(Parental Settings) Playtime Timers for Children (Sorry, Kids!)

[FreeMediaKids!]

My suggestion here is having a built-in timer for each Steam user and parent to use. Parents can set how long their children may play and on what days they may play, or Steam users can time themselves for how long they could play before their timers say "0:00:00".

This is a great alternative to help kids and older Steam users who are "addicted" to and obsessed about computers because there is a serious problem especially in America and places elsewhere where an average American teen spends seven hours an average day, being in front of screens. This is a bad thing because this eventually leads to possible problems, such as obesity, lack of socialness, and lower grades at school and/or college.

The main idea for this setting would be for obese, disobedient, and/or other kids to realize that there is so much more to do other than just being in front of screens and therefore be healthier mentally and physically.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with playing on Steam for a little bit, but, when kids segregate themselves from their friends to play Steam for as many as ten hours an average day, the opposite is true. I hope that this is a great idea.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Ursprungligen skrivet av supertrooper225:

When does it end? You already have the family sharing. Now you want a clock. Then it will be a more detailed activity record to record what your kid says online. Then you will want a revamp of the ESRB to give you more details of game content. There has to be a line somewhere....and it is not Steam's responsiblity to control your kid. That is your job. If the kid is spending too much time online....do something about it. You don't need Steam to do something about it.

Suggestions don't end, and there doesn't have to be a line somewhere. People can and will keep posting new suggestions for new features of expansions of existing ones, probably for as long as Steam exists. If you don't want to read any more, best to stay out of the suggestions forum.

We don't need Steam to do anything. It's a videogame platform. It's a luxury. We'd all live without it. That doesn't invalidate any suggestion.

Ursprungligen skrivet av gamingforfun365:

I also need opinions from Steam moderators.

Steam moderators are just volunteers, they have no particular connection to or authority from the Valve developers. And the devs don't really post here. They'll read suggestions but you won't hear from them.

Ursprungligen skrivet av FalseGiraffe:

It's a good thing you folks weren't around when someone thought of the alarm clock.

When does it end? First you wanted a clock, now you want an alarm IN the clock? Next you'll want a radio in it! There has to be a line somewhere, it's not a timekeeper's responsibility to sing you songs. People who want to be woken up need to buy a rooster!

[Hanomaly]

Ursprungligen skrivet av supertrooper225:

If people aren't having any success with their kids.....they need to send them to military school or something or take their computer from them until they learn to abide by the rules they set.

Ehh,.. maybe maybe not.

i don't want to get into something TOO heavy here on Steam forums. But.. a lot of children/teens with behaviour problems come from problem homes. They have alcoholic parents, abusive parents (verbal, physical, sexual), drug addict parents, parents who neglect them. Punishing a a child with "military school" because the child was raised by irresponsible and potentially abusive parents is really unfair.

Like saying the child or teen is at fault for never having been raised properly in the first place and should be punished as if it's all their fault for having bad behaviour.. when really they are only copying bad parent behaviour or responding to cruel parents with negative behaviour. Bleh.

Sure, there are actually rare occasions when great parents have (severely**) misbehaving children.. but even then i think the first course of action should be Therapy for the child and making sure the child doesn't have some sort of learning problem or behavioural problem /before/ sending the child to military school or those "boot camps" for teens >.>

But.. ya.. i agree with the last part it's totally appropriate to take the computer away, or to take some part of the computer away to render the computer unusable.

**by "severely misbehaving" i mean misbehaving at a level beyond /normal/ child and teen issues. Of course all children, even perfectly well treated ones will misbehave sometimes that's just part of growing up.

~~
But as to the OP.
A 4 digit pin is /exactly/ the sort of protection my parents had on the tv and computer when i was a teen and i was easily able to guess their code. Even without guessing codes there are other ways to bypass such things.

[FreeMediaKids!]

Ursprungligen skrivet av FalseGiraffe:

Wow, I don't think I ever saw anyone demaning that Steam keep track of it and police it. I believe the request was for a way to block out certain areas of time or days that games cannot be played, as well as possibly a timer to count down to a time when it's time to quit. They ALSO said 'and older Steam players'. I'm sure nobody else but me has a hard time keeping track of time when playing certain games (snark!) but I know it would be helpful for me to have an in-Steam timer I could set to let me know when I've been playing X amount of time.

