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Most Parents Allow Unsupervised Internet Access To Children At Age 8
colinneagle writes "The timing for this study is interesting, given the arrests of two teenagers believed to have bullied a 12-year-old classmate until she committed suicide, but Microsoft found that 94% of parents said they allow their kids unsupervised access to at least one device or online service like email or social networks. The average age at which most children are allowed access to at least one online service, such as email or social media, was 8 years old, while 40% allow children under the age of 7 to access a computer unsupervised."
8 years old supervised, 12 unsupervised but monitored and 16+ unmonitored.
My kids are 4 and 7. They've been exposed to computers as early as possible. We play a lot of minecraft. The 7 year old has graduated to looking at odd things on youtube and "Movie Star Planet" She loves to tell me, "If you search Justin Beiber on google, it says, "Justin Beiber eats poop"
I think it's good.
Just last week I'm building a PC and the older one wants to help. It wasn't a full build, just plugging in cables. I was in shock though, she pretty much knew where everything was supposed to go. She just lacked the hand/eye to wiggle things in correctly.
In school they're both far ahead of their peers in terms of reading and typing.
If Zero Cool was not a lesson to all parents, I don't know what is. The fact that he grew up to be Sherlock Holmes is neither a blessing nor a curse.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
I was exposed to computers from a very early age. I used to sit on my brother-in-law's lap while he did programming assignments for college. Allowing children under 7 access to a computer unsupervised is perfectly fine in my book, as long as it's not connected to the internet. Kids are naturally inquisitive at that age and learning how things work. I learned an awful lot about how computers worked just by playing around with them. It would occasionally get me in trouble (Like accidentally formatting the hard disk), but I consider it well worth it.
That's a lot of coppa letters.
Both of my children (6 and 8) have their own gmail accounts with every restriction I can find turned on. They do not know the passwords and Chrome is only browser installed on their computer, which lives in the living room. After one of my History checks I did have to discuss some questionable Mario and Princess Peach videos.
Just goes to show how little Americans understand how the Net works.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have two great kids but we simply DON'T allow unfettered access to the internet. Folks think I'm nuts, but we do not allow unmonitored access to social networks, e-mail or chat services from ANY device. Having been in the network security business previously, I have the tools and equipment to actually control and monitor what my kids are doing. I have multiple layers of network security and logging. They might manage to get by the filters, but they won't bypass the logging so I'll know. What's more, they both KNOW they are being monitored and I reenforce that view regularly by asking them about specifics I find in the logs. We also make sure that internet access happens only in the common spaces in our home. We have laptops (3) but you cannot take them to your room by yourself to use them and nobody but me has an administrative account.
Any parent who just turns the kids loose on the net is NUTS. There is a huge percentage of trash out there and it is irresponsible to just let a kid access this junk either on purpose or by accident. Parents need to be *active* in this area to avoid the sad stories like this one, as rare as it is. There are a number of other reasons to know what your kids are up to, sexting, pedophiles, identity theft, bullying etc are all reasons you need to at least monitor what your kids are doing online. (Not to mention to keep the NPAA off your case should they figure out how to bittorrent the latest movie they want..)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Just "most parents in the population sampled."
At age 8, I would never have allowed my parents unsupervised use of the home PC.
Now, by 12 or 13, I had learned enough about security basics to limit their access enough as to render them relatively harmless. But before that? No frickin' way - One "install our daily free coupon print driver" ad away from needing to do a total reimage.
Oh, wait... You meant... Ahahaahahhaaaaahah!!11!!1!!!!!
How quaint. As though non-IT professional parents have the least shot at keeping their kids off the internet. Cute notion, though.
...in 1996/1997 on AOL. I recall, 5 years later, our excitement when we got MSN after AOL got stupid, the parental controls on it were totally broken & I saw all the vaginas I wanted from then on out.
And in "real life" 100% of parents allow 8-year-olds to have unsupervised in-person social interaction with their peers (and probably on the phone as well). The fact that socialization is happening with the aid of a computer does not make it inherently more dangerous; without the Interwebs this girl would still have been harassed, and we should be working to stop the harassment, not to stop the use of computers in harassment.
If you don't have children, you have no clue about this topic. And if you do, you're concerned about the lost child. But not enough to support those that would turn the internet into a corporate sponsored lock down.
I use to think I'd be a fine husband, till I got married.
I use to think I'd be a fine father, till I had chidren.
