It's less about control or hacking and more about the ability to be in a safe environment to explore and experiment on your own. The issue of child abuse on the Internet is much bigger and more aggressive than most people think. My daughter has had a cell phone for about 10 months. And already she gets sms and WhatsApp messages from strangers who want to make "friends" or send her dubious links. I have technically secured the phone and also educated her, but the reality is - if an intelligent adult can fall for phishing, you should not be so stupid to believe that a naive and curious child will not click on such a link. There is a documentary "Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror", I believe on Netflix, that left even me flabbergasted. What is shown there is extreme, but still this is reality. And one thing you can believe me ... a child with access to IT and the Internet, will certainly be confronted with child pornography before the age of 16 (probably even before 14). It doesn't matter if the child clicks on a link, becomes the target of a pedophile, someone shows something on the cell phone in the schoolyard, or it gets unwanted pictures and videos via messenger. It is impossible to prevent this, but I believe that you can protect the child from the worst, even without restricting too much.
My daughter is quite tech-savvy, which I want to encourage. Therefore, I want to create a system that she can use and explore unsupervised and still be secure.
I already protect the internet traffic mainly with a DNS-sinkhole (Pi-Hole). Therefore, it is important that the VPN works well. On the cell phone, this already works really good.
The other problem is installing software or running scripts. And I am sure that if she finds or gets an USB stick, she will put it in the computer out of curiosity and try it out, no matter what dad and mom told her. That's why I thought about restricting access to unknown external drives. But in the meanwhile I think that the risk is small enough so this restriction is not needed.
Then the point of a robust and stable system with automatic backups. Well, kids break things like all the time. Her mother and I live apart, and she doesn't know anything about IT. So I will often have to help remotely, and hope that the system otherwise runs as stable as possible.
Her mother would prefer our daughter alone not having access to the Internet at all. And to be honest, I understand that. Most parents don't have sufficient technical knowledge to set up good protection. Besides this I think we should take care of our children by helping them with their homework, I for example don't have enough time to do this so I compromised and decided to use this source
https://paperell.net/write-my-literature-review because my children are not good in literature and also I think this is quite a little useful for their development, this source really saves me a lot of time and nerves. I am very glad that there are guys who do my literature review. What do you think about this? And from 14 or 15 the kids are so fit that they can bypass all technical barriers if they want to. By then, you should have managed to teach them sufficient media competence and have created enough trust that they will tell you what happened before shit hits the fan.
How do you handle this with your kids, especially in the 10-14 age range. And I would be more interested in practical approaches than theoretical or even philosophical ones.
