As a parent, screen time vs no screen time is a fine line that we have to continually renegotiate.
Screens can be great, there is so much good information out there that can enrich our lives. I wouldn't go the "no screens ever" route because that's just being a luddite, robbing them of the change to experience, and acquire expertise in, the digital world that they will be interacting with for the rest of their lives.
However, I am not letting my kid roam the internet, there be dragons. In particular YouTube's recommendation algorithm, even in their YouTube kids app, seems to default to serving up horrible brain melting crap instead of anything pedagogical. I am against kids content that is designed solely to entrance and keep them sitting still, it's the equivalent of digital candy floss. For example, the whole "surprise egg" trend, which basically is a video version of the lootbox / Deal Or No Deal, mechanic, is some of the most popular and recommended videos to children on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=surpris...
All three of the frist vids we were served by YouTube kids were surprise egg videos. Hard uninstall.
Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era. We cannot outsource this responsibility to companies and AIs because there is simply no way an algorithm find the stuff that is just right for your child.
Curation is key and there need to be better tools. I strongly limit my kid's screen time, and was pleasantly surprised by the PBS kids video app (and to some extent the games app). I felt very comfortable leaving her alone with that at the designated screen times, as most programs had at least some educational component... or at least had some generic but positive moral lessons. And (key!) she gets personal choice in what she watches, out of a curated garden.
As she's gotten older these programs are not cutting it, though, and she is asking for Netflix more and more. The problem is that the vast majority of kids shows are just garbage. Basically the equivalent of sitcoms or (worse) dramas about girls being cliquey or mean or whatever. I'm looking for another garden with a wide variety of bigger kid shows that have some positive qualities to them.
Sure, there are great programs on there, but I wish I could pre-select those programs and give her a selection out of them. Netflix lets me set age limits and block programs, but I'd rather spend some time selecting 20-30 shows/movies that allows her to feel free while still giving me some control
"Designated screen time" makes my stomach curl. That's a surefire way to make sure a kid who has interest never develops any skills and resents you for ruining a career opportunity later down the road (I know from experience).
I find it odd that most people in this thread are equating "screen time" to "watching videos". My parents were like that, they never understood that mucking around in OSes and writing crappy software is a totally different thing from watching YouTube videos about eggs.
I think you should modify your limits on screen time. Make limits on mindless entertainment kind of screen time, not on productive learning screen time. I'd consider it abusive to force your kid off the computer when they're in the middle of configuring a kernel "for their own good".
Like I said, I know from experience. I feel like I'm a decade behind because my parents thought I was "playing" on the computer instead of learning valuable professional skills which is what I Was doing. I doubt you're actually that kind of person, but to a point they were suspicious of my attempts to learn those things. They thought I was up to no good because I wasn't mindlessly glued to YouTube or whatever they do on their computers.
Nope, not surefire -- speaking from experience. My parents also set limits to screen time, but I have worked in software for over a decade now and see it as my main creative expression.
Torrent the shows you want her to see and setup Jellyfin server. I run one on a Xeon SOC from 2016, but i would be surprised if a Raspberry Pi 4 couldn't handle the transcoding.
Install Jellyfin app on a tablet, you just built a curated version of Netflix.
You really do have to do this if you want your kids to be able to pick what they're watching without you right there all the time. If only all these video services would just let parents add content to allow-lists for kids' accounts. But no. It's literally all we need, but they won't do it.
[EDIT] Incidentally, Jellyfin doesn't have an allow-list, either. You have to put kids' content in a separate library. They have block lists based on tags, but not a more-useful allow-list. It's been requested and I've thought about doing it—I've looked at the code, looks pretty easy—but, LOL, I have kids! Which I expect is why all the other kid-havers requesting the feature haven't gotten around to it, either.
