Out here in the 'burbs nothing gets under the skin of the soccer moms and the power moms as wreckless teen behavior. I'm on the verge of seeing it in my household as my oldest daughter turned 11. The other week, I found the scrunched up face of some teen idol on her desktop. She has since found a non-thug picture. The kid, Chris Brown, even has a picture of himself in a Boy Scout uniform.
So this past weekend, I updated my daughter's website the old fashioned way with Dreamweaver. We put on her favorite links, changed her pictures and colors and a few other things. As I was doing it, I thought about MySpace. What a shame, I thought, that so many other kids have to network in an unsupervised jungle.
I've done a couple things to make sure my own kids don't get into all kinds of grit available to us porno consumers. And still the occasional lesbian video ad pops up when they are looking for pictures of panda bears. (True story, I still can't explain it). One thing is that I get them email accounts in my own domain. That means I can forward every incoming mail they get to my account. In six months all I've gotten are registration notices for Bratz, Neopets and Millsberry. In a previous life, I put a keylogger on a computer in my house, but for now I'm very confident that my kids' taste in only activity is pefectly wholesome. And considering the amount of homemade media they have, their appetite for what's online is relatively small. I have had to preview (and therefore sit through) an entire CD of Black Eyed Peas for my daughter so I know that before long, my patience for this kind of supervision will ultimately come up short, but all in all I think I have a fairly good set of defenses. Now.
In the future however, I am not likely to have such patience. I still haven't completely rid myself of any suspicions that Chris Brown is all that; I haven't really inspected the website. But I'm also preparing myself to live without paranoia. Just as I realized after a while that my kids would not turn into retards by watching Barney, so long as they had plenty of superior alternatives, I am confident that the winning formula has to do with cultivating elevated sensibilities rather than building walls. A kid who already knows that nobody on American Idol has any real talent is a lot better off than the kid whose parent cringes everytime they watch fearing their daughter wants to be the next (insert interchageable slutty popstar here). Or as my girls used to say about whatsername, that's "So Yesterday".
But I know I am taking distinct advantage of my IT and web skills by giving my kids the same tools I use. Yes they all have Google Mail and chat. Yes they all have their own desktops. No I don't use Net Nanny. Yes they are relatively proficient at recognizing bogus downloads. Yes I still did get attacked by the Comet Cursor. And so it is likely that they'll end up with real blogs instead of the fake ones in MySpace, and they'll learn the difference between Opt In and Opt Out. They already know to keep passwords secure and what it's like to forget one. But I feel for those parents that are behind the curve, whose kids are pulling cyber-fast ones on their luddite moms and dads.
I suspect that if things get out of hand in my household, I'll end up buying the kids cell phones. When they have to pay for their communications out of their own pockets, they'll come to recognize the sensibility of not inviting 1000 'friends' into their circle. Who knows, they might even learn that just physically going up to someone and talking is way superior to every online experience.
Wait, did I say physically? Uh oh.
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