Do you have a "technology policy" for your kids?

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Allegra

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With kids being exposed to computers, the internet, and social media at a very young age, I was curious as to what other CM members had as a policy regarding internet technology. My eldest child is only six, and we don’t let our kids have any internet access currently. I figured we had some time before we had to worry about that, but apparently my eldest is already “late to the game” as she doesn’t have access to “Dreambox” and “Seesaw” which are now essential to kindergarten. I literally just bought my first smartphone last week. Apparently my 6yo needs her own device in order to keep up with competitions at school. (Like literal competitions, not keeping up with the Jones’ kids.) I feel icky seeing a child her age coming home from school and staring at a device for hours. Currently, she’s only missing out on winning erasers shaped like hamburgers by not participating in this stuff, but I’m trying to piece together a plan for what hills I prefer to die on. My husband says he’s fine with whatever I think is best. So what are your policies? No internet? Supervised use only? Time limits? Trusting them with it as long as they don’t give you a reason not to? Free range?
 
I don’t have kids so feel free to take my opinion and toss it round out the window 🙂

Like it or not it’s a digital world. Using “the internet” is such an all encompassing term that I don’t think you could ever pass a good/bad judgement on the whole thing. Luckily in addition to there being more junk out there for kids to rot their brain on, there’s also more educational resources and brain-building tools/games/etc than ever before as well. I’d consider starting with a tablet style device if you’re going to buy something. They all have parental controls you can enable and you could have a rule such as using it only in the living room or something, not in the bedrooms; and with a limited number of ‘free time’ use of it, say 30 minutes a day where they can watch youtube or whatever you agree on, with other use being for school or whatever, e.g. “can i use the tablet to do my history homework?”. Can always tie the ‘free time’ to grades as well, perhaps adding some time each semester so long as their grades stay up.

No matter what your child will need skills using this type of equipment and navigating the web, it may merely be a ‘good idea’ at 6 but it’ll be critical in just a few years and essential in the real world for pretty much any job.
 
I think it’s too young, and I personally would be asking her teacher why this is the way things work. It’s like your child is being “punished” for not having a way to earn the erasers. It was the same way when my, now grown, children were in school. Teachers assumed that every household had a computer at the time, but they didn’t.
 
For reference, I have a 4th grader, 2 2nd graders, and a toddler. No unsupervised use. Devices are communal and stay in communal areas. If internet access is needed, we take a look at where they are going first. There are programs to enforce that but so far we’re on an honor policy since they are in communal areas. 95% of the time they are using the same websites they use at school for educational videos and games.

We don’t have time limits currently. Should probably start that but having to share the devices helps immensely.

Also, devices are normally hand me downs from me or they use mine. I’m looking at buying a handheld gaming system for ODD this year and that will be the first time she’s gotten a device that didn’t go through me first. It will have parental controls enforced and will have the same communal area use rule.
 
I don’t have kids but the opinion from people that give talks about this stuff is that it’s negligence to not have a technology policy for kids. There can’t be free reign or else there’s like a 99% chance they’ll end up somewhere they shouldn’t at some point.
 
At what point do you think you will begin allowing unsupervised use, if ever.
 
I don’t really think that using a tablet is a “skill” that must be developed. The websites and apps my 6yo is using in school will likely be obsolete by the time I finish this post. One can’t realistically pretend that training a child to use an educational app that’s “all the rage” right now is going to help her for a technological future we can’t even begin to predict. Other than coding and maybe typing, there’s not alot of technological “skills” that have stood the test of time, even within my slower moving generation. And technological companies make money by selling things that are approachable by the highest number of people possible. They aren’t making things for an educated elect. If someone needs technology for their benefit, they can learn when they need it. I simply don’t buy the idea that my 6yo is learning invaluable life skills from playing a math video game. (except for math of course.)
 
Allegra said:
Other than coding and maybe typing, there’s not alot of technological “skills” that have stood the test of time, even within my slower moving generation.
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Coding has changed as rapidly as anything else. The proficiency doesn’t come with learning one thing, the proficiency comes with learning to move with the changing technology. Don’t confuse the specific with the general, learning shapes may not be a good life skill either, no one gets a job identifying shapes, but try to get a job when you can’t (yes, weirdly extreme example I know).
 
No kids, here.

As for me and hubby – internet for e-mail, some hobby or special interest forums (such as this one), and Googling occasionally to look stuff up for purposes of learning and researching.

Ancestry for finding previously unknown relatives, and for doing genealogy stuff.

No social media.

No online games or shopping.

No online banking or bill paying.

No online trading.

No smart phones. Just a good old reliable land line that is simple to use, doesn’t drop calls, doesn’t need battery recharging, still works during a power outages, doesn’t need a cell signal, doesn’t require purchasing time on it.