[EDIT AGAIN] The reason the separate-library solution kinda sucks is it fragments your content, so if you're browsing based on library you have to think "wait, did I decide this was OK for the kids' library?" and it doesn't de-dupe so if you put content in both (say, with hard links to avoid wasting disk space) they'll show up twice on accounts that can access both libraries, plus it means shelling in to move files around to change what's available, plus it's a huge PITA if you want multiple kids' accounts with different content (tags are easy—older kids gets all the kid tags as allowed, younger kids get a smaller set of kid-tags allowed). I'd also personally really like to be able to not display all my kid-friendly content to them all the time (too much choice, same as adults experience on streaming services) and change it up periodically (this also lets me push better things on them that they might not pick from a list of 100 but might pick from a list of 10) which makes the separate-library especially painful, since it means file-management actions every single time I want to change up the kids' library, rather than just some quick tag-shuffling on the Web UI, which I can just do from my phone in a pinch.
There is an easy solution to this. Make 2 folders. One with stuff for you, one for stuff for kids. Make an account for the kids that can only see kids folder. Make an account for yourself that can see BOTH folders. Isn't stuff like this normal for plex/jellyfin/kodi? Before these media servers I used to organize everything based on genre and if I liked the video or not (watch using vlc)
It works, but it's worse than a tag-based allow-list.
With tags you don't need to shell or sftp in to move things around.
You never have to wonder which library something is in ("wait, did I put Star Wars in the kids' library...?") which, admittedly, matters more for some Jellyfin clients than others (the natural way to browse in the web UI or on Roku is by library—the natural way to browse on my 3rd party tvOS client is by type, which browses across libraries, i.e. movie, TV, et c., so it matters less on there).
Since it's easier to make changes, you can swap material in and out on a whim, from any device with a web browser.
I use Plex and just only input shows I want my kids to watch. It's more work, but allows me to have a garden. It's probably not Kosher legally for me to be pirating shows, but I'm only doing shows that I have access to via Netflix, Amazon, HBO etc. So morally, I feel I'm justified.
They're probably doing fine at their job. Building better tools for curation would be nearly antithetical to the goal of serving an endless stream of highest-bidder ad-supported content algorithmically chosen to keep a viewer engaged to maximize impression counts and duration.
I’m not sure that most TVs would allow much of that. But disconnecting them from the network seems wise after I saw the amount of connections mine was making (via Pihole).
Time spent reading = 2x amount received in screen time works for us. Books (comic books count) have no screen time, neither have any kinds of crafts or other interactive things.
Games are more OK in my mind than just passively staring at someone open surprise eggs on Youtube or watching a "let's play" of some game or a "influencer reacts to X" crapfest.
Thus we have a separate more generous screen time set for games and another for passive video watching. Now my kid is playing Pokemon Violet/Scarlet with their friend using a WhatsApp video call for communication, all good in my book. I showed them PokedDB and they spend time reading stuff about Pokemon in there while gaming :)
We do something similar and cap the time on screens. Also, if the kids start showing signs of wanting screens too much, we refocus them on something else- sometimes for several days or more. When they ask why, we remind them that screens are a tool for us to use, not the other way around-- and it's time to take a break. In fairness, we do this for anything they get overly attached to that could be harmful in excess.
I hope you're also a role model for this. Do you take multi-day breaks from screens, and take care to avoid wanting screens too much?
I'm spending most of my leisure time in front of a screen. Explaining to my children why it's OK for me and not for them would be the hardest part for me.
Yep, you should always be able to take the screen away without causing a nuclear meltdown in the child. If that's not possible - you've got work to do.
>Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era.
This, 100%! We're at the point where the tablet is for podcasts, and we can watch instructional videos with a specific topic in mind (e.g. tips on drawing anime characters). And that's it. It's been a month and we saw a noticeable change literally overnight in quality and amount of sleep, quality of conversation, and the child is generally happier
To be clear, we were strict up until the pandemic when we let things slide. Then all the friends were on messenger and if that's the only source of socializing, well ok. We didn't have YT on the tablet, but through ad clicking she discovered it would sometimes open in the browser, then she just figured out how the browser works.
