Comment by fma
2 days ago
>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
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I was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
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We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
Who said it had to be unfettered?
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My comment got a lot of traction but for context my kids are early in elementary school, far from their teenage years.
The intention of the iPad was to watch some educational videos, check out books, magazines from the library.
They still have occasional access but only with direct active supervision (i.e we are next to them vs we are making dinner).
As they get older, we will revisit.
Don't apologise. Children end up sending pictures of themselves in their underwear to strangers all the time because 12 year olds panic when someone puts the screws on them. Their brains just work differently.
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
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Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
This demonstrates why forcing people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs is a stupid, stupid policy.
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The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
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When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
Adversarially train the children, rlai works on human brains too?
That’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE you mean :-)
Dude. 80’s kids think of FAT32 as that new filesystem that supports more than 8.3.
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My childhood was filled with increasing escalations of restrictions to both the computer and the network, and my workarounds.
Excellent education
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
I've concluded the only way to avoid workarounds it to reduce my own screen time. I stopped having a tablet myself. Got off the Iphone too.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
Try discipline
Children don't have fully formed brains. There's a wildly varying ceiling on the efficacy of discipline.
curious kind of discipline you have in mind.
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No one asked.
Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
Our school's library computers (mind you I was early 20s by then) did not allow people to just sit down and go online, an admin had to log in first.
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.
We were once 1337 hackers too
A friend was woken up by his young kid trying to surreptitiously lever his finger onto the TouchID sensor to pay for a game dlc.
LMAO incredible
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You are teaching your children to be even more secretive and hide things from you even better.
Great. They are learning good security culture. That will be useful later in life when every move they make will be surveilled.