Rethinking IM Privacy For Kids

mackles writes, "Now that the world has read the despicable instant messages from Rep. Foley, should parents take a second look at monitoring their kids' IMs? After all, it was IM logging that exposed the scandal; would we have found out otherwise? Cost is not an issue, there are free monitoring tools. Should parents tell their kids before they monitor? Parents and their tech-savvy kids are at odds on the topic. From the article: 'As many as 94 percent of parents polled this summer by the research firm Harris Interactive said they've turned to Web content filters, monitoring software, or advice from an adult friend to keep electronic tabs on their children.' The article quotes one 18-year-old as saying, 'A lot of kids are smarter than adults think.'"

Comments

Re:Anything on the router level?

[Doctor Crumb]

Don't forget recording all of their phone calls and hiring someone to follow them around after school, so you can make sure they're not doing anything you wouldn't do.

Seriously, didn't you have unrestricted and unmonitored internet access growing up? Why is it even conceivable to play CIA with your children? If you want to know what sites they are visiting, ASK THEM.

Re: other dangers

[5of0]

What kind of V-chip are you suggesting to deal with [other real-world dangers]? Why should Internet use monitoring take so much of parent's time rather than say, sending the kid to a Karate class?

First of all, I wouldn't say that monitoring takes a lot of the parent's time - setting it up once, then scanning some e-mails or however your program works, doesn't take an hour a day. And it's free - a lot cheaper than, say, a Karate class.
But today's kids are spending a lot more time on the computer than, say, crossing the street. There's a lot of kids that spend a lot more time on the computer chatting/myspacing/what-have-you than they do riding a bike or walking around the city. And that brings up my other point - in most families, it's already pounded into kids heads to look two ways before crossing the street, don't talk to strangers, scream like bloody murder if someone tries to grab you. Kids are told to eat their vegetables, drink their milk. And I don't know of many kids that spend time chatting on the phone with someone they don't know.
The point is, the whole idea of kids online is fairly new, and parents don't have generations of experience on how to deal with it. Parents walk with their kids on the street, they know who their kids are talking to on the phone, they make them eat right. A lot of parents, when the same principles are taken to the internet, are clueless - they're just doing that IM/MySpace/etc thing, it can't really hurt them.
Somehow when the same dangers are transferred to the internet, it all of a sudden becomes a non-issue, with parents and kids, because it's new. Parents don't see it as a danger, and kids say and do things they would never say or do over the phone or on the street. So why should internet monitoring take so much time? Because it's not so hard, and it's a new thing. Parents need to figure out how to deal with this new area of danger, and teach their kids that even though it seems harmless, it can be dangerous. The same basic safety lessons need to be pounded into the heads of today's information age kids that were pounded into ours, the lessons just need to be extended to the realm of cyberspace.