To not have internet at home?

[VelvetLady88]

I live with gaming addiction & find the best way to manage this is not to have internet at home. I've previously used various software to block sites & manage screen time but I've always relapsed. I've lost our home & jobs during relapses so I'm terrified this happens again. My DS is due to start secondary school in August & I'm worried about how he will do his homework without internet. At primary school he had been doing his homework at an after school club as they have Wi-Fi. We go to the library & gaming cafes on a Saturday & school holidays so he can game & keep in touch with friends & he has internet access at his Dad's home on a Sunday. He doesn't have a smartphone & his new school don't allow them. I don't have a smartphone. He will be able to go to the local library for 1hr after school to do his homework & can work offline as we have a laptop at home. Is this reasonable for him to be able to do his homework with this amount of internet access?

I don't think it's at all fair or realistic to ask them to change established streamlined school-wide communications methods just for you.

If you told them that you don't have the Internet at home, they would likely try to help you find an affordable social tariff or some other solution to get your home online, but I don't think they would readily accept as an answer that you simply can't or won't have the Internet readily available when a secondary-aged child lives there.

Ask the head.

One hour of internet access at the library would be wholly insufficient for accessing the curriculum
at DD’s secondary school. The work is almost exclusively done on the school provided laptops via an online portal. Most homework is due not the next morning, but in the evening on the day it is assigned.

addiction is a serious problem. You still can’t deny your child access to a basic amenity like the internet. At this point it is like not having electricity or water in the home.

your son will be old enough that he could manage the connection. While you will need to be the account holder, there is no reason for you to have the passwords.

Also wanted to add, if the school encountered a family that could not access the internet, the solution would not be to provide paper homework. They would seek financial support to get the household online.

He will get more and more homework to do online as he moves up through secondary school. He will also miss out a lot with being able to play and keep in touch with friends if you're restricting it this much. I think you need to put his needs above your own and find another way to work through your addiction.

Using the Internet at the library is probably fine if you're retired and are able to wait around for a PC in the daytime, and you save up a couple of specific little tasks to do but are otherwise not really fussed about doing stuff online... but it's categorically incompatible with the life of a secondary-age young person nowadays.

You underestimate the amount of online notifications you get a day about homework,, lessons, emails about food tech, we have separate apps for school lessons, one for homework and different ones for maths and science. All our school introductions and information evenings are done online. Parents evening is online, you have to book the slots online. If a pupil doesn’t have access to a laptop, our school have a Chromebook scheme. They have to have one.

Yes, good point. I forgot about all this. I get inundated with emails from my children's schools daily. All school communication is done via apps.

Apologies if this is obvious; I have read the thread but can't remember anybody saying this...

Can you get yourself a really rubbish, low-spec, bottom-of-the-range laptop for the online things that you need to do yourself- such as communicating with the school and other basic admin - and then get your DS a decent one with a password that he keeps strictly to himself?

If you get a pentium with 4GB of RAM - like my useless work one - it will be irritatingly slow but just about functional for emails and other simple stuff. Try gaming on it and it will constantly crash and be utterly useless.

whether it disadvantages him or not isn’t the point I was making. Calling a person who is working hard to beat an addiction selfish is just mind-bogglingly awful.

there are ways around having the net at home.