If there is an advice I can offer out of my experience as a kid: Be friends with them, and don’t push too hard that they don’t make mistakes.
My dad wasn’t very friendly with me as a kid, and got angry quickly whenever I made mistakes. So I grew up with a fragile personality, prone to addictions, and always trying to do things behind his back.
Even though we didn’t have internet at home until I was 18, I always took money behind my parents back and skip classes to go to the internet cafe.
He also restricted the set of TV channels we can watch, but I knew how to have my “secret” set of channels that I can easily add/remove whenever my parents weren’t home.
I’ve discovered a lot of dark corners in the internet, and developed a porn addition since the age of 13 which I’m still struggling with (I’m 25 now).
It’s always a good idea to setup a DNS filter to avoid accidental harmful content or define a screen time, but keep in mind that a determined kid can be as smart as you are and bypass it, or can encounter such content via their friends smartphones or other means. The best you can do is to educate them to make conscious good choices when they browse the internet, educate them so that they can define their own screen time and understand why it is a good idea. And be a person of trust to them : Make them feel you respect their privacy and trust them, and when they do something wrong, talk to them quietly about it, it would have a much better effect that expressing anger.
You want that when your kids find harmful content come to you and say : “Hey dad, I saw such and such on YouTube”, so that you can educate them about it, not that they continue watching it behind your back.
My dad wasn’t very friendly with me as a kid, and got angry quickly whenever I made mistakes. So I grew up with a fragile personality, prone to addictions, and always trying to do things behind his back.
Even though we didn’t have internet at home until I was 18, I always took money behind my parents back and skip classes to go to the internet cafe. He also restricted the set of TV channels we can watch, but I knew how to have my “secret” set of channels that I can easily add/remove whenever my parents weren’t home.
I’ve discovered a lot of dark corners in the internet, and developed a porn addition since the age of 13 which I’m still struggling with (I’m 25 now).
It’s always a good idea to setup a DNS filter to avoid accidental harmful content or define a screen time, but keep in mind that a determined kid can be as smart as you are and bypass it, or can encounter such content via their friends smartphones or other means. The best you can do is to educate them to make conscious good choices when they browse the internet, educate them so that they can define their own screen time and understand why it is a good idea. And be a person of trust to them : Make them feel you respect their privacy and trust them, and when they do something wrong, talk to them quietly about it, it would have a much better effect that expressing anger.
You want that when your kids find harmful content come to you and say : “Hey dad, I saw such and such on YouTube”, so that you can educate them about it, not that they continue watching it behind your back.