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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.
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'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.
I'd also suggest putting a computer as your gateway with Dan's Guardian on it. It's certainly not perfect, but it's the best filter I've ever seen, and allows for different filtering levels through user names. It runs on a linux box, so you can combine it with iptables to disallow a lot of other things like p2p as well. I'd highly recommend it as a good tool to make sure that your internet connection gets used on your terms whether you've got kids or not.
... 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.
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Those ads have a lot more to do with what Google knows about you than what your friend sent...
But thanks for sharing!
Probably not what you're looking for, but one option is to get them a Wii. Each Wii has an associated email address of w[friend code]@wii.com, and you have to whitelist any addresses on the Wii that you want to be able to receive email from. Spam-proof, "child-safe", and you can play bowling on it!
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!
My daughter had an email address with bluebottle.com, which worked perfectly for the 2 or 3 years she was using it. They use a whitelist-only type system which requires new incoming email addresses to reply to an authorization email before their messages will be delivered. When they discontinued the free service, we did not sign up again, but it's probably worth the 10 bucks a year. Now that she is in middle school, she is more interested in using IM services and rarely uses email anyway.
As for the internet not being safe for kids, I've never really found it to be an issue. The kids learn by example and osmosis to behave responsibly. Up to a certain age, we always made sure a parent was around when they were on the net. In the dozen or so years of having internet in the house, the worst incident I can recall was one of my sons searching for she-hulk images and finding a naked drawing in the results. Big deal. He's in college now, and if he wants to find naked she-hulk pictures, at least he knows how to find them.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
If you are using a Windows box for your kids, try K9
It's free for home use and the database is the best I have found, with very few of the false positives that you get from other filters (like finding source code examples on somebody's random blog).
It allows you to block video and file sharing sites, P2P, social networking sites, etc., as well as gambling, violence, hate, sex, nudity, etc. so it has a lot of options to turn on or off, giving the parent control. Apparently, it's very hard to uninstall without the password, too.
I don't work for them or anything, just a Dad with kids on the internet.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I always try to explain that to people right after they say "Gmail has strange ads". They never get around to explaining the ads after that. I figure it's better for both of us.
I have 3 kids under 8. When they are old enough to read (or starting to), I give them an email account to practice reading and writing.
My solution requires:
First, I setup a mail account for each kid. I'll use family.com as the example. The account for each kid is their first and middle names (jilljane@family.com). Then I setup a mailing list at jill@family.com, and deliver that mail to her account and to my wife and I. Nazi style.
Next, I setup the mailing list names with a postini mailbox. I was running without this for a while, but one of my kids leaked their address to an email marketing firm and the spam started pouring in.
Next, I setup Mail.app. I turn on parental controls, and have all inbound messages request permission from me to land in the kid's mailbox. This way nobody gets in unless I explicitly say it's OK. I setup her client account to return jill@family.com as the identity email address, so replies to any message she sends automatically copy me. No one even knows the jilljane@family.com address exists (except me).
The last step probably won't work for older kids, but I have Mail.app default jill@family.com as a BCC address for any message she sends. This gets me and mom copied on her outbound mail. If she ever figures it out, she could delete that from the BCC field, but so far so good. It also means that I have to manage my own mailbox a little bit. I setup a couple of rules that look for jill@family.com and route that into it's own IMAP folder, just for tidiness.
If you are interested in finding a reasonable host for your own domain with IMAP and Postini support, I strongly recommend BlueHost. Just finished switching over to them, and they have been great.
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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