I don't feel the need to know the intricacies of every religion in the world because I don't believe in them. I respect other people's right to believe in them - but to me if I am interested then I'm reading them as mythology - or as an interesting look into ancient people's thinking, but I don't feel it's important I do that, just interesting.
That is a perfect example. If you lived in a Buddhist country, but didn't believe in Buddhism - it would still be important to know about Buddhism. Your interactions with other people would be seriously hobbled by not having a understanding about where they were coming from and how they are thinking.
So even though we are not Christian, my kids have some biblical knowledge (and even attended a Jewish day care even though we aren't Jewish). Depending on where you live in the US, it pays to have a working knowledge of the Judea-Christian religions when dealing with people at-large. This analogy can be extended to just about anything - it is important to have a thorough knowledge about the culture you live in - even the parts you don't like or disagree with. As an somewhat silly example, imagine a job interview where you don't apply deodorant because your parents were kind of hippies and didn't believe in it. Now it would be one thing if you were sticking to your belief that you should be able to stink, but it's quite another if you keep getting turned away from jobs because you stink and don't realize it.
That's a good starting point - but you're also a person who called every sexual fetish you don't share "not normal". That's not tolerant.
I think you are getting semantic on me. Anything that deviates from the herd is not "normal". Like I said, I won't bow to political correctness and keep changing perfectly good words just because someone is offended that they are not mainstream... it's really not my fault if someone's self-worth gets tied up in being considered "normal". My own mixed-race relationship is not "normal", but I embrace and relish it for being outside of the mainstream. Blue hair is not "normal", but I've definitely crushed on some girls with blue hair... there is no connection between tolerance and recognizing when something does not fit a typical pattern.
Parents should be guides - exposure + guidance = good parenting in my book.
I mostly agree. But very young kids need guidance almost all the time - not just when a parent is around. In this context - the internet filter - the filter cannot be a guide, but it can be a valuable tool for the guide for those times when the guide is not around. I'm pretty sure NetNanny is worthless, which is why I use a whitelist. We surf together on the computer and I whitelist stuff that interests the kids. That way, when I go to take a shower or mow the lawn or whatever, they can still use the computer without me just turning off the connection altogether. As my kids start to show some discretion and some ability to cope with traumatic images/videos I will lay off the filtering. I keep mentioning the shark attack videos because that is always what they try to view when we are looking at YouTube, and that's the last damn thing I need a week before I take them to the beach.
My grandfather told me how - in his childhood - death was different from now. That was before strong pain meds like morphine. Most people died at home, in pain. When they were getting close to it, the entire family - of all ages - gathered around them, holding their hands and seeing them off. Watching somebody die in agony was a normal thing for any child who could walk. It was considered a duty to be there. He also said "back then - everybody was conscious until the last moment they weren't. There was no going to sleep under morphine and never waking up, and while what we've done since is much kinder to the dying, it's made us lose something incredibly valuable for the living."
The idea that a 7 year old can't walk the streets would seem ludicrous to most parents of just one generation ago, because it is.
It rather depends on where you live. Where I live you get visits from child services if your kid starts showing up at school alone - and the school won't release them unless someone picks them up. I'd say it is safe for a 7-year-old to walk around given a couple of conditions: 1. they aren't alone - this can be another 7-year-old, but alone is no good. This rule pretty much extends into adulthood as well, especially for girls. 2. You live somewhere with fairly busy streets. Many suburbs are not acceptable places for a kid to walk around alone - they are easy pickings when no one else is around. I'd actually feel safer having my 1st grader walk around Manhattan than in the suburb that we live in now.
Again, normal doesn't exist. There's no such thing.
Of course it does. That said, being abnormal is not so bad.
I believe children should grow up to know that a family is any group of people who love each other, that's the be-all and the end-all of it.
I agree, but I don't see why my kids need internet access to be taught this.
If nothing else, you're shielding them from the reality that there are people who enjoy things you don't get.
I'm going to make a prediction here: My kids will never encounter people shitting on one another except on the internet. Maybe I'm way off base here, but in my experience people who are into this sort of thing are pretty shy about it and they don't usually bring it up at dinner parties or in conference rooms at work.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is in fact very important for my children to learn about the erotic art of shit-eating. OK, fair enough... I'll introduce them to it. But not at 7 or 8. They need to have some concept of sexuality to be taught about "other" forms of sexuality. Right now we're still in the "When mommies and daddies love each other they get married and have babies" phase, with some mommies and mommies and daddies and daddies talk mixed in. Jumping right to scatological fetishes seems... premature.
