Safe Surfing
My kids have an active life online; they are penguins and power miners and sparkly unicorns. They chat, tell jokes and go to other player’s pretend houses. And I trust them. But I’m nervous, the boys search YouTube where you are always one click away from something horrible and I have heard that Facebook is becoming popular in the 10-year old set.
And then I came across the top 100 search terms by kids. Guess what was in the top five for boys?
“Google, YouTube, Facebook, Sex and Porn”. Porn? Oh God. Is parenting harder these days or does every generation feel that way?
It’s like the kids are hard-wired to understand technology minutes after it’s been invented and it will take us years and a 100 phone calls the call center to figure out how to start. The good news is that even if you don’t have a Facebook page, or don’t know a plug-in from a USB cable, you are still their guide to the big questions in life. So the one resource that we dim-witted parents have is trust. And unfortunately, trust is a lot harder to build than loading up Online Family Norton, (though parental controls are good to).
And trust, unlike Facebook friends, is based on two-way communication; continuous, open and non-judgmental. It seems that according to the experts the unsafe, exploitive world of the Internet is similar to those other murky issues of parenting like sex and drugs. We can’t police them and we can’t be with them all the time, we have to have faith that they are making good choices. One of the ways to ensure that is to give them some guidelines and have a “big talk”. Just like the other “big talk”, there needs to be a clear communication about online behavior and expectations. Here are some guidelines for parent, at the end of the discussion there should be a mutually-agreed upon household code (and by the way mutually-agreed upon means the kids have to agree too).
The technology teacher at Aaron’s school (the lovely Mr. T) compiled a handout for us nervous parents that outlines a sample code that covers the important bases surrounding privacy, acceptable sites and bullying. There is another great Family Media Agreement at Commonsense Media (one of my favourites).
For The Younger Years:
The Older Years:
Over time you will need to have specific conversations about privacy, password sharing, reputation building and sexting (oh God) but the key will remain having an open, non-judgment line of communication and and a strict rule: No Internet and/or dates in the bedroom with the door closed.
