a website they use at school, such as Mathletics. We'd normally let them use this. 8 year old has a Kindle (not a Fire but the eReader type) that is used just for reading books from the Kindle Kids subscription that is age limited.
Perhaps once a week we might watch a YouTube video about something vaguely educational, so for example a Tom Scott video.
I remember growing up watching Discovery channel specials like Steve Irwin, learning a ton of history playing Age of Empires (that led to me having a love of reading historical biographies years later), and just watching movies in general that led to me loving writing stories.
However I have also seen young kids do nothing but waste 7+ hours a day on youtube watching imbeciles splutter about their opinions on tabloid drama or reaction videos.
So my point is that I think it's less about total restriction and more about guiding the content.
I think you might also not be appreciating how common computers are in (UK) schools. Both children have lots of computer time in schools (both on iPads and standard computers). I don't think either of them lack familiarity (at least for their age) for how to use them. You might be confusing not having a cheap Android tablet that allows children to play a child-friendly version of Candy Crush with the concept of tech skills; I don't think they're the same.
For many years, the rule was simply that the computers were in the living room.
For about a decade, all accounts and passwords were setup by parents. When a kid could successfully keep a password secret from a parent's social engineering attack, they were allowed to maintain those accounts themselves.
Discussion at meals and during homework frequently visited topics like "the school is tracking and censoring your use of their network", "seventy million email addresses and passwords leaked, thanks for letting us know", and "this is why XKCD is funny".
No limits on browser usage, but all devices run through a mandatory VPN which blocks all ads as well as particular sites at the DNS level: TikTok, Snapchat, a few chat apps. No limits on screen time. App installs on iOS devices are disallowed.
I find that rules and firewalls and schedules and blocking are a fools errand - it is a cat-and-mouse game that you can't win.
So we just turn off the Internet.
We have a different wifi network for the children that has a very restrictive schedule. Basically just Fri/Sat night and 15 mins on weekday evenings to send messages to friends and check school assignments.
The 7 year old gets his Nintendo Switch on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The older two have their ipods/iphones and can use them anytime they want. They are just offline.
The reason this works so well is that we live in a place that has zero cellular signal. If they need to do homework, they plug into an Ethernet switch and sit at the dining room table with a laptop.
The other reason this works so well is that our children are not our friends. We don't have a peer relationship with them and we don't owe them explanations as to why our family is different from other families or blah blah blah.
Complaining is expensive and they know not to waste that energy.
Don’t you feel like this will backfire at some point? I don’t think I would have liked it if my parents never explained themselves.
This is turning into a discussion of parenting, generally, so I won't go too deeply into this ...
What I will say is that stability and predictability are what make this possible.
When our children were old enough to care about wifi and Internet and social media, these limitations were no surprise at all to them because they were directly inline with all of our parenting up to that point.
We have simple, predictable rules (and schedules and behaviors) and they have a good idea, in advance, as to how everything is going to turn out.
And to be clear ... we explain everything to them ... we have a very high level of communication and discussion and learning.
It's just never in the context of complaining, bargaining or negotiation.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/authoritarian_parenting_style
In your household, I suspect I would be chatting with friends in the dead of night. I also suspect that I would, one way or another, manage to come by the WiFi password that you presumably use for your own devices.
If you're trying to raise kids who regard you as an adversary to overcome, I suppose you're on the right track.
I don't know, my kids are 1 and 2 so maybe I'll change my mind when I get there, but as someone who has made a career out of looking at a screen and spent most of the fun parts of his youth doing so as well, I plan to teach my kids how to self-manage screen time. My parents limiting my screen time just made me try to do everything in my power to maximize it, and I do think that made me quite a bit of an addict when I was a teenager (playing wow 6 hours a day every day on top of school and sleep). I only really learned to manage my enjoyment of screen time with my enjoyment of non-screen-time when I got to my last year of high school and college.
My wife, on the other hand, was never really constrained beyond her parents sanity-checking things now and then to make sure she wasn't getting into trouble. And she has always had healthier screen time management habits than me.
There is nothing to circumvent and no adversary to overcome.
The Internet just disappears. They can play games or watch shows all they want to.
"... this sounds like a great way to make sure your kids become experts at circumventing your limitations."
If my children manage to erect a cellular tower within range or our ranch I will tip my hat to them.
