I’m not a parent, so I have no iron in this fire, but I’m curious: how do you parents deal with your children getting on the internet? Are you with them at all times when they’re on-line? Do you use blocks & filters? Do you teach them good internet skills and let them surf by themselves?
Please tell me your kids’ ages if it’s relevant.
Thanks!
As the father of 4 boys, currently 19, 17, 14 and 11 I’ve been dealing with this particular issue for a while.
My biggest concern was not so much inappropriate material as loading viruses and other malware. The first line of defense was to instruct the boys not to click on any banner ads or anything that looks too good to be true. Kids are surprisingly adept at identifying scams and the like. I installed Trend Micro to scour for malware and set it to update every three hours and run a full scan every night. I also loaded WinPatrol. The little Scottie dog monitors for installations and system changes. My instructions: Always say NO when it asks if it’s OK to do whatever.
That said…to the inappropriate material. When looking for a house 11 years ago one of the deciding factors in our selection was where to put the computer(s). The house we chose had an office directly off the family room. Perfect. The computers are out of the main room, but close enough so I can pop in to see what you’re doing. I explained that I can and will demand access to their FaceBook pages and other sites that might contain personal info “on demand”. The biggest concern was the age-appropriate stuff…not porn per se, but language, jokes and situations OK for the older boys but not for the little ones looking over their shoulder.
I will not allow computers or other internet access in their bedrooms, down inthe basement or other isolated places inthe house. I need to be able to walk up to the monitor at any time.
Did I prevent all inappropriate viewing…no. Did I think I could? or should? No. They’re going to see it…one way or another.
So, a compromise. I think I did ok.
I have a seven-year-old. He has a computer in his room. The browser connects to the Internet only via proxy server. The proxy server I use allows only sites I’ve white-listed. I can also designate a site as a trusted referrer, which means that any site directly linked from the trusted site is reachable and added as a white-listed site on its own.
My ten-year-old’s only allowed on specific sites. Other sites aren’t blacklisted, but if I caught her on a site I hadn’t okayed she knows she’d be banned for a long time. The computer’s in the kitchen and the screen can be seen from the hallway, so it’d be hard to hide.
Previously, she was misusing the internet, talking to strange adult men (at the age of 9. :() After that she was banned from the internet for almost a year, banned from the computer for a long time, and banned from playing out on her own, and, to be honest, she’s lucky she’s allowed back online at all.
We’re just reaching this point (my kids are 10 and 12) and we haven’t had a computer at home for a while, so I’m interested in all the replies. If we get one it will definitely be in a very public place.
scifisam2009, I’m curious, where was she going to make those sorts of contacts?
My daughter has had free access to the internet via the main computer since age 11 and via her laptop this year at age 14.
However the caveat always has been that “I” have free access to anything and anywhere she has been online and I need to have passwords, etc. I randomly check her online activity to keep her honest and will mention occasional items as to where she had been the day before, etc. I just want her to be aware that I can and will monitor her online activities to an extent.
She is a good kid and has never given me any concern online. We have talked about the issues involved and that I will give her privacy that I can. But if she wants privacy she should get a diary. She understands that anything she does online is free game and those were the rules going in from day one, so I haven’t had any issues with her over it. I would imagine if I gave her free access and THEN imposed the rules it would be a much tougher road.
At my place, my 11 year old son spends some of his time with my laptop. He visits only a few sites, one of them being Roblox, which is an interactive game he can play with his buddies. The laptop never leaves the living room, and I plop down next to him periodically. He likes to watch goofy youtube videos. He’s never tried to access anything innapropriate…yet.
At his dad’s, the online access is still dial-up (yeah, I know), so he doesn’t even bother. It’s too slow to play games.
He does not have his own email address, and uses mine to register for any online game sites he wants to visit. So it all shows up for me anyway.
No problems, yet. But puberty is surely going to rear its ugly head soon…
As a former Internet Service Provider, IRCop, MMORPG customer service person, here is my advice. Keep the computer in a public room where people walking by can see the screen. Be aware if they minimize windows quickly when you enter. Check the history. Often.
Netnanny and such are pretty useless for the least internet savvy. A present parent is far better.
One computer mad (and pretty tech savvy for his age) 7 year old boy.
We have two machines with desks at right-angles in my home office / wife’s sewing room. He and I will often be in there together; me playing WoW and him doing his own thing (Lego games, Sims 2, recently Warcraft II…).
He hasn’t shown much inclination yet to wander off into the real wilds of the 'net – apart from a distressing desire to watch badly made Youtube videos (some of which have some coarse language, but meh I’m sure he hears worse on the playground), and playing some less-than-completely age appropriate flash games (the one that involved firing a cartoon kitten out of a cannon was kind of funny though, and since I know he loves his real cat I’m really not too worried).