In the case of my daughter, she is not extremely defiant but very understanding about doing something until X time, but the fact is that she has a simple inability (medical, mental) to keep track of time (as I do). If she knows she has to get off at 10pm, yes, I can keep reminding her, right up until 10, whereupon she'll say 'I'll quit right after I do X.' If instead, Steam is telling her she has ten minutes until it will stop working for the night, and then a timer in the corner, she will know there is no arguing with it and will see when she has to get off.

In other words, don't think of it so much as a replacement for parental responsibiltiy, but an AID to it. We can already set some parental controls now, why aren't you objecting to those? They could just as easilly be a 'crutch' for 'bad parenting'.

It's a good thing you folks weren't around when someone thought of the alarm clock.

:)

[supertrooper225]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Hanomaly:

Ursprungligen skrivet av supertrooper225:

If people aren't having any success with their kids.....they need to send them to military school or something or take their computer from them until they learn to abide by the rules they set.

Ehh,.. maybe maybe not.

i don't want to get into something TOO heavy here on Steam forums. But.. a lot of children/teens with behaviour problems come from problem homes. They have alcoholic parents, abusive parents (verbal, physical, sexual), drug addict parents, parents who neglect them. Punishing a a child with "military school" because the child was raised by irresponsible and potentially abusive parents is really unfair.

Like saying the child or teen is at fault for never having been raised properly in the first place and should be punished as if it's all their fault for having bad behaviour.. when really they are only copying bad parent behaviour or responding to cruel parents with negative behaviour. Bleh.

Sure, there are actually rare occasions when great parents have misbehaving children.. but even then i think the first course of action should be Therapy for the child and making sure the child doesn't have some sort of learning problem or behavioural problem /before/ sending the child to military school or those "boot camps" for teens >.>

But.. ya.. i agree with the last part it's totally appropriate to take the computer away, or to take some part of the computer away to render the computer unusable.

~~
But as to the OP.
A 4 digit pin is /exactly/ the sort of protection my parents had on the tv and computer when i was a teen and i was easily able to guess their code. Even without guessing codes there are other ways to bypass such things.

Sometimes....kids won't just wise up. I didn't say anything about alcoholic parents. I said if kids are misbehaving they need to be discouraged from doing so. Proper parents teach their kids. If the parents are great parents but kids still don't want to learn? Sometimes they need to be taught a lesson. Not all kids have learning disabilities and if the kid is misbehaving IT IS BECAUSE HE DEFINITELY HAS A BEHAVIORAL PROBLEM. Military school has helped many kids and it is intended to turn trouble makers into people of worth. Not that ALL kids need to be sent to military school or that any misbehaving needs to be treated as grounds to send them to military school. But YOUR KIDS ARE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If they are spending too much time on the computer....take the computer. It is literally that simple. Why should a company have to make a clock for you? Use your own clock and make that call yourself. You don't need anything to do that.

[FalseGiraffe]

Also, I would think it would be very nice, given how much at least my daughter's school relies on them to use computers nowadays, to have a way to know she is using her computer but NOT playing games on Steam, without having to watch over my teenaged daughter's shoulder every moment (we need to give her SOME degree of independance and trust for her to develop into a responsible adult). Note ALSO that she has many friends she talks to through steam through chat, it would be very nice if she could still do that without using up game time.

Right now the only tool we have is to keep going over and staring at her screen.

As to the PIN, this is a computer. We don't have to rely on a four digit pin, we can have ANY length, as well as email notifications of use of parental controls. Heck, I think it would be great to be able to plug into something like VIP Access from Symantec, which provides a new code every thirty seconds from a phone app, like I do for my work VPN, if you're worried about having especially savvy children.

[FreeMediaKids!]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Gus the Crocodile:

Steam moderators are just volunteers, they have no particular connection to or authority from the Valve developers. And the devs don't really post here. They'll read suggestions but you won't hear from them.

You are certainly right about that. Even then, suggestors can be a little naive, like me. Sorry.

[Hanomaly]

Ursprungligen skrivet av supertrooper225:

Sometimes....kids won't just wise up. I didn't say anything about alcoholic parents. I said if kids are misbehaving they need to be discouraged from doing so. Proper parents teach their kids. If the parents are great parents but kids still don't want to learn? Sometimes they need to be taught a lesson. Military school has helped many kids and it is intended to turn trouble makers into people of worth.

i think most studies show most children with /serious/ behaviour problems actually have genuine diagnosable issues.. or.. come from some sort of traumatic home.