I'd say there was close to a year of virtually unfettered access, up to 2 hours a day, always simultaneously with Messenger Kids for chatting/calling friends.
Cutting off was tough, but it happened over the holidays so we all took a full digital diet, and it gave the opportunity to gently introduce the concept of addiction
I think if a 9 to 11 year old doesn't understand that there's a web browser already, and how it differs from the YouTube app, you've failed to teach your kids vital information, and are putting them at risk. You're leaving them defenseless under the guise of keeping them safe. You shouldn't have given them a tablet in the first place until they understand basic things like that.
Ultimately, as you have learned, your child will circumvent your restrictions. You could go ahead and teach them how to be safe, or you could let them fall unprepared into monster-infested waters.
I get what you're saying, but "the internet" has evolved alot. Even knowing the dangers that are present, and how marketers try to short-circuit your brain etc etc (which we did do, I'm very clear with my kids that every law needs an explanation and they are provided with explanations) I think 13 is still too young to be left alone. Really I don't believe there is a minimum age, it's more who can resist addictive behaviors, so you tell me.
I'm not going to presume your age but at least when I was growing up, the internet was more like a giant flea market: you go in, and yes there could be things that might be bad or useless or creepy or diddly, and you really learn where the quality stuff is by poking around. Internet then was very analogous to going out into the real world where you learn risk through experience and can walk away. With the walled gardens we have today?... it's more like dropping an open kilo of cocaine in front your kid, saying "you can snort it, smoke it, shove it under a toenail, put it on your wee-wee and it will make you feel good for a bit, but then really, really, really bad. So be careful" then turning on a fan pointed in their direction as you walk out of the room... Everyone working on user engagement at FB, TikTok, Insta and the rest, they know how to keep you on with dopamine hits. The second a kid logs in, the hyperoptimization forces the most addictive, useless crap in their suggestions or feed no matter what their search is, such as the box opening junk, or mash-ups that don't have anything but popular characters giggling for 2 minutes, and it gets weird in a hurry [0]. And no matter how hard you try, there are always more suggestions that take you into a corner of dopamine hits than quality information, and it's very difficult to tell the difference. It's unavoidable, and to say "just let them learn the dangers" just tells me you need to observe a kid while they navigate (it always ends in a sinkhole) or one who just put the tablet down. I'm not going to presume your life experience, but I know someone who's jonesing for a hit when I see one.
I highly recommend you try setting up fake child accounts (minimum age, or if you want the full experience, set up a Family Link and say you're 8) on YouTube, TikTok, and the rest. There is no chance for a learning curve, there is no chance for evaluation. It's just immediate click-and-addict.
These are the new cigarette companies and I'm treating them as such. In my case, we're learning as we go along. So she can use the laptop for writing (podcast scripts, stories and essays), research for school and any activities/hobby with one of us in the room to help with tips and, as we put it, help to make sure the algorithm doesn't short-circuit her brain), and introduce her to coding by making her own Roblox games (played locally). The tablet is for listening to podcasts and recording her own episodes/thoughts and there are good drawing apps.
As to how we're going to approach things moving forward... Awareness is key but at least with drugs you can say no and not ingest. When she's in high school, just saying no is probably not a viable option, so we're still figuring out and trying to learn what works for others.
"Just say no" and the rest of the D.A.R.E program weren't just useless, they were actively harmful. I really hope you don't teach your kids to "just say no".
There's a version for kids (0). Contact approvals go through the parents, there's a weekly report so you see who they spoke with, settings to prevent link sharing, curated GIFs (but that's as curated as YT Kids), etc. It's the only reason I signed into FB in the past decade.
Obviously they can just set up their own fake FB account and lie about their age (which frankly I already told her to never sign up to anything with any real information) but the rest of their friends need to as well for it to be of any use. At this age, we're not there yet
I understand why parents let their children lie in order to avoid social exclusion. Kids can be very cliquey and being excluded hurts.
