No invention in the history of man has had a more dramatic impact on a child’s world view, in such a short period of time, as the internet. The entire range of human behavior, from the most noble to the most depraved, is available to our children online. As parents, our job is to manage and modulate our kids’ exposure to this wide range of content good and bad. Unfortunately, credibility on the topic is hard to come by with our kids. However, there is a solution: Approach the problem from familiar ground. We’re the parents. We’re responsible for the family. And in particular, we’re responsible for the family's behavior in public.
Public behavior is anything that is seen, heard or otherwise witnessed by other people in a public place, whether at the high-school football game or at the local Starbucks. When our kids go out in public, we expect a certain kind of behavior. We’ve taught our kids this discipline since they were toddlers. The reality is our kids accept that we have the right to set boundaries on their behavior in public.
So why not accept the same boundary-setting for the internet?
The internet is the world's largest small town. You can find nearly everything and everyone in this virtual world we’re weaving. Social networking(socializing over the Internet) is a new form of behavior. It’s being invented by our kids every day. MySpace, consisting of over 70 million active accounts, is the most well-known locale for social networking.
Your kid probably has a MySpace page or some other social networking page. These sites are very public places, and yet they don’t feel like a public place to our children. It may seem obvious to a dispassionate observer that it's not a diary, or even a journal, but, surprisingly our kids, and even some parents, probably haven’t considered just how public these sites are, much less what an open door they provide into our kids’ lives. The content posted by our kids is widely circulated, and is likely to live on into their adulthood. This information gets searched, shared, and forwarded and not just by “nice” people.
The upshot is simple: Internet behavior is public behavior. This is certainly true for activities on social networking sites, but the same is true of email, chat rooms, and instant messaging. It may seem like a private conversation, but it's not. And the Internet is forever. Once information is out there, you can’t take it back.
We as parents have the right and responsibility to monitor (and manage!) our kids' Internet behavior precisely because it is public behavior. We need to be more engaged, and not be afraid to ask questions: Is this behavior in the best interest of our child’s future? Does it represent our family’s best? Is it something we’re content to share with our neighbors and our broader community? We need to open up the dialogue with our kids in order to get them to focus on these questions.
We also need to open up dialogue within our communities so that, in spite of our personal best efforts, our kids aren’t at the neighbor’s house surfing porn, gambling online, or chatting with a predator.
Establish the relationship. Establish the rules. Remove the computer from the bedroom. Put monitoring, filtering or logging software on the home computer. It’s not spying. It’s supervision which is a normal and relevant part of our job as parents.
Always keep in mind kids have a strange view that as long as we don't see it, it's not public. When we can make clear to our kids the Internet is a public place, we help them avoid the pitfalls and dangers of excessive Internet behavior, from a perspective they can understand and appreciate.
John Carosella is the VP of Content Control for Blue Coat Systems where he is responsible for overseeing the production of the K9 Web Protection Internet filtering product, and the company’s associated community outreach program created to raise awareness in communities, educate and encourage first generation Internet parents on the impact the Internet has on children, and on parenting strategies in the 21st century. John is a frequent resource for the media, and has been published in several parenting magazines, and established a parenting blog to keep parents informed and share their voices. John holds a BS in Computer Science from Cornell University and can be reached through his blog.