A kid who trusts you for guidance, and who won't when they get confronted with these things blame you for hiding them from him and leaving him unprepared.
LOL, so your contention is that my kids will develop this complex by age 10? Imagine what will happen when they find out about Santa! Oh the lies! The deceit!
Every experience I have had has taught me one thing: there is never a time when hiding things from a kid is a good idea. Everything you hide will come back to bite you in the ass.
Well, my life experience has taught me not to make sweeping binary statements. Words like "never" rarely apply in reality and run contrary to my pragmatic tendencies. All children are not the same (and that's just in my sample size of two!) and there are stark differences in mental capacity with age. I don't see how I should be expected to teach a kid who is still afraid of thunder to reason about the odds of a shark attack at the beach.
If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ?
Are you advocating ignorance? I thought you were the one advocating exposure?
Teach your kids to be tolerant
It's in the plan. They are mixed-race Obama style, and they have friends with gay parents. I'm sure they will develop biases, but our goal is tolerance.
but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
Strongly disagree - and I think you do as well. In your other posts, you told me how important it is to expose them to stuff and now you tell me that my exposing them to things is not good... You seem like a smart person, so I don't think this was your intended argument. It is my job as a parent to prepare my kid for the time when they are 18 and have to go off on their own. I contend I could do that without any exposure to the internet at all and they would be perfectly fine (if perhaps faced with a bit of a learning curve when they first have to use it!). I guess there are hidden dangers:)
Life is fucked up shit. It's beautiful things too. But you gotta raise kids to live in a world of both.
While you make good points about the past human condition, the fact is that a typical person today lives in a very different world than a medieval village dweller. And as you point out, that has been the case for at least 70 years. I actually feel you overestimate the amount of trauma experienced by a typical peasant farmer, but I digress...
Of course kids can handle death - my daughter has been to two funerals prior to her 4th birthday. Death is a natural human experience. But death on the internet is a much different affair than death in real life - it's more analogous to movie violence. When someone dies in real life, you have a mourning period and some kind of memorial ceremony. People around you gather for support and you see all of the associated human emotion. When a tiger mauls a man on YouTube, it's over in 2 minutes and you get none of the emotional connection.
I don't know if this is healthy or not, and frankly I don't care. I know it is different, and this kind of stuff gives my kids nightmares, and then I have to deal with 2AM visits in the bedroom. I also have to deal with fears of the ocean if they see shark attacks, etc. We're talking about people who are still afraid of thunder here. When they are 9 or 10 and start to think that a man being devoured by a shark is "awesome" or funny, then we'll discuss letting them see everything - but certainly not at 7 years old.
I find that the politics of authors can be determined soley by their glasses. Clancy has big 80s-style aviators - a sure sign that he leans rightward. Authors with comically tiny John Lennon glasses tip toward the left.
I'm not against censoring what your children experience. I think it is an important part of parenting. It is no more appropriate to let a 7-year-old browse YouTube than it was 20 years ago to let them browse police crime scene photos (or some other horrible collection of violence). Until we went out to catch lightning bugs, I was sitting here at the computer with the kids surfing YouTube, but the things they want me to click on are totally inappropriate for a 1st grader and a preschooler - so instead I explain that I don't want them to see that and I have them click on something else. When I'm not around, I turn on the whitelist.
Once I sit there and they don't try to click on the inappropriate stuff all the time (and I think they can handle it if they do accidentally without 2am nightmare visits), I'll ditch the filter. But for now, it is a great tool.
Isn't that what this whole discussion is about? Someone wants a block so their 7-year-old can't get to the broader internet. Some people (yourself included) make it seem like a big deal, when in fact this is how you and everyone else (except the very young) grew up. You have a very high user ID, so maybe you are young enough that you can't remember life without the internet - but believe me, it is a very recent development and people got along just fine without it.
Well, I'd rather not have things be banned by default,
Right, but you have to admit that is the more conservative approach.
And the fact that something is old doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. I don't see why so many people are afraid when there is no scientific proof.
There is no proof one way or another just yet. I'm just not willing to make my kid into a test case. If other people want to expose their elementary kids to the full-blown internet, I won't stand in their way. Let me know when the study comes out, and I'll thank them for donating their kids to science.
