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Good Email For Kids?
mgessner writes "My kids are starting to want email accounts of their own. Even though gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, it's not perfect. Searching the web the other day for kid-safe email, I found a few sites that say they can do the job. What do others do for their kids' email? Pay for it? Just use a free service like gmail or yahoo? I don't pay for email accounts out of my own pocket, so I don't really see the need, but if the cost was a few bucks a month, I'd do it."
You probably won't find a service with better spam filtering than Gmail, so what's the problem with it?
That should be a fairly simple conclusion from the fact that (almost) anyone anywhere in the world can send email to any email address.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
People anymore are so paranoid about everything anymore, it is a wonder society can even function. If you are THAT worried about it, then DON'T get them an email address.
My wife and I are just at the point where we're talking about kids, but I think what we'd do is not allow them to have an email account until we felt they were old enough to understand what porn is and why we don't want them looking at it. That way, you can expect them to push porn spam into the spam filter, and ground them if you catch them seriously looking at it. Before then, I just don't see a good reason. I wouldn't give my kids an email account until they're at least 10 years old, if I were in your position.
Call that what you will, but it's a good and easy way of being responsible.
I'd recommend looking for a service based on a whitelist rather than a service with great spam filtering. This will help you two ways:
1) Probably no spam
2) You can actively monitor and controlwho your children get email from (which is OK, these are children not adults!)
I would NOT pay for any email service. If anything I'd say use gmail or yahoo or something free. But ... I would say no matter how hard they whine, they do not need an email account until perhaps junior high years or so (getting a job age, getting a drivers license age, somewhere in between). Instead if they're little and still in elementary school, I am just letting them use "mom & dad's" email account to email relatives or receive emails from friends, etc. That way I can filter what was sent and received. Kids that young do not need their own email account.
I'm not a parent, but if I was, I'd have an age when they could get on the Internet. The internet is not a safe place for young kids in my opinion.
As a parent, I am already planning what to do when this situation comes to light. My answer: moderate their internet usage. That's right. Me or the wife will be watching what sites they visit. I will set up a laptop just for them, with their kid games and such.
It will mean a lot of work, but it will avoid more problems than it causes. And as a bonus, it is spending time with the kids.
Bearded Dragon
Would you rather have your kid to another kids house and get on when no parents are online?
Would you rather have your kid sneak on when you're not around?
I say, force the kid to go online (assuming the kid is reluctant, which I doubt), and make sure you are always with them when they are surfing. I'd rather be there when the kid stumbles upon a bad site, than have them find it when I'm not around, or being told ignorantly what it is by the other kids with them (before, during, or after the visit).
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
My 12-yr-old has an email under our ISP account that I can monitor and it barely matters. Email is what her Mum & Dad use. Instead, she's obsessed with IM ("MSN" is what she calls it), facebook & MySpace. *That's* what keeps me awake at night.
Cheers,
DCobbler
What, exactly, are you trying to protect your kids from?
The natural tendency to make the world this warm, safe, fuzzy place for our children cannot be refuted. If we didn't look out for the basic well being of our infants, our survival as a species would be highly threatened.
But, I think that we as a society are suffering from over-protectionism. We take this natural urge too far. In order to learn that actions have consequences, they need to make some mistakes. Letting your child get a minor burn their hand on the stove when they are young prevents them from major burns later on. Letting your children make a few dumb mistakes when they are young and suffering the consequences results in mature, capable young adults.
But we aren't letting our youth make mistakes. When they do a few dumb things, we pass laws that say that you can do X until a later age. You can't drink until you are 21, and enforcement of these laws has result in a host of 21 year olds that are unable to deal responsibly with alcohol - the number of alcohol poisonings at the local college has been rising year after year.
And the response? "Don't let them drink 'till they are 25!". Not that this solves anything, because somehow the drinking age is just 16 in Germany and they don't seem to be having the problems with alcohol that we're having.
If you want kids that will grow up capable of handling the real world, you gotta give them a good taste of the real world so that they can work it through. If you want them to deal with sex responsibly, you have to let them see what sex is and does and what the consequences are of it. Don't hide them from hookers, let them see the real damage that prostitution does to marriages and families of those who engage with prostitutes. Let them see it for what it really is, rather than leaving them free to romanticize due to lack of information.
Sure, get a decent email host, with decent spam protection - that's just self respect. But don't think that if they see a picture of a penis pump, that they'll be ruined forever. Just answer their questions clinically and accurately, and trust that they can figure it out.
