Rules for Teenage Internet Access?

Kent Brewster writes "Despite dire warnings, we've gone ahead and put computers with Internet access into our adolescent (11, 12, and 15-year-old) childrens' rooms. We've got a nebulous set of rules, which include several like these: Keep the door open when you're on the computer. Don't quickly exit from everything when we walk past. Don't ever lie to us about what you're doing. Unfortunately we've had instances where all of these rules - especially that last one - have been broken, so now we are looking at getting more specific. We'd be very interested in hearing from both sides of the fence: parents with Net-connected progeny, and those who are chafing under their rule. Parents, once you're past making the huge mistake of actually letting the kids have computers in their rooms, what's a reasonable set of guidlines? Non-parents, what are the rules that chap your hide the worst? Do they actually make a difference in your behavior, or do you just sneak past them anyway? Finally, and this is sort of a meta-question from an exasperated dad, does everybody lie about what they're doing on the Internet?"

Comments

Start the policies before they start walking...

[flogger]

I don't want to preach; but, to me, the trust issue (as mentioned earlier) is the key to raising children. Trust them and let them know you trust them. But, children will screw up and loose that trust. Let them know that the trust is gone and let them know what it will take to get that trust back. And LET THEM EARN THE TRUST BACK. I have seen many parents that "give up" when a child becomes untrustworthy. When that happens, the child doesn't have anything to strive for in his/her parental relationship. Is this "Trust See-Saw" easy to handle? No, of course not.

Let me get back to the topic: Start young with teaching children what is appropriate and inappropriate. (For the parents with teens, it may not be too late to start, but it will be tough if you have to convince you child that certain clothes he/she has been wearing for two years are now inappropriate.) Is it easy to discuss this with children? It shouldn;t be hard.

Let me use a personal example: My son, at the time was age 9, went to spend the night at a friends house. While there they watched an austin powers movie. This came out in conversation a couple of days later. My wife and I were horrified that this happened, but we didn;t yell and hoot and holler. We asked about the movie and he told us about it (We had seen this movie a couple of years before at a friends house (Strange how things work out)) During this conversation we talked about attitudes toward women and sexuality. And we talked about whe we found certain things objectionable. But it wasn't a lecture. we were having a conversation and he understood why it was inapproriate when we had finished.

You may say, "Bah, kids can't handle that kind of talk." Well, you'd be suprised. It you are honest and open with your children in ALL areas, they will learn and respond in this type of conversational enviornment. A few months ago, My son was at an overnight with a few friends and a movie was going to be shown. He asked what it was rated and got a couple of friends to go into another room and play cards (or a board game, I can;t remember. He's in bed now, or I would ask him). But I think that takes some maturity. Maturity that comes from learning how to think along the lines of what is appropriate and what is not.

How does one get to a point where we can trust the kids to make good choices? As parents we should make good choices ourselves and explain these to the kids. Dinner is a great time for these discussions. And whenver something comes up, don;t hide it from the kids. Let them in one what is happeneing. Another example: A student from where I teach was kicked out of his house. We let him stay with use for a bit while things got straightened out. My children were, of course very curious about what was going on, and we told them about the neglect, abuse, and everything going on. My children were very welcoming and treated this person as a brother fot the time he was here. Since then, my son has volunteered his time at some charities in the area for other "transients."

Again, bak to the topic: In the manner of the internet, as with all areas, be open and honest. When you are deleting spam from your email, there is a great learning experience for the kids. "Look at this junk. Enlarge your breasts..." and get into a discussion about the previlence of sexual attitudes in society. It works, kids listen, and they will understand. Yesterday, When I was playing my father-in-law on some online chess and my kids were helping out, I got an offer across AIM (Through trillian) to check out some girls webcam. (Yea right.) Well what a great learning experience about the inappropriateness of the internet. We even went to the link, and sure enough, it was filtered out.
which leads me to...
Don;t let children surf without proper filtering. All of our computers run through an E-Smith server (modified red-hat small office gateway and server) which runs an excellent free SquidGuard filter. This doesn't mean that you don;t t

Re:Trust them

[spoonboy42]

Well, I find that being able to outsmart one's parents definitely provides a measure of privacy. Here's a few steps you can follow at home, kids (don't forget NOT to ask Mom and Dad's permission):

1. If you have your own computer, install Linux. If your parents have ties to the NSA, better make that OpenBSD instead. The fact is that, unless one of your parents has a beer gut, wears t-shirts with slacks, and hasn't groomed their beard in a couple of decades, they don't know how to use UNIX. You could leave it logged in as root all the time, and they probably wouldn't know what the hell was going on (not that I'm suggesting you do that. Use strong passwords!).

2. Encrypt your data. You can do this on your own machine or the family one, doesn't matter. GPG is available for Windows, Mac, and loads of Unices. It's also a simple, unobtrusive command-line tool that you can use to pretty well scramble anything.

3. Hide your files. On UNIX machines where you have root, chown them to root, then put them in a directory that only root can read (su to retrieve them). If you don't have root on a UNIX box, at least give them the standard '.' prefix. In windows, I recommend tacking on a ".sys" extension and hiding them somewhere in the C:\WINDOWS tree. As far as Macs go, just use the ol' unix '.' trick, and Finder will be none the wiser (I think, I don't have a Mac to test this on).

4. Browse anonymously. Back when anonymizer was free, it was a great solution. Nowadays, you'll probably need a friend to set up a server in a safe, uncensored environment. I recommend school buddies with apathetic/permissive/hippie/workaholic parents, as this lessens the likelyhood that you'll run into trouble. A dedicated *nix server with a simple redirector CGI would be nice, but for all the legions of windows users out there, this would appear to be an excellent option.

5. Cover your tracks. Clear browser history. On Windows, clear the list of recently accessed documents. If you have root on a UNIX box, flush the logs.

6. Encrypt transfers. Enigmail for mozilla and the encryption plugin for gaim are your friends.

7. Make your data look innocuous. Chatting with some friends on IM? Why not chat in Arabic (if you're on an unecrypted connection, be aware that this method reduces the possibility for parental-snooping, but increases the likelyhood of unconstitutional racial profiling. You've been warned). If you don't have the time or inclination to learn a foreign language, at least learn ROT-13. ROT-13 is so simple that, after a few weeks of practice, the overhead for conversing in it online gets to be pretty low. Keep in mind that it's by no means secure, but it prevents parents from catching naughty words with their peripheral vision. If your friends aren't as "safety-conscious" as you, you can probably write a quick script to do ROT-13 on the fly to incoming messages. Learning to do RSA in your head would be truly impressive (I can do it with small keys with pen and paper, but nothing's stopping you short of the computational limit of the human brain)

The moral of this story is that clever children can cheat their way out of a lot of parental and societal rules. When I was living at home, I used some of the methods above to keep certain data safe (e.g. IMs with my girlfriend), but curiously, I didn't use it to browse porn and the like. The reason? My parents didn't constantly snoop to make sure I wasn't breaking the rules, they just raised me with the conviction that sexual intimacy is a beautiful thing between two people, and that commercial exploitation cheapens that, and they trusted me to make the right choices when they weren't around. If you never give your kids a chance to make bad decisions, they'll never learn how to make good ones.