I use to think I'd be a fine grandparent; I pray that I just don't fuck this up.
... my mother was driving the tractor on the farm at age five. What kind of moronic five year olds do you know?
People create the content on the internet. Do parents supervise each and every conversation their child has with another human?
Although I allowed them unsupervised but still monitored access to the internet at age 12. Before age 12, they were always supervised.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are a fucking shutin idiot if you dont think the poster you are replying to is actually fairly typical of a more rural area. Or even go back 30 years ago in the suburbs. 5 year old are much more capable than you presume.
It's amazing at how many (including taxpayer) dollars are spent "educating" the kids about the "evils" of online copyright infringement. These dollars would be better spent educating about online bullying and setting up a website where kids, at their option anonymously, can get help from a real human being (of course properly vetted).
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Have gnu, will travel.
That I have yet to install any kind of parental control on the computers... wish there was some kind of feature directly built in my router though.
People forgot about NSA quickly I see.
Not them, but I rode my bicycle to and from elementary school starting at 1st grade... Age 5. I also had to help KILL, GUT, AND COOK food. Take a trip to any 3rd world country and you'll see kids younger than 5 helping out.
Your culture is bullshit. Thats why your kids are bullshit. That's why your parents are bullshit and try to censor the kids against reality... You laugh when little boys are DUMBER than 3rd world nation kids -- You laugh because boys think girls have penises and girls think that boys don't; Then you wonder why the ignorance leads to teen pregnancy. You shelter them from the reality of how their favorite foods make it to the table; Then you wonder why they don't give a damn about decades long wars that kill hundreds of thousands of INNOCENT people. You are the bullshit.
At age 8 I was reading about black holes in science magazines and had taught myself how to code in GW-BASIC and created a lesson plan / grade manager program (basically a custom spreadsheet w/ reports) for my Geography teacher, and was selling my software on Compuserve. My parents let me do, read and watch whatever I wanted, and stay up as long as I liked as long as I was respectful and my responsibilities were met: Chores done, and I went to school the next day. They respected that I was a sentient being. It's too bad your parents treated you like bullshit.
I gave my kids (11 and 6) uncensored access to the net as an experiment. The computers they use are in the living room so I didn't expect anything too extreme, but I did expect that we'd have conversations about content. And we did. After several days I insisted they did something other than watch Minecraft videos.
Now we were poor and didn't have a video camera, but I'm pretty sure my parent's photo album still has several shots of me zipping through the alfalfa. Perhaps the following will help your perception of what a five year old kid can do:
5 YO on a 50 cc Yamaha
Another 5 YO on a 50 cc bike
This one has a 3 YO But mine didn't have training wheels.
My parents weren't reckless though; I was at least 6 before my dad removed the speed governor.
I used to drive the tractor while feeding out hay to the cattle. When I started school as a 5 year old my kid sister took over.
I used to wonder the district - I went as far as as 15km before I started school. Most days I would turn up back home at lunch time but not always.
He has had a computer since 18 months, unrestricted access to the internet sometime later.
At 18 months, he had learning games. In the beginning, he could only bang the mouse, but very rapidly figured all that out.
For the last 5 years, he has been 'unschooled'. He has a couple of language tutors, piano lessons, dance class. Read a lot earlier, then got insane about video games, says he is now bored with those.
For him, education is keeping boredom at bay : he watches a lot of Youtube -- everything from serious science through complete dumbness (IMHO). He started wirting essays lately as a way of expressing complex arguments with friends -- Good grammar, pretty clear thinking and expression, structure could use some work. But I see worse blogs.
Result is his friends all think he knows a lot, and adults like talking to him as he is interesting. He is working through one of the GED books, is only having a little bit of problem with math, I think he has decided to try to Khan's academy.
Most of what happens in school is physical maturation of the brain. If the kid has had a stimulating, complex environment and learned to run his life himself, he can cover 12 years of grade + high school in 2 years entirely on his own. That is a standard outcome of adult literacy programs world-wide : 2 weeks in a classroom, then self-study with books until college.
Schools are terrible environments for young minds, I very much regret the years we had him in private schools. Big waste of $ and hard on him.
He started a job recently, feedback is he is great at everything, including writing emails replying to queries from customers. So not perfect, a normal kid, lots of interests, lots of knowledge
At age 8 I was reading about black holes in science magazines and had taught myself how to code in GW-BASIC
So you were a perfectly average 8-year-old in the 1980's. Good for you.
