I saw a post recently about someone setting up parental controls -- screentime, blocked sites, etc. -- and it made me wonder.
In my childhood, my free time was very flexible. Within this low-pressure flexibility I was naturally curious, in all directions -- that meant both watching brainteaser videos, and watching Gmod brainrot. I had little exposure to video games other than Minecraft which ran poorly on my machine, so I tended to surf Flash games and YouTube.
Strikingly, while watching a brainteaser video, tiny me had a thought:
I'm glad my dad doesn't make me watch educational videos like the other kids in school have to.
For some reason, I wanted to remember that to "remember what my thought process was as a child" so that memory has stuck with me.
Onto the meat: if I had had a capped screentime, like a timer I could see, and knew that I was being watched in some way, I'd feel pressure. For example,
10 minutes left. Oh no. I didn't have fun yet. I didn't have fun yet!!
Oh no, I'm gonna get in so much trouble for watching another YTP...
and maybe that pressure wouldn't have made me into an independent, curious kid, to the person I am now. Maybe it would've made me fearful or suspicious instead. I was suspicious once, when one of my parents said "I can see what you browse from the other room" -- so I ran the scientific method to verify if they were. (I wrote "HI MOM" on Paint, and tested if her expression changed.)
So what about now? Were we too free, and now it's our job to tighten the next generation? I said "butthead" often. I loved asdfmovie, but my parents probably wouldn't have. I watched SpingeBill YTPs (at least it's not corporatized YouTube Kids).
Or differently: do we watch our kids without them knowing? Write a keylogger? Or just take router logs? Do we prosecute them like some sort of panopticon, for their own good?
Or do we completely forgo this? Take an Adventure Playground approach?
Of course, I don't expect a one-size-fits-all answer. Where do you stand, and why?
As a kid I was effectively given unlimited screentime, and that definitely shaped me into adulthood for better and for worse. My wife has severe insomnia so she often sleeps until 11am, and my 4 year old always gets up around 7:30am so before she started school we setup an old phone with a managed google account with a 2.5 hour screentime limit, and a 30 minute limit for the YouTube Kids app (grandma got her hooked on YouTube of course so no putting that cat back into the bag) to encourage more enriching content (I preinstalled the PBS Kids apps, as well as a number of age-appropriate games) She's at an age where she's extremely impressionable and without locking things down will end up installing things by clicking ads or watching weird stuff she probably shouldn't be watching.
In the near future my plan is to gift my 4 year old an old ewaste laptop I acquired off a friend and a Minecraft account since she's really been getting into Minecraft when she gets to play on my or my wife's computers, and I'll probably play it by ear for when to raise the parental controls, but right now she's simply not ready for unrestricted internet access. I probably won't limit screentime on the computer other than telling her its time to do something else when she's been on the computer for too long, but we'll play it by ear.