I counseled my children that it is immoral to misrepresent yourself to someone in order to get them to give you something they otherwise would not (or are prohibited by law from doing so). I still remember my (now 24 year old) daughter gleefully signing up for Facebook on the morning of her 13th birthday.
All apps are 13+, it's a law thing. If companies go under that, they face intense scrutiny. Epic lost a case because of that already ($200M+ fine & years of supervision), Rovio is in hot water too.
Same issue with WhatsApp for example, but it's pretty much a requirement to have any social life after first grade over here. Also there is no way for anyone except a parent to report an underage WA user, so there are no repercussions.
"Parent permissions" is how they get around that one for underage kids. It's either a notification through the parent portal or you login with the Google account on the kids tablet. Not sure of the mechanism on iOS, but I imagine it's similar.
There's marketing and then there's using. Obviously they do restrict certain apps like Tinder and PH, but it's only those that are exclusively 18-over (and Epic since the fine).
Other apps like FB, TikTok, XBox and the rest that no child should go near (or anyone else for that matter) gives a prompt with something along the lines of "Ask your parents for permission". If I say OK, either from my account or by logging in on hers, the app is installed and can be used, even though her profile is under 13. They don't market to kids, but it's still available and still shows up in search.
It would be great if these legal actions do show real restriction for all apps that are rated 13-over, but then no more tablets for kids. That's going to cost manufacturers and ad-driven apps a ton of money so I don't see it happening outside of the FCC going directly after Apple and Google.
Source: I have a kid with an age-restricted tablet and just tested
To be clear: all of this happens when the device is set up by the parent to mark it explicitly as kids' device? I've never seen such things before.
When I was a kid, knowing what year to put in a DOB form to put yourself safely over 18 y.o. was the most basic "Internet 101" life skill, second only to knowing where to type a website address.
On Android they have something called Family Link where you link a device and mark it explicitly as a kid's device to set restrictions like time usage, banned apps, etc. The only way to change settings is through the parent account. And yes she ran some very clever social engineering to try to get in.
Almost got me once - my wife left her phone unlocked so my kid opened WA and wrote me a message asking to lift the time restriction for the rest of the day. Her mistake was sending an extra "thank you so much" with heart emoji, which I though was off. If not for that misstep she would have got me.
Obviously she was rewarded and we listened to one of the Darknet Diaries episodes on social engineering
all diets fail after 6 months on average. ppl gain even more weight.
you are going have the same results with this screen cap thing because you are using willpower to supress the urge which is still there and isnt going anywhere
Right, just like I wasn't able to quit smoking after a 25-cigarette a day habit over 10 years ago and haven't looked back? Or how no one is ever able to keep weight off? Or get off heroin? Or change their lifestyle?
Maybe ask:
"What are you doing to try to ensure you'll keep your kids off screens and active?"
Or
"Do you have any experience trying to give up addictive behaviors, and how are you helping your child deal with it?"
Snarky comments, especially those that involve assumptions ("you're using willpower") just make you come off as 1- a person who has never accomplished anything of note and isn't worth paying attention to, and 2- a naval gazer with neither the curiosity nor intelligence on how to approach discovery.
Learn how to be inquisitive, then you can be judgemental
>all diets fail after six months on average; ppl regain even more weight
This is not true and is also potentially harmful if people believe it. In reality, weight regain after "cutting" occurs over a period of years and tends to be around 50%; that is, less than the amount of weight lost in the first place. Several meta-analyses have been conducted, e.g.:
It's also worth noting that adults under 60 tend to gain weight over time on average, so the actual effect of the intervention versus no intervention may be underestimated by simply treating the baseline as a constant. Losing ten pounds may seem small, but losing ten pounds instead of gaining ten pounds is more significant.
> In reality, weight regain after "cutting" occurs over a period of years and tends to be around 50%; that is, less than the amount of weight lost in the first place.