It was a different time. Kids today have advantages we would have killed for, sure, but they also face different problems. Parents also face dramatically different social and legal pressures.
When we were kids, it wasn't a big deal to ride your bike a few miles to a friends house, not checking in until after dark to ask if you can stay over night. Today, you're face would end up on the news before lunch, and net your parents a few visits from social services.
Christ, just look at shit like this. If it were satire, it would be too implausible to be funny, but that's reality.
Why can't little Johnny code? Because we suspended him for planning out a game where you shot alien space ships with guns. The Horror!
Blame "culture" if you want, but it's a culture we've created. We're not kids any more. This is our world now. We did this. We're the ones who allow nonsense like the above to continue unchecked.
What are you going to do about it?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Who the fuck modded this crap up? Havent the examples already quoted been enough to show how full of shit this guy is?
I'm sorry to see how this is anything but nature doing it's own doing, .... oh wait, now "with a computer". Bulling is bulling no matter if it is with a computer or not.
I used to read BASIC programming books (for Apple II clones with radio cassette recorders) when I was 5.
When I moved to a new school at 7 (2nd or 3rd grade) I got bullied by two guys, every day for like a month, till one day one of them had an H8 2mm lead from a Koh-I-Noor automatic pencil sticking out of the back oh his neck and nobody really crossed my path in the school since. I left it after 7th grade.
I touched my first computer at school (Apple II clone) and later on had my first home computer (a XT clone with a NEC V20 chip). Did I had unfiltered access - for my parents filtering meant reducing the time. So they took the CGA cable from the computer to the monitor - no problem. I designed and soldered a contraption of transistors, resistors, and wires myself several days later that allowed me to plug it into the composite input of the TV, when I was 12. Later on I had other computers (a 386) taken keyboards, so I wrote autoexec.bat programs that would drop me in a menu to start a predefined list of programs when the computer was started between this and this time and the mouse buttons were clicked in a correct sequence - otherwise - boot as if this prog was not there. Anyway I was able to use 3D Studio 3 or SimCity 2000 Special edition with the mouse just fine. By age of 15 I removed windows from the home computer and had linux exclusively for more than a year. Not only that but I also wired the apartment building we lived in with 10BASE2 and had to recalculate one of the terminators from 50Ohm to 55 or something, and run internet from my 33.6KBps dial-up modem, via my NATting linux box to other people's apartments. Again the only supervision I got was how long the phone line was in use and that I had to get to bed by 0:30AM, because school started at 7:30, and I had to get up at 6:30, that when I was 15.
When I was 16 I got asked to install linux on the computers in one of the labs in my highschool by our Informatics teachers.
So tell me how this would have happened if I didn't had unrestricted access to my computer, or the internet- that was 1997/1998, IRC was wildly popular, and the ASL line to/from a stranger was a prelude to a P2P meeting over beers one our later, nobody had cell phones and I was 16. Oh yeah, I started drinking beer when I was 12.
So.. I would say - this is evolution doing its work at its finest. You are weak/dumb - you kill yourself. And you will be bullied regardless if it is "with a computer", "on the internet", "in the cloud" or in the yard.
what with the Internet and all.
By the time children are able to get in trouble online, they are smart enough to bypass your best efforts. A 7 year old will see naked people "wrestling" and go off looking for my little pony videos. A 13 year old will go a public library on a way back from school and login to a secret facebook account with fake birthday.
The trick is to start presenting realistic, unembelished facts at 7 so that a 13 year old finds you credible enough to consider your warnings seriously.
I am a natural born US citizen, who is also a citizen of Colombia and Panama. Both decidedly third world countries. I also have taught classes in both places and worked for companies for pesos. In addition I have worked in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador. In those countries kids until there are about 15 are under their mothers skirts because they are helpless. Your experience is not germane to the rest of the world. Get off your high horse, and your mother needs to tell you that other people can be smart.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Children can hurt themselves on the Internet... Quite badly...
No, seriously.
I have never seen any credible evidence whatsoever that children can be harmed by any particular nasty bits they see or read online. If they aren't interested in something they simply laugh or say, "Ewwww, gross," and move on. But they can nevertheless get themselves in a world of trouble online in various, and I don't think that age 8 is anywhere near mature enough to even begin to understand how they can destroy their own lives by making certain mistakes online.
