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Limiting Kids' Computer Time?
Bibu asks: "As a parent of three, I have to spend a lot of effort to keep my kids away from the computer. Until now, we had a Linux box in which a little cron script would just shutdown the machine after half an hour, when the kids were using it. Does someone on Slashdot have a fancier solution? One that keeps track, controls the total time per user per day, and would warn the user of the upcoming deadline (e.g. in five minutes their time is up)? Since we just moved to Mac OS X, solutions for that platform are preferred."
Come on. Let the little bastards run free. None of this, I don't want the to turn out like me BS.
Set some rules and enforce them. If the kids don't follow the limits you set now for computer use, what makes you think they're going to follow limits you set in a few years when the consequences are a bit more serious? In 10 years will you be writing Ask Slashdot looking for advice on how to limit their car usage based on miles driven, time of day and past usage?
Why limit their time?
Concentrate on making sure they do other things too - encorage them to do their homework, or some kind of exercise, etc. If they're doing that, they're not on the computer. If they don't need to be doing other things, why not let them decide what to do?
My parents got me a Commodore 64 when I was 12. They didn't even know what a computer was, and they couldn't fathom that it was little more than a toy.
Yet, they left me the $#*!@) alone, and I played with it and played with it, and I'm a computer programmer today.
Let the kids have some #$)#@ing joy in their life. If they're on too long, then take them off yourself.
Perhaps, OMFG, they're actually DOING SOMETHING USEFUL, like filing emancipation papers!
What exactly do the kids do? If they play games all day or chat, then I can understand your concern. But if they are doing something worthwhile, like trying to figure out how the machine works, maybe drawing a picture, or even programming something simple, then I think limiting their time would be more harmful than beneficial. Imagine if you were working, just realized the solution to a problem, and suddenly the machine shuts down on you.
Saying "johnny you have 30 minutes of computer tonight" and "JOHNNY! You'd better be off that computer and doing your homework in 5 minutes!" always works
...and that's all there is to it.
...I would personally reserve it for punishment situations. A long time ago when my time spent playing games and IMing was seriously out of line, my parents used this to slap me and my grades back into shape. After about a month I got the picture and was back on track (I had the grades to prove it,) buy my parents decided to keep the policy going for another six months. I obviously wasn't happy with it at the time, but in retrospect, it was a really unneccessary move on their part that only made me feel spiteful rather than teach me to manage my time.
Arbitrary time limitations should be a short-term thing rather than a permanent policy, because you're doing your kids a disservice by managing their time for them, which is a life skill they need to acquire on their own. Making sure your kids' work is done and that they're being social with you on a day-by-day basis is much more effective, and they won't hate you for it.
cron works on OS X too. http://www.macosxhints.com/ has something on this, I believe.
Nobody wants to hear your opinion about parenting based on your experiences as a child. If you're a parent, you're qualified to offer an opinion (not impose one). If you're not, don't tell this guy how to parent his children. Regardless of whether you are or you aren't, the fact is that this guy has already made a decision to limit his kids' computer time, and you aren't going to convince him otherwise. He's looking for a technical solution - one that may also help other people who need to automate computer timing controls, perhaps for someone not their kids.
Now, back on topic: cron's a good start, but AppleScript can help you. Schedule the command osascript -e "display dialog \"You have five minutes left on the computer\"" & sleep 300 && osascript -e "tell app \"Finder\" to log out" - it's probably a little cleaner of an interface that way. Ampersands sic: the single ampersand causes the first command to run in the background, so the timer starts ticking as soon as the dialog appears. The double ampersand waits for the five minutes to finish. (This isn't the idea behind the different syntaxes, but it's close enough for our purposes.)
Be a responsible parent. Your kids don't listen to you? Beat them.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Why not have a linux box someplace else runing Mr. House, and the computer plugged into an X10 appliance module that they have to enter a user code to turn on? Or Windows 98 and Homeseer? I believe both have just such a TV/Videogame timer in them with upper limit daily & weekly quotas. Any modern operating system ought to be able to recover just fine from a power outage. And since the software is in a separate machine, it's less hackable.
OTOH, I agree with most of the previous posts- all time spent on the computer not in "addictive" activities such as web browsing, messaging, slashdot and gaming is indeed profitable later on in life. Most likely MORE profitable than any homework the kids might have.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Be a parent. Don't rely on technology to monitor your kids. That's YOUR job.
