Parental Control is Crucial
Does parenal control trump a child’s privacy?
Parental control software has made it possible for parents to know what their kids are doing online, how much time they’re spending there, what sites they’re visiting, and with whom they’re chatting. In the Internet age, online parental control can be vital and by tracking your child’s online activities, you may feel faced with an awkward tradeoff between issues of privacy and censorship.
The Internet is a remarkable tool for learning, for entertainment, for fun and for networking with friends. It’s a positive enabler for kids, a place for them to learn to socialize and make friends without fear,.
The Web can be an enabler of a darker sort, where adults pretending to be children go online looking to set up face-to-face meetings with confused, rebellious or naïve children looking to establish an identity separate from those of their parents. It’s important to realize that children don’t actually have to meet predators to be harmed by them.
What about Web sites that are created to spread a drug-oriented philosophy? Or online pornography? A zealous approach to restricting kids’ Internet access is completely understandable in this context.
But that’s where it gets sticky. Do you want your children to know about drugs? Most experts would say that yes, in fact, you do – so that they know the dangers, the lures, and how to avoid them. But you want to be the gatekeeper of that information, and a guiding influence in the conversation.
While some parents declare that they don’t think it’s stepping over the line to read their children’s diaries, most kids would disagree. What makes kids hurt and angry is the discovery that their parents are sneaking around behind their backs.
Given that, doesn’t it make more sense is to be open and above-board about your parental expectations, to make rules and set limits for Internet use? To tell them up front that you can and will be monitoring their use of the Internet? It’s not ‘spying’ if you let them know you’ll be watching them.
In that conversation, explain that you have the tools to see where they’ve been on the Web, when, and for how long. Yes, technology has made that possible; both Network Magic and Home Network Defender allow you to establish hours of Internet access for each computer, and print out reports about where users have been on the Web.
A few other tips for smart parents:
• When you have the list of Web sites your children are visiting, be sure to check them out – are they as innocuous as appear on the home page? Are they for music, games, chatting, or homework?
• Get to know your children’s online personas – and the social networking sites they visit. The short list is FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr. Here’s a more lengthy but still incomplete list of social networking sites.
• Though your kids may writhe with embarrassment, it wouldn’t hurt to join some of these sites yourself, to see how they work, where the pitfalls are, and draw limits that are based on reality rather than paranoia.
• Be sure your kids aren’t downloading movies or music illegally. If you hear them talking about BitTorrent, there’s a good chance they’ve at least been tempted to do so (there are plenty of legitimate reasons the technology – BitTorrent simply enables large-scale file sharing by ganging member computers.
• It’s important that kids understand not to give out any personal information on the Web. Some of that is obvious: no social security numbers, telephone numbers or street addresses. But that should be extended to last names and even city names.
You should view the Internet, like the automobile, as a tremendous boon to our culture, and that includes our families. But, like the automobile, the Internet can be a dangerous thing in young hands, and careful monitoring on your home network is not only advisable, but necessary.
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Posted by Johanna Fry at 02:34PM PST
Johanna Fry
Anca Mar 26, 2009
The truth is that Internet contains a lot of junk content that should not reach the children eyes.