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Hime · 05-02-2007, 02:24 PM

Personal experience:

My parents let my twin brother and I use the internet with supervision for educational sites, games and school research when we were pretty little (maybe 6 or 7). I didn't have much interest in browsing for fun until I was 12 or 13, when my friends started using instant messenger and posting their own homepages and online journals. I have always been very close to my mom, and didn't have anything to hide (all I was posting were stories and poems I'd written, drawings, fangirl raving about my favorite authors, etc), so when she asked me about what I did online (which I remember her asking regularly) I showed her my page and told her the truth about what I was up to -- updating my page, chatting on IM with my friends, reading their pages and journals, and sometimes looking up things that interested me like fantasy writers or world music (I was a big nerd). I think my dad found porn sites in the history when my brother and I were 14 or so, though, because he started snooping on us openly. A couple of times he and mom confronted my brother about the porn, but he always got defensive and said that he clicked on it by accident or something, so they never really got anywhere.

The thing that really bothered me was that my dad would read our friends' journals and make jokes and comments about them based on what they wrote -- sometimes when they talked about sex and drugs (my best friend's cousin was in college and wrote about her adventures a lot), sometimes just because they were goofy and used a lot of silly memes and in-jokes. That felt like an invasion of privacy to me -- not because he was reading what they put online, but because he wanted to judge our friends based on internet posts taken out of context rather than on what they were like in person and what we said about them.

So, I think that it's good for parents to keep an eye out and ask a lot of questions to make sure that kids aren't being exposed to dangers BECAUSE of the internet (like hardcore porn, creepy adults who pretend to be 13, stalkers, etc) but not so good for parents to use the internet as a tool to find out what their kids are doing in real life. When my dad decided to do that, it made me feel like he didn't want to hear what I had to say, because he'd second-guess me with what he'd read online. And I think that the healthiest thing is for kids to want to talk to their parents if something is wrong or sketchy, not for parents to have to check with their own sources.

Of course, if the kid has real behavior problems that's a different story. If you know that your teen has a history of seeking out dangerous activities and people, monitoring his web histories could help keep him safe.

05-02-2007, 02:24 PM	#164
Hime Extraordinary Machine Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Outside of Washington, DC Posts: 307	Personal experience: My parents let my twin brother and I use the internet with supervision for educational sites, games and school research when we were pretty little (maybe 6 or 7). I didn't have much interest in browsing for fun until I was 12 or 13, when my friends started using instant messenger and posting their own homepages and online journals. I have always been very close to my mom, and didn't have anything to hide (all I was posting were stories and poems I'd written, drawings, fangirl raving about my favorite authors, etc), so when she asked me about what I did online (which I remember her asking regularly) I showed her my page and told her the truth about what I was up to -- updating my page, chatting on IM with my friends, reading their pages and journals, and sometimes looking up things that interested me like fantasy writers or world music (I was a big nerd). I think my dad found porn sites in the history when my brother and I were 14 or so, though, because he started snooping on us openly. A couple of times he and mom confronted my brother about the porn, but he always got defensive and said that he clicked on it by accident or something, so they never really got anywhere. The thing that really bothered me was that my dad would read our friends' journals and make jokes and comments about them based on what they wrote -- sometimes when they talked about sex and drugs (my best friend's cousin was in college and wrote about her adventures a lot), sometimes just because they were goofy and used a lot of silly memes and in-jokes. That felt like an invasion of privacy to me -- not because he was reading what they put online, but because he wanted to judge our friends based on internet posts taken out of context rather than on what they were like in person and what we said about them. So, I think that it's good for parents to keep an eye out and ask a lot of questions to make sure that kids aren't being exposed to dangers BECAUSE of the internet (like hardcore porn, creepy adults who pretend to be 13, stalkers, etc) but not so good for parents to use the internet as a tool to find out what their kids are doing in real life. When my dad decided to do that, it made me feel like he didn't want to hear what I had to say, because he'd second-guess me with what he'd read online. And I think that the healthiest thing is for kids to want to talk to their parents if something is wrong or sketchy, not for parents to have to check with their own sources. Of course, if the kid has real behavior problems that's a different story. If you know that your teen has a history of seeking out dangerous activities and people, monitoring his web histories could help keep him safe.