Let's just take for instance the batshit insane prosecution of young people who take naughty pics or videos of themselves or a "friend" while they are underage. The way things are going there are many people who probably want to start branding people even those still under the age of consent as sex offenders for this kind of thing, but rest assured that as soon as you turn 18 you WILL be branded a sex offender for LIFE if some so-called "adult" or law enforcement somehow finds out you are in possession of such things, even if it's a picture of YOURSELF that you took yesterday, just before you turned 18.
Yeah, that shit happens in this country. Look it up. And once you are branded a "witch"--oh, sorry, a "sex offender", that shit is with you FOREVER, no matter how ridiculous or even false is the reason the label was originally applied. Oh, and you think this only applies to you if you live in an insane puritanical country like the US? Think again. This is really becoming a global society now. Something you do that's perfectly legal in your own country could land you in prison in another country, even decades later.
You're American and go drinking under age 21 in Europe and post the evidence on Facebook? Come back to the US and bam!, "We see you've been underage drinking while you were away. It was legal there but you're an American citizen, so we're still going to prosecute you and make you go through a drinking program. Since you're over 18 now this will of course be on your permanent legal record. You're welcome." I don't know if that specifically can happen right now (i.e. prosecution for underage drinking), but there's no reason it can't. I know for a fact that Americans are being prosecuted for things like sex offenses that happened completely outside the jurisdiction of the United States that weren't necessarily offenses at the time or location where they took place, so why not other offenses? Every nation on Earth is on track to extend their concept of "jurisdiction" to the entire planet. The US government sure feels like they already have jurisdiction over everyone, everywhere.
You'll notice I am very busy in this post NOT insulting the monarchy of Thailand. I may wish to go back there for a visit again someday. No matter where I am physically located, if I post an insult to the King of Thailand online and their immigration department finds it, I could be barred from ever entering Thailand again or imprisoned if they find out after they let me in. God forbid you're a citizen of some even more insane country like Saudi Arabia. "Oh, we see you are a female Saudi citizen and were photographed behind the wheel of an automobile while on vacation in America. Also, you were unsupervised by a male at the time. Now that you're back, here are your 2,000 lashes and/or death by stoning. You're welcome."
So, what used to be a youthful indiscretions that didn't really matter can easily put a serious crimp on a child's life, wherever you're from. It is not the content of the Internet that will damage a child directly, as the moral-panicking parents always believe. It is that which the child creates that can leave them without possible job prospects or life choices decades later, because of how OTHER PEOPLE react to what the child leaves behind in their wake. The Internet truly does not forget, and even if privacy laws are strongly enhanced in any specific country that fact will never change.
We're all well down the road to making a ton of sil
This 4 year old and 5 year old would disagree with you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOh-Bg7jsrY
Today, your face would end up on the news before lunch, and net your parents a few visits from social services.
Only if you live in the United States of America.
Do you really expect a parent to stand over a kid whenever he's online? The original incident said that the suiical girl was bullied AT THE SCHOOL as well as on the Internet. There was no adult looking over their shoulders when they were talking on the playground.
Maybe this relates to the NSA? Maybe Americans want somebody looking over their shoulders all the time to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to them?
Shit happens. Get used to it. And teach your kid to deal with it. Also teach your kid not to do it. But don't expect anyone to protect your kid from other people; it can't be done. Not by the other kid's parents or the teachers or the playground supervisors or the police or the FBI or the NSA.
Parents (and I am one myself), don't get dragged into the media hype of paedophiles and internet bullies everywhere. Your child is much more likely to be run over by a car.
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
I know right :( this great nation is being destroyed one freedom at a time starting with freedom of speech that is under fire so bad. The freedoms we're guaranteed from birth are not enough to protect us from the law anymore. We just keep adding more and more workarounds until we're eventually left with nothing to protect us from our own laws. Even worse they have no problem taking every little thing anyone says out of context to use it against them.
The future of this nation is very bleak and that scares me almost as much as nobody having any clue how we're ever going to fix this mess we're in. :(
If parents have to rely on censorship, they have already failed in their education. Three of our four already grew up to become happy productive and thriving adults, and we never ever censored them. Right from when they started to walk they were granted their private sphere, and once they were able to read they had unrestricted and unmonitored internet access.
And no, we are not some bogans living in a trailer park. I am a medical doctor and owner of a group practice and one of my "uncensored growing up" offspring will soon be too. The kids already were exposed to viewing a female breast right form birth on anyway, so what point in hiding anything from them?
