That's a good question--for the physical world as well. Sometimes too much safety can be stifling. If we are afraid of everything and everyone, we will never really live. That's a terrible thing to do to a child. I think that very young children should be closely supervised while using the Internet; older ones should be taught not to give out personal information online and should be gently guided so that they gradually learn to judge the quality and appropriateness of websites for themselves. It will not kill a child to accidentally come across a pornography site now and then (just as when I was a kid a friend occasionally showed me a paper issue of Playboy found under a parent's bed), but parents should not have to have those sites (or television channels) automatically filtered out. They should be around and talking to their children often enough to know what their children are doing most of the time and what is on their minds. That is true off-line, as well, where children may make undesirable friends at school or in the neighborhood and be offered drugs, for example. I believe that the best things parents can do to avoid serious problems is to establish a close relationship in which their children actually want to talk to them and trust their advice.
I read an article in a recent reader's digest where a woman allowed her 13 year old son to ride the NYC subway home from shopping. Of course, she gave him the talk, he knew to contact her and all that. But, when she wrote about it, she received a huge backlash from people asking, "how could you put your on in such a dangerous position?" Just to clarify, he did make it home alright and was very pleased with himself for accomplishing this task. As was said on the Daily show last week, there is enough fear to go around for everyone. But I want my kids to be able to navigate their own way through the world.
2 comments:
That's a good question--for the physical world as well. Sometimes too much safety can be stifling. If we are afraid of everything and everyone, we will never really live. That's a terrible thing to do to a child. I think that very young children should be closely supervised while using the Internet; older ones should be taught not to give out personal information online and should be gently guided so that they gradually learn to judge the quality and appropriateness of websites for themselves. It will not kill a child to accidentally come across a pornography site now and then (just as when I was a kid a friend occasionally showed me a paper issue of Playboy found under a parent's bed), but parents should not have to have those sites (or television channels) automatically filtered out. They should be around and talking to their children often enough to know what their children are doing most of the time and what is on their minds. That is true off-line, as well, where children may make undesirable friends at school or in the neighborhood and be offered drugs, for example. I believe that the best things parents can do to avoid serious problems is to establish a close relationship in which their children actually want to talk to them and trust their advice.
I read an article in a recent reader's digest where a woman allowed her 13 year old son to ride the NYC subway home from shopping. Of course, she gave him the talk, he knew to contact her and all that. But, when she wrote about it, she received a huge backlash from people asking, "how could you put your on in such a dangerous position?" Just to clarify, he did make it home alright and was very pleased with himself for accomplishing this task.
As was said on the Daily show last week, there is enough fear to go around for everyone. But I want my kids to be able to navigate their own way through the world.
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