I don't want my kid to get hooked on the tablet

As you already know, I’ve got a ton of kids. 4, no more no less. So some colleagues consider me an ‘expert’ on the topic of kids when the real expert is actually my wife, I do little more than follow her orders recommendations and suggestions when it comes to raising our kids. Maybe I should start another blog to give advice to less experienced parents! Well, being honest, my wife should be the one to start it… anyway, I’m getting sidetracked, let’s get back on topic.

This experience combined with the fact that I work in the world of Security means that occasionally some typical conversations come up, like the classic ‘I don’t want my kid getting hooked on the tablet’ or ‘when they’re a bit older I’m going to check their browsing history’ or ‘I want to know what content they’re watching on YouTube because they say they want to be a YouTuber’ (my oldest wants to be a YouTuber, by the way, and I hope he wants to be something productive like elrubius rather than one of those guys who pull tasteless pranks).

I don’t consider myself an expert on anything, but I know enough about technology to weigh in on these issues. I’m going to give you my opinion on each one since, in this case, I can’t tell you the best way to do things, just the way we do them at home, and so far it hasn’t gone badly for us.

I don’t want my kid getting hooked on the tablet

All my kids have tablets. Well, not all of them, my little princess seems to want to ask for one for Reyes (Epiphany)… a pink one covered in sparkly glitter, so for now her 3 older siblings have tablets and she’s happy watching cartoons on TV… the Disney Channel princesses when she’s alone and calm, and Boing or Clan when her siblings are around and take over the remote. The tablets we have at home aren’t anything too fancy: a 2012 iPad 3, a 2015 Samsung Tab A, and another 2016 Samsung Tab A, all 10-inch models with drop-proof protective cases that haven’t saved them from having to replace a cracked screen every now and then. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many hours each of them spends on their tablet, but it depends on the day and where we are. Some nights my oldest son watches a bit of Netflix before bed or watches a YouTube video. The little ones are more into YouTube (they love the MikelTube channel, by the way, in case Mikel and Leo’s parents are reading this blog :D) and some simple games. And like I said, I’m not worried about how much time they spend on the tablet because they’re not going to get hooked, this isn’t the same era we grew up in, or the one kids lived through a few years back when this technology first arrived in our homes and the iPad was something we guarded like our lives depended on it. Keep in mind that my kids were born with technology already all around them, so for them the tablet is just another toy. They don’t even spend hours on it, after a while they get bored and go do something else, just like with any other toy. These ‘digital natives‘, as S2Grupo’s blog put it a few months back, have technology so deeply internalized that for them it’s nothing particularly exciting, unlike what happened to me when I unboxed my first computer at age 8 (my ZX Spectrum… I get a little teary-eyed just remembering it). For kids nowadays, connecting to the Internet isn’t a privilege, it’s practically a right, and when they don’t have a connection to watch a video or play some game that requires one, they complain. I remember my first 2400 bps modem (yes, 2400 bps, that’s 0.0024 mbps… now I’ve got 50 megabits at home) with which I connected to the Internet for the second time (the first was at a Cybercafé), and the excitement of hearing the sound of the modem negotiating with Infovía‘s telephone exchange so I could ‘browse’ among the few content sites that existed back then… and of course, only at certain hours, starting at 10:30 PM and for a very limited time since local calls cost quite a bit of money. Now my youngest complains because there’s no ‘wipi‘ in the car, as he calls it.

For our kids, tablets and Internet access are just one more toy among all the ones available at home. As soon as they get to the park, they drop it and don’t think about it again. So to the question of whether I’m afraid my kids will get hooked on the tablet, my answer is no… not only am I not afraid, but they’re simply incapable of it, they get tired of it just like any other game because to them it’s just one more toy. It would probably be more of a problem if we rationed it and kept it as ‘my treasure‘ that they can only touch for X minutes a day if they’ve done their homework or behaved well (there are 4 of them, it’s IMPOSSIBLE for them to behave well all day long, they’d spend their whole lives grounded).

