How old is your son approximately? Purely out of curiosity, what are you most afraid of him doing that makes you install spyware? Are you worried about time wasting or porn or social media or what?
I have friends who had parents that installed NetNanny etc on their computers and their recollections of their parents behavior around their use of technology are now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet (which they invariably did at a friend's house or some such).
My parents didn't know what a regex was so when I was a teenager with a computer and an (extremely slow dial-up) internet connection we had to have conversations and build trust rather than involve blacklists and non-admin Linux accounts.
I'll answer your questions directly and then add some explanation, because neither our situation nor our son is anywhere close to normal or typical.
Our son is 15 years old, and he's in his second semester of high school, a year behind.
> what are you most afraid of him doing ... Are you worried about time wasting or porn or social media or what?
The 'advanced', regex based spyware only arrived after he started high school. I've been logging (via a different system) his activities for many years now, so we know what kinds of things he gravitates toward, and it's not porn or social media. In fact, in most contexts, the stuff he looks at online is quite harmless. The key thing is 'wasting time'.
Very briefly, our son is both autistic and also pretty heavily ADHD. He gets 'stuck' on things very, very easily, and he has virtually no innate self motivation to do things academically. Finally, because of the way he is, he currently has no friends, and has historically very, very few friends.
All this adds up to a lot of challenges that would take all day to write down. What he can do on his laptop is heavily locked down most of the time. Basically anything that's currently drawing his attention or anything that's 'fun' isn't available. We're using that as a lever: a lot of that laptop lockdown will be lifted once he is failing none of his classes.
The lockdown on his personal desktop is usually a lot less severe. In fact, right now, since he just started a new semester, nothing is locked down at all.
I can understand that a lot of this might seem rather draconian, and under more typical circumstances it would be. But there's a lot more going on that I don't have time to get into, and would require a whole lot of context.
> now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet
For all of the trails he faces, our son is surprisingly self aware. He understands his own character, weaknesses, strengths and challenges.
Thank you for your earnest inquiry. I would be happy to answer more questions, if any.
Ahh that's very interesting, and sheds a totally different light on your original post. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the thorough reply, I had not considered a more complicated situation when I was pondering your approach.
We actually err on the side of 'open' and 'permissive' in general, because that's how my wife and I were raised. We honestly find the steps we often have to take to influence our son uncomfortable. But it's been the only way to wedge him out of the enormous, intricate, detailed, persistent, fantastic, odd and amazing world that is in his head from time to time. He must join with society at some point.
I have friends who had parents that installed NetNanny etc on their computers and their recollections of their parents behavior around their use of technology are now mostly bitter and they ended up becoming obsessed with accessing unfiltered internet (which they invariably did at a friend's house or some such).
My parents didn't know what a regex was so when I was a teenager with a computer and an (extremely slow dial-up) internet connection we had to have conversations and build trust rather than involve blacklists and non-admin Linux accounts.