Remember, that kids tend to live up to your real expectations. If you expect them to be able to handle (for real) then they most likely will do just fine. And then, as adults, they'll be that much better equipped to handle all of reality.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
... since your children will interpret censorship as damage and route around you. As soon as you make a decision they don't agree with, they'll be at Google registering their /real/ account...
And right after that, they'll learn to keep a slow flow of garbage to it they won't mind you catching, and then they'll learn compartmentalization, and by the time it gets far enough where you get suspicious, they'll already have so much damning evidence in their second account that they won't hesitate to lie to you about its existence, rationalizing it as being no worse than having indirectly lied to you these last few months, and...
Hmm. You know what? I wouldn't give them an email account. There's no way your expectation of control will match their expectation of privacy -- and for the purposes of this debate, I don't care what rights the parent has or has not, it's what the child expects that's important. If you want to teach your kids to lie to you, by all means, manage their email account. We've already got an industry trying to make a common good scarce and using fear tactics and hamfisted legislation; if you want your children to regard you with the same warm affection we give the RIAA, this is definitely the way to go about it.
Let them register an email account on their own. It's perfectly reasonable to reserve the right to extract the password from them, by force if neccesary -- but they should expect you won't do that unless you feel it's worth what it'll cost you. If you constantly snoop, you'll be snooping garbage inside a week.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
I'm not a parent, but if I was, I'd have an age when they could get on the Internet. The internet is not a safe place for young kids in my opinion.
As a parent, I am already planning what to do when this situation comes to light. My answer: moderate their internet usage. That's right. Me or the wife will be watching what sites they visit. I will set up a laptop just for them, with their kid games and such.
It will mean a lot of work, but it will avoid more problems than it causes. And as a bonus, it is spending time with the kids.
This is exactly what needs to happen.
The Internet is no more kid-safe than the rest of the world is. When you give a kid unfettered access to the Internet you're giving them access to the absolute worst kinds of hate, propaganda, and pornography you can imagine. And regardless of what kind of filtering you set up, eventually something will show up that you wish they hadn't seen.
If you think your kid is ready to handle pretty much anything the world can throw at them, go ahead and turn them loose on the Internet.
If not... If you're thinking about filtering solutions, you need to be there watching your kids. Filtering won't cut it. Something will make it through. And you need to be there to explain what is going on, why, and how best to respond to it.
Plus, you can teach them good computing habits at the same time, so they don't wind up clicking on something or opening an email that they shouldn't.
Parents these days seem far too eager to automate the process of raising a child. Folks want parental controls on their TV, filters on their Internet, and only kid-friendly video games being sold. They don't want to think, don't want to put any effort into it. That doesn't work.
Parents need to be actively involved in raising their kids.
I'm not a parent...
... but let me go ahead and give you parenting advice.
Yeah, because it takes a parent to have good ideas about how to look after kids! It's not like anyone can have children without having to prove their competence as a parent.
I would have thought that /. of all places would be free of this kind of bizarre logic.
Wow, that is some hard core invasion of privacy there. Why not install a key-logger while your at it, or take snapshots of the desktop every 2 seconds? Even in the OP's case logging every PACKET sent or received or sent might be a bit much, but suggesting doing that until the kid is 18?? thats pretty crazy and shows no trust at all in your kids. If you need to resort to packet logging to make sure your 16 year old is not doing incredible stupid things on the internet you really havent done your job as a parent. No amount of logging is going to fix that.
Just because you have never personally experienced something, you can't have any knowledge of it? I guess all those male gynecologists should get new jobs then...
"But this one goes to 11!"
I am a parent, and sucessfully raised two daughters, the youngest is 21.
Well, maybe not so sucessfully since they haven't made me a grandpa yet, but the 21 year old manages a GameStop store and neither of them have been arrested. They used computers since before I got on the internet in 1997, the youngest was ten then.
I watched their internet use, the computers were out in the open. Patty was a Jazz jackrabbit fanatic, and one of its artists once sent her a drawing of her as a rabbit.
I never saw anywhere unsafe. You want unsafe? The mall is sunsafe. Church is unsafe. School is unsafe. The youngest got her head bashed in at age 10 by another kid with a bottle. A high school coach here was busted for "inappropriate touching", it's in today's paper. You read about clergy molesting children all the time. In fact, if a child is molested, in most cases it's by a family member; I know a couple of women who've told me they'd been molested.
Your kid isn't going to get run over by a car on the internet, or have her head bashed in. She might break a leg on the swingset or her bike, but she's not getting any bones broken on the internet. The danger is in the real world, not cyberspace.