# open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).
man shutdown
man crontab
man sudo
# should have you nicely set up it.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
Applescript is your friend, and most of your cron job stuff should move over to OS X just fine, just read the man page ;)
On a related note, and perhaps you are not looking for opinions on this, but if your children are doing their homework, eating their vegetables, finishing their chores, etc. then limiting their computer usage will probably feel like more of a punishment than a guideline. You might have better experience monitoring them in person, rather than scripting something. This is, of course, unless you're doing this because of a scarce resource. Depending on how determined your children are, and their skills, you might find them circumventing you within a short period of time (fostering problem solving skills and self reliance, but at the expense of your authority).
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
I can't WAIT until your kids get older and rebel.
What you need is a device like a Basic Stamp which you can connect to the Mac (possibly using a USB->Serial adapter). You can then connect that to a relay board that can switch high voltages such as this. Now you install a pair of flat metal plates on the seat your kids sit on when using the computer and hook them up to a relay on the relay board. Now you can write a simple app that gives your kids a 110V shock after a designated time. My kids complained at first because they said it didn't give them much warning. So later I added a pair of step down transformers to give them shocks at 30V and 60V before going for the big one. Let me tell you: I've had no problem with computer overuse.
Seriously, have you ever tried to get anything done in half an hour?
That said, your kids already know how to boot up knoppix, temporarily shut off your cron script, reboot, play games, turn the script back on, and shut down the computer before you get home. And if they don't know it yet, they'l figure it out. Nothing motivates kids like excessive and arbitrary restrictions.
When I was a kid, my parents did similar things. It only served to make me angry. The time I spent using the computer was a lot more useful than, say, the time I spent running around outside or reading school books for no reason. I figured out pretty quickly how to defeat their various computer-time-limiting methods.
Good luck.
P.S. I have to know... is this Ask Slashdot a troll? Did the editors approve it because they knew people would get riled up?
P.P.S. Yes, this answer is offtopic. Saying this is worth burning some mod points.
A quick read of the post reveals that he's already doing that. Here's the relevant quote:
"Until now, we had a Linux box in which a little cron script would just shutdown the machine after half an hour, when the kids were using it. Does someone on Slashdot have a fancier solution?"
And how much time do *you* spend in front of your computer?
They'll notice that you're allowed to play on the computer more than they are, and for longer stints, and they're going to get resentful.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I may be mistaken but since macos X is a BSD you should be able to just add
/etc/login.conf
D _Basics.html
accounted true
daytime time
to
where accounted turns accounting on and where time is the time in seconds but can prefixed in the unix way i.e. 2h is 2 hours.
daytime limits the total wall clock time allowed per day. You can also set per session limits (sessiontime) and total times per week (weektime) as well, if you would like as well.
use the command warntime to set the end of time warning, but it may send this to the login tty rather than to X (or whatever the mac graphics are).
For the exact format take a look at:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/01/17/FreeBS
Sit them down. Tell them their time limits. They can budget their time accordingly. If they don't, they should be disciplined. They need to learn how to budget their time, and discipline themselves. Don't impose technical solutions to moral/character issues. This is a great opportunity to help your children become more mature!
If you have to use external measures to limit their time, you've already failed.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
I know too many kids who sit at their computers to avoid going outside and playing with other kids. If this is your reason for limiting their time at the keyboard then it is a good thing, though 30 minutes is unrealistic. I wouldn't be too concerned until the 3rd hour or so.
It fundamentally depends on what they would be doing without the PC. If they would be watching TV then by all means let 'em type. PCs make kids smarter whereas TVs only make people lazy and stupid. Both PCs and TVs, however, contribute to the skyrocketing rate of childhood obesity and that's a _very_ bad thing.
As long as they're walking or cycling to school, playing sports afterwards, and not overweight then I don't think you really want to limit their computer time.
I think some routers allow you to set which times during the day an ip/mac address can connect to the internet. I would be bored as hell on my computer without an internet connection.
The pool timer will shut down electricity at a specified time, the UPS will give the kids a warning, along with an annoying beep. As long as the kids don't have physical access to reroute the power, you shouldn't have a problem.
There's tons of apps...SoftwareTime is one of them... http://www.softwaretime.com/
It looks pretty robust, probably takes advantage of a fair amount of the features built into Windows, by the looks of some of the interface screens.
This guy is a moron... half an hour may not even be enough time to COMPLETE THEIR HOMEWORK -- most teachers want stuff TYPED these days, and espically papers. Instead of limiting their time, let them learn on their own.
