My oldest daughter has been reading the Dope lately. She’s read some of Cecil’s books, and then started reading the archived questions on the site, then became interested in the message board and started reading a lot of threads. She has expressed an interest in registering to post, but she’s only ten and I believe the age limit here is thirteen.
So my question is if anybody knows of any kid friendly, general interest message boards where she might find a home until she’s old enough to become a Doper (I swear I never pushed the Dope on her, she acquired her interest entirely on her own).
She’s a precocious kid. As I’ve said before, she’s basically Lisa Simpson. Intelligent, idealistic, and reads and writes well above her age level. She could probably just about fit in here if it wasn’t for the age limit (she tells me the profanity here doesn’t bother her because she hears me swearing pretty much constantly anyway). I think she really likes the whole arguing on the internet concept and wants to join in. Any ideas about where she could start.
I’m not looking for chatrooms, incidentally, but topic oriented message boards. I should also make clear that her mother and I would be monitoring any and all internet activity she participates in, so we would be on extreme guard for the creep factor.
She’s probably going to be reading this thread, by the way, so keep it reasonably clean up in here.
Honestly, I can’t think of any at all. The dope seems to be rather unique in both the breadth of topic, and the level of discourse. Other than the Giraffe boards, I can’t think of any forums where posting in standard English is required either. The lack of chatspeak, leet, and general idiocy is a huge part of why I love this site. Maybe you could get a mod to open her an account with limited posting/ viewing privileges?
I wonder if there would be enough interest for someone to start a forum designed for intelligent young people where reasonable debate and discussion of topics would be encouraged. If I had a kid, I hope and expect the kid would be a bright one as it sounds like Dio’s daughter is, and I’d want them to have a place to go to practice writing and discussing issues that didn’t reinforce bad habits like chatspeak or general idiocy.
Maybe ASFAR (Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions)? You/she may or may not agree with the organization, but there are plenty of precocious youngsters there. (A friend of mine used to be a member.)
I was going to suggest one of the sites operated by Disney or Nickelodeon but the commercialism can be annoying. I just check the Scholastic website, and they have some message boards, but they seem oriented toward various book series. Looking at Big-boards.com, I found The Student Room, which is apparently a UK site for students, and then very few after that.
Unfortunately, the passage of COPPA really cut down on the number of internet venues available to rule-following children.
A lot of the more intelligent general-interest boards that I used to use when I was in my teens all have similar rules to the Dope with regard to 13 being the minimum age.
She sounds like a great kid, even if she must struggle daily with the burden of her father being who he is.
(I kid, I kid because I love. Sorta.)
While Bricker Jr is still too young even to read the threads here (he’s eight) I have no doubt I’m going to be confronting this same question soon enough. Right now, he asks me on a regular basis if there’s been any communications for him in the Pokemon threads, so he’s hip to the message board concept.
It’s a US law that mandates a number of protections for children under 13 online–the salient point for most sites is that if someone asserts their age as under 13, the website operator must have paperwork proving that they have the child’s parents’ permission to store any personal profile information (including e-mail address) about the child.
This is why most non-child-focused websites (especially US-based ones) ask for either a birthday or an age, and refuse to allow people under 13 to register.
Well it’s too late to do anything about it on SDMB because you already made this topic, but it’s beyond easy to just say you’re 13 when registering for a message board. If you find a forum you feel is appropriate/entertaining for your daughter, it takes no effort to just check “I am 13 years of age or older,” or any equivalent.
Not that I would condone such heinously irresponsible parenting. :rolleyes:
