Comment by jon-wood

I'm glad I'm not the only person with this approach. We have a 12 year old son and we've never really gone overboard with restricting what he's permitted to do with his free time, if he wants to watch crap on YouTube then fine its his time. What we will do is talk to him about what he's doing, maybe sometimes ask why he's doing it ("hey, you appear to have watched the first 30 seconds of 5 videos in a row, have you considered doing something else?")

We also don't have any hard blocks on internet access, that's also managed via a combination of talking to each other and keeping half an eye on what he's up to. His computer is in a public part of the house, not hidden away upstairs, and anytime I'm passing by I'm going to take a glance at the screen and see what's going on.

Overall I think teaching kids how to do things in moderation, and to consider what they're doing and why, is far healthier than denying them access entirely. You can tell the kids who were never allowed a drop of alcohol in the first week of university - they're the ones who've passed out in a bar, and are being gently guided home by the kids who were given some freedom a bit earlier in an environment where someone's going to step in if they're getting out of hand.

Who knows, maybe he'll grow up to be an absolute monster, and one day I'll look back on this comment and how naive I was, but for now it seems to be working.