The program you're looking for is called Mac Minder. I've used it to monitor the amount of time my young sisters spend on their computer at home and it works flawlessly. If you're also looking for a filtering solution try Dan's Guardian which has been turned into a package for MacOS users called DG Complete.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
... who have kids. Being a bit of geek I get to make/rebuild/refresh/re_what_have_you a lot of boxes for my friends' kids. So, although I don't have personal experience, I have seen A LOT of cases.
...
Basically, as I am sure others will no doubt point it out, YOU have to take responsibility. Don't rely on the box. I can honestly say that _I_ haven't heard about any of my friend's kids have a problem with spending too much time in front of the computer. No doubt it hapens in some cases, but
As an aside, I can tell you for a fact that having free - as in not timed - access to computers has actually improved the grades of quite a few of my friends' kids. Basically, their parents said "After you are done with your chores and your homework you can "play" with the computer." The story I most often hear from my friends is that while it used to take all afternoon for the kids to finish everything, they are now done in a couple/three hours. Also, since they know that they get reduced computer priviledges for messing up, they do a better job of everything. You can take this with a grain of salt, as this is, statistically, a relatively small sample, I think I heard that from about seven or eight of my friends only. Their kids are from about 7 to about 13 years old, and they are involved in a lot of other activities.
As another aside, some of the kids, mainly boys, but also a couple of the older girls, have asked me about "that Linux" and a few have asked me to load it on their previously Windows running machines.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
I'm going to have to disagree with any kind of monitoring or restrictions on time use. I did nothing but game at first, then moved on to learning how the computer worked while trying to fix my games and modify them(mods, extra levels, etc). If I only had a half hour a day, I'd probably never have done that. I'd only have enough time to get a little deathmatch in and then that would be it. And then chat isn't all bad. Slashdot has taught me a lot. I don't understand time restrictions on the computer. I could have either been playing Asheron's Call all night on the weekends, or hanging out at the mall or going to parties experimenting like all the other teens in middle school and highschool.
Nobody wants to hear your opinion about parenting based on your experiences as a child.
Maybe you don't want to hear it. Perhaps you should let the submitter of the question decide what he does/doesn't want to hear. Oddly enough, that is not your decision to make.
If you're a parent, you're qualified to offer an opinion (not impose one). If you're not, don't tell this guy how to parent his children.
I find it both amusing and disturbing that people who manage to procreate think this imbues them with knowledge far beyond that of non-parents. If you think the opinion of a dullard who happens to be a parent is more valuable than the opinion of an educated, well-read non-parent, then I fear for your children.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
... when I was a kid my parents allowed me 1 hour a week with my computer. Considering the thing took 35 minutes to boot up...erk! I used to write programs out in the back of my schoolbooks and have a great big pad of code ready for my weekly session. Later, when I was a teenager, my parents locked the computer away 6 days a week. However they kept forgetting to lock away all my spare parts, so I used to build a new system from the spares while they were at work and disassemble before they returned home. They never caught on...
Those were the days...
--cros13
Disclaimer: I'm just a teenager myself (age: 15.5) but I have perfectly valid reasons for spending 90% of my non-educational time tinkering with computers. I should not (and never have been) considered similar to other people my age, rather as an adult.
Do you have any real reason why you want to limit time?
Kids don't have cars. If they had a chaffeur to drive them around at their request they stil wouldn't use it. IM is the wonder product for people of their age and I'd suggest you be careful in trying to limit it. Despite what you think, school (and specifically recess time) is not a perfect place to socialise, so don't use bulls*it excuses like "You can talk to x tomorrow". Let your kids try to manage their own time and let them bite the consequences if they manage it incorrectly - TIGHTARSE PARENTING DOES NOT WORK. I HAVE SEEN IT FAIL MANY TIMES.
Excercise? Seriously, its time someone tries to create a new wonder drug to burn fat doing less work. Sport is overvalued in the world, thanks to you Americans and your broken education system. Thanks a lot for making my life difficult by having class mates that have no ambitions whatsoever than to be free advertising space for their favorite surf brands. Ok, end rant. If they want to excercise, they will. Encorage but do not force.
Do police any bad engrish that you see - computers aren't mobile phones. Believe it or not though, using proper english on "teen-centric" IM networks such as MSN gets you called a nerd by some idiots, so be careful not to destroy social lives.
One therory I have about the over use of discipline is that once you start using it excessively on a person, such person will quickly lose any motivation and be more willing to do something wrong*. Don't be an arse, you are only creating more problems.
* I suppose that holds up with the long standing fact that teenagers will deliberately break rules. By punishing them, you are giving them rules to break. Encorage use of common sense not strict enforcement.
