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MySpace Age Verification - for Parents
unlametheweak writes "North Carolina is thinking of the children by passing a law requiring parents to verify they are parents before letting their children onto social networking sites. Notwithstanding the whole concept of an Internet ID for people in general; children are now being tracked by cellular phones with GPS, spied upon with Parent Controls (MS Vista has built-in parental spyware), and also strategically placed Nanny Cams, keyboard loggers, etc. 'Few of the proposals we've seen so far seem like good ways to [protect children], but North Carolina's approach at least has the virtue of novelty--unlike most video game legislation, which relies on similar rhetoric but has been almost universally struck down by the courts, sometimes at great cost to the states.' Is the zoo-like Minority Report world in which children are growing up in today doing more harm than good? How will this affect a 14 year old, much less a 17 year old "child"?"
When will people learn that spying on your children is not a replacement for good parenting? The fact that there's actually a demand for this sort of thing is depressing.
As soon as a kid shoots up a school, people ask "Where were the parents? Why didn't they see the problem?" We're very quick to point the finger at parents when something goes wrong. And then I see posts like this asserting that parents shouldn't be able to monitor their childrens' activities.
Fifty years ago, parents didn't have to watch so closely. There was far less media coming into the home, and what was available was far easier to monitor (and far more regulated, as it was all under the watchful eye of the FCC).
Now, we've got the internet. We've got a half-dozen game consoles. We've got cable and satellite television, dirt-cheap movies and music available for purchase, and a barrage of information everywhere we look. For parents to keep the same level of attention on what their kids are doing, they have to use tools like "spyware" (you know, software that lets them know what THEIR computers are being used for) to keep track of their kids and look for dangerous behavior.
I've got to say, though, that I object to nanny cams unless there is a very specific reason to have one. If you smell pot in your living room, maybe it's a good time to put in a camera to see if your kid is using illegal drugs. But putting up a camera *just in case* is paranoid.
Parents have to monitor their kids. Every generation has done so in some fashion. So long as kids know the rules, know they are being watched, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I wouldn't let my kids go certain places in the city without me being around because it's risky for them; the same goes for the internet.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
That stupidity doesn't magically go away when they turn 18, but the "protection" they're afforded under the law does, so how do you reconcile those two things?
I think the point is since we expect people to be adults at 18, they'd better be pretty damn close to it by 17. Close enough that we shouldn't have to spend so much energy protecting them from themselves.
They act without considering the consequences to themselves or others. They are irresponsible and generally stupid, with a few exceptions.
They sound just like adults, to me...
There is now a small, but growing movement within the psychological profession to abolish the concept of adolescence. All I can say is, IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME! Teenagers are not children. They are physically closer to adults both in terms of their physical/sexual maturity and the ability of their brains to function. In other words, a 14 year old is physically capable both in their brain and the rest of their body of assuming a position as a young, but real, adult in modern society. We just don't let them do it!
Our ancestors knew this. That is why even the advanced societies of the classical age regarded teenagers as adults, rather than as children. Even our own legal system on some level recognizes that teens are capable of functioning identically to adults because it allows them to be tried as such in violent crimes cases.
It's a good thing Luke's parents didn't let him have a MySpace page, otherwise his father might have found him with one Google search, and essentially ended the series right there.
I've raised three kids who now range in age from 24 to 31.
I'm not and never have been my child's peer or friend - I'm a parent and the relationship between me and my child is and always will be asymmetrical.
As a parent I reserved the right to investigate any aspect of my child's life when I had reason to believe that the child was at risk - and investigations into my child's sexual activity or drug or alcohol or internet use are IMO appropriate.
Minor children have an inherent right not to be physically, sexually or emotionally abused - every other right a child has is granted by that child's legal guardian. My responsibility as a parent is to protect that child until (s)he can fend for itself.
My house, my rules. Doesn't matter if the child is fifteen or thirty-five - as long as they're under my roof I will determine what does (and does not) go on in my house. For example my imaginary twenty-five year old kid is legally able to smoke cigarettes. He's still not gonna smoke them in my house. He can pretty much come and go as he pleases - with the caveat that if you're not gonna come home that night you give Mom and Dad a call so they don't stay up worrying about whether you've wrapped your car around a tree or something. Don't know about other parents but I can't go to sleep if I have a child unaccounted for.
