Told them there was stuff on the internet that could harm them, that there was stuff they could NOT unsee.
They're 18 now, the results of the science experiment are still out, but they seem to have turned out okay.
Hiding children from facts of life (sex, death, drugs, abuse, alcohol, etc) does not in fact help them, it helps you (the parent). It makes parents feel good, but leaves children scarred and unprepared for when they will inevitably face those facts later in life.
There are stages of life when children will (or should be) exposed to those things. The brain naturally regulates these things. If a child is exposed at the proper time, their brain regulates the amount of information they are capable of understanding. As they re-experience the same thing later in life, they will understand more and their progress towards understanding that concept is more gradual and healthy. By contrast, if you shelter a kid, they will still inevitably face reality later in life, but the experience will be more difficult because they have to face everything at once.
Parents should not be afraid to discuss or even introduce difficult concepts to children. The children will inevitably face these. It is better for them to face them in a controlled manner early in life so they can build healthier relationships with these hard ideas. It also gives parents better control over the introduction of these ideas. If you turn sex, alcohol, and drugs into a taboo in your house, you might think you are helping your children, but the reality is that you are actually setting them at higher risk to abuse these things later in life.
Back to the original comment. If your kids are going through all this effort to subvert your DNS and controls in order to see something on the internet. It would be better to allow the child to confront their curiosity in a controlled way. Their curiosity is clearly very strong if they are willing to go to this extreme to satisfy it. Letting the curiosity pent up, will ultimately have the reverse effect than you desire. It could lead to overindulgence of that curiosity, or potentially abuse of that curiosity later in life.
Ironically, its not porn, warez, hacking or any of that crap that concerns me - it's the dudes who pray on girls - it's the people with fake disorders building communities to cause people to have ticks and self diagnose with severe disorders. It's kids who don't sleep because they're addicted to tik tok and instagram.
Take away their phone to help break that addiction and they end up with friends phones or connecting on other devices...
I can't police all that, I can't talk my kids out of that and I certainly won't hide them from the internet - but i can block the URLS of places i know that shouldn't exist and i can set sane restrictions as any good parent should
Of course kids are gonna find porn and yeah, they're going to try and bypass controls. Clearly, they're figuring it out and clearly, they think we don't know so whose the clever one now?
Still think Apple should have MDM for families. When i was a kid we were stealing pornos from Circle K so it's not about that at all.
There have been successful societies built around early trauma (Spartans, etc.) but we remember many of them as brutal by necessity of their surrounding environment.
Agree with the rest entirely.
My son is 14, and when my wife proposed blocks and access control, I made this very point. Even if we were able to perfectly lock down our home and his phone, we can't control every other place he can access the Internet. So, we also are in a talk about it, occasionally check on what he's been into, talk about anything "interesting" that comes up, but NEVER make a big deal of if. As long as we're able to discuss it (and no, he doesn't love talking about it), I'm OK. By keeping it low stress and low key, there's no incentive for him to hide.
As it turns out, he merely figured out that flipping the Wi-Fi Off switch killed the network connection on the chrome-based tablets, which makes it easy to get to the chrome dino jumping game.
I was disappointed that he disrupted class, but equally impressed by his resourcefulness.
Now approaching the age where the thought of having a family and kids is on my mind more and more, I always wonder how I will approach this problem. I can't think I would do it any differently than you. For young children sure, throw up DNS filtering at the router level and the kiddos' will be none the wiser. But if my future kid ever turns out like me, that will probably only work until 7 or 8 (when I figured out how routers worked), at that point I would think it has to be an honest conversation about all the crap on the internet. Even when I was a kid I knew when the adults were feeding me a load of crap.
It doesn't mean you'll be in any way effective.
By the same token, we block this kind of traffic at work...all it ended up doing was pushing the negative traffic to employee's cellphones. Which is fine, because it makes the office network safer.
Rateshaping students to have enough bandwidth to do schoolwork but not to have wonderful connectivity (campus has a 2gbps symmetric connection, but we only give students 4-5 megabits/sec over wifi most places on campus) is also a part of the picture.
Certainly schools are not even attempting to teach countermeasures. They tend to dabble in the "be aware of bullying and self-esteem" issues, but are completely outmatched in the security arena. Ignore at your peril.
- Advertising and dark patterns
- What else can be inferred about you from seemingly innocuous information, and potential misuse
- Durability of your digital footprint
- Security, file types, etc.
Education doesn't fix these issues, though. Even well-educated developers would often give up and click 'Allow' on a modal privilege escalation box that pops up repeatedly in research. And if I need to get something done and it doesn't work I'm pretty quick to re-enable scripts and tracking.
But, it doesn't become a concrete, visceral thing until you inspect a no-script menu while browsing a news site. Or run Little Snitch on a freshly unboxed Mac. Or going to a "white pages" site and see the last four addresses of your family members. Salary info, current whereabouts, criminal history, are a fee away.
It's a different world.
You're talking about a population of 12 to 18 year olds. Even among the most responsible and least-easily influenced of them, social pressures absolutely dwarf any abstract concerns about corporations knowing a bit more about broke-ass you to try and sell you things.
Most of this population will take a short term gain for an uncertain consequence a few minutes later. You're talking about short term gain versus consequences that they may view as inevitable and occurring decades away.
These are exactly the population that should be protected. If you wanted to give them agency, which I support, let them manage their own whitelists instead of throwing up hands in defeat.
The future is already here, trends are not reversing:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-09/column-tra...
We can teach them to protect themselves, pretend the problem doesn't exist, or say "aww shucks, all the cool people are being violated."
As they get older I'll remove it in stages: blacklist, logging only, then direct access with no proxy. The opening up will be done when it seems appropriate and in full discussion with them. I don't have a schedule for it.