Here's an idea. Try being a parent and monitoring them. Worked wonders for previous generations.
My parents were never rich. But they did want me to have a good education. In the 1980's, everybody and their brother just knew that the secret of a good education was to get your kid(s) a computer. Now, of course, the leader of this charge was mainly Apple, with their IIe and IIc lines (the Mac had just barely come out, and it was expensive and not targetted toward kids), Radio Shack had their Color Computer line, Atari had the 600 and 800, and Commodore had the Vic-20 and 64. Hardly any of the schools had computers - I remember when my elementary school got its first Apple IIe, they wheeled it around on a cart, and each class got it for a week. Our school was small enough that we managed to get it twice a year (!). It was popular enough, though, that in a couple of years they openned up an Apple "lab" next to the school library, with about 20 Apple IIe's for the kids and teachers.
Play your games, learn typing, learn spelling, play with LOGO, and if you really knew what you were doing, you could play with BASIC.
Those were the days - me and a few of my friends all had computers. One of us had a Timex Sinclair (ugh), a couple of us had C64's, I personally had a TRS-80 Color Computer. None of us cared about incompatibility - we played with BASIC, traded code written down on paper or printouts - I remember the effort we put in to get a maze drawing program working that a friend of my friend who lived nearby, who had a TRS-80 Model 4 (power!), had given him. We were in the 5th grade. Our computers were hooked up to TVs in our bedrooms, and we were hooked.
A couple of years passed, most of us had floppy drives by then, and a few of us got lucky: we begged, we pleaded, and we got modems. Not anything fancy, most of us got 300 baud manual dial/pickup things - one of the lucky guys got a 1200 baud screamer. This was in the 7th grade. We BBS'ed and had a blast dialing locally when we could. I had a friend who was a little more daring (and in high school) at the time, who had a phone junction box outside his bedroom. He managed to get it open, jack into someone's line, and would dial long-distance to LA, and bring back rare downloads from places like the the MetalShop BBS (I still have a printout of those files I traded with him, somewhere)...
We surfed the beginning - I later discovered things like TymeNet and such, but never managed to get internet access (not possible unless you were really lucky and went to one of the local universities or colleges) - that had to wait. But BBS'ing was where it was. I was a kid, and still I managed to get that dreaded evil of parents: Porn. Yeah, it was black and white or 4 color at best, blocky, and not the greatest stuff - but yeah, I delved into teh 3v1L. We all did. We all had fun. We went to school, we came home, we hacked our machines. I still have a lightgun I fashioned for mine out of junk parts, a toilet paper tube, some cardboard, and a magnifying lens - grafted onto a joystick. We coded. We learned. For all of it, we got an education, learned to program, improved our grades, and stuck with it through school...
Today, I am proud to say I am a professional software developer. I am proud of my skills, in software, and in hardware. I continue to increase my knowledge of these magical boxes daily. I don't know where I would be today had my parents never bought me one so long ago.
My parents never limited my time - unless my grades got low (yeah, I had problems just like every other kid). That would happen, my computer would be taken away for a while - that forced me to be a better student, to study more, and to keep my grades up. I learned how to use my machine to allow me to make my grades better, to learn how to learn. My computer was always in my room, and eventually, I got others (just before leaving high school in 1991, I had three computers in my room, two of them "networked" via the serial ports - the third was a laptop).
All I am trying to get at here is how my life would have, could have,
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Assuming you have an Internet connection, you should get BumperCar from Freeverse. It's got a whitelist, timing functions, tracking, etc. It's robust too, a company I worked for ran several "kiddie" stress tests against it--using denary addresses, trying to proxy around, homemade javascript, etc. I can confidently say that very few 8th graders can beat it if you set things correctly. I cannot say the same for things like CyberSitter--those are comically poor at keeping your kids away from porn, gambling, and warez.
blarg.
I'm not a sports fanatic by any means, but what's wrong with helping your child balance physical and intellectual disciplines? Your post seems to suggest that children should be allowed to dismiss any modicum of moderation; I think this is a recipe for disaster in adulthood.
Apologies in advance if I missed a joke. I'm but a poor dimwitted ex-student of US origin.
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I have squid and squidguard set up on my firewall box. The kid's computers are proxied through there. Yes, they'll eventually figure it out, if they're tech savvy, but thene again, that's what I'm counting on.
To be Debian centric: apt-get install squid squidguard chastity-list
Configure to your heart's delight.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.