On Mon, 22 Apr 2019 at 23:12, Bill <[email protected]> wrote: > Having said that we as a community should be helping them find and use the > tools needed to do this.
TL;DR: we can give the parents a great set of tools to control their children's internal access, but few parents are technically savvy enough to use them even if they wanted to. Those who do will fight with their children due to false positive blocking, and be worn down and disable any blocks. Some years ago when my son turned 11 and wanted to play video games with high age rating, and my wife and I tried imposing controls, we found he simply went to friends' houses where the parents didn't attempt any controls. I tried carrying out a survey on our local village facebook page to ask if any parents did observe age restrictions on video games and very very few did. I didn't get to the bottom of whether it was apathy, ignorance, indifference, or a feeling of futility given that it would take all parents to act since those who didn't undermine all efforts. I think until domestic CPEs allow per user/device content filtering, most parents will simply turn off any censorship mechanisms if they become annoying. Chances are, their children will quickly get hold of the admin password for the router (even if it's not printed on the bottom of the router! thanks, BT!) and learn to turn off any restrictions. Many parents get technical help from their children for even basic technical tasks anyway, so their children can also gain access to their parents' email and thus access to the ISP portal. I use DNS-based blocking myself, have inbound and outbound firewall access controls, and apply time of day usage restrictions by mac address filtering on my firewall, and face an ongoing battle with my teenagers over their usage.
