While we're waiting...
the email your kids don't want you to read
Dear Friends -
By now you’ve probably heard that for the first time in 100 years, the House of Representatives has not been able to elect a Speaker on the first ballot. Sit back, folks — I think this could take a while. The GOP has no incentive to be competent. So while we’re waiting, let’s talk about what my children dread most: the annual parental audit of their social media and screen time consumption. Word of warning: this email is all about how I monitor and manage my children’s screen time. If you’re not interested, skip it. For reference, my three kids are in middle school and elementary school.
One of the many wonders of contemporary parenting is the digital dilemma. How much screen time? What kind of screen time? Typing tutor is pretty different qualitative from pornography. What apps? It’s all overwhelming.
Although in some circles I am considered a pioneer of social media, I despise it. And although I am, at heart, a techno-loving nerd always eager to buy the newest gadget, I have written about how it is terrible for our mental health. And when I say “it”, I mean all of it: social media, smart phones, the internet, AI, etc. I think frequently of Jaron Lanier’s book “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” (Argument Six: Social Media Is Destroying Your Capacity for Empathy).
In the context of parenting I find it all vexing. But I have deployed my tech-nerd skills to try to forge a path forward for my kids on this front. In particular, there are three tools I use that I’ll describe below – but first, it all starts with some fundamentals. Here are our family’s:
Social media is a part of life - so we can’t ignore it. We let our kids have phones starting in sixth grade; we let them play video games and text their friends and watch YouTube videos. It’s part of life, a part of jobs, a part of everything. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules:
Nothing until they ask for it. We don’t allow anything by default. We wait for our kids to ask for it. No phone, no social media, no video games – until the child specifically requests it. It is astonishing how well this one rule works.
After they ask for it, parental assessment is still required: we evaluate all requests and discuss with our kids: is this age-appropriate? Who else is using this? Why do you want this?
The price of digital is eternal vigilance. We monitor all digital activity. Specifically, we use an artificial intelligence designed to help parents be vigilant. More on that below. But my children understand the price of access to the digital world is surveillance, at least until they’re 16.
Digital nutrition is as important as actual nutrition. Passive consumption is dangerous to your mental health, so we work with our kids to try to help them build healthy digital habits. We aim for quarterly check-ins to discuss how they’re spending their screen time. These check-ins are individual and always include a discussion about pornography. If you’re not worried about porn, you should be. At some other point I will write up my rant about pornography as the most powerful cultural force in America, but for today I’ll just say that porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. There is some argument about what age the average American child is exposed to hard core pornography – actual graphic sex – but all of the estimates fall between the ages 8 and 12. Not good.
I know we may sound like perfect parents, but actually our implementation of the above is wildly imperfect. Sigh. You gotta start somewhere.
The first challenge is actual screen time. There are so many different devices – computer, phone, television, Xbox, etc. – and they all have different built in parental controls and settings and it’s just all too much. I can’t manage one set of parental controls for the Apple TV, another set for the xBox, and a third set for the phone. Instead, I bought hardware – Gryphon Mesh Networking Routers – that provide the wi-fi in our house. And I bought the Gryphon specifically because it has robust security and screen time controls. It tracks each device in our home. As of this writing, with five people in our house, there are 44 connected devices. Don’t be shocked - you’ve got a lot more than you think you do, trust me.
You can buy the Gryphon here. It’s a little tricky and I’m available for consults if you need some tech support. Mostly, it takes a lot of time to setup in the beginning because you have to figure out which device is used by which kid. Like all tech, it’s imperfect and has glitches and issues. It does a ton of stuff, but what I really use it for is these five things:
Mesh networking to provide fast wi-fi all over our house.
Screen time controls: Each kid gets 2 hours of screen time each school day across all devices, including for homework; 3 hours of screen time on the weekend. I can dole out extra screen time for the day as reward or as part of some other negotiation. When you hit your limit, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you’re cut-off.
Sleep time: no matter what, Gryphon is set to cut-off all screen time for kids between 8pm and 6am every day.
Porn: Gryphon has pretty decent pornography blocking. Never underestimate the persistence and creativity of a horny teenager. They’re going to get to porn, but I want to make it very, very difficult especially when they’re younger. Gryphon is a first line of defense. (I also use OpenDNS’ parental settings, thank you Cousin Jesse.)
Security: Can’t be too careful with all the hackers and bots running around; Gryphon has some good security features. Not a major reason for the purchase but worth mentioning.
