How Much, and How Soon? A Parents’ Discussion
Edward and Marie
let us sit in as they discussed their
technology safety plan and approach as their
third grader, Caroline, begins to use
computers. Marie: We should sit down with
Caroline and teach her about search engines and
how to do safer searches. We’ve also got to
bookmark the sites she uses so she can go there
without hitting any strange sites. And we need
filtering software. Wow. She’s growing up
fast.
Edward: There
are points of vulnerability in things I never
even dreamed of, like the X Box and PlayStation
where you have the ability to chat with other
people, and the small hand-held gaming devices
like GameBoy that have WiFi and texting built
in. Adults have used those to approach kids,
which blew my mind. I never would have thought
of that. How do you begin to get a handle on
that without taking it away?
Marie: We’ve
got to find a balance between liberty and
control. No one thing is going to be enough; we
need a combination of approaches and it’s still
not going to be foolproof.
Edward: With
e-mail, one option is to create a sub-account
and actually set it to upload her emails on our
Outlook, so if there’s any activity it’ll show
up on our Outlook. Do we tell her that it’s
showing up on our e-mail accounts or do we keep
it quiet? Marie’s in the camp of “tell
her.”
Marie: I don’t want to start with
deception. She’s going to rebel against us
sometime…
Edward: So we could set up the
account but not the auto-preview to us, and if
we have suspicions, we activate
that.
Marie: And she can have her own
password but if she changes it without telling
us, the account gets shut down. We’ll check it,
probably daily, and if we see anything that
seems uncomfortable or deceptive, we’ll address
it.
Edward: For IM and the Web, I
found a keystroke logger software for parents
who want to make sure their kids aren’t IMing
in inappropriate ways. It’s a background
stealth program that saves IMs as a text file
and sends it to you. That’s more extreme, but
if we’re getting worried about things outside
email, it’s an option. Trust but
verify.
Marie: It’s one of these
things where, e-mail: no problem, that’s easy
to control, but she’s going to find out about
IM, Facebook all these things. So do I open the
door slowly so she sees it and gets comfortable
and builds up a relationship of trust with me,
or pretend it doesn’t exist?
Edward: Since
we have WiFi at home, we can run the key logger
program on the family computer and have it send
data to another computer—that way, we can log
on from wherever and check the files, even from
the office.
Marie: I have
no problem with the keystroke logger running
and not telling the kids, but I do have a
problem with uploading her email to ours.
Edward: Yeah, I see the
difference there, but I think we need to
install the keystroke program. I’ll show you
how to log on remotely.
Marie:
(laughs) So I can find out where you’re
surfing now too!
Edward:
(laughs) Prepare to be very bored.