That depends on the 7 year old. How did anyone ever survive without censorship or keeping children in a bubble?
What bubble? Were children in a bubble when there was no internet? I could just unplug the computer for the next 5 years and my child would not suffer at all. Oh, sure, they'd need to catch up on their mousing and game playing skills... I don't see the problem.
Kids growing up with unfettered access to the internet is the grand experiment here. We have 150,000 pre-internet years of mankind as the baseline. I don't need scientific proof to default to the traditional exposure of kids to the internet.
Why not? Letting them out of the house is quite different, anyway. If he's educated about proper use, what's the problem?
Because you can't educate a 7-year-old to properly use a medium like the internet. A 7-year-old has a completely different, very self-centered worldview. Their brain is simply not done developing to even a basic level. Studies show that on average a kid has to be 10 before they will stop chasing a ball into a street without looking for oncoming traffic... this isn't something that is simply "taught" - it has to be learned, of course, but the brain also has to be ready for it.
So I know my kids, right? And I know that if my 1st grader accidentally gets one of the animals-devouring-a-person videos on YouTube, not only will I have to deal with nightmares, but depending on the animal I might not be able to get her to go into the water (shark attacks). I can't teach her to un-watch a video, so instead I have to wait until her brain is mature enough to handle this kind of imagery. I don't have a 9 or 10 year-old yet, but I'm assuming that is about the age where they won't be running into my room at 2AM anymore because a tiger is chasing them.
Until then, she gets a whitelist.
Why does it matter what most think?
Because you have to live in this society. Social norms are a pretty important thing to learn, even if you chose to ignore them.
That is not true at all. Many devices ship with non-Google-approved hacked-up versions of Android - and they didn't pay Google a dime. The Kindle Fire is an enormously successful example.
I have a whitelist, and the allowed sites are the homepage. Google search is not even accessible. Kids are pretty smart, but unless you have a prodigy on your hands configuring a whitelist is a bit beyond their capacity.
It's really only there for when I'm showering, cooking dinner, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, or other times when I can't be with the kids at the computer. When they are a bit older they will obviously need to Google and stuff, and then the whitelist will be tossed.
Again, most of your comments apply to older children - and I tend to agree. A 7-year-old shouldn't watch Jaws unless you want them to refuse to get in the water when you hit the beach.
Thanks for insulting everybody who enjoys anything you don't understand.
Look, if you get off on people shitting on one another, I'm not going to get all PC and call that normal. You might like to watch people get eaten by wild animals, but don't ask me to pretend that is normal. You might be a perfectly nice guy, but that's some fucked up shit that my kid doesn't need to see until their brain has grown a little bit. It's certainly not reflective of the "real world" in any way that is important.
It's hard to imagine what I would gain by letting my 1st grader cruise the internet unrestricted. A ten-year-old is another matter.
I also reject your claim that my kid will be harmed by a filtered internet. The internet, in the form we are discussing, is only about 20 years old and the rich media part is younger than that. Almost anyone over 30 grew up with no internet at all, and most people over 40 grew up with no computers at all. Were they all "harmed"? Real life is still the best way to get exposure to real life. The internet is not a basic human need by any stretch.
They'll probably get around any meaningless filters, and then, assuming they're idiots (as some people like to believe), the lack of guidance they received from their parents could damage them.
Dude, not every situation is going to have conclusive scientific research behind it.
If my kid finds some goo on the ground, it probably won't hurt him. I still won't let him eat it.
As for a seven year old. Seven! I won't let my seven-year-old out of the house alone - why the hell would I let her surf the internet alone and unrestricted?
Think about it for a moment: is it acceptable to let a seven-year-old browse an adult video store? If you say "yes", I suspect you'd be on the fringes of society. Yet the same content in the video store is easily accessible via the internet. Should a seven-year-old be brought to a movie that is R-rated for violence? Quentin Tarantino? Saving Private Ryan? Again, most would say "no" but I can find worse on YouTube.
I agree that kids need to be exposed to real life, but the internet is not "real life". It is an amazing repository of knowledge, but it has also filled a role as a niche entertainment medium for people with "deviant" tastes. In other words, it's full of fucked-up shit that you wouldn't be able to find in "real life" unless you were exceptionally lucky (or unlucky). You may very well be right that my kid won't be affected by this stuff, but I won't let my kids be the subjects of this uncontrolled experiment. I'll let your kids "take one for the team".
