Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Turning from Dad into Big Brother probably didn't help this girl develop proper social skills. She chaffed under the yoke of this monitoring, and seemed like she had an antagonistic relationship with her parents. They weren't pushing her towards becoming an inherently good person, just towards hiding her bad behavior from them. Your goal as a parent should be to create and foster good behavior from your children, not teaching them to hide the choices they know you won't agree with.
FWIW, my parents put 0 effort into monitoring my online behavior, I made TONS of mistakes/did bad things online until my mid-20s, and I'm now happily married, well employed and generally well liked by people I know.
Met a girl at a Rocky Horror, we were maybe 17 at the time. I didn't even show her how to break her parental controls, only found out that her parents were monitoring everything she did when they called my cell phone and threatened to call the police on me if I ever talked to her again.
I was still close with some other friends of hers, so over the next few years I could say with conviction "this didn't turn out well/the way her parents want."
My own parents were oddly contradictory as well. Huge amounts of parental controls at home, despite being very supportive in getting me into novel social experiences. I got into computers largely to find ways around the "AOL for Kids", and got my first tastes of "social engineering" by working around the passwords they'd set on anything from the TV to the PC to cell phone apps.
Given TFA (and all research I've seen about porn blocking outcomes in the past) aligning with my own experiences, the most surprising thing about this thread is the amount of "yes, BUT <I still severely monitor and limit my kids>" responses. I'd go so far as to say that from among my (very large public highschool) peergroup, over the last 20~ years, the correlation has been _stark_ between those who grew up more sheltered vs those with less, that the former group often gained some very strange pathologies with respect to social interactions or "adult" content (even as an adult later in life).
I honestly wonder if my experiences were unique, and others saw large numbers of kids "heavily impacted" by lack-of-oversight? (To try and explain how many parents support more restrictive parenting) Or if parents "forget" or "Reassess" the rebellion they may have felt as a kid when it becomes their turn to parent? Obviously I can't judge, since I haven't had a child yet, but having had long conversations about the hypothetical with the wife, both of us still have our stances well-crystallized from our own upbringings, after a good handful of decades.
Restriction made porn fascinating to me. Restriction made video games so much more valuable(So much that I'd sell contraband at school and bike to an inner-city target to re-buy the ones my parents confiscated). Restriction only meant that I binged harder when I was finally could, or went through more risky channels to circumvent it.
We, the people on HN, represent a uniquely tech-savy segment of the population, and can (probably? usually?) say that we're better with software than our kids so we actually COULD put restrictions in place that they wouldn't be able to circumvent. But why? You're going to creating a security battle with your kids. Isn't one possible, logical conclusion that your smart and annoyed teenager who hates you (justly or unjustly) just SWATS you at work? Or finds a way to cancel your internet entirely so NOBODY can search for things?
You're going to have plenty of conflicts with your kids already. They're going to think you're stupid and annoying and trying to make their decisions for them based on your stupid old brain that doesn't understand their life. Don't you think it's better to build a relationship of trust where they're willing to listen to you is better than trying to build a relationship where they're FORCED to listen to you in the long term?
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.
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.
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.
Monitoring and discussion are not mutually exclusive.
Do you have evidence/sources to back this claim?
I've read many studies, of which I didn't catalog, but the above link should get you started.
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.
To someone without a sex drive, porn is yucky and boring
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
It is not about do as I say, but do as I do. Lead by example and not by strength.
I build parenting-control systems (via DNS) and I often see parents trying to force it on older kids (and even college students) to try to control them. My response is that strict restrictions only work for younger kids that are not mature enough to make good decisions. As they get older, they will find a way to bypass them and will hate their parents for it.
I don't blame them as they generally want the best for their kids. Being a parent is not easy.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to assume that people do not have sex for fun?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.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 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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'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...'
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.