The phone hasn't been a huge problem. The laptop is and you can't limit that a easily because homework is done on the laptop.
What we did with my son when he was starting electronic independence was tell him that his devices and accounts were like his room for privacy-- we'd tell him beforehand, but we could look around when we wanted to.
Most of the big phone OSs have family/parent controls you can use.
xelA has an iPhone and has had it for a few months (he just turned 10). We gave him one of our old phones as he walks home from school some of the time, and we wanted a way for him to reach us but also a way that we can track where he is. So far, it has been fine.
You can lock the phone down pretty good, so, for example, he only gets a fixed number of hours on the phone for different kinds of activity (social media, web, games, etc) and you can set it on a by category basis; it has a hard cut-off so he can't use it at all between 10pm and 8am (you choose the hours); he can't install any new apps without our explicit permission, and he can't spend money without our explicit permission, etc. We've allowed him free reign with music, and haven't tried to filter explicit material there, but for web, etc we have.
We can track some of what he does, but we have largely not been too intrusive. A couple of times I've skimmed what he's doing on Whatsapp as he's in a few groups with school friends and there's the potential for some bullying and other things that might upset him--he tends towards being quite sensitive and some of his friends with multiple brothers can be quite harsh verging on dickish--but so far that has all been fine. They mostly just send each other stupid memes and say "hi" 20 times a day, like little chimps grooming each other.
Some of his friends are less regulated, and I'm aware of at least one watching Andrew Tate videos and other toxic shit. His Dad was shocked to find out (but didn't seem to consider how _I_ knew about it, and he didn't).
Probably to nobody's surprise, I'm laissez-faire about it because I set a terrible example on that front myself. We do text each other regularly.
1: This has been a huge irritating battle with Hawaii which we are 100% going to walk back, starting this summer. At the beginning of the school year, she wanted to start keeping her laptop in her room. After a prolonged discussion, we agreed to try it out.
What it's happened to is that her door is always locked and she's always partially undressed, so that if you knock, she hollers, "ONE SEC! I GOTTA PUT CLOTHES ON!" and do whatever the hell else needs to be put away.
Aside from the fact that it's an obvious workaround to unlimited screen time, it's also a giant PITA because she shares a room with Ace, who is 100% locked out of her room constantly. ("I just left to go to the bathroom! I said I was coming right back!" etc.)
We have not asked Ace to spy/report back, partly because technically Hawaii probably does have homework on her computer, so always has a plausible excuse. Ace has said that yes, Hawaii does take off her shirt or whatever, so as not to be lying about the reason the door is locked.
In hindsight it would have been better to be prison-warden-strict about the kid's personal phone in the beginning, then *maybe* relax those rules once they're established. What's happening with us now is the relaxed boundaries have gotten tested and pushed, and we're trying to get back to something sensible, but it's only led to a lot of yelling.
I think you're within legitimate bounds to get Ace to confirm she isn't running an OnlyFans page.
The side question will resolve itself when Hawaii shows their siblings porn on their new cell phone
Following. The Calabat is ten (Christ) and not inclined to push boundaries on the Internet, phones, etc. Pebbles, at seven, is exactly the sort of kid who hasn't met a screen she didn't live or a boundary she didn't want to headbutt, so... I need some strategies.
Utah really doesn't offer school sex ed so also following for that.
But both kids now are fine with "no" as an answer to Nintendo time or screen time, so maybe we're okay?
At least until she gets a phone at 21.
Shiv loves computer games so maybe playing Stardew Valley with dada has taken away some of the allure of screens/TV. They both have Chromebooks for schoolwork/art but we keep them in a public area of the house and most days the kids ignore them.
The Calabat is ten (Christ)
Yep. Decennial of Unfoggedspolsion is upon us.
Mostly aligned with ttaM at 3. We got them Apple Watches a couple of years ago (they're 12 and 10 now) and that worked until the older one discovered texting his friends and his watch battery was dead by 5. Got him a phone a few weeks ago, with a two-hour-per-day time limit (for apps; he can still call whenever--we use Qustodio for the limits; there are many such offerings). He spent the first few days doing nothing but watching YouTube Shorts, so I got rid of YouTube on his phone. He mostly just wants to call and bathe in social drama with his friends, and that's allowed outside the two-hour-limit. I also had some talks with him about porn and sexting, just to make sure he wasn't suddenly being prosecuted by some asshole DA for forwarding a pic from a girl or something.
re: 10
xelA is really bad at turning off screens. He has super addictive behaviour around TV and games consoles. It's a constant battle and we have daily disagreements about it. So far, though, he hasn't particularly replicated that with his phone. He often leaves it at home when he goes to school (if he's not walking home alone) and will ignore if for hours on end, even if it's buzzing as his friends message him. His relationship with the messaging culture also seems quite healthy. He regards a lot of it as sort of fun but also a bit dumb, and will deliberately just ignore long-running group chats because he's bored by them.
I can't get my son to attend to messages from anyone. It's both a relief and a huge pain.