Interesting. Perhaps I missed it, I am not seeing that claim in the link you posted in the comment.
It's shown most prominently in in Figure 4, which tracks post-weight-loss outcomes to 160 weeks (about three years). Sorry if it's not showing, I'm afraid sometimes I'm not sure what's open access anymore, since the journals have all done their best to make institutional logins automatic and invisible.
Practically all studies and reviews on the topic emphasize the large individual variability in outcomes. One in six Americans who has ever been overweight or obese loses at least 10 kilograms and keeps it off for at least a year, for example:
That study tracks a sample of adults in the general population, not a group assigned to diet. But evidently a significant fraction of people find success on their own. Most studies on the subject emphasizes substantial individual variability. Furthermore, a strong predictor of long-term weight-loss maintenance is just the initial weight lost:
The notion that "all diets fail" seems to be perpetuated by a few unscrupulous journalists seeking clicks and social media slacktivists doing the same. It's not true, it's not helpful, and it's not defensible.
I still think that treating the problem as screen time is the wrong approach. It is too low resolution. What happens on the screen matters. Many parents end up using screen time as a very blunt tool because we simply lack better tools.
But curating content as a family is close to unfeasible because it goes against sponsored algorithmic curation to which others are still exposed and once a kid is socialized they face the problem of peer pressure.
Even if you have a private Jellyfin server that automatically downloads approved fresh content, kids will still complain they do not have access to Youtube like other kids. And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.
I find that caring parents are put in an impossible position of at the same time trying to maintain trust and also be a curator and censor.
Caring parents aren't in an impossible situation. The problem is that we have given up on the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Corporations have, intentionally or not, contributed heavily to the destruction of our villages, physical and online. I think with just five sets of parents sharing a similar worldview, it would very practical for them to curate enough good educational content for all their kids. Having four other families on the same program in their own community will reinforce to the kids that the parents aren't antagonists, but that this is what their mini-"society" just does regularly, and so mitigate resentment.
> And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.
Good, then you can teach them to subvert you productively. Keep the tablet locked down, but put an unlocked Linux machine in the house and tell them they can watch whatever they want in Firefox. Once they've done that, make them launch Firefox from the command line. Once that's mastered, make them connect to the wifi manually. Then make them start the DE manually. Then make them configure the router to get online. Then disassemble the PC and force them to put it together. Better to learn computer literacy skills in the process than just be a drooling, gormless consumer.
> [Fifth grade classmate] Did you watch the new Wednesday episode yesterday?
> [My kid] I could only catch the last half hour, it took a little longer than I thought to solder all the components on the TV's motherboard before I could turn it on again. The real issue is getting the forge hot enough to heat up the screwdriver I use as a soldering iron...
I’m not sure that slicing yourself up assembling a machine is part of computer literacy. If job interviews are anything to go by, computer literacy is a familiarity with trash apps like Teams.
This is why it is simpler to set time limits and let the kids do what they want. It’s too much management and friction and negotiation otherwise. For now, I’ve done so anyway: games (even dumb ones) are fine but video is only available under special circumstances (e.g. on an airplane). I’m sure even this very coarse line will eventually erode though.
We had the same rule, and modified it to include type of games. Phone games have time limits, unless it's things like Dragonbox, flow free, or other "educational" games (at least games that require some kind of thinking) approved by us beforehand, including minecraft. Because 99.999% of games for children are just absolute trash stuffed full of ads.
Any PC game that is age appropriate gets a pass, but only if it's evening and we're inside already, or if it's really shitty outside.
As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way. So much technology today is meant to be set and forget. I had my oldest build a linux pc last year, and that seemed to pique his interest, but it was short lived, because so much is just apps and consumption with no backend. Even age appropriate apps for programming and learning about that sort of thing are very boxed in.
> As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way.
Let me know if you ever figure out - I feel I'll be facing the same problem in the next few years.