There really aren't all these "seriously bad behaving" children/teens who came from homes with good non-abusive parents and un-broken homes in some way.

i admit i speak from an emotional place. i was a seriously messed up teen, behaved really bad. My house was full of abuse (again too serious to get into here). But my family put on a good act and behaved like "Wow, Hanomaly is sure a bad kid for no reason!".. fortunately my school was able to identify an abusive household and i was taken to therapy rather than sent to some "scared them straight" program my parents would have preferred.

Military School can, of course, even make traumatised abused children "behave better" even towards their abusive/neglectful/bad parents. But that's not really treating the root problem... Although it might be better than nothing. i guess if your parents can't teach you proper behaviour, it's better to have a military school teach you /some/ level or proper behaviour. Since that's better than nothing, of course. Better to grow up to be "better than" your parents than for kids to grow up to be crappy people like their parents were.

But ya... the topic is sensitive to me when it comes down to /extreme/ punishments towards children with /extreme/ behavioural issues. Because i just don't buy the idea that "great, loving, warm parents, who respect their children, and raise them to be repectful too by setting a good example, and teaching them rules" end up having these magically monstrous-for-no-reasons children.

~~
Edit to add: i don't think a timer on Steam is a extreme or inappropriate punishment of course! Neither is taking the computer mouse/keyboard away or the monitor away or otherwise limiting computer and video game time.. of course. So nothing about the Original Post is extreme.

[76561198001062896]

when i was a kid my parents never installed any filter software or anything of that kind (not that i was able to spend hours and hours in front of the screen anyway but my parents actually spent time with me and I had a decent childhood nonethless

[Dangerous Beans]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Laptop65:

Ursprungligen skrivet av gamingforfun365:

They can do that instead, but the main problem is that many kids are so disobedient, they disrespect their own parents by ignoring their commands and have things in their own way.

That's because they have been brought up to be disobedient. Relying on a timer to control your kids is just piss poor parenting.

+1

[ KARR™]

It's not a Steam issue, it's a computer issue.

Even if you limit steam time, many steam games you can still launch without launching steam or you just move to play uPlay or Origin games until your Steam time is back.

The PC itself needs to be setup in a way that it isn't in the childs room, so it can't just log in and lock themselves away and instead in a family environment. OR, just BIOS password it, install the multitude of cyber-nanny software available to control what they can or can't do on it when you aren't around.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

I'd like a feature like this for myself.

Set it on, say, half an hour, and then click play on TF2.

I like me some immersive gaming, but having a handy reminder of the time is very useful if I wanna do both that and not be useless piece of crap.

Just gotta make sure it's got a "you have only so much time left" notification, so it doesn't just boot me out of a game when it's run out, before I have a chance to save.

[Unexpected]

instead of this why not just block children entirely? a large majority of game systems like steam have a requirement of people at least 13 to register, if a kid is wasting their life on steam it's not our fault they chose to go ahead and make an underage profile

[Laptop]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Vlady Puts Fegelantic Master:

instead of this why not just block children entirely? a large majority of game systems like steam have a requirement of people at least 13 to register, if a kid is wasting their life on steam it's not our fault they chose to go ahead and make an underage profile

And how do you propose Valve finds out who is secretly underage on here? I completely agree with you on doing it, but they pretty much have no idea how. Most parents will just buy their kids R18+ games these days, they won't care.

[=EndOfToon=]

A timer for a kid who has already been 'taught' it's okay to be at that level of disobedience is more likely going to worsen the situation.

The pro I can see is they might learn to focus better, or even understand the annoyance an adult has with being interrupted. But these are possibly only short-term benefits.

The cons may weigh in more depending on the individual. They may get mad when you shave off 'their time' with common interruptions for things like supper, letting the dog out, etc. This timer thing may inevitably spill into other areas of their life where they could grow impatient, judging how you waste their time, etc. This can also have a long-term negative effect. (Not to mention how frustrating it would be to achieve a big task in game & have it suddenly cut off seconds before saving.)

We all have our own ways to do things, for sure. My own personal feelings say teach & treat the kid like you'd want to be treated - when you were a kid; not how your adult self thinks you'd like to learn or be treated.

Talk with your kids & ask what they think is a suitable punishment for disobeying rules. Negotiate, it teaches them diplomacy & patience. Teach them the value in rules, and why they're beneficial, not purely to be mean to kids.

Most importantly, if you want to go ahead with a timer, show kids the value of a timer as a BENEFIT, not a punishment. Give them a cheap $2 kitchen timer from a value store. Tell them to set the timer & keep track of time themselves. This puts the power & responsibility into their own hands. They won't need mommy or daddy to enforce their lives; they can grow & learn how to manage their own time.

Think of the long-term.