What's a reasonable total number of hours per day? 3? Different on weekends vs weekdays?
Devices charge overnight outside of your bedroom
We did this for a while when we started to be concerned about some online behavior, and it seems to have worked well enough that it was just a temporary measure. Ours are a little older than Hawaii now but they seem to have reasonably healthy phone/computer habits at this point so we haven't felt the need for any very intrusive or restrictive policies.
I'm the worst and I don't advocate this, but we did absolutely no control of screen time/phone usage, and it worked out fine. But that doesn't help much -- just that complete laissez faire isn't necessarily disastrous.
I also got my kid his first phone when he started high school. He had a computer in his room from age ten on. Also, he and I talk through texting at least once every day, and sometimes more often, whereas by his age I talked to my mother maybe once a month, on the phone, if that.
He met his current boyfriend/fiance through the internet, and they've been living together happily for years; and he has a 'friend group,' as he calls it, which he also met on the internet, all of which has enriched his life; but he also encountered a certain amount of abusive asshats on the comic forums he frequented. That was traumatic, and he didn't tell me about it at the time.
Teens do need privacy, and they have to learn how to handle their own boundaries; but in retrospect I might have kept the computer in the living room, and held off on the phone another year or two.
I had aspirations to set hard limits and every one of them got blown through quickly. Part of that is that if Michelle has a different idea for what the kids should get, she just goes ahead with her ideas when she feels like it, so coordinated parenting isn't always a thing around here. So the practical outcome was laissez faire like LB in 19. Our kids have been exposed to some bad things because other high schoolers are jerks. Now as late teens they just watch videos all the time but are still good kids, just teenagers in 2023... I'm not sure if I have a point, because I don't know how it would have been different with more controls. At some point I figured they were growing up in this youtube world and they would have to figure out how to navigate it themselves.
For both of mine, internet relationships have been either mostly or entirely keeping in contact with meatspace friends. Neither one has an independent internet friend group I know about.
We should probably think harder about digital rules soon, if not already have done so, even though Atossa is only 7. She has an iPad secondhand from her grandmother. I think it started as a way to watch stuff when in planes or long car rides, and we knew it could be used for messaging with friends and family but that seems fairly rare, but these days she mostly seems to watch YouTube videos about TV shows she likes or Harry Potter. Haven't caught her doing anything specifically concerning yet but it's only a matter of time.
A few weeks ago I thought I had a good approach to it: I'd check the browser history and let her know I was doing it, so she'd know that sort of thing was possible. I was immediately surprised to see big gaps in the history, like three days between the last item and the one before it when I knew she had been on her device in between. I think the most likely explanation is that I should have checked another app in addition to Safari, I'm more a PC guy than a Mac guy, but the "check after the fact" plan is not nearly as effective as I thought it would be. (The possibility that she already knew about that and can scrub her history hadn't even occurred to me until now, and still seems unlikely, but she has older friends and friends with older siblings so I guess I can't rule it out entirely.)
I feel like the pandemic made this worse, like so many other things. Kindergarten was almost entirely online.
I'm relatively sanguine about the whole sex ed thing, though. Several months ago, after spending time with some of those same friends, she opened up to us about feeling left out about things her friends were in the know about and she isn't, so I read her a kid-appropriate book about how babies are made. It was awkward and she found the important parts of it funny, but I think we've got an OK foundation here.
16
What's a reasonable total number of hours per day? 3? Different on weekends vs weekdays?
Back when it was just the TV, the rule was one hour on weekdays, two hours on weekends, but not too strict about that if it wasn't a busy day. We don't have fixed rules about the iPad yet but we do expect dinner, chores, and things like that to take priority over it. Three hours on a weekday seems very permissive just because we aren't home that much between school and bedtime most days.
If you go with the strategy in 3.3, depending on how devoted your child is to YouTube, you may need to put limits on every other goddamn app on the phone. I think the current YouTube containment strategy involves the YT app, Safari (per-website limit), all other browsers, Facebook Messenger* (if a single YT link is ever sent, you can binge-watch indefinitely) and, somehow, the Google search app. I'm sure she will find more. All these exploits have effectively increased the total limit, but it's so much better than having no limit at this point. I think this addictive behavior would have gotten her no matter what training and support we gave her, no matter how long we postponed it, and I do think limits function as harm reduction now even if she hasn't learned to manage a digital world without them yet. However, I realize I don't actually know where the state of the art research on ADHD and addiction is at present.
*I don't know how common it is that a single friend will have a single app they use to communicate such that deleting the app is effectively deleting the friendship, but I think Elke has had a couple of these.
22.last: Only weirdos would do that.
Give the kids two tin cans and some string just like we did back in my day
I found out that when my boarding school introduced the Internet in the 90's to the dorms, they shut it off at 11pm on weeknights. Can you do that while keeping the telephone feature to you or emergency services on?
How is she supposed to turn on the internet in a dorm halfway across the county?