From my tech person perspective, I agree with your summary: advances in computer tech and consumer product design have done away with tinkering: where it isn't actively discouraged, it's still hard and doesn't seem that fun anymore.
Yes, people will bring up BBC Micro and those 8-bit handheld boards and Arduinos - but the truth is, even if they replicate the experience of 20-30 years ago somewhat, a big part of the motivation (to me) was knowing you're doing something unique, that you can't just trivially buy a ready-made product that does the same thing but much better.
I feel you can't get people to "tinker" in general - this happens when they have a goal and tinkering is the best way to achieve it. For me as a kid, this was building model rockets and writing video games - it's what got me to do electronics and programming. Without such goals, I wouldn't sustain my interest in learning and playing with these things.
And why should tinkering be easy ? The whole point of it is understanding things beyond the initial use and this is the mindset that, I believe, only handful of people have (like one in ten).
I distinctly remember that when I was tinkering in high school with things most of my peers were tinkering with people (a.k.a living life). So maybe, just maybe, it does not really matter if tinkering is easy or not - because its mostly character that decides if You will be into it or not (I subscribe more to nature then nurture side).
And I honestly question if my children should waste their life on things instead of people.
I'm not a kid now :) but I tinkered a lot with tech as a kid and still do today as an adult.
Most of that came from the fact that I didn't have a lot of the stuff others had - no cable TV, outdated computer, etc. Thus the tinkering came out of necessity and over time I started to like it. That stuff broke constantly and I remember searching for troubleshooting info on school computers to bring home and try.
I did have the Internet though, and soon began exploring Linux, finding ways to make the computer faster, learning to repair secondhand equipment, and so forth. Not having easily accessible entertainment also had the bonus of getting me into other hobbies like writing, drawing, and music which I still do today. The more you do these things, the more you like them - and the satisfaction of making or fixing something is always greater than mindless consumption.
And before you ask - yes, my social life suffered a bit as I couldn't play the games others played, talk about the shows they watched, etc. I knew many other kids who were "good" with tech, but they didn't really have the motivation to tinker as they could easily buy stuff that just worked.
I think the solution wrt youtube would be supervised browsing and then adding approved videos to jellyfin/plex. or even a folder on their device if you don't want to get fancy.
above all, I would try explaining how media sites try to capture your attention and helping kids recognize when it's happening. easier said than done of course.
I think "screen time" is this generation's "Dungeons and Dragons" boogeyman. Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way, but people really aren't articulating how. What's the mechanism, and how did it differ from similar kids entertainment of the past? Is "Algorithmically Generated Spiderman/Frozen Mashup #45501" or "Streamer babbling on about nothing" really that much worse for an 8 year old than the crappy cartoons I grew up on in the '80s?
Our household has pretty simple rules. Keep your grades high (straight A's, one B allowed) and kid can have as much screen time as she wants. Grades drop, and entertainment (including the dreaded screens) proportionately goes away until they come back up. That's it. We've had to limit her once, and she got the message and course corrected.
Yeah, there is some truth to your D&D scaremongering analogy, tho I don't think anyone is calling for parents to lock arms and drive Satan out of the Apple Store.
I think there is a big difference in the devices and content of yesteryear and the magic phones filled with an unlimited library of today. Eventually the cartoons would end and we would emerge bleary-eyed into the daylight.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a quantitative difference in the life outcomes between kids who were given firm boundaries by their parents and kids whose parents just gave up and let them watch any old shit. We are running this experiment on live humans, so time will tell.
> Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way
It didn’t take a lot of My Little Pony before my child’s accent whet from that of a New Zealand child to whatever the accent is that the horses have (Texan?).
Nailed about the algorithm. As an internet user since 1998, I'd be not so worried about "horrors", but of the algorithm and the "screen-sticky" junk it funnels to my son.
But on the other hand, it's my duty to actually be present with him. I see too many parents just paying "gadget ransom" to their kids, to just avoid distraction in unnecessary moments -- like on bus.
