Parental controls?
Hi all,
I'm getting a pc for my daughter. I'll install Fedora KDE Spin. I'm looking for a parental control solution that also integrates with her Android phone. I'm currently using Google's Family Link which while not great it offers enough. I'd be happy to move to any other solution that can count both device's usage screen time as one so she doesn't use up her phone and then move to the PC.
Any cool recommendations?
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// sry for offtop but
Is everyone is fine with parental control nowadays? It was for paranoid parents only in my childhood and I didn't know anyone with parental control really.
The worst thing to me and my friends was hidden power supply cable if you did something really wrong.
It's not really random internet strangers' place to judge someone's parenting choices. We don't know their overall parenting style, the personality of the child, what lessons they may be trying to teach, etc. The only thing we know for certain is that they want to use parental controls, perhaps to ensure they stay safe as they learn how to use the internet responsibly while also having a level of autonomy.
That's not helicopter parenting, that's just prudent.
Exactly. I don't personally have kids so I also feel especially out of line telling someone else how to raise theirs. Parenting isn't easy, and there's tough questions like "How do I get my child to learn good habits around screen time so they don't end up addicted to devices built for addiction?" Honestly, I personally don't know a better way other than loosely (not strictly) limiting screen time enough so that they naturally learn good habits over time, and that unfortunately means you need to monitor screen time. As an adult I noticed a lot of my good habits were things my parents instilled in me in my youth that I hadn't really thought about, like drinking a lot of water, for one. They didn't prevent me from drinking soda at all, but they limited my intake at home and made sure when I was home I was drinking lots of water and not just juice or soda, they didn't try to control me outside of the house when I was making my own decisions... and now I drink water a lot because it just feels normal. It's a habit they got me into, and because it became a habit I'm left with a good habit in my adulthood. I don't see how it would be any different in getting a kid to respect screen time as an adult.
God... I wish my parents had done more to monitor my screen time because I'm bad at this shit.
Yeah I guess you're right and that depends on the child and their parents themselves.
My parents weren't limiting my time in any way and that helped me to become software engineer actually so to me it turned out to be a good thing. If I did have my screen time limited I would totally spend it on computer.games and not CS. I'm sure about it because I spent a lot of time playing too haha
My daughter has ADHD and if we don't limit her screen time she can literally spend the whole day sitting and watching Minecraft videos, and then later she gets very grumpy, so yeah while I absolutely hate having to do it, it's more for her own health than content exposure (not blocking websites and app installation other than by age recommendation).
Oh, sorry, that sounds totally understandable - I wish my best to both you and her!
And don't see anything wrong with that either way - was just interested how common it is
If your goal is to interrupt her usage to avoid excessive usage, would a pomodoro timer help?
https://gnomepomodoro.org/
I dunno if that can be setup to force lock the screen or something, but maybe its helpful? Depends if its easy to override?
I wonder if maybe some kind of notification system for her, and you, would be useful (in addition to blocking).
Then maybe you can interrupt her, perhaps talk about it, or setup some tools for her to use to help manage stuff and learn along the way.
Guess what I'm going for is the learning/growth angle, rather than just automatic constraints (which hy themselves don't teach or help us learn to manage this stuff ourselves).
Seems like there's a need for all this for all kids, not just neuro-atypical.
You should absolutely monitor and restrict content for for children
I agree that parents can get overzealoused but that doesn't mean it needs to be the wild west with no monitoring