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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
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 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.
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.
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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