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Originally Posted by Elle Sommers
My brother is 13. He asked me how to change the background on his myspace. I said, "I don't think mom wants you having myspace." And he asked my mom. And she said, "No, you don't need to be on myspace. You can stick to meeting friends at school and talking to them at lunch or on the phone." And he said, "Okay." He doesn't have myspace anymore. How hard is it to control what kids do online?
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As parents of two schoolage daughters, we take a very proactive role in monitoring what the girls do online. At home they're only allowed online when we're in the vicinity, and we occasionally check to see what they're doing on the computer.
However, lately they've been going down to the public library and using the computers to work on their MySpace webpages. They claim a LOT of their friends are on MySpace, and they feel left out of the loop if we don't allow them to maintain their own MySpace pages. So we do. But my wife keeps track of what's going on as much as she can - and we've had MANY discussions with the kids about the potential risks and hazards of it all. We've done about as much as humanly possible to pass along our own extensive experience with the web to educate them about the possible dangers.
I have little sympathy for parents who fail to take responsibility for educating their kids about the web. Its a component of modern life, plain and simple - and fits under the same category as 'street proofing' in my books.