I don’t have any hard rules in place yet except for the one that goes: If Dad says that particular game or video isn’t OK then you stop playing it or face time-out and/or loss of computer privileges.
Whether more formal measures will be needed in future, I don’t really know. But he (and we) are going to have to learn to deal with the Internet; it’s not going away anytime soon.
I don’t think blacklisting, whitelisting, or filters are the way to go. Our computer is in a visible area, albeit in the basement. My kids (10, and 12) have been fairly responsible. I say fairly because I found some porn history that my 11 year old daughter was looking at with a friend one day and informed her about it. She’s been good as gold so far. My 10 year old son has become curious of late regarding the opposite sex, but nothing too major yet. I’ll let him know that I can check his browsing history if and when the time comes.
Really, I think education and trust are the way to go. I mean, they’re going to get exposed to this stuff anyway, so like drugs or alcohol, it’s more important to educate on the pitfalls rather than try to keep them in a hermetically sealed environment.
She was emailing with an adult male who kinda worked with me (he supervised the computer section of the language school I was working at, where she’d go on the computer one evening a week while I was working; I’d pop in and out to see her in those two hours, and didn’t think her having two hours on the computer was a bad thing), and she joined a dating site.
The latter means that she won’t get true freedom to use the computer for a very, very long time indeed. The former didn’t include anything dodgy, but she gave her email address to an adult without telling me, and he didn’t tell me either.
She seems like a very innocent child in general, far younger than her peers, so I had no idea that she’d do anything like that. FWIW, she pretended to be thirteen, had contact with two men (one just one message, one two) and neither of them contacted her back, which is actually comforting in a way. They must have been horrified!
I did that kind of thing a lot but my parents had no idea. When I was about 12 or 13, I’d go online and sometimes pretend to be older, have cybersex, etc. Basically it’s how I learned about sex–talking to random people, or reading Straight Dope articles. In retrospect, it seems kind of screwed up, but I don’t think it really harmed me.
Does this go for the 19 & 17 year old as well, or is that just what you did when the older boys were at the age of the younger ones?
My daughter was 9 at the time. She’s only 10 now. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to have learnt much about sex through her time online.
Don’t you have a teenage daughter now? Maybe I’m confusing you with someone else, but I’m puzzled by the timing of all of that, what with the relatively young age of the internet.
As for us, our kids (7 & 5) are still content to just play games and do activities on the bookmarked sites, which my wife and I have approved. They’ve never searched out sites on their own. Their computer is in the family room and the monitor is within view of the kitchen, so they have no privacy. Just the way we like it.
Our daughter, now 12, has been on the net for a while, and for a long time was generally more net savvy than my wife and I. However, she is not very savvy about being able to cover her tracks, so we are generally able to catch her whenever she wanders outside her boundaries.
The only time she really got herself into some trouble was a few years back emailing an older guy back and forth. The guy had contacted her through the role playing forums on Neopets, and she responded, frankly because she was a naive kid. She was banned from that site for a long while afterwards.
She knows we check up on her, and the computer she uses is in a high traffic area, so she polices herself well. Like **auntbeast ** mentioned, the other safeguards have generally been useless, and the high traffic, watch for quick minimizes strategy seems to work very well. It is a delicate balance between letting them learn their own lessons and protecting them from themselves.
Funny related story alert… When she was 6 or 7, and big into the “make your own stuffed animal” store, she would go to their website, and play the games they had. When Young Miss could not get one of the particular games to load, she wrote them an email claiming that what they were doing was false advertising, and that if they did not get the problem corrected, she would “shut you down. SHUT YOU DOWN! CAPEESH!” (Her spelling, not mine, exact quote from the email).
Young Miss Striker scares us sometimes.
The only computers in the house, available tot he kids (of any age) are the desktops in the office. So, yes, the rules still apply to the older boys.
There are occasions where my wife and I will retire before all of the boys are in bed…or home, for that matter, and there is unsupervised internet access then. I’m not stupid, but as I said, it’s more about aga appropriate viewing. He’s 19…when I think back to what I was doing then…sheeesh.
Internet viewing in other locations has never been a discussion topic in our house. Rules is rules.
That is awesome.
No, you must be thinking of someone else. I’m childless myself!
Same here. Got my first computer at the age of 13. My parents knew nothing of how to use a computer, so even though it was in an area they could see it, I still did all sorts of stuff. Uh, no dating sites or anything though, but I was a geek who was more fascinated by video game and anime websites. When when I was 15 or 16, I came home one day to find my parents had bought a new computer desk and moved everything into my room, saying they trusted me. Dunno what triggered that, but hey, I’m not screwed up now from having totally unmonitored access to the net.