Maybe we're strict laissez-faire? As in, the default is "TV/computer is off" and so average time per day is about half an hour. But if they do get into it the only hard and fast rule is that when we say you're done you're done. The upshot is that Pebbles has figured out that if I'm distracted with work she can get unlimited Phineas and Ferb but spends most of her time reading, annoying her brother, or off in imagination land (kid is basically cloud cuckoo.). But if I said no TV she'd be immersed in something else.
I forgot about this story. Pokey came home on the first day of 6th grade and asked Jammies, "What's a hub?"
Jammies rambled for a while about wheels and spokes and such.
Then Pokey said, "So what's a porn hub?" Welcome to riding the bus in middle school, kid.
"See, it's a metaphor when used in that context. "
You're the math teacher, you tell me
It's teacher appreciation week, but I think that's just primary and secondary school teachers.
Yes. Today was "favorite snack day" which we failed to do.
35: Does anybody really know what sum it is? Does anybody really care?
I willingly break the 40-norm for this.
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You, a rube: "Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse by a jury in a civil case, resulting in a $5 million judgment but no implications of criminal conviction"
Me, an intellectual: TRUMP GUILTY OF RAPE"
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37: I don't know why we can't do Amazon gift card day
OT: People are complaining, but if you want to write a book about children's' grief and you don't want to be abusive to children, how else are you supposed to make them grieve?
Mr. 10-almost-11 here has a nominal limit of 3 hours of screen time per day, which feels like a lot, but he blows through it on weekends and immediately starts complaining. He has an Apple watch for messaging us and for us to track him, and that's been useful, but we failed to notice both that he can message anyone with it unless it's locked down and also that he can use it as an actual voice phone, so he immediately started calling up friends and having hours-long online gaming sessions - and then getting upset when the 3-hour limit kicks in in the middle of it. So keep the watch locked down? (It's also less great as a tracker than I might have hoped - doesn't update very often).
Laptops are definitely the least manageable part, and we don't allow them in the bedroom. I do monitor the Youtube history, because that's 99% of what he does, and then we get into arguments about whether he watched all or only half or a few seconds of the latest "10 most underrated enemies in Super Mario Bros" video, of which there seems to be an endless supply.
Differently annoying is the way that he doesn't eat much dinner, declares that he's all done, goes back to using up his screen time until the hard limit of 8pm, and then is suddenly hungry again and wants to find things to nibble on. We don't lock down the kitchen, but I'm considering trying to say that 8pm is also a hard deadline for eating (bedtime is 9). However, I am concerned with him not actually eating enough in the first place, so that's also not great.
The real heroes never get public notice.
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Heather Armstrong, Dooce, has apparently passed away. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/25/18512620/dooce-heather-armstrong-depression-valedictorian-of-being-dead .
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Oh god, that's horrible. Her poor kids.
What was that webpage where you enter any URL and it tries to summarize it in text? There's a YouTube video on the scourge of family-vloggers that I want to make a post, but want to avoid people having to watch it.
I want to make a bad taste joke about titling a book The Valedictorian of Being Dead but am refraining.
I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but yeah:
Ashdown said Armstrong died by suicide. He told the AP that she had been sober for more than 18 months, and recently had a relapse. He did not provide further details.
Everybody here okay, including lurkers?
I just came here to share the news about Dooce. Thank you all for noting it.
Her blog was one of the first I read. I hope her girls are okay.
Me too. It does feel like knowing someone for two decades. Like I remember reading about how Leta wouldn't eat for days on end as a three year old or whatever.
I keep thinking about how many people with rough mental health came out of the pandemic in worse shape (not to mention people who went into it feelin' fine). I know there are exceptions and the reverse is true for plenty of people, but as a historical event, it had unusually powerful effects on people's brains. Maybe we can do a whole damn post about this but then I might need to do research.
I was having dreams where I'd wake up because I had trouble breathing. I blamed covid-related anxiety, but it turned out I was just drinking to much and it wasn't dreams so much as real trouble breathing because alcohol was making by throat get lazy or something.
" Mormons are taught to journal from a young age,"
True? Why?
I used to have these amazingly awful nightmares that were -- I'm convinced -- my body telling me I was smothering and needed to wake the hell up.
I was having dreams where I'd wake up because I had trouble breathing.
In the one I remember, I got into trouble with gangsters, who threatened to cut my fingers off if I didn't give them what they wanted. That wasn't enough to wake me up. The gangster actually had to start cutting off my finger, and I woke gasping for breath.
The moral of the story: Get a CPAP machine, which I did. (Or maybe stop drinking so much, which I didn't do.)
Regarding screen time and personal internet-accessing machines, I wanted to add my name to the list of laissez-faire parents. Not because I'm proud of that, but because I find it comforting that I am not the only awful parent here. My kids (20 and 18) seem to have weathered it pretty well so far, but stay tuned ...
The CPAP seems like such a bother. I suppose I'll need one eventually.
I made sure to train my kid on screens early so he had an edge on the other kids.