High schoolers know how to by pass the system. I had a friend's 12 year old tell my son how to make a bootable memory drive into Linux where they could surf anything they wanted. Kudos to all the expensive $$ you spend on antivirus and hard drive monitoring and all the Internet filtering. Responsibility is what you should be teaching I think. Observe from the home computer before granting the laptop.

Thanks pp, that is incredibly helpful!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our rules are much like the PPs. Until 6th grade, all computing is done on family computers in our library. In addition, we limit access, especially on school days.

Grade 6, kids get an iphone but not in their room at night (and we have full access). Grade 9, child gets a laptop and can use it in their bedroom as long as grades are good and we are not seeing illegal or unethical behavior. With our first DC we tried taking the computer away every night but he actually does better in schol, and is more self-disciplined, when he has full access. Counterintuitive, but he was ready for some independence.

OP here. Thanks everyone, I think the bolded is how we are going to approach this. A friend recommended Avira for anti-virus protection. It's free, not sure if that means it's not as good as the others that cost? Anyone have any experience with this?

13:34 here -- in addition to advice from friends in IT, two websites I generally trust for reviews of antivirus programs and similar are http://www.pcmag.com/ and cnet.com

Here are their reviews of Avira: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425954,00.asp and http://download.cnet.com/Avira-Free-Antivirus/3000-2239_4-10322935.html

AV Comparatives (http://www.av-comparatives.org/) is a lab that does testing and reviews of antivirus software. Their site has an incredible amount of information, some of it very technical, so if you really want to dig into this decision I think it could be a good resource. By far the most useful single thing I have found on their website is the results chart from their "Real World Protection Test" -- see here http://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php. Avira seems to have done very well on this test.

I don't have any experience with Avira, but based on the reviews it looks like a reasonably good free option.

Anonymous wrote:Our rules are much like the PPs. Until 6th grade, all computing is done on family computers in our library. In addition, we limit access, especially on school days.

Grade 6, kids get an iphone but not in their room at night (and we have full access). Grade 9, child gets a laptop and can use it in their bedroom as long as grades are good and we are not seeing illegal or unethical behavior. With our first DC we tried taking the computer away every night but he actually does better in schol, and is more self-disciplined, when he has full access. Counterintuitive, but he was ready for some independence.

OP here. Thanks everyone, I think the bolded is how we are going to approach this. A friend recommended Avira for anti-virus protection. It's free, not sure if that means it's not as good as the others that cost? Anyone have any experience with this?

Our rules are much like the PPs. Until 6th grade, all computing is done on family computers in our library. In addition, we limit access, especially on school days.

Grade 6, kids get an iphone but not in their room at night (and we have full access). Grade 9, child gets a laptop and can use it in their bedroom as long as grades are good and we are not seeing illegal or unethical behavior. With our first DC we tried taking the computer away every night but he actually does better in schol, and is more self-disciplined, when he has full access. Counterintuitive, but he was ready for some independence.

Just make sure the computer has an antivirus that scans downloads, and teach him what to do if the program alerts to a malicious file.

Our rules are pretty simple:
- attitudes, grades and other obligations come first -- if those start to slip there will be restrictions or stricter monitoring

- no porn, no gambling that involves actual money, no proxy servers or similar. We configured our router to block these on our wifi so nobody in the house can get to them on any computer.

- no illegal or unethical behavior, (music downloads, cyber bullying, sending/posting/keeping inappropriate pictures, illegal tv or movie streaming, plagiarism, etc)

- ask permission before making an online purchase (in middle school; we relaxed this rule for high school)

- act online as though what you do can and will get found out in the real world, by people you know and respect, and by people you might someday want to know and respect you.

- we reserve the right to look at/inspect/monitor/revoke access to the computer if there is a compelling reason

I just told my teens even though the computer was "theirs" it was still mine and that meant I had the right to all passwords used on it and all info on it.

Every one to three months or so I'd remember to check it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're all crazy control freaks. If you try to control him he'll just pay some kid who knows what he's doing to unblock it. My son has done that for several of his friends with fascist parents.

I'm 13:34 -- no porn and no viruses hardly seems too controlling to me. Besides, just because someone can find a way around the rules doesn't necessarily mean there should be no rules.

