Looking both ways.
I’m in a quandary.
My oldest has been using computers and the Internet for a long time now, and wants to register on non-kid sites these days, which for the most part I won’t allow. As a parent, I’ve never believed in just saying “No”; I’ve tried to make it “this is how to do it safely” or “here’s what you have to accomplish to earn it.” You do this with all sorts of things—after all, your job as a parent is to teach your kids to survive and thrive in the real world, not to keep them locked away from it forever. Step by step, you show them how to cross a street, stay on the sidewalk, wait for a traffic light, and walk further and further distances until they can walk to school by themselves.
So how do you develop a child’s Internet survival skills?
The child needs a healthy dose of skepticism (“Dad, this YouTube video says that if I don’t forward it to five friends immediately, I’m gonna die.”). He needs to understand that there are a lot of people out there who post weird, patently false, misleading, manipulative, and mean things.
The child needs a thick skin to be able to withstand the usual stupid attacks that anyone can be subject to at any time. She needs to understand how to have a civil discussion, how to argue well, how to support her arguments with reliable sources, and how to quit the battlefield at the right time. How to be sure you’re having a private chat with someone, and how to spot an imposter. How to size up strangers you meet on the Internet to figure out whether they’re really who they say they are.
As with anyone else, children need to be able to tell when a site is unreliable or suspicious; which scripts to allow and which to block; which ads might be okay to click on and which ones definitely aren’t. And they have to have a certain level of maturity to be able to deal with shocking, obscene, or hateful things they might see, because you will never be able to protect them from those, not even with the best nanny software.
Finally, a child has to be able to understand the concept of privacy, and how that privacy might be violated and how it could hurt him later on. I’m not talking just about identity theft, predation or bullying; I’m also talking about understanding how information can be aggregated and retained over decades.
So there are a lot of sites that purport to teach children about Internet safety, but it seems mostly to be along the lines of “watch out for this!” and “don’t do that!” That’s like teaching a child, “Watch out for cars! And drunk drivers! And suspicious men in windowless vans! And vicious dogs! And obnoxious bikers!” They have to venture out sometime, and have to learn the positive steps to take to protect themselves, because these days, using the Internet is as ubiquitous as walking down the street.
What would you propose as a sensible course of study for Internet use, and for which age levels? How do you achieve the objectives listed above, without turning into a fearmonger? And at which point do you judge your child ready to venture out to different areas?
on 05/04 at 12:09 PM:
on 05/15 at 02:45 PM:
All age levels. My buddy’s gf keeps hosing her computer because she isn’t suspicious of anything and essentially clicks on anything that blinks. We’ve tried explaining it to her, but she continues to make lots of money for advertising/affiliate programs.