As I said, Gryphon has all kinds of features but I don’t use most of them. Complexity is deadly. Keep it simple: 2 hours of screen time a day, no screen time when you should be sleeping, and no porn.
Now that we’ve tackled all the different devices with their different parental controls to manage screen time, there is the matter of what they’re actually doing online. Like many parents, I’m busy. I got a lot to do. I’m not going to review everything my kids do online. So instead I use an artificial intelligence called Bark to monitor all of their activity online – from what texts they are sending their friends to what music they are listening to on Spotify. Creepy? Maybe. But my kids are still in middle school. As they get older and I’m confident they’ve developed healthy habits, I’ll back off. But for now: vigilance is the price of parenthood.
Bark (which you can try here) monitors all of my children's online activity with an artificial intelligence — including text messages, emails, YouTube, photos kids are taking, and more. The AI looks for bullying, porn, and lots of other things. Like Gryphon, it’s a pain in the neck to setup but once it’s up and running it is quite impressive. A few examples to give you some context:
Bark flagged that my son was listening to a song on Spotify with extreme violence, sexual content, and profanity. I reviewed the alert. He had listened to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now". Well, I can live with that. I told the AI to ignore future songs by Queen.
One strange thing I learned: one of my kids texts my wife 10 times a day with various hypochondriac concerns, all of which I was unaware of. The AI flagged these as "medically concerning content".
Once I noticed one of my kids texting a friend a meme about vaping. I realized I had not ever spoken to my kids about vaping, so without mentioning the specific incident, I talked to my kids about vaping.
A lot of it is normal kid stuff. Once Bark flagged that someone in our home had watched a video on YouTube called "the scrotum song". I forced myself to watch this video and it is run-of-the-mill middle school stupidity, so I decided not to raise it with my kids.
The Bark tech is pretty strong and locks down the phone/ipad/computer (all of them!) so they can't do anything outside the system. This also means it can be finicky at times. There are a bunch of other features but it all gets so complicated and never works perfectly that I use Gryphon to manage screen time and Bark to manage monitoring.
We explain to our children — once a year, as part of their digital audit — this is automated surveillance, but it is in the interests of helping you form healthy screen habits. Most of the time the kids forget about the surveillance and frankly that’s fine with me. All of the arguments are about screen time — 2 hours! What tyrants we are as parents! — not about the monitoring.
It is all still imperfect. Neither Gryphon and Bark can monitor Discord, for example. Bark is only able to monitor some video games – and mostly the games my kids play it does not monitor. But by and large, between Gryphon and Bark I’m able to have the monitoring and enforcement I need to help my kids build healthy digital habits, and that’s the ultimate goal.
There is a third tool that we use and love – but it is not in the same space. It’s called Greenlight - a debit card / allowance / chore app. It is not an exaggeration to say it has been life-changing. The kids each have a debit card and the app on their phones. If they do their chores by Sunday night, they each get $6 on Monday morning (you can set this anyway you want, ignore the chores, whatever). We’ve set some mandatory family rules: 30% automatically goes into savings, 30% into charitable giving, and the rest into "spend anywhere". The kids can set their own savings goal (one of my kids set two savings goal: $15 for a remote control car, and $8,500 for a gaming PC. we'll see how that works out.) Greenlight also provides the option for kids to invest their money in fractional stock buys.
But my two favorite parts of Greenlight: I now routinely put money on their card to make them go buy me things — Starbucks while I'm at one of the kids’ games, or the other day we were out of milk and I made our oldest walk down to the corner gas station and buy some. The other thing I like is that I get to teach them / talk to them about money. One of the main ways the kids use their money is to tip influencers on YouTube and Twitch – mostly video gamers. Once one of my kids signed up for a subscription to a YouTube channel, and forgot about it. A couple months later the card got declined; I had to explain what a subscription is and we did a little experiment on managing money. You can sign up for Greenlight here and I get a free month.
There are a few other things I pay attention to — they spend enough time on screens I care about their ergonomics, so they must know how to type; they should have good monitors, good keyboards, and learn to type standing up. (Sitting is the new smoking.) That is probably for a separate email.
Love, nicco
PS. What do I love most about the internet? Other people’s pets. Anyone else follow Fattica on Instagram? That is one FAT cat with A LOT of personality! and I have been mesmerized by the saga of Kernel the Great Dane over the last year. I couldn’t get enough of Good Boy Ollie when he developed an attachment to a pumpkin. Will the New York Times write an obit for the original Doge? I didn’t even get started on crows. Any time I really need to waste some time I head over to Wikipedia’s list of individual birds.