I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.
But of course there's also nothing wrong with thinking about and doing this kind of stuff even if it never turns out to be very useful, if you enjoy it, that's enough :)
My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name.
It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency.
I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!
