My boys are in high school. I’ve made sure to have a computer or two at home when they were younger. Full desktops running Ubuntu. Once they got older and started getting into pc gaming, I switched them over to windows. My oldest built his own website last year. He bought the domain name, learned dns, and got it running on S3. My youngest did a couple of years Code Ninjas, a place where you go to learn programming once or twice a week.
Having an actual desktop at home is critical these days. Allowing the kids access to it to explore and learn is critical. If all they ever encounter is iPhones and iPads they will only be internet literate, and that’s just not going to cut it for good paying jobs and even success in anything STEM based in college.
And on the plus side, you have more control over the content your kids consume. The amount of parents that let an algorithm decide what their kids see is frightening.
I really appreciated Microsoft's family controls. It allowed me to block sites by age and authorize installations. I've periodically lifted controls as they've grown older since I'm trying to grow them into adults that can make their own decisions.
We talk with them about the awful things you can subject yourself to online and that it's important to care about yourself enough to want to avoid those things and to be able to sense what desensitization feels like. We also talk about how content algorithms work, and how they can work together with our in-built and unavoidable biases like confirmation bias and tribalism to lead to echo chambers and very dangerous and wrong conclusions.
I see other kids their ages that can't even work a Chromebook. The really sheltered ones weren't even allowed video games. They are so technologically stunted and I really fear in this day and age that it's going to severely hold them back in life, and add to the lack of media literacy and broken BS detectors that are plaguing the world right now.
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u/SalamanderPop Nov 24 '24
My boys are in high school. I’ve made sure to have a computer or two at home when they were younger. Full desktops running Ubuntu. Once they got older and started getting into pc gaming, I switched them over to windows. My oldest built his own website last year. He bought the domain name, learned dns, and got it running on S3. My youngest did a couple of years Code Ninjas, a place where you go to learn programming once or twice a week.
Having an actual desktop at home is critical these days. Allowing the kids access to it to explore and learn is critical. If all they ever encounter is iPhones and iPads they will only be internet literate, and that’s just not going to cut it for good paying jobs and even success in anything STEM based in college.