You should still do some blocking to make sure he learns how to circumvent them. Those are valuable skills to have later in life, I still profit from the lessons I learned circumventing high school internet restrictions.
I'm confident he already has those skills. When he was in fourth grade, my wife and I were called into a meeting with the (private) school Principal because my son had "hacked all of the tablets used for class so kids could play games on them."
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.
Re:Business Essentials
by vishnugupta on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:37PM
(#29177530)
Through Norton's suite I had filtered out YouTube app from being installed. It took ~10 minutes for my 5 yo to figure out use it via Safari :-| Since then it's been education over enforcement as OPs have mentioned.
Does the Norton suite not have website/URLbase filtering? Weak sauce.
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.