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Originally Posted by zipper
What are the rules for MYSPACE....you must be 14 to create an account. Her mother KNEW she was using MYSPACE...let's point more than one finger here. I see the PARENT just as responsible!
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My pet peeve. I have 3 kids, the oldest is now 18, but they range in age from that down to 10.
For the past 10 years, since I first got highspeed access in the house, there has been constant vigilance and an ongoing struggle to enforce appropriate online usage. Both my wife and I have been IT professionals since the late '80's and while teethed on the mainframe world, the new technologies grew up around us and there's no way that any of the kids can pull the wool over our eyes with respect to computer usage at home.
This is not the case for our neighbours, or parents of our kid's friends. Everywhere they go, they have friends who not only have computer access to the internet IN THEIR BEDROOMS but also are not monitored for length of time, bed times or homework completion. It seems that the parents accept the statements that "they are working".
Early on I gave MSN access to my oldest, he was in grade 9, and he was working on homework in the basement. Well, I soon discovered that he typed a lot into MSN (75% of his effort went here) and hardly had any typing done on the Word document that was due in the morning. Immediately the plug (cat5e) was pulled on the basement computer, and he found himself working at the kitchen computer under our supervision. He also had to stay up past midnight until the work was completed.
Parenting is NOT easy. The decisions are hard, and following through and remaining consistant is hard. But this is what we signed on for, and technical sophistication is no excuse for reduced parental vigilence.
The very same neighbours have this "high " technology in their houses, yet, leave 10 year olds or 13 year olds alone to "play" with facebook, MSN or yahoo chat. I can hear the IM noises in the background when I pop over for what ever reason. She complains she can't control thier access to the computer as they always discover the password, yet there is not removal of access.
Video games & movies fall into this lazy parenting category as well. There is very little enforcement of age appropriate material and my kids constantly complain that we are too strict compared to everybody else.
Well, yes we are. And, both our 18 year old and 15 year old received 88% as their first term averages, so something is working. At least from the parenting aspect.