Agreed, but they also have to have the brain development to handle what is thrown at them. A certain percentage of 7-year-olds are going to react very poorly to visual images of violence, which are very common on YouTube (e.g. shark attacks). Maybe you like the idea of recurring nightmares and a fear of the beach, but that doesn't appeal to me. I think by 10 most kids can even handle a slasher movie, but again you have to use some judgement with your own child.
To use your analogy, there is nothing wrong with only allowing a 7-year-old out of the house with a chaperone. That might be more creepy with a 17-year-old. Your job as a parent is to manage that transition.
A white list consisting of things like PBS kids and Khan Academy is not "unsupervised".
TV is bad, but school is worse. Most of the really atrocious stuff my daughter has picked up comes from her classmates. We mostly restrict TV to things like PBS (because I'm too cheap to buy Nickelodeon and Disney). We also get movies for the kids, especially on car rides or rainy/hot days.
That said, yesterday was the first day that TV advertising got the better of me at the grocery store: Daddy! Daddy! Krave! Get Krave! It's new! (it's a cereal).
That's great but there are things a 7-year-old shouldn't have to see, even accidentally. Even YouTube has things like people getting attacked by sharks - nothing a 7-year-old needs to have nightmares over.
I have a whitelist. Sometimes it's a pain (like adding Khan Academy), but I know exactly what they are doing when unattended. It also saves on the amount of malware removal I have to do - wish I could get my wife to use a whitelist:)
I agree with your post when referring to slightly older kids. By 10, I think a kid can handle more violent images without developing a life-long complex. I don't think it is fair to expect a 7-year-old to have mature defense mechanisms and coping skills yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at his username - the lower-case 'p' ran away in 1956.
I don't feel the need to know the intricacies of every religion in the world because I don't believe in them. I respect other people's right to believe in them - but to me if I am interested then I'm reading them as mythology - or as an interesting look into ancient people's thinking, but I don't feel it's important I do that, just interesting.
That is a perfect example. If you lived in a Buddhist country, but didn't believe in Buddhism - it would still be important to know about Buddhism. Your interactions with other people would be seriously hobbled by not having a understanding about where they were coming from and how they are thinking.
So even though we are not Christian, my kids have some biblical knowledge (and even attended a Jewish day care even though we aren't Jewish). Depending on where you live in the US, it pays to have a working knowledge of the Judea-Christian religions when dealing with people at-large. This analogy can be extended to just about anything - it is important to have a thorough knowledge about the culture you live in - even the parts you don't like or disagree with. As an somewhat silly example, imagine a job interview where you don't apply deodorant because your parents were kind of hippies and didn't believe in it. Now it would be one thing if you were sticking to your belief that you should be able to stink, but it's quite another if you keep getting turned away from jobs because you stink and don't realize it.
That's a good starting point - but you're also a person who called every sexual fetish you don't share "not normal". That's not tolerant.
I think you are getting semantic on me. Anything that deviates from the herd is not "normal". Like I said, I won't bow to political correctness and keep changing perfectly good words just because someone is offended that they are not mainstream... it's really not my fault if someone's self-worth gets tied up in being considered "normal". My own mixed-race relationship is not "normal", but I embrace and relish it for being outside of the mainstream. Blue hair is not "normal", but I've definitely crushed on some girls with blue hair... there is no connection between tolerance and recognizing when something does not fit a typical pattern.
Parents should be guides - exposure + guidance = good parenting in my book.
I mostly agree. But very young kids need guidance almost all the time - not just when a parent is around. In this context - the internet filter - the filter cannot be a guide, but it can be a valuable tool for the guide for those times when the guide is not around. I'm pretty sure NetNanny is worthless, which is why I use a whitelist. We surf together on the computer and I whitelist stuff that interests the kids. That way, when I go to take a shower or mow the lawn or whatever, they can still use the computer without me just turning off the connection altogether. As my kids start to show some discretion and some ability to cope with traumatic images/videos I will lay off the filtering. I keep mentioning the shark attack videos because that is always what they try to view when we are looking at YouTube, and that's the last damn thing I need a week before I take them to the beach.