In the years of watching my kids and paying attention (I read to them, played whiffle ball with them, played dolls with them, played Quake with them, watched TV with them; they're "daddie's girls" now =) not once did I witness anybody trying to harm them - except other kids.
Free Martian Whores!
The number one thing I did was put the computer in the living room, facing out toward the room.
That way Mom & Dad can quickly glance at what Junior is doing as they walk by doing other things (dinner, laundry).
The PC is out in the open, letting Junior know that everything is potentially visible.
The screen faces so that anyone can see it. Once again no hiding.
If I let them put it in their rooms (like mine, pre-Internet days), they could pretty much do anything. And in the days of modems & BBSes, I did do pretty much anything. Fortunately, I was in high school and BBSes encouraged a small circle of people. As opposed to a young young kid using the Internet and Everyone having access to the network (Internet).
I am not sure how well this will work as Junior #2 gets old enough that time sharing the PC will be an issue. Also, as time marches on, and laptops take over and mobile phones get into their hands, Juniors ability to hide things increases, but the hope is that by putting them on "training wheels" with the central family PC, they can handle themselves a bit better when they are on their own.
Eventually, I'll discuss that everything is logged, but Junior is too young to understand that now.
BTW, I am shocked at how PC-integrated their schools are now, even 1st grade.
Christ, a handheld spelling computer is recommended (and later required) as a school supply by the school.
I discovered that my wife was sleeping with her best friend (who is a lesbian). You should take a look at it.
So you're saying an IM filter can eventually lead to a 3-way with my wife and her friend? Awesome!
You're not really clear on the concept of what "lesbian" means, are you?
(Hint: It means they like women, but not men, as in you'll not be welcome. You're thinking of bisexuals)
Parenting is something you learn by doing and learn by consulting people who have done. No offense, but most parents discount the advice of the childless because 1) we used to be one and remember how clueless we were, and 2) they come up to us all the time and tell us their clueless ideas. I won't say it's impossible for people without children to give meaningful parenting advice, just unlikely.
For example, the advice about setting a minimum age for using the internet is completely useless. First of all, what age do you set? When they start asking for their own email account makes a lot more sense than an arbitrary age set before you even know if they'll be interested or capable at that age. Second, you don't generally dump kids from 100% oversight to 100% independence when a certain birthday hits.
The OP has made the judgment that his kids are ready for an incremental amount of independence provided that they won't accidentally be exposed to inappropriate spam. He knows his kids better than anyone and doesn't need people to second guess that decision. The decision is safe email with occasional supervision or continuing to share the parent's account under close supervision, and like most parents, he wants to find a way to be able to say yes.
If you don't have your own children, you have probably only seen the end result of good parenting, not all the effort that goes into it. What looks like a child doing something merely because a parent asks is actually the result of a long period of constantly adapting discipline and diplomacy with the most immature, illogical, demanding, self-centered, and emotional people you have ever met. That's not an insult to children, it's how we all start out. It's not something that most people can grasp only by learning about parenting, observing parents, or babysitting.
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Perhaps the best thing to do then would be to explain this to them. Sadly any amount of screening is going to be broken at some point so why not do it on your terms with some planning rather than waiting till they find it in the woods?
The kid is five. You need to monitor a kid of 5 like 24/7 anyways. And even if he/she even sees something "wrong" they won't understand. I generally agree with you, but what you are saying about the internet not causing any damage is more relevant to a 10 year old. Porn is porn, they will find a way to view it if they want to.
I know sociology is a field without a notion of controlled experiments, but we really owe it to society to raise 100 kids for every single childhood experience we assume will fuck them up for life, and see what happens.
Yeah, but that doesn't make you any less of an obsessive control freak asshole.
Yes, because setting appropriate boundaries for your children based on their maturity is the true sign of a fascist overlord.
Nowhere did I say that I would ban viewpoints that I didn't like or agree with. Nor did I say I would brainwash my kids. Nor did I say I would implement any sort of blacklist. Stop putting words into my mouth and sounding like a spoiled 15 year old at his daddy's computer.
I am saying that I would keep an eye on what they are doing. I didn't say that I would obsess over the logs, crawl them nightly, and start blocking on them. Just keep an eye on them. Use them to see if anything out of the ordinary is going on.
More than likely, I'd ignore them unless I suspected something weird was going on, but if I'm financially and legally responsible for their actions, then I need to be able to see what is going on if necessary.
