You just have to zoom out to see this is all on an aircraft carrier.

I think that’s a reasonable approach. Personally, I don’t want to be a helicopter parent, as that would be awful for the kid, and at the same time I don’t want to be oblivious to what is happening in my children’s digital life.

I think the closest thing to ‘spyware’ I would consider is finding a way to prevent browser history from getting deleted and put on general web filters to block porn, sketchy sites, social media, etc. As they get older, the restrictions lighten up to zero filters. all the while teaching them internet safety as they grow so they aren’t cluless.

The internet, and computer itself, are a fantastic place to explore and learn and I don’t want to hold that back from them.

Because a parent should have the right to monitor their child’s internet exposure just as our parents told us we couldn’t watch R movies or play violent video games…imagine for two seconds she didn’t have innocent pictures of a video game character, but the parent found she was in contact with a groomer and sending pics. Maybe she’s the bad one getting into drugs, or bullying other kids. It’s a parents job to intervene and to help their kid - you can’t do that if you don’t know what’s going on.

How many stories have you heard about cyber-bulling, grooming, or “send me a pic” scams that led to suicide or other terrible outcomes? - way too many. In a lot of the post-interviews, the parents responses are always something like “I never knew this was happening, my 9 year old Billy was so happy the 20 minutes a day I saw him outside of his room. I never imagined that his ‘online friends’ on 4chanclone77 were telling him to send pics and that he should die everyday.”

For a kid its protection over privacy everyday - same reason that you might want to know if your kid is spending a lot of “extracurricular time” at the teacher’s house.

Once they’re a teen the training wheels slowly come off until they’re not needed, hopefully by 14, after they’ve been taught about the dark side of the world and how to protect themselves from that crap, and know that they can come to me with any problem no matter what, weather they caused it or not, and I’ll help them figure it out.