My grandfather told me how - in his childhood - death was different from now. That was before strong pain meds like morphine. Most people died at home, in pain. When they were getting close to it, the entire family - of all ages - gathered around them, holding their hands and seeing them off. Watching somebody die in agony was a normal thing for any child who could walk. It was considered a duty to be there. He also said "back then - everybody was conscious until the last moment they weren't. There was no going to sleep under morphine and never waking up, and while what we've done since is much kinder to the dying, it's made us lose something incredibly valuable for the living."
I agree with your grandfat
The idea that a 7 year old can't walk the streets would seem ludicrous to most parents of just one generation ago, because it is.
It rather depends on where you live. Where I live you get visits from child services if your kid starts showing up at school alone - and the school won't release them unless someone picks them up. I'd say it is safe for a 7-year-old to walk around given a couple of conditions: 1. they aren't alone - this can be another 7-year-old, but alone is no good. This rule pretty much extends into adulthood as well, especially for girls. 2. You live somewhere with fairly busy streets. Many suburbs are not acceptable places for a kid to walk around alone - they are easy pickings when no one else is around. I'd actually feel safer having my 1st grader walk around Manhattan than in the suburb that we live in now.
Again, normal doesn't exist. There's no such thing.
Of course it does. That said, being abnormal is not so bad.
I believe children should grow up to know that a family is any group of people who love each other, that's the be-all and the end-all of it.
I agree, but I don't see why my kids need internet access to be taught this.
If nothing else, you're shielding them from the reality that there are people who enjoy things you don't get.
I'm going to make a prediction here: My kids will never encounter people shitting on one another except on the internet. Maybe I'm way off base here, but in my experience people who are into this sort of thing are pretty shy about it and they don't usually bring it up at dinner parties or in conference rooms at work.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is in fact very important for my children to learn about the erotic art of shit-eating. OK, fair enough... I'll introduce them to it. But not at 7 or 8. They need to have some concept of sexuality to be taught about "other" forms of sexuality. Right now we're still in the "When mommies and daddies love each other they get married and have babies" phase, with some mommies and mommies and daddies and daddies talk mixed in. Jumping right to scatological fetishes seems... premature.
A kid who trusts you for guidance, and who won't when they get confronted with these things blame you for hiding them from him and leaving him unprepared.
LOL, so your contention is that my kids will develop this complex by age 10? Imagine what will happen when they find out about Santa! Oh the lies! The deceit!
Every experience I have had has taught me one thing: there is never a time when hiding things from a kid is a good idea. Everything you hide will come back to bite you in the ass.
Well, my life experience has taught me not to make sweeping binary statements. Words like "never" rarely apply in reality and run contrary to my pragmatic tendencies. All children are not the same (and that's just in my sample size of two!) and there are stark differences in mental capacity with age. I don't see how I should be expected to teach a kid who is still afraid of thunder to reason about the odds of a shark attack at the beach.
If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ?
Are you advocating ignorance? I thought you were the one advocating exposure?
Teach your kids to be tolerant
It's in the plan. They are mixed-race Obama style, and they have friends with gay parents. I'm sure they will develop biases, but our goal is tolerance.
but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
Strongly disagree - and I think you do as well. In your other posts, you told me how important it is to expose them to stuff and now you tell me that my exposing them to things is not good... You seem like a smart person, so I don't think this was your intended argument. It is my job as a parent to prepare my kid for the time when they are 18 and have to go off on their own. I contend I could do that without any exposure to the internet at all and they would be perfectly fine (if perhaps faced with a bit of a learning curve when they first have to use it!). I guess there are hidden dangers :)
Life is fucked up shit. It's beautiful things too. But you gotta raise kids to live in a world of both.
While you make good points about the past human condition, the fact is that a typical person today lives in a very different world than a medieval village dweller. And as you point out, that has been the case for at least 70 years. I actually feel you overestimate the amount of trauma experienced by a typical peasant farmer, but I digress...
Of course kids can handle death - my daughter has been to two funerals prior to her 4th birthday. Death is a natural human experience. But death on the internet is a much different affair than death in real life - it's more analogous to movie violence. When someone dies in real life, you have a mourning period and some kind of memorial ceremony. People around you gather for support and you see all of the associated human emotion. When a tiger mauls a man on YouTube, it's over in 2 minutes and you get none of the emotional connection.
