re: Helpful Parenting in the Digital Age Thread

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1. What are the best apps for protecting the kids from the pitfalls of middle school & soon to be high school cell phone use?

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Karate school and camping trips where there is no internet.

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. What are the best apps for protecting the kids from the pitfalls of middle school & soon to be high school cell phone use?

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In an ideal world, all social media. Although most phones allow you to put a timer on apps, so limiting something like instagram to say, 45 minutes a day could be effective if the kids already have social media.

This may sound hippy dippy, but headspace is a nice tool to teach young people about mindfulness habits. Mindfulness has helped me manage my digital time tremendously.

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1.) No tik tok

2.) No tik tok

3.) See 1 & 2

4.) No social media apps

5.) See 4

6.) No encrypted messaging apps

God Speed

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All of this plus you can and will check their phone whenever you want, including text conversations (because that is where civil society is quickly dying, kids hide behind phones, don't know what sentences are, and speak in idiotic memes and vines and emojis and shite I don't even understand)

Any school that requires my child to have a phone in order to learn is a school I’m taking my child out of. That is wholly unacceptable.

I understand a computer for high school kids and 7th and 8th graders. Yes, I know a cell phone is like a mini computer but they function differently. It’s not necessary to have a phone to use an app. A cell phone is being used as a wedge to separate you from your child. A computer is different.

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Welcome to The Privacy Dad's Blog!

I write about online privacy and parenting. This is a diary, not a guide.

The Privacy Dad's blog is for anyone, but especially for beginners who may want to take steps towards digital privacy. I describe what worked for me, the problems I ran into, and how all of this influenced my parenting.

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LINK

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Any school that requires my child to have a phone in order to learn is a school I’m taking my child out of.

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So you'll sell your house to change counties/school districts?

The phone/iPad itself isn't the problem, it's how parents don't control what happens on the device because it's too "hard." Moms get tired of approving the installation of apps, dads get tired of looking in their messages and deleted messages for inappropriate content, etc. I helped a mom install an actual security program on her daughters' devices, it lasted two days before she asked me to remove it.

The current rage, which I really don't get is putting Life360 on iPhones for kids that don't drive. Find My iPhone works just fine, but they see this crap in their social media feeds and think the programs do things they don't. They don't bother to see that in the top results of searching for Life360 is a video that teaches you how to fake your location.

It’s a constant battle. Use Microsoft to monitor Xbox and PC…go through their phone settings to block everything and check it regularly. Have the phone shut down at a certain time.

And every time it updates you have to do that all over again.