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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."
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?
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.
...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.
In a way I agree here, Computer time shouldn't be limmited but ONLINE and Game Playing time should.
:)
Get some programming software and such and let them play with that as much as they want, and show interest in the "cool" programs and stuff they come up with. Come up with different "challenges" for them to program a solution for.
Have a ghost image of the PC standing by when they accidentally wipe out a file. The "Play" PC should not have anything important on it and if they do accidentally wipe something out, let them explore how to fix it and let them help with restoring it.
Limiting their online time is what you really need to do, and it's easy if you have a router or a gatway, just disable the port that that PC is on except for the times you want to allow them on the net, and keep the router in a separate room, or locked up somehow. And when they are on the net, never be where you can't see the screen and when you are done supervising their internet time, disable the port again.
Computers of them selves are nothing but tools, they can be good for kids. Look how well most of us slashdotters turned out.
In all seriousness, it's not the time on the computer that needs to be limited, it's the time spent at different activities on the computer that needs to be monitored.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Your kids are going to grow up despising you, since you'd be one of very few parents who do this to their kids.
I know this might sound unusual, but instead of assigning your kids the "30 minutes alotted compartmentalised computer enjoyment period", you could stay by the computer with them?
If you think they're spending too much time on the computer, why don't you just take them all outside and play an outdoor sport?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
. 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.
You're qualified to offer an opinion regardless. Being a parent doesn't escalate you to some grandious level of wisdom or insight. It means you are capable of combining sperm and egg. Congratulations on doing something dogs and hamsters can do, too.
Further, if you're asking for advice of any kind on here, whatever judgements or questions are raised about any aspect of it are completely legitimate. For example, if I said "I'd like to kill my husband. How could I device an undetectable poisonous meal that will kill him over the period of about one year?" - I wouldn't have the testicles to say "hey - I don't care about your judgement over me killing my husband! For whatever reason, I've decided that's what I'm going to do. All I want from you is advice on how to kill him!".
Anyway, I always found (as a child as well as the step-dad-type person for more than a short while) that the best way to limit computer, television and other activities is a not at all fancy one. And it's not at all new. See, you work hard to be a consistant and firm parent who has the respect of the child involved. When you have this, the child knows "the television goes off at 10:00 PM" means just that. They may ask if they can stay up and watch it a little longer, but they rarely argue or cry or throw a tantrum. They know what's expected of them and that it's okay to ask for more but they also know that what the adult says is what they're going to have to do. It's no too strict and it isn't depriving them of growing up or developing some sense of self-governance. It's just called parenting.
Believe it or not, children can be given expectations and rewards and punishments and still be very happy, balanced, behaved, good kids. If there is any sort of stress or violence or anger or fighting involved in something as simple as turning the television or computer off - then there are much greater problems and avoiding dealing with them by implementing mechanical means is a rather passive and ineffective way of attacking such a problem.
Note that I'm not saying this idea (the article's submitter" is a bad one at all. Just that there could be vairous circumstances that make it a good or bad choice. We don't really have enough information to judge, frankly (not that it would stop me or most of us). Hell, I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility that a child might ask his parents to implement something that tracks and limits his time becuase he doesn't want to get in trouble, but knows that he would have an easier time keeping track of and obeying the rules if there was some automated way of seeing how much time he had left or had used (not to mention, mom and dad won't think he's sneaking time on it when they go shopping or something).
But you know . . . I hope most parents don't go overboard, either. You're not going to produce the next Lins Torvalds if you limit the child to AIM and certain websites and one hour of computer time per day. They do need ample time and freedom to really explore. Just think back to your own heyday of exploration (though for some of us that's still ongoing!).
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.
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.
If you think they're spending too much time on the computer, why don't you just take them all outside and play an outdoor sport?
You know, this comment is very insightful, especially for fathers (single or not).
Squirt guns, water balloons and general playing mayhem is a great thing to see when you have a bunch of kids to entertain. Everybody ends up laughing and they won't forget the experience.
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
So you're saying that simply squirting out a kid makes a parent more knowledgable about being a parent than someone like myself who, having somewhat raised more than one child over a period of time, has none?
Is there some magical thing handed out to parents that makes them infinitely more wise and experienced simply for having spread their legs and dropped seven pounds of gooey baby? If so, why are so many parents apparently not receiving this magical gift and doing such a shit-poor job at it?
Religious fanatics aren't nearly as self-rightous as the average defensive parent is.