"Well played", I will say.
> If they need to do homework, they plug into an Ethernet switch and sit at the dining room table with a laptop.
> There is nothing to circumvent and no adversary to overcome. The Internet just disappears.
You have to realize they very well know this is an arbitrary limit you have created out of thin air since they can see the other wifi network and (at least the oldest) just know that the ethernet switch works 24/7.
I mean, let's be real, they'll read about the Iranian and Egyptians warlords who tried to cut out the country's internet to keep control and make the connection.
You are aware that if you don't become friends with them as they grow up it's very likely you will very likely have a very limited relationship unless you continue to send them money?
This is an incredibly harsh restriction, and "we don't owe them explanations" would piss me right off. It sounds like you're really souring this relationship, and "I can have wifi, not you" seems really quite bizarre.
What do you think you're "protecting" them from? A healthy relationship with their parents based on trust and honesty? /s
He used to watch 15m of youtube every night (together with me), but he started going mental when he didn’t get his Youtube, so we cut down on that completely.
The only time he sees Youtube now is if we are out for dinner, but ideally we get him to stop that too.
Other than that, there’s TV (educational, or disney channel) in the morning. And sometimes in the evening, depending on the day.
TV is projected by a beamer, and I feel like this cuts down on the intensity of the whole thing.
He finds my Switch and DS around the house and plays with them for a bit, but he doesn’t really get the concept of playing a game yet.
My main worry is that he sees his mom and dad busy with their phone way too much.
They get 40 minutes a day (mon-thur) of tv that they watch together.
On Friday and Sunday, we have family movie night. Age appropriate, which is getting harder.
2 hours a week of games (mostly switch, but they sometimes play minecraft or approved games on mobile devices). This happens over Sat/Sun, and we let them manage how they want to allocate time over the two days.
One observation is that after they play video games, they get agitated and angry afterwards, and it ruins the next hour or two of activities as they act like little assholes.
They do have access to Spotify to listen to music (content controls are turned on), but if we notice that they are watching the videos and not "listening" the phones turn off.
The one area where it gets dicey is my 9 year old is learning how to code, so managing that screen time is weird (is it like watching tv/playing games?). I dunno, but I generally don't say anything as this is his best use of devices during the week.
Shit is hard to keep up with tbh.
1. Losing is hugely disappointing because there's no time to win the next one
2. They can't get very good, so gaming is more frustrating
3. They can't build coping skills because of how little they've won/lost
Depends on this kids, obviously, but we let ours to stay on pads/computers for (pretty much) as long as they want IF all homework's done, they make occasional breaks, do other things (like read books) and they don't get zombified in process and can quit on a short notice.
No Tiktok, IG or any other doomscrollers. We had a chat about them, they know the party policy, so it's not really enforced, but they don't really crave these either.
Age-restricted stuff tends to sort itself out, but we track what they play. Again, it's all based on the party policy rather than enforcement and we have gentlemen's agreement that they ask if we may consider some game off limits.
Been like that for several years. One is a teenager now, another is on the way. So far so good.
Two hours isn't a long time to make any progress on a game, especially if they start playing strategy games like Age of Empire where 1 hour games are the norm. It must be very frustrating for them to stop for arbitrary reasons (the $EVIL_SCREEN can't be used for more than $TIME) when they know their schoolwork is done and friends are still online.
> The one area where it gets dicey is my 9 year old is learning how to code, so managing that screen time is weird (is it like watching tv/playing games?)
It might feel like a game to him. Remember reading books? Assigned reading took the fun out of reading since the selection was imposed and you knew you were goign to be quized on it. But especially if it's unstructured and there's no assignment, he may think programming is a weird sandbox/logic game.
No tablets or phones. A PC in the living room with a loose ask before use policy. The older two got PC's in their rooms during pandemic remote schooling. Switches on weekends with friends.
They got a tablet each and 1H a day of use max, in a 7AM-8PM window.
They can only play games on it on week-ends (blocked with Family Links) and during holidays, and have no internet webbrowser access. They mostly use duolingo, image and video editing and stuf like that. They have an email address to exchange with friends.
TV an episode of a show (curently Gravity Falls) in English (we're French) when tere's no school the day after.
And sometimes a movie on weekend, or some Recalbox time (which I prefer becaus I play with them :-)