There are four ways our relatives and friends can reach us, if they need to:

e-mail
phone call
written correspondence
personal visits (with reasonable advance notice)

Keeps our lives simple while still letting us stay in touch with loved ones and others whom we need to communicate with from time to time.
 
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I honestly don’t know. I mean it will happen eventually when we give then their own phones that they can take places. But I’m probably going to start with a phone that’s not a smart phone or a smart phone that’s got some tight controls and relax them as they get older and/or prove that they can handle it.

But I’m not planning on doing that for a few years yet, unless a need arises.
 
But since the technology is always changing, I’m not convinced that setting a 6yo in front of a screen an hour a night is going to teach her anything other than how to use that specific game. Your example kind of supports my point. Shapes are a universal concept that is adaptable to almost any situation. Playing these video games isn’t. Now, if they were teaching the kids to use the tablet to measure something, record something, research something, or publish something, then I could maybe get on board. There is a theory to those concepts that is going to transfer to whatever technology evolves.
 
I’m hoping those phones still exist! When I went last week to replace my “dumb phone” because it suddenly kept dropping calls, they told me that the network it ran on was obsolete and the only phones they still sold other than smartphones were prepaid.
 
I do think this depends on the game and how it’s being used. A math video game is probably one where you’re only going to pick up the math skills and there may be other (potentially better) ways to learn them. So in your specific case, I could see the limited utility.

But there are programs like Scratch, which is a programming language created for elementary aged kids to learn how to code. Block based programming may not get a person far but the foundational concepts of loops, if- then statements, etc would still be the same in the majority of commonly used programming languages today and for the last several decades. So I wouldn’t discount all situations where these games are used for learning.
 
My 6 year old grandson lived in another household until he was 3, when he came to live with us. He had been given a Kindle, which I hid for over a year since he was hooked on it and would have meltdowns.

His dad eventually gave it back to him, so I got Amazon Freetime on it, which has a parent dashboard that I can set as far as what and when he can watch it.

He watches it an hour after school,; it has videos like Fireman Sam and so on, and games he can play. If I were starting over, I would maybe start when he was 6 or 7 (definitely not 3) and allow an hour on weekend days, not on weekdays.

Amazon has a Freetime Kindle designed for the system, which I think is a good one. I think knowing how to use tech is a useful skill, so I wouldn’t ban it entirely. But it definitely needs supervision.
 
My oldest is almost three, the most he has currently been allowed to look at pictures of dogs on my phone while I try to put his brother down for a nap.

I am worried about technology requirements in schools as he gets older. If tablets are still required it may be what pushes us over the edge for homeschooling. We live in a “good” school district and when a child starts school they receive a tablet to do school assignments on. Which I think is bonkers.
 
So in the early aught’s when my daughter was a little one, in elementary school, I let her use my computer to do math games and other learning games. She was allowed a certain amount of time each day (homework had to be done, she had to have spent some time outside playing --weather permitting–, and it was always supervised). At the time the home computer was a PC and it was in the kitchen so she usually used it while I was fixing dinner.

I recommend talking to her teacher to see what is really required and what is not.

By the time my daughter was in middle school a laptop became convenient for school work but used parental controls which required a password to continue on after the allotted time (and only for homework). No Facebook until she turned 13 (I think I was the only mother who observed that policy). Everyone else seems to be okay with letting their kids fudge their dates of birth. All friend requests had to be approved by me for the first year and then I drummed the rule into her --If you wouldn’t be friends in real life, you should be friends on social media. To date, she only has 45 friends on FB.

Cell phones: she had an old-fashioned flip phone (not smart) in third grade due to after school latch key situation.
No cell phones allowed at the dinner table (include DAD).

I also had her sign a computer use contract in middle school that outlined what I expected and the consequences if she didn’t follow the rules.
 
Allegra said:
So what are your policies? No internet? Supervised use only? Time limits? Trusting them with it as long as they don’t give you a reason not to? Free range?
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I haven’t read the replies but can tell you what we do. I printed off a template for a chore chart and assigned the kids to make their beds, pick up stuff from their bedroom floors, and complete three daily, rotating assigned chores that include things like taking out the garbage, cleaning the litter box, and sweeping the kitchen. Access to gaming is always pending chore completion, and believe me, they’ll try to do the minimum, lol!

We have no tablets, (we had 2 - kids broke both), a PC, and an X-Box. (They left everything a mess, and I had no privacy). They each get one hour of gaming per day. If they throw fits at the end of their turns, the lose the next day. (Yep - I’m harsh). Sometimes we’ll go to the library for gaming, although I don’t like how libraries are getting so noisy and less and less about books and reading.

Finally, we game on Thursdays at the library, while my oldest attends an activity there, and Friday through Sunday.

I suspect that I’m a harsher parent than most, so don’t look to me to figure out the “norm.” But hopefully that gives you an idea.
 
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