When they're old enough to have phones I can initially give them managed devices with always-on wireguard and the same transparent proxy. (I've tested this setup and it's not circumventible without wiping the device.)
The claims often made on hn about this stuff, that:
* Kids will resent any attempt to limit their access, and
* Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access.
are empirically false, at least in my experience so far. I expect they become more true in the teenage years but that's when things can start to open up.
Even if the restrictions have to be entirely dropped or become irrelevant the second they enter senior school, they've already benefited a lot from this over the years.
The other argument, that other kids will have phones etc so there's no point, is just an abdication of responsibility. I feel like I should do my best here, whatever everyone else is doing.
The one thing that is true is that it's quite technically demanding. A managed phone with an always-on wireguard connection to a network with a transparent ssl-bump mitm proxy and a domain-based whitelist with an admin UI to browse logs and block/unblock domains is not an easy thing to set up.
It's possible, though, and it has value. It should be much easier.
> * Kids are NSA-level hackers who will circumvent any attempt at limiting their access.
There's plenty of people in their mid-20s now on HN who have been the kids, either working around their parents restrictions or their friends parents restrictions. I had an internet enabled phone as a 12 year old in 2004, so it's not a post-iPhone kid experience only.
And yes, parental control software has got smarter to not just be a matter of changing your DNS or using an alternative browser, but tunneling over SSH still defeats much of it, and yes the audience here is more tech savvy, but there's a hundred new web based proxies that open up every day that your chosen solution may not be up to date on blocking - whitelists avoid that but it's something a lot of people here are opposed to on moral grounds once kids reach a certain age. Certainly if you let them go out unsupervised that's not enforcable, and honestly you should be able to let a 12 year old go out unsupervised.
I think a lot of the "try and restrict and you'll just harm your relationship" stuff comes from 20 somethings whose memories are primarily of their teenage years. There's 12 years before you get to twelve, and we're in a situation where clueless parents are allowing (knowingly or not) their preteen kids to have their own youtube channels and watch Squid Game. (And much worse besides no doubt, those are just a couple of things I know particular kids have been doing.)
It's really that simple.
In the case of NextDNS its less controlling what they see, we're not naive about that - but more about ensuring their safety and well being.
All told, a 12 year old kid seeing porn they sought out is small potatoes compared to the consequences of some other decisions.
Source: maladjusted, mid thirties virgin, who grew up with on instant and infinite access to online porn
I still remember discovering a bug in the iphone parental controls where i could go to the amazon app, leave a comment for google.com, click it and open that in a webview, then open that into safari with restrictions disabled. How i discovered that, i have no idea. But there's always a way.
Later i just wasted my money on a crappy android phone and forced their hand.
Edit: please, please, parents do not do this to your child. Learn trust, have conversations, and let them explore. If you trust your child (truly trust them) and they know it (believe you, not just hear you say it) then they will mostly try to make good decisions. Controls will just be bad for your child in the long run, even if it makes parents job easier in short run. Once a child isn't in eg. middle school, you have to start letting them access tech on their own.
Beyond that, The internet for a boy, is much different than the internet for a girl - your experience isn't the same as everyone elses and neither are the filters.
We home school so some of the controls are just in place so they actually do some school and they're only in place because they choose NOT to do school.
The thing is, when kids grow up - they're gong to work at places that have blocks to ensure employee safety too and they're going to have to realize what they need to do to keep their kids safe
and the kids will hate it, as they have always hated it.
Oh yes, i certainly broke trust of my parents, but mostly by bypassing controls they put. That deteriorated trust (and encouraged more trust-breaking) much faster than if the controls werent there.
All blocks are not created equal here.
There are 10s of thousands of girls going through therapy, rehab, mental hospitals and such because of some of what is going around right now and much of the blocking is learning from parents who didn't and lost their kids to suicide or sex trade.
It all starts with a supposed nice 14 year old kid on discord who buys you a gift and turns out to be a grown ass man praying on girls who are susceptible to social issues - they're the ones boosting the servers and writing free advice and coming off as being helpful to teen issues but its all a big con... and that's just one channel of the absurdity. THe other is social pressures on tiktok and insta and their addictive properties - especially for young women. Unchecked/unbound you're asking for trouble for you and your kids.
Be a parent and let your parents parent.
Some level of controls feels like a way to encourage exploration and learning and the "hacker" mindset. If they escape the controls, great! We also have the conversations about what's out there, how to handle it, etc.
Instead you should limit the amount of time for device access or even just take the device away.
Ha! Lock down everything and casually leave a printout on the kitchen table titled "How to bypass home network security" with a bunch of Python exercises that lead up to disabling the filters. Presto, now they know Python :-)
That doesn't seem like a bad skill to foster.
Better, prepare them for the worst of what they will experience on the Internet: violence, pornography, abuse of all kind, and guide them in their use of the Internet. Place yourself as the person your kids can come for help instead of the person they have to be afraid of. That is an incredibly easy and common thing for groomers to exploit.
Both kids have fought it, my oldest is 17 and nextdns for her just blocks ads and keeps the spyware from calling home.
Every generation has "wtf is that" and what my 13 year old is going through is "WTF IS THAT!??"
Or go the panopticon route: "I have software on the router that can see everything you do, but I don't usually look at it."
Not sure that "kids" is well defined here. But it seems completely normal that "kids" would be watched by their parents.
I realize that the appropriate nature of "watching" is going to change with the age of the "kid", but oversight and watchfulness by a parent shouldn't be viewed as inherently problematic.
They already are though. Usually by tech companies without the kid's best interests at heart.
Tailor it to the kid. Certain amounts of anxiety in developing minors around surveillance seem healthy, especially given the risks associated with unfettered access to the dangerous fire-hose that is the internet which itself has tracking at every corner.