+1. Just because your kid tries to get around your rules doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be a parent who has rules. Same with setting rules for alcohol and pot - there's a good chance your kid will try them at somebody else's house, but don't just throw up your hands and let it happen at your house.

Anonymous wrote:You're all crazy control freaks. If you try to control him he'll just pay some kid who knows what he's doing to unblock it. My son has done that for several of his friends with fascist parents.

I'm 13:34 -- no porn and no viruses hardly seems too controlling to me. Besides, just because someone can find a way around the rules doesn't necessarily mean there should be no rules.

It has to be used out in the open like the family room.

You're all crazy control freaks. If you try to control him he'll just pay some kid who knows what he's doing to unblock it. My son has done that for several of his friends with fascist parents.

No electronics in the bedroom - ever. That is my rule.

I have a very unique and controversial approach to most things technology. By the time I consider my child ready for her own laptop, I do not monitor very closely.

All computers or Wi-Fi enabled devices that will be in our home long term have to be on our home Wi-Fi network, and we use OpenDNS filtering to block pornographic content across the entire network. Nobody in our house needs to run into that kind of stuff online, so we set the filtering from the router so that no computer on our network will access such sites, accidentally or otherwise. Attempts to do so would be recorded in an access log so that we could see and address that happening. For antivirus we use AVG Protection, and we can manage the antivirus on all devices added to our network. All files downloaded on any device on our network are logged, so we can see what is causing the problem if something has given our computer a virus. Other than that, I do not further monitor once they’re in high school and we have decided they are responsible enough for their own laptop. Until they are self-supporting, we tell them that we retain the right to check the contents or activity logs/internet history of their computers, but in practice we would only do this if we had serious reason to believe there was a major problem such as a crime or a risk to someone’s physical or emotional safety. That has never happened and hopefully never will.

In order to get to that point, however, we treat use of the internet like a serious responsibility and prepare for independent use in much the same way we prepare our teens to get their driver’s license. In order to gain adult-level trust and unmonitored internet access by high school my child will have had many years of closely monitored use of everything online except social media. We start very young and slowly back off the strict supervision as they demonstrate responsible use; the last year before we intend to allow unmonitored access we do a trial run where we do not monitor in real time but instead log all online activity and spot check on a random basis to ensure responsible usage habits. They will have had one year of very closely monitored social media use, and depending on how responsible they have been with that, we may choose to continue monitoring social media when they are given their own computer or we may decide they can be trusted to use it with only random spot checks for another year before phasing out even those. The final requirement to get the pretty much unmonitored access to the internet (other than the virus and obscenity blocking that is on everyone’s computer even DH’s and mine) is a major project about computer network security, internet safety, and prudent online behavior. This has a rubric and written requirements, and it has to actually be completed and presented to DH and I, otherwise we keep a “young teen” level of parental controls on their computer that does enable us to closely monitor and/or restrict internet access.

If we find out there is some sort of problem with their online behavior, if they ever make an unauthorized attempt to alter our network security, or if it seems that monitoring their own internet access is causing them problems in other areas of life, the high level of trust is revoked and we go back to using a fairly restrictive suite of parental control software. That happened to one kid for one school quarter, and the problem has never been repeated.

Would use a good anti-virus software like Kapersky and set controls. I'd be very wary of downloads. One child downloaded from a nature TV site and we had to take it into Best Buy to get rid of the virus. Definitely, if this is a boy especially, set parental controls to prohibit pornography. It can be very addictive , and you don't want to be dealing with that. BTDT.

We are giving our 9th grader a laptop for his bday. If your high schooler has a laptop what time of rules do you have in place? Do you monitor their activity and if so how? Do you have an Administrator account on their laptop so that you can setup permissions that restrict what they can download? This is something the IT guy mentioned to me at work as a way to prevent him from being able to download something that could potentialy infect the laptop with a virus, just wondering if folks actually do this.

My son is responsible and has always shown good judgement with regards to social media. I'm not concerned that he might do something horrible like cyberbullying or be lured to runaway by someone he meets online, so I'm not quite sure how much freedom he should have here and how much monitoring I need to be doing. Looking for advice or suggestions from others.