Internet and our kids
Internet is here to stay, and it’s embedded into our daily tasks and lives. We’ve learned to use it to some extend. We use it for work, for research, we find lot of interesting things there. But do we really know what is it that our kids do online and what are they been exposed to?
When I was 5 years old, my parents used to said to me “don’t talk to strangers”, “don’t accept nothing from people on the streets”. With those rules and knowing my friends from the block and school, they felt safe that they had an eye on me, my friends and what I was doing.
But nowadays, how can we know with whom our kids are talking to. They have this video games that they can play online with friends around the world. They have their own social media pages like Facebook, where they add these friends and where they talk with them. How can we control or filter with whom our kids are interacting? How should we replace the rules that my parents used to have for me?
Before we knew the type of shows that could be find on the TV, but now they can watch whatever they want at any time. They can talk with people that can say they have the same age of our kids, but nobody is actually screening them, the same way they don’t screen our kids when they create their online profile. And we are not there so we can’t tell.
Is there anything that we can do to make sure that our kids are not getting the wrong messages, or information that can not be suitable for their age? There are lot of sites that have content not suitable for children under 18, and that can be find looking for them or just by accident because you misspelled the URL address of the website you were trying to go to.
My sister has two kids, 8 and 5, and she has a limited knowledge of Internet. Yes, she knows how to open her emails, search online, but that’s about it. She doesn’t know how to block the computer to accessing websites with content that she doesn’t want her kids to watch. There are some software applications that the same way you protect your computer from viruses, can protect your Internet browser from displaying websites with adult content. But let’s say that you install any of those software, and in that way we control the content of the websites they can visit and block the others. We still have a big interrogation mark regarding the people with whom they are talking through those video games chat rooms, or in their social media pages.
About the Author: Demian writes daily a recap of his thoughts about things that happen in our lives. You’ll find subjects from parenting, to relationships and sex. The whole idea is to trigger some thinking about these subjects that sometimes are overlooked because we are running trying to get things accomplished. To learn more about Demian please visit byDemian.com