We used YouTube for a few months with our first kid but we stopped again because you quickly end up in a rabbit hole where it mostly recommends videos that look weirdly auto-generated, are devoid of any meaningful content and have an uncanny pacifying effect on children - exactly like the surprise egg videos you linked to. We were the ones controlling the app, but the kid quickly learns to recognize the bright thumbnails and requests them. We ended up making up a story about YouTube being broken, and we are still very happy with that choice.
I really don't think watching this kind of brain-melting content is healthy for anyone. I think we all know the feeling we get when we have binged a show for too long, that bored and slightly depressed feeling where you want to stop, but you keep going for a little while longer than you should simply because you crave the continued stimulation. I get that feeling almost instantly when watching one of these videos, and I am truly worried about the mental state of kids who watch this stuff for hours every day.
> I really don't think watching this kind of brain-melting content is healthy for anyone.
I spent two hours yesterday transfixed by the AI-generated Infinite Seinfeld stream. Afterward I felt the mental equivalent of the feeling you get after eating an entire tray of cookies in a single sitting. This algorithmic crap is brain poison.
I'm guessing the meta thing we're going to have to become robust to (after 'the system is trying to sell you things you don't want/need' and 'the system is trying to make you feel bad about yourself', 'the system is trying to make you believe that you are more clever than everyone for discovering a cabal', 'the system is trying to get you angry for engagement', 'the system is trying to have you invest in a thing you'll have to pay exponentially to keep enjoying at all') is going to be 'the system is trying to engage you in getting you to watch predictable things'.
So many horrible human tech we're teaching our kids to harden against, how powerless is our society that this constant violence is accepted.
We've had good success with our three-year-old with Khan Academy Kids. We have an old Android tablet that has a few FOSS parental control apps (TimeLimit and App Lock), and he's allowed 30 minutes of Khan or Scratch Junior per day. All other apps are locked by App Lock.
Khan Academy Kids strikes a good balance between activities and videos. He enjoys and uses both, and all the content is intentionally teaching something.
I found that "screens after N pm" worked well for us. It created a zone where there was no consideration, expectation, or backsliding onto screens. We also kept a VERY consistent bedtime, so that "N pm" to just before bedtime rituals timeblocked screens.
If you get on a screen at 4pm it can be hard to suggest putting the screen down to go outside or do something else.
Was that a "no screens after N pm" or a "screens only between N pm and bedtime" rule?
I can imagine the latter working well, but we never tried because we're worried about screen exposure close to bed time causing sleep issues (blue light, but also because content on screens seems to excite and energize kids somewhat) - we're already having way too much problem getting kids to sleep on a sensible schedule.
The latter -- and getting to sleep on a regular schedule wasn't really a challenge in my situation. We did consistently start it at a certain hour, though.. so it would be, say, 7pm to 830pm and then start the bedtime rituals.
Would you change your rules if your kids showed interest in developing actual computer skills? My parents had rules similar to yours and wouldn't budge, and it effectively killed a decade of potential programming experience. I still resent them for it to a point, but I realize they were just ignorant and thought learning to program was equivalent to playing, because I was at the age they thought I was supposed to be playing.
Just... try to avoid making your kids be something they're not, in general.
And you'll have to remember that curating content won't be possible forever. At some point they will be alone with an unlocked device and the internet, probably much sooner than you're comfortable with.
We've got filters set up at home; they worked fine for a while, but teenagers are easily impressed and soon we had to add stock photo websites to these filters. Then there's free VPN services, going around the (consumer grade) filters and time limits entirely.
Next up, schools give kids laptops, but they don't have the necessary IT prowess to lock them or the school internet down (and there's unrestricted public wifi everywhere, of course). The amount of shit I've found on there is unreal, and of course the thing breaks because of caggy-handedness.
Maybe try to actually prepare your kids for these moments instead of trying to restrict them so hard. Teach them how to use a computer for real, instead of sitting them down at a hyper-restricted one for an hour a week.
