TLDR: 10yo son regularly skips sleep and responsibilities in favour of YouTube. Technical counter measures don't affect this behaviour. Looking for non-technical solution to augment technical intervention.For the past few year, we've been battling our 10yo son's YouTube addiction, and I feel we're not making any progress. The content he watches is quite benign (mostly gaming-related), but the way he does it isn't. We've caught him several times early in the morning behind the desktop computer, with his internet history showing that he started watching just after we went to bed. Yesterday he skipped on an after-school appointment, because he knew the home computer was unsupervised. (Normally I work from home, yesterday I had an appointment elsewhere).Some time ago, we've started implementing various parental controls, but so far he has been able to work around them, by stealing our devices, abusing the homework-exceptions, and finding new ways to access YouTube. I believe I can still win the tech-part of this battle, if I try hard enough (at least for the next few years). However, none of the technical measures seem to affect his behaviour - they just seem to increase his tenacity and the amount of deceit used to avoid them.When discussing this with him, he just flat-out denies it. He would claim he wasn't up all night, until I present him the evidence that he was. Even when he is aware that I already know the truth, he will lie. If I present evidence, he will amend his story ("why was your phone on at 3AM", "I was just putting it on the charger when I went to the toilet"), this goes on until his story is obviously longer consistent, at which point he will stop talking.I don't believe we can affect his addictive behaviour by just taking away YouTube access (although I still intend to do so), as I think that he will just express these 'urges' differently. However, I have no clue how to effect a positive change his behaviour.About us: I (M37) work from home as a software developer, my wife (F35) has a day job in logistics, 3 days a week. My son was formally diagnosed with the "gifted" label, and attends a specialised school for this. With me working from home, my son is rarely unsupervised. The most frustrating part is that I'm a skilled IT worker, and yet my son beats me at my own game. On a positive note, he recently switched to watching English language content (his native language is Dutch), so at least he's improving some skill this way. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2Sg0iSP
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