It is usually not what the children see elsewhere that makes or breaks their future, but what they experience (or fail to experience) within their own family.
And yet these same morons will complain that their child found pornography online.
Bad parenting really needs to be a finable offense.
I was riding bikes at that age too on the farm. They are not full sized bikes, motor cross bikes have always come in small because you typically do start young. Just because you didn't do jack at 5 is not the same as no one else did or can.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I've got three boys: 9, 7 and 3. The oldest has been around long enough he got started at age 2 1/2, maybe 3, actually sitting at our desktop clicking and bashing the keyboard. Our youngest had the iPad and iPhone figured out well before his second birthday. The middle son was somewhere in between.
Our 7 year old saved his pennies and bought his own el-Cheapo Android Tablet (a Sero 7 Lite, not terrible, actually), which is basically his most prized possession on earth. I set up an account for him with el-Goog, so I could buy him Google Play cards for him to get his own apps. He hasn't actually e-mailed anyone on his own; he has asked me to show him how to do it, but I haven't given him anyone's email address except my own. Mainly he plays Minecraft (and Minecraft Youtube videos).
Minecraft videos (which often include "colorful metaphors") is about as racy as it gets. They all mainly stick to games, apps and websites that cater to the under 13 set. Roblox.com, a10.com, Angry Birds and the like. My wife plays WoW, which they sometimes watch, and she's on occasion conned our 9 year old into gold farming for her. He hasn't figured out yet that that's the boring part of the game. So thus far really no biggie, but I'm just waiting for the hormones to kick in and them to start nagging me for their own cell phones.
My firewall returns the OpenDNS servers in the DHCP responses. So everything in the house is filtered.
Nobody has an admin account. Even if they did, the younger kids will not know how to change DNS servers.
The teens are always looking for workarounds. It's fun to watch.
I know it's imperfect, but it's better than nothing. Even a 5 year old knows how to pick up an ipad and search google. And since their spelling isn't very good the results can be quite surprising.
But you say "What happens when they go to some other house?" I'm only in charge of my own house. I'll have to rely on other parents to manage theirs.
Christ, just look at shit like this. If it were satire, it would be too implausible to be funny, but that's reality.
And the school's justification is that they have to consider every potential threat to avoid school shooting/bombing.
Yeah right.
Again a perfect exemple of over-reaction.
How many school bombing have ever happened in the decade before this kind of "Ban-Children-Drawing-Bombs" madness started to be enforce?
I bet you that in the developed world, its near zero. (In developing countries with still active conflicts the situation is different).
How many autistic kids (aka "special needs" in this article) are out there? a lot (a dozen per 1000 according to some estimate).
But better hurt the hundreds kids by teaching them that they should never try to make pictures because sometimes adults will react weirdly to them, than have the risk of keeping so many school bombing per decade (hint: probably zero).
Why can't little Johnny code? Because we suspended him for planning out a game where you shot alien space ships with guns. The Horror!
But one of the alien's name was an anagram of the school principal's name! That's a clear proof that little Johnny was planning to "go Columbine Massacre" on his school!
We must suspend him, and buy 10x more metal detectors for schools!
Huh... what's this thing called "catharsis" that you keep mentionning ? I can't hear you over the sound of the monney that lobbyist got from metal detector manufacturer.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously, how it the term "average" used in this context.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I had unfettered access to a computer, but there was for all intents and purposes no internet when I was a kid.
I had access to many BBS, but they worst thing I was probably subjected to was a naked photo of Troi from STTNG (which took forever to download on 2400). Which is why I found the Simpsons reference to comicbookguy and Janeway so funny.
As an adult I have see things on the internet in which I wish I could unsee. There is a whole generation coming to adulthood that is going to be very different from those before it. There is a fine line between sheltering and protecting. I don't think it is in doubt that eventually they are going to see everything it is they want (or not) to see on the internet. Trying to delay that point a bit until they are mature enough to not be overly damaged by it is probably not a bad idea.
That said kids have had access to porn at a young age in my generation and before, if not quite as easily and in magazine form (or quite that early).
This article is fake.
All children of all ages browser the internet supervised and monitored by the NSA!
My mom was driving to school at 13. The rule was: If you see a car pull off the raod and stop until they are gone.
Different times man
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=8740992
It was a different time. Kids today have advantages we would have killed for, sure, but they also face different problems. Parents also face dramatically different social and legal pressures.
Don't go running around with your reasonable and rational arguments. We'll have none of that here on /.