Text Messaging For Safety
from the beats-spying dept
Over in the UK, there's a new "safety campaign" trying to get adults to learn how to use text messaging to make it easier to stay in touch with their kids, making sure that they're safe, without being overbearing. While some may scoff that such a solution probably does little to actually keep kids safe, it does seem a bit more reasonable than recently promoted systems that let parents spy on their kids whereabouts at all times via their mobile phone. The fact is that no solution is going to keep a kid entirely safe, but, teaching them to be responsible while also opening up better lines of communication with their parents seems a lot less likely to cause resentment (and doing things to purposely mislead the tracking system). It also might have the side benefit of making it easier for some kids to communicate with their parents in general. Since kids are so comfortable with text messaging, if their parents use it as well, it opens up another channel for communicating (while also making it possible for kids to communicate with their parents without their friends realizing what they're doing - so that it's less embarrassing for the kids).
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