And if a 16 year old is going to MySpace or Facebook or something like that and chatting with their friends, then that's fine. But if this same 16 year old is hanging around on the "Erotic Services" section of CraigsList, then maybe it's time we had a little talk and I find out exactly what is going on. It might be nothing other than a little curiosity and exploring. If so, that's a good thing, but if it's something more than that, I need to know.
maybe you should trust your kids and no be so over bearing
ROFL, this nothing compared to what I USED to be like. Man, I changed diapers and cleaned their little butts, I cooked and fed them food, bought and dressed them up in clothes, I told them when to get up, take naps, and go to bed, I held their hands when we crossed the road, coached their soccer teams, talked to their teachers over report cards, stayed up countless Christmas Eves putting toy kitchens, castles, and bikes together, reviewed homework and hounded them on reports and science projects, and most of all loved them so damn hard my eyes still water thinking of those times. So now when they're older and can wipe/clean/dress/feed themselves and I check on their internet usage, the emails in their accounts and stay up until 0130 in the morning hoping and praying that they'll return safely from prom and homecoming dances, you'll forgive me if I think your answer is crap.
Impetuous! Homeric!
Don't bubble your children. Teach them about the REAL world. Currently 17, I've been lucky to be granted home internet access for around 10 years now (remember the good ol' days of AOL 4.0 :D). Throughout the whole time, my connection has never been filtered, monitored, or logged. Over the time, I have visited sites that many parents would not want their children visiting, but as a result, I have learned.
Every 13 year old boy has a burning curiosity about the opposite sex. A little bit of porn never hurt anyone. Moving on, I have a very strong feeling that the teachings of DARE (drug avoidance class tought in public school via typical propaganda) and sex ed. (here in the US, complete abstinance is all they teach in school. By law.) gloss over a few very important facts and don't provide an accurate understanding. Through the uncensored internet, I was able to research these subjects farther, through unbiased sources, and make better decisions as a result.
I have done research into political ideologies that many people don't understand or just consider to be evil. Instead of just calling communism or facisim evil, I have a more complete understanding of them and have my own views about where they succeed and where they fail. I can also detect when these ideologies effect our own precious capitalist state (which unfortunately isn't a very ideal implementation of capitalism anymore)
Through many of the darker memes of the internet (goatsetubgirldetroithardcore2girls1cupbmepainolimpics, stereotyped memes, and the darkest depths of /b/) I have learned to be much more laid back. I am no longer homophobic (though strait) and I find incredible pleasure in goatseing homophobes. The penis is a body part. Get over it. I understand steriotypes. They exist because they are true, but I understand they do not apply to everyone - everyone is unique. It is easy to separate the black people with no interest in education who play with their $350 phones all day from the black people who live in the real world. I strongly dislike the former (call me a racist), but associate with plenty of the ladder. As an individual, you can't complain about steriotypes when you prove it true yourself.
That rant went off topic and covered a bunch of bases. Thinking about it though, it all comes back to where I started. I am who I am because my outlet to information was never blocked, cencored, or distorted. I think I am better off as a result.
Apart from the possibly biased conclusion (just winding you up, relax) I agree with you 100%
Two main arguments:
1 - my job as a parent is to ensure my kid can exist in this world. That means building awareness of right and wrong (moral compass), respect for others (instead of being politically correct) and developing his senses for where danger may lie and what to do about it.
2 - I'm not always around (neither is any other parent). Choose your preference: the kid standing a chance on his own because he knows how to use his own brain or him being a rabbit in headlights?
That doesn't mean I won't keep an eye on what he does, because a child's innocence can be used against him, but I won't impose limits on his exploration. He's already learned that there are safe sites and "very scary" ones (his term) where a mistype landed him, and he comes to me with questions which I can answer.
I've kept a "no lies" policies for all his life - I can tell him that something isn't really for his age but he won't get BS from me, it means he's got someone he can trust to give him confidential, open and honest answers when he grows up. In this world, kids need that, and he now expects me to give him the unvarnished reality. Sure, it means I sometimes spend hours with him to get through a complex topic, but that's what being a parent is about.
Simple summary: "I should have" is a useless phrase, it translates to "I didn't".
Insert
Yes, because setting appropriate boundaries for your children based on their maturity is the true sign of a fascist overlord.
There are no appropriate boundaries for a 16 year old - that's two years from being a complete, functioning adult that can be sent overseas to kill people. 2 years is almost nothing.
A 16 year old needs privacy as much as you do.