I trust my children and always have - that doesn't mean I didn't verify where they are (and with whom) from time to time. The internet was really only an issue with my youngest but I can and have used tools to determine what he was doing on the net and wouldn't hesitate to do so again if I had a kid in the house.
The parent poster mentions spying on your children - monitoring is not spying. My kids knew their entire lives that I might call to verify their whereabouts from time to time, check their homework, call their teachers to see how they were doing in school, occasionally check the odometer in the car and yes, even monitor their internet use. As I said in the title, trust but verify.
My children also know how much I love them. They're not peers or friends and never will be - they are my children and that relationship brings both additional benefits and additional responsibilities. Doesn't mean I don't hoist a glass with my kids or seek their counsel sometimes - they're adults now and in charge of their own destiny and even though sometimes I don't agree with their decisions but I have learned to STFU and allow my kids to grow from their own choices - good or bad.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
The odds of your kids finding a sexual predator on MySpace are vastly less than them finding one in their own circle of family and friends...The younger the child, the higher the odds that any sex crime against them will be perpetrated by a family member or a close family friend, and at NO POINT do assaults by anonymous strangers become more common than assaults by acquaintances.
So saying, "ZOMG MySpace is rife with sex predators!" is essentially meaningless; they're no more prevalent there than anywhere else. People love to cling to the illusion that the bad people of the world are all faceless evil people lurking ion the shadows, and it's just not true. But the media is pushing the idea, and parents are eating it up.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Right, and your solution to this is to get rid of the cyberworld? Or just wall it off?
The others poster's point remains. This is not a new situation. This happens all the time when new technologies break onto the world. Historically, technology changes faster than people do. In truth, people can change much faster, but they rarely have any need to. During the industrial revolution, factories changed life in astounding ways. It took decades for people to catch up. The first mass-produced food had a tendency to be of lower quality, some of it bordering on dangerous (sawdust in the sausages, anyone?). The number of problems and dangers people faced because of factories has been the subject of thousands of doctoral papers. Do you really think we should have outlawed them back then? Or maybe we'll just prevent our children from ever going near them or using anything that came from one. While it might have been good advice to keep your kids from working in one, segregating them from the segment of society best suited to adapt to the changes produced by them is a pretty horrible idea.
Let's take a situation that's easier to understand. Did you ever learn how to drive? No matter how great you thought you were at it, you were unsafe. Even for the first year or more after getting a driver's license, your chances of being in a fatal accident on the interstate vastly exceed a child's chances of meeting a predator online. So how should we solve this problem? I know: Since people are dangerous drivers when they are learning to drive, let's forbid people from ever learning how to drive.
Stupid, isn't it? You have to learn sometime. Maybe we should just make them wait until they're older... because that's one sure way to completely avoid solving the real problem. We could dissolve the interstate system. Or drop the speed limit to 30 mph. These are all great ideas that are doomed to completely fail.
People have to learn. People need to learn. The world needs them to learn. This is how things change and get better. Wall your kids off from the Internet and you'll have kids who aren't adapting to the world as quickly as they should. Yes, I know the same old If you had kids... idiocy is on its way. The problem isn't with the internet. The problem is with the kids. If they are doing something unsafe, teach them. They'll learn. They'll learn faster than you will. They'll adapt with frightening efficiency if you help them.
It's very simple really. I don't put up a billboard showing the world my life in the real world, but I'm not a hermit either. My friends know more about me than the rest of the world. I feel safe talking to them because I know who they are and I recognize them. I don't go sharing details about myself with strangers. The Internet is no different. I have friends and I talk with them openly because I know who they are. If all they are to me is an alias, then that's all I am to them. It's really very simple.
This illustrates my point exactly. By now everyone knows to avoid the guy giving out candy. If we teach children how to be safe, in five or ten years everyone will know to avoid the guy who goes around asking people what their address or real name are. Of course, the more people we have who choose to (cowardly, in my opinion) hide their children instead of actually teaching them how to be safe, the longer this will take.