You cannot protect your children
It's true.
In this day and age, protecting your child from violence and the cruelties of the world is improbable. With the internet now at our fingertips we can peruse thousands of sites in our lifetime. Trying to stop it is a hopeless case and watching someone try to stop it is entertaining.
A concerned mother came up to the counter today. She needed to be able to set parental controls on her sons computer. Which is all fair and good. But we asked what she wanted blocked and her answer was "Porn." Weeellll, unfortunately there is no such software that could handle such a task, we explained. The kid was a teenager and she would have to block each site one by one as they came along. But what about Youtube? What about the news? There was way too much out there. And we showed her why. Going through the browswer history, we already saw what kind of kid this was: Hot Topic store, brokenarm.jpg, skydiving accidents, myspace, Gwar events, and on and on.
Just then, the kid saunters up to the counter and asks what his mom is doing. His hair is shaped in a freshly done mohawk. He is shocked to discover that the computer we are all looking at is his and that we know every website he's visited in the last two days. We continue talking to his mother, in front of him, about monitoring him. Recording his keystrokes, checking his browser history daily, blocking groups of sites. The conversation slowly turned over about skydiving and the videos he'd seen lately of people falling from perilous heights and surviving.
The fact of the matter is, when the mother approached, I would have thought she wanted to block a few sites for her 10 year old. But in fact she already had a worldly teen on her hands, who had the curiousity to explore every dark corner of the internet no matter what control she thinks she has. She was obviously quite concerned, but its not the 1950's anymore and god knows, I don't have any great parenting tips, but I think the kid will turn out ok in the end.
Every year, our lives depend more and more on the internet. We count on it to tell us where to go and what to think next. Blocking the internet should become a crime. It's a free world of free speech and uncensorship. Protecting your kids should be not monitoring their every move, but asking them all the time what new things they have discovered. Let the internet be a tool for a common ground of communication between you and your kid, not an obstruction. And thats my parenting advice from someone who knows nothing about parenting!!
And in other news....
Cameron is the cutest cricket player ever!!!
Posted in: chaosgurl, general musings, portland on March 20, 2007 at at 10:00:00 PM