Rethinking IM Privacy For Kids 507
mackles writes, "Now that the world has read the despicable instant messages from Rep. Foley, should parents take a second look at monitoring their kids' IMs? After all, it was IM logging that exposed the scandal; would we have found out otherwise? Cost is not an issue, there are free monitoring tools. Should parents tell their kids before they monitor? Parents and their tech-savvy kids are at odds on the topic. From the article: 'As many as 94 percent of parents polled this summer by the research firm Harris Interactive said they've turned to Web content filters, monitoring software, or advice from an adult friend to keep electronic tabs on their children.' The article quotes one 18-year-old as saying, 'A lot of kids are smarter than adults think.'"
Re:Damn kids! Get off my lawn! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Revolutionary Idea (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Damn kids! Get off my lawn! (Score:3, Interesting)
Anything the kids don't know, they can get off the internet. They will have at least one friend that knows how.
Re:Revolutionary Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Teen Curiosity you think. The trouble was (from my wife and my perspective) that some of the content he was looking at was from the pretty extreme end of human sexual behaviour. We'd talked to the boy pretty frankly about his body, about sex, responsibility, hygiene and health, but there were people inserting things into each other's bodies that I'd never have thought to have mentioned in some of the things he was looking at.
Now I personally don't think that women inserting baseball bats in men's rectums is "normal" sexual behaviour. Call me a prude. But we realised that there are so many things out there that are just sooooo outside anything we could think of talking about (and to be frank, I don't really want to discuss the joys of prostate stimulation with foreign objects to my 13 year old son).
It all came back to school - there was an older boy (18!!!) who was taking great delight in "advising" younger boys to go to certain websites. That kid has been expelled, and has a court order to stay away from schools and p[laygrounds, as a bit of investigation showed that the lad has a history as a 17 year old of gettting heavily involved with 12 year old boys and girls. I accept that kids will have sex, but not with people that are almost adults who have a fetish for objects and 'toys'. But an older kid will alwys be "more informed" and "cooler" than parents.
As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing too extreme when it come to me finding out what my kids are doing on the Internet. I log, monitor, re-direct and block my kids use of the Internet. They can move out at 18 if they don't like it.
Re:Who's at risk here? (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell? When people ask, "where are the parents?" and say "they should have known," they don't mean "they should have tapped his phone to hear him talk about his plan, logged his computer to know he was visiting sites that instruct him how to make bombs and sneaked into his room and go through his stuff so they can find his Wile E. Coyote-like plans to destroy the school". They mean that parents should have known, because you can't possibly live in the same house as the kid, talk to the kid every day, and not realize he is THAT screwed up. The only explanation for this is that either you never talk to your kid, or you ride his ass so much with all your surveillance that you've escalated his normal teenage rebellion into something bigger and completely and utterly screwed up his mind. It's YOUR fault that he got that way, not that you didn't manage to stop him, call the police, or chain him to the bed minutes before he was supposed to carry out his plan.
As for teenage pregnancy, "they should have taught them better" is just that. They should have taught her, not locked her in her room because you intercepted an e-mail from her boyfriend. The idea is that you teach your kids to understand the consequences of their actions. I don't mean consequences as in punishment. I mean consequences of their actions, not whatever artificial things you impose. When you punish your kids for every little thing they do, they know that the action that led to the consequence was when they weren't careful enough to not get caught. When you explain to them that even their first sexual encounter can lead to pregnancy or STD's, they'll be thinking about that consequence.
And as to your little rant about your kids illegal internet actions leading to you...if you're really thinking along the lines of "better him in jail than me," you're one of the most screwed up parents I've ever heard.
Re:Anything on the router level? (Score:3, Interesting)
This may be true, but I would bet that online contact is a more frequent cause of harm to teens than slip and fall in the shower. It's not as obvious, because it's not physical, but it's there.
I grew up on computers, from 10 years old and up, talking to people online back when it consisted of paging the SysOp for a one-on-one conversation. (And I'm sorry for all the SysOps I so incessently annoyed when I was 10.) And I am really starting to think that what we need is the equivalent of VChips for computers. Something that doesn't let kids have a profile, anywhere, and something that doesn't let them install instant messaging programs.
Let 'em use the phone.
Re:Revolutionary Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
What? You told me to.
Okay, stupid joke.
I can't see any value in your kid seeing these pictures, or taking cues about his sex life from a seventeen year old. But I do see some value in having clear lines of communication, and I don't know if the value of protecting your son from weird pictures is worth the loss there. I'd much rather have a kid who finds weird stuff on the 'Net and thinks, "maybe the parents can tell me what's up with that," instead of, "how do I get my hands on more without the parents finding out?" But maybe it's overly optimistic to think that most kids could ever see their parents as reliable sources for information about sex.
I'm curious: did you have a good talk with the kid about why he was interested in these pictures, and why you didn't feel that they were appropriate for someone of his age? Probably you did. Maybe he understood your reasoning. Maybe he agreed with it. Maybe he's following the rules. But it seems to me that, so long as the interest is there, that the situation isn't fully resolved. And if he doesn't even feel safe in telling you that he's still interested, I think it has a snowballing effect on your relationship, multiplying the number of things that he doesn't feel comfortable discussing with you.
All I'm really saying is that even twelve year olds have some concept of sexuality, and a desire to figure it out. If you can make him comfortable telling you what's going on in his mind, without getting judged or humiliated, then you've got a better shot at protecting him from the really dangerous things.
Re:Revolutionary Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, as a wizened old sage (I'm 20), I call bullshit on that. It is not ridiculous to check logs, history, etc. I know personally, my parents kept fairly close tabs on me and my siblings. Some of it was through the normal means (talking to our friends' parents and our teachers) and a some of it was by computer. One time my mother was worried about my sister's mental health, and even looked through her private journal and poetry, as well as checked out her Yahoo and ICQ profile, friends, etc. It turns out there was some pretty bad things going on that my sister denied, and my mom probably wouldn't have found out until my sister ran away, committed suicide, or done some other awful thing. This was clearly an invasion of privacy, and it pissed my sister off like nothing else I've ever seen. However, now she recognizes that it was a good thing.
Parenting is not this well-defined black and white scenario you lay out. There are many dubious decisions to be made. Just saying that when you use a computer to monitor your children you are doing harm is ridiculous. Parents have a responsibility to make sure their children are doing the right things. If that includes checking in on their online activity, so be it.
Re:Revolutionary Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Patronize much?
I'm talking outside the home. I personally believe kids do not (and should not) get to enjoy all the rights of a citizen until they are of voting age, but there are some laws that disagree with me. At home, though, sorry. They do have rights (shelter, food, etc) but not first amendment rights. You ever see a kid try to claim "first amendment rights" to speech to their own parent? If the parent has half an ounce of brains they'd laugh in the kid's face. Freedom to assemble? "You're grounded. Tough." Freedom to bear arms and form militias? LOL! Uh, no.
Children are not property, true. But they are not fully-vested citizens either. The concept is just silly. I hope you're not a parent.
Oh, and drawing an analogy between the child/parent relationship and the citizen/government relationship may seem logical on the surface but isn't at all. The government's role is not to raise healthy citizens. It is to keep them safe from foreign invasion (which includes terrorist attacks), safeguard law and order and provide a functioning system in which the economy can thrive .. basically, to allow the citizenry to live their lives in reasonable safety and with the maximum of freedom consistent with order. A parent's job is wholly different.