Onboarding Your Kids Into Tech
Any family with kids is faced with the pressure and decision on when or if they might give their kids a phone of some sort. And if so, what are the parameters around it? In this post, I’ll discuss the approach that we adopted for our daughter and shed some light on the choices we made.
Initial Goals and Desires
As a family with technical-ish parents, I knew that we’d have to cross the bridge of phones in the hands of our kids at some point. It came a little sooner than I’d anticipated when my daughter started going to youth group at church. It’s quite a bit less fashionable now for places to have phones for people to use and everyone is expected to bring their own. We decided we would go ahead and get her a device and use it as an opportunity for learning how to properly use a phone. After all, my wife and I had to learn phone responsibility as adults and we want our children to be prepared.
Technical Overview - NAS Setup for Family Data Storage
In a previous post that I made, I underscored the importance of holding your own data. I discussed the challenges and some of the benefits of having control of that data. In this article, I’ll go into the technical descriptions of the hardware and services I’m using to hold my own data.
Defining My Needs
The setup that I’ll discuss in this particular article is pretty specific to my needs. I go into great detail about those needs here. But I’ll go over some specifics in this article so that it makes sense from a technical perspective. Here’s roughly what I had for my needs:
Digital Memories: Holding Your Own Photos and Videos
Most of us store photos and videos in consumer cloud services. While convenient, this comes with hidden costs and risks. This article explores why taking control of your digital memories matters and how I transitioned to holding my own data.
Background
I’m a millenial nearly in my forties. Growing up, my parents made sure to share with me the many picture books of my family. I now own many of these and expect to gain more as I grow older. These are great and definitely something I appreciate. I came to the realization about three years ago that I don’t have that same thing for my children. Instead, our family photos are all digital. From the time my wife and I got married, everything has been digital. I’m sure this is the same for many of us at this point in life. I think the digital storage of these assets is great, especially from an organization standpoint. However, many have ceded control of those assets without realizing that, not only have you given great power over them, there are costs that come along with this strategy.