4 ms·

Being dad of 2 y/o and 9 y/o. Where during lockdown younger kid was strategically getting "screen time" so older kid could study & wife and I could work... Aft

Being dad of 2 y/o and 9 y/o. Where during lockdown younger kid was strategically getting "screen time" so older kid could study & wife and I could work... After opening new or commenting on existing similar bugs/features reports to YT/Google, trying things mentioned in other comments (e.g.: /etc/hosts, router or OpenDNS filtering...) as well as (being software engineer) also experimenting with writing something myself. Somehow accidentally I've ran into https://account.microsoft.com/family/about https://account.microsoft.com/family/about. And I couldn't believe how something that was produced by company that just "a couple of years ago" was the prime example of how bad big-tech can be (also forced employee performance bell-curve, "Developers! Developers! Developers!" and many other :facepalm" things)... That M$ company produced something that literally "just fucking works exactly as you would imagine/hope it does". Seriously - last email I got from M$ is: "Hi {my_name}, {kids_name} wants more screen time today. How much extra time would you like to give them? 15 minutes 30 minutes 1 hour 2 hours 8 hours I don’t want to give more time today" And the one before that was: "Hi {my_name}, {kids_name} wants more time on this app today. Extra time starts right after it's added. Roblox How much extra time would you like to give them? 15 minutes 30 minutes 1 hour 2 hours 3 hours I don’t want to give more time today To change the daily limits for Roblox, you can go to App and game limits." For context - to earn "game time" he first did some reading and math today. So latter his "Roblox time" for today (weekend) was first to run out, followed by overall "screen time". And really the only thing I've been wondering is should we ditch Android devices/tablets and get M$/Windows stuff instead? Meanwhile the whole "Should we ditch Sony/PS for XBox (which plays along because it's M$)?" is resolved by simply not getting next gen game console and instead kid starting to play and appreciate PC gaming \o/

skissane 5y ago
> That M$ company produced something that literally "just fucking works exactly as you would imagine/hope it does". We used to use that with our son when he was younger. We found some problems with it: 1) Popping up a button saying "ask a parent for more time" was a problem – it was encouraging him in asking for more. I wish there was a way to turn that off, but at least at the time there wasn't 2) It was unreliable, sometimes we would give him more time and he wouldn't get it and he'd get upset 3) The monitoring data on how much time he used on each app was often wrong We haven't used it for a couple of years though, so maybe it has improved since. I wrote my own parental control software and we use that now. Its big advantage is that it does exactly what I want, and I can experiment with changing how it behaves and observing how our children respond – can't get that with an off-the-shelf solution

skissane 5y ago

> That M$ company produced something that literally "just fucking works exactly as you would imagine/hope it does". We used to use that with our son when he was younger. We found some problems with it: 1) Popping up a button saying "ask a parent for more time" was a problem – it was encouraging him in asking for more. I wish there was a way to turn that off, but at least at the time there wasn't 2) It was unreliable, sometimes we would give him more time and he wouldn't get it and he'd get upset 3) The monitoring data on how much time he used on each app was often wrong We haven't used it for a couple of years though, so maybe it has improved since. I wrote my own parental control software and we use that now. Its big advantage is that it does exactly what I want, and I can experiment with changing how it behaves and observing how our children respond – can't get that with an off-the-shelf solution