When they’re older, I’m going to check their browsing history

Regarding the second statement about checking our kids’ browsing history, this is something I’m completely against. My dad never checked my browsing history (to this day I’m not even sure he knows what browsing history is) and thanks to that, I now work in Information Security. If my dad had seen that I was hanging out in forums full of other curious people wondering how the Internet worked under the hood, seen some of their nicknames, or realized we spent all day chatting and messing around instead of using the computer to study (which had been the whole reason for buying it), I probably would have never left the jewelry workshop where I started my working life. I don’t know if he trusted me or simply didn’t know what I might come across on the Internet, but either way, I made the most of every minute online (at a premium price as I mentioned before, over 300 pesetas an hour (a bit less than €2, you kids these days make me so jealous)) to learn about hacking, systems, servers, protocols, phone booths (phreaking, as it was called back then), and a thousand other things. I remember a phrase an old boss of mine, JMegias, used years ago: ‘all of humanity’s knowledge at the click of a button, and you decide to search for Britney Spears‘. And none of that knowledge gets learned if someone’s checking your browsing history or scolding you for visiting a certain site or reading about certain content. This brings us back to the reflection we made at the start of this blog when we talked about the minimum age to sign up for social media: education. We need to teach them to recognize situations, conversations, or websites that could harm them in some way. And even so, they’ll wander in somewhere out of pure curiosity from time to time. If we raise them with that mindset, the Internet becomes a tool for work, for seeking out knowledge, and for having fun, instead of some dark place where you have to watch your step and be careful where you click.

I want to know what content they’re watching on YouTube because they say they want to be a YouTuber

And when it comes to YouTube content, more or less the same thing applies, although we can limit it a bit more for their own safety. The problem we have with YouTube is that there are some genuinely offensive videos just a click away from the little ones… one time I searched for a song from the movie Frozen for my kids and you can’t even imagine what came up on YouTube when I typed in ‘elsa y ana‘. It’s nothing pornographic, far from it… but it’s weird. In some videos, the songs were even dubbed with insults. Given this landscape, and since my youngest kids use YouTube simply by clicking on related videos since they can’t read yet, we had to come up with some kind of solution. That solution is called YouTube Kids, another YouTube app available in the tablet’s app store, specifically designed for children, where you don’t need to know how to read, and with content that’s thoroughly curated and reviewed. Even so, adult supervision is recommended, but in all the time my kids have had it installed, I haven’t seen anything strange other than Russian videos of Spiderman playing with Frozen’s Elsa dolls… which we may or may not like, but they’re not offensive to our kids… the Russians just have a really odd sense of humor.

As for my oldest son, the YouTube Kids solution didn’t satisfy him at all (not even the Russian videos), so he uses regular YouTube with the ‘Strict’ filter, which stops YouTube from recommending him certain filtered categories. Yes, elrubius (I’m sure he’s a follower of my blog), my son is one of your gazillion followers.

Netflix

We do the same thing with Netflix, the little ones have a profile with content that’s exclusively for kids and already vetted by Netflix (and there I can tell you not a single inappropriate piece of content slips through) and my oldest son has a profile with certain content restrictions. As before, simply for his own safety, since once he saw a vampire scene from some show and screamed because he found it really unpleasant and thought he’d have nightmares. So, since Netflix doesn’t let you create a profile with the category ‘pre-teens who are curious but don’t want to get scared’, we simply set up a code to access content rated for ages 16 and up, and when my wife and I log into our profile to watch a movie or show, it asks us for that code at the start of the session.

And what about the Apps and games they install?

When it comes to installed apps, they’re free to install whatever they want, but since the little ones can’t read yet, I’ve set up filters in the iPad’s App Store and the Samsung’s Play Store so that apps rated for ages 7 and up don’t show up, so as long as they have storage space, they can install all the games they want and the tablet’s antivirus will handle the rest if the app in question isn’t what it claims to be (if you’re interested, I can talk about this another day… let me know in the Comments)

As you can see, at home we’re technology users and content consumers… and the only one who seems a bit more hooked on it is me 😛 For them, technology is simply just another form of entertainment, they were born immersed in it. It cracks me up, for example, when a message pops up on the TV screen with a big ‘OK’ button and one of my kids presses the screen itself… or when we put up a photo on the TV and they try to swipe it with their finger right on the screen (yes, the TV is always covered in little fingerprints), but for them it’s the most normal thing in the world, they never lived through the transition and adoption period of this technology, it’s something that’s just always been there, like the intercom at home or the car’s power windows, which they still fiddle with sometimes because we’ve always restricted their use (for their own safety), so they see it as something forbidden and cool.