Would you let your kids get a driver's license without teaching them the rules of road safety? Would you let your kids cook without telling them the stove is hot and will hurt them? Do your kids know not to let random people in the house?
Or do you just helicopter them so they never experience danger?
Use tube-archivist which lets you grab your favorite youtube videos and serve them locally. You can basically build a locked down youtube clone for your kid.
100% with you on this one. And we need to make sure parents have the resources to learn themselves. So many parents these days are not even aware how accessible bad content is, or they even consume it themselves, not knowing why it’s bad.
As always with parenting there is no 100% right way to do it, but parents need to be educated first, so that they can make reasonable decisions by themselves.
> Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era. We cannot outsource this responsibility to companies and AIs because there is simply no way an algorithm find the stuff that is just right for your child.
Plus the incentive for YouTube/Google to do it right is not that strong as their goal is to make money first.
It's hard for even a parent to find the right stuff for a child... because it is really up to the child in terms of what they find engaging. A lot of PBS kids content is good but not all youtube is bad.
The surprise egg thing is a thing almost a cultural thing and it does pass. Kids watch those videos up to about age 5. You find these eggs in Target and Walmart now too so you end up with a junk drawer of fidgets. All the kids end up trading fidgets for awhile as well. Lots of tears but they learn to negotiate. If you are lucky you might skip Pokemon.
They then move on to watching Minecraft and Roblox videos. I let my kids facetime and play roblox with their friends at the same time.
As far as educational screentime goes, my child has learned addition, subtraction, and multiplication purely from Number Blocks. To the point where we have to do supplemental learning because the fellow kindergarteners are just learning numbers and letters.
I don't think this is the own you think it might be.
Our oldest child's kindergarten class (at a very rural, poor school) was doing multiplication and division within the first month, because they all attended a pre-k that encouraged the use of educational games, like Prodigy for math.
Like everything, It's what is on the screen and how the child is using it and how involved the parents can be. Number blocks are the same way. They're a great way to learn basic reading and writing, if that's how the parents use it; they are also a great chew toy without some input from the parents.
Piggybacking off this, is there a way to allow only certain channels. Unless i missed it, even on YouTube kids I only have the option to block...and to my horror one day I let my kids watch the Peppa Pig official channel and find out later through YouTube recommendations they were watching some grown man playing with Peppa Pig toys.
Also, my eldest is 6 and already knows you can get to YouTube via browser -__-
I’d argue that our current algorithms can absolutely find the right stuff for your child, its just not in their financial interest to do so. Sad stuff from capitalism, as always.
That's it exactly; surprise egg videos get repeat views, kids open them up and just hyperfocus and/or zone out on them for hours on end; it's low energy watching. Give them something intellectualy stimulating though, and they'll have brain drain after a while and be too tired to keep watching that kind of content. Bad for revenue, it's better to have them accrue those minutes watched counters all the time.
There is absolutely no technical reason this problem could not be solved. It is not a technical issue. It is a human issue. Just like most issues of modern society.
Screens can be great, there is so much good information out there that can enrich our lives. I wouldn't go the "no screens ever" route because that's just being a luddite, robbing them of the change to experience, and acquire expertise in, the digital world that they will be interacting with for the rest of their lives.
However, I am not letting my kid roam the internet, there be dragons. In particular YouTube's recommendation algorithm, even in their YouTube kids app, seems to default to serving up horrible brain melting crap instead of anything pedagogical. I am against kids content that is designed solely to entrance and keep them sitting still, it's the equivalent of digital candy floss. For example, the whole "surprise egg" trend, which basically is a video version of the lootbox / Deal Or No Deal, mechanic, is some of the most popular and recommended videos to children on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=surpris...
All three of the frist vids we were served by YouTube kids were surprise egg videos. Hard uninstall.
Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era. We cannot outsource this responsibility to companies and AIs because there is simply no way an algorithm find the stuff that is just right for your child.