Comment Re:"Internet Awesome" (Score 1) 19
Children should NOT have unsupervised full access to the internet on ANY device.
Unfortunately, this is getting harder and harder to implement. Based on your Slashdot ID (roughly half of mine, and I signed up in 2008), I'll wager that your first few years of computer use involved using computers that didn't have internet connections. We had games on cassettes (if you're older than me), floppy disks (if you're my age), and/or CD-ROMs (if you're younger than me), which made computers useful in a standalone capacity.
I'm hard pressed to think of a game or software title from the past few years, intended for children, which retained that paradigm. I'm sure there are a handful of iPhone games that may be one-off purchases and can be played without an internet connection, but even the later iterations of Angry Birds mandate an internet connection, even on the paid iterations and where gameplay does not depend on a server component. My nephew likes Roblox, my first-cousin-once-removed likes Fortnite, and my niece likes this fashion choice game where, shockingly, most of the outfits are in-app purchases.
Even if you're the kind of parent who's going to ensure your child uses Edbuntu, their friends won't. Even if you're the kind of parent who plans on giving their child a laptop or desktop to use for their digital learning, you can't load Edbuntu on a hand-me-down iPad.
The depressing reality we find ourselves in is one where preventing children from being online unsupervised is basically to keep them from using computing devices. An analog childhood is a good thing for most children, but it requires incredible dedication from parents to implement, doubly so in finding a community of similarly-minded parents, lest your efforts be undone as children meet friends who enable them to have unsupervised internet access.