I don't know if this is healthy or not, and frankly I don't care. I know it is different, and this kind of stuff gives my kids nightmares, and then I have to deal with 2AM visits in the bedroom. I also have to deal with fears of the ocean if they see shark attacks, etc. We're talking about people who are still afraid of thunder here. When they are 9 or 10 and start to think that a man being devoured by a shark is "awesome" or funny, then we'll discuss letting them see everything - but certainly not at 7 years old.
I find that the politics of authors can be determined soley by their glasses. Clancy has big 80s-style aviators - a sure sign that he leans rightward. Authors with comically tiny John Lennon glasses tip toward the left.
I'm not against censoring what your children experience. I think it is an important part of parenting. It is no more appropriate to let a 7-year-old browse YouTube than it was 20 years ago to let them browse police crime scene photos (or some other horrible collection of violence). Until we went out to catch lightning bugs, I was sitting here at the computer with the kids surfing YouTube, but the things they want me to click on are totally inappropriate for a 1st grader and a preschooler - so instead I explain that I don't want them to see that and I have them click on something else. When I'm not around, I turn on the whitelist.
Once I sit there and they don't try to click on the inappropriate stuff all the time (and I think they can handle it if they do accidentally without 2am nightmare visits), I'll ditch the filter. But for now, it is a great tool.
Isn't that what this whole discussion is about? Someone wants a block so their 7-year-old can't get to the broader internet. Some people (yourself included) make it seem like a big deal, when in fact this is how you and everyone else (except the very young) grew up. You have a very high user ID, so maybe you are young enough that you can't remember life without the internet - but believe me, it is a very recent development and people got along just fine without it.
Or I could use my judgement instead of filing all things into binary categories?
Well, I'd rather not have things be banned by default,
Right, but you have to admit that is the more conservative approach.
And the fact that something is old doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. I don't see why so many people are afraid when there is no scientific proof.
There is no proof one way or another just yet. I'm just not willing to make my kid into a test case. If other people want to expose their elementary kids to the full-blown internet, I won't stand in their way. Let me know when the study comes out, and I'll thank them for donating their kids to science.
That depends on the 7 year old. How did anyone ever survive without censorship or keeping children in a bubble?
What bubble? Were children in a bubble when there was no internet? I could just unplug the computer for the next 5 years and my child would not suffer at all. Oh, sure, they'd need to catch up on their mousing and game playing skills... I don't see the problem.
Kids growing up with unfettered access to the internet is the grand experiment here. We have 150,000 pre-internet years of mankind as the baseline. I don't need scientific proof to default to the traditional exposure of kids to the internet.
Why not? Letting them out of the house is quite different, anyway. If he's educated about proper use, what's the problem?
Because you can't educate a 7-year-old to properly use a medium like the internet. A 7-year-old has a completely different, very self-centered worldview. Their brain is simply not done developing to even a basic level. Studies show that on average a kid has to be 10 before they will stop chasing a ball into a street without looking for oncoming traffic... this isn't something that is simply "taught" - it has to be learned, of course, but the brain also has to be ready for it.
So I know my kids, right? And I know that if my 1st grader accidentally gets one of the animals-devouring-a-person videos on YouTube, not only will I have to deal with nightmares, but depending on the animal I might not be able to get her to go into the water (shark attacks). I can't teach her to un-watch a video, so instead I have to wait until her brain is mature enough to handle this kind of imagery. I don't have a 9 or 10 year-old yet, but I'm assuming that is about the age where they won't be running into my room at 2AM anymore because a tiger is chasing them.
Until then, she gets a whitelist.
Why does it matter what most think?
Because you have to live in this society. Social norms are a pretty important thing to learn, even if you chose to ignore them.
That is not true at all. Many devices ship with non-Google-approved hacked-up versions of Android - and they didn't pay Google a dime. The Kindle Fire is an enormously successful example.
I have a whitelist, and the allowed sites are the homepage. Google search is not even accessible. Kids are pretty smart, but unless you have a prodigy on your hands configuring a whitelist is a bit beyond their capacity.
It's really only there for when I'm showering, cooking dinner, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, or other times when I can't be with the kids at the computer. When they are a bit older they will obviously need to Google and stuff, and then the whitelist will be tossed.
Again, most of your comments apply to older children - and I tend to agree. A 7-year-old shouldn't watch Jaws unless you want them to refuse to get in the water when you hit the beach.
Thanks for insulting everybody who enjoys anything you don't understand.
