I started off sympathetic, but as I got down to the end of the article I found myself horrified. It's a recipe for indulging the worst tendencies towards helicopter parenting. Is detailed invasive intrusion and surveillance into the personal lives of our children really what we want? Do children really deserve no privacy at all?<p>How about bringing up children to have a responsible attitude and building trust? I have exactly the same concerns the author has. I have two children ages 13 and 14, and they have each had an iPad since they were 6 and 7 thanks to the generosity of my brother. Our youngest in particular spends more time on youtube and chat apps than we would like, but I can easily imagine the damage I would do to our relationship by constantly spying on every single thing she does on it. Especially as she grows into her teenage years. It strikes me as lazy and avoiding building trust and responsible attitudes, the actual things parents should be doing to address such issues.
This web page is called "Hacker News".
I became a hacker because when I was a kid I did all those things with a computer that I was not meant to do. I edited the AUTOEXEC.BAT (that's probably a crude analogy to the settings these days). I tried to understand options about memory management to some of the commands that probably weren't meant for anyone except for the developers (with limited success I must say). A lot of things happened during my childhood that were not good for me. Using a computer in unintended ways wasn't one of them.<p>If you want no more hackers in 20 years you should give your kids devices so locked down they can't do anything.
I credit much of my current aptitude with (and interest in) computers to getting to use one throughout my childhood with no restrictions. I understand it can be nerve-wracking for parents ceding that much control to children, but I think children are both smarter and more self-disciplined than we give them credit for and I think digital free range can build independence in the long run. Maybe my opinion will change when I have kids of my own someday. Who knows.
This is part of the reason I got my son an entry level windows tablet instead of an ipad. You have excellent control over what they can access, when and how long, and weekly summary reports on how they spent their time across apps.<p>The trouble turns out to be that it is windows with all of the problems of windows. Unlike iOS updates regularly break things or hang for obscure reasons. The creator’s update even discarded the entire start screen layout. Partly the update problems are caused by the 32 gb storage constraint, but I don’t see why the windows folder needs to take up 16 GB and then complain it needs another 8. Also, because backgrounded apps don’t get tombstoned the machine runs out of ram and starts swapping / freezing (emmc is even slower than spinning rust), unless my son is careful about closing every game when he’s done with it.<p>All of which is a long winded way of saying that iOS is not that bad for a kid’s device. It gets the basics right: don’t break unexpectedly for technical reasons.
These “I wish my technology would let me avoid having to discipline my child” articles always bother me. Son sneaking into your room to grab iPad without permission? Easy solution to that. No iPad for a week. He will learn eventually not to do it. No settings needed.<p>The thing is, you don’t want an environment where a child cannot make a mistake. Sometimes you want to let mistakes be made and use those moments to teach your child what behavior is correct. Many of the restrictions requested in this article are in that vein. Although some, like age level restrictions, make more sense, since it is quite difficult for a child to ascertain whether a video will be appropriate for them without viewing it.
We’ve struggled with this. We’re taking the bet that our kids will learn how to handle this if they have the ability to make wrong choices, and we convince them to make better choices later If they only know when to stop when they hit a fence, what are they actually learning about real life?<p>Not sure how it’ll work out. I’ll report back after High School.
I get where this is coming from - but to be honest the main thing I want to lock down on my ipad is just not let them fire up youtube. You can't restrict certain apps from being opened.<p>Restricted mode works mostly how I want. I have a bunch of suitable games I'm happy for the kids to play with without me hovering around. But every time I let them use an ipad I have to remove youtube if it's on there, as they are only allowed to use that when I'm watching with them.
The fact that your kid is addicted to Angry Bird or spends too much time on Snapchat if there's no restrictions in place, it's just a deeper problem of how you've gone about educating your child. Restricting its use to those applications wont change anything. It's like using duct tape to fix a broken tire, only worse, because at the same time you're also destroying your relationship in ways you can't realize (by taking away his freedom and privacy).<p>Yeah, he/she must be able to not lose time on its own. Some actionable advice to start with: if you or your wife are using TV/Social Media - AT ALL - you can begin there (by giving the example).
Apple simply hasn’t figured out this huge market yet. I bet “iPad as nanny” is perhaps the top 3 use cases for the device. Amazon however has already discovered this market and produced customized Android based tablets just for kids: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J94SCAM/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J94SCAM/</a><p>On side note, it’s terrible idea to give iPad ownership to kids below 13 years old. Current tablet HID model primarily makes them as consumption device and most kids are better off with things that allows them to produce instead of just consume.
Marketing says pretty much anything is for anyone.<p>Can't really blame marketing for a kid having something you think they shouldn't.<p>And, kids don't <i>need</i> iPads. Kids need attentive parents and guidance, then they can use anything.
So there are many hacker type comments below. And I somewhat agree with them. My kids use an Ubuntu box where while they are not sudoers they can do what a user can.<p>The tablets (android) are different. For one the age can be much younger. My 2 yr old can play with the tablet, but I don't think giving her access to settings is going to
help make her into a hacker. Ability to read makes a big difference between iPad and computer.<p>I will also note that giving your kids access to scratch and python is far more likely to build the next generation of hackers than having access to iOS settings.
This is the outcome of lack of competition.<p>Also, Apple is not enthused about anything that might limit the ways in which a device is used. The whole point is that everything they do is focused on finding more and infinite ways to make a device used. Constraining use is deeply against the DNA of everything they are actually aiming at. There seems to be a real, deeply ingrained unwillingness to implement things that might reduce unfettered usage.<p>Truly this is politics. In politics, you say what people want to hear but do whatever you want. That's what Apple does - positions the iPad as kid and family friendly but just does what it wants.
> If iPads were meant for kids, then I, as a parent, would be able to set a parent passcode on a device in order to unlock it, even when the kids have forgotten their passcodes for the 17th time, so I don’t have to spend another hour or two getting the device in to DFU mode, re-installing the OS, and then re-downloading all of the apps they had that have now lost all of their local-stored data.<p>Then a third party who steals or finds the device would be able to get all the kids user data (but perhaps not the adult's credit card data and passwords). That would potentially be an issue but I guess would be ok as an option.
I realise this is an Apple-centric (refer "posted in apple" in the footer) blog post, but there's 21 'ipad' and 0 'tablet' references, so it seems very much like an anti-Apple dig ... which is fairy nuff, but I suspect the same claims can be made about almost any <i>generic</i> consumer device these days.<p>I note that none of these concerns applied to my initial computing devices.
If all of these things were implemented I might allow one of these things in the house. As it stands I'm almost to the point where the only tech I would be willing to let in the house is a raspberry pi.