Look, if you get off on people shitting on one another, I'm not going to get all PC and call that normal. You might like to watch people get eaten by wild animals, but don't ask me to pretend that is normal. You might be a perfectly nice guy, but that's some fucked up shit that my kid doesn't need to see until their brain has grown a little bit. It's certainly not reflective of the "real world" in any way that is important.
It's hard to imagine what I would gain by letting my 1st grader cruise the internet unrestricted. A ten-year-old is another matter.
I also reject your claim that my kid will be harmed by a filtered internet. The internet, in the form we are discussing, is only about 20 years old and the rich media part is younger than that. Almost anyone over 30 grew up with no internet at all, and most people over 40 grew up with no computers at all. Were they all "harmed"? Real life is still the best way to get exposure to real life. The internet is not a basic human need by any stretch.
Yes, but I'm not terribly concerned with porn - unlike the other poster. I'm more concerned with things like videos of shark attacks on YouTube.
A few years is all you can ask. By 10 their brains can handle more adult concepts.
They'll probably get around any meaningless filters, and then, assuming they're idiots (as some people like to believe), the lack of guidance they received from their parents could damage them.
You overestimate the capability of a 7-year-old.
Dude, not every situation is going to have conclusive scientific research behind it.
If my kid finds some goo on the ground, it probably won't hurt him. I still won't let him eat it.
As for a seven year old. Seven! I won't let my seven-year-old out of the house alone - why the hell would I let her surf the internet alone and unrestricted?
Think about it for a moment: is it acceptable to let a seven-year-old browse an adult video store? If you say "yes", I suspect you'd be on the fringes of society. Yet the same content in the video store is easily accessible via the internet. Should a seven-year-old be brought to a movie that is R-rated for violence? Quentin Tarantino? Saving Private Ryan? Again, most would say "no" but I can find worse on YouTube.
I agree that kids need to be exposed to real life, but the internet is not "real life". It is an amazing repository of knowledge, but it has also filled a role as a niche entertainment medium for people with "deviant" tastes. In other words, it's full of fucked-up shit that you wouldn't be able to find in "real life" unless you were exceptionally lucky (or unlucky). You may very well be right that my kid won't be affected by this stuff, but I won't let my kids be the subjects of this uncontrolled experiment. I'll let your kids "take one for the team".
Agreed, but they also have to have the brain development to handle what is thrown at them. A certain percentage of 7-year-olds are going to react very poorly to visual images of violence, which are very common on YouTube (e.g. shark attacks). Maybe you like the idea of recurring nightmares and a fear of the beach, but that doesn't appeal to me. I think by 10 most kids can even handle a slasher movie, but again you have to use some judgement with your own child.
To use your analogy, there is nothing wrong with only allowing a 7-year-old out of the house with a chaperone. That might be more creepy with a 17-year-old. Your job as a parent is to manage that transition.
Children aren't some kind of exotic pet that you can stick into kennels when you don't feel like looking after them.
That's not actually true.
Just don't be surprised when they take on the value system of the people who work at the kennel (i.e. the nanny).
I don't know what you are talking about - I was glued to the TV for my entire childhood, and I turned out just...
OH! Look! A new Apple product announcement!
Can't talk now.
A white list consisting of things like PBS kids and Khan Academy is not "unsupervised".
TV is bad, but school is worse. Most of the really atrocious stuff my daughter has picked up comes from her classmates. We mostly restrict TV to things like PBS (because I'm too cheap to buy Nickelodeon and Disney). We also get movies for the kids, especially on car rides or rainy/hot days.
That said, yesterday was the first day that TV advertising got the better of me at the grocery store: Daddy! Daddy! Krave! Get Krave! It's new! (it's a cereal).
That's great but there are things a 7-year-old shouldn't have to see, even accidentally. Even YouTube has things like people getting attacked by sharks - nothing a 7-year-old needs to have nightmares over.
I have a whitelist. Sometimes it's a pain (like adding Khan Academy), but I know exactly what they are doing when unattended. It also saves on the amount of malware removal I have to do - wish I could get my wife to use a whitelist :)
I agree with your post when referring to slightly older kids. By 10, I think a kid can handle more violent images without developing a life-long complex. I don't think it is fair to expect a 7-year-old to have mature defense mechanisms and coping skills yet.
Didn't know that... cool pro-tip. VLC is just awesome.