Shocker: Parents Don't Have A Good Idea Of What Their Kids Do Online
from the attention-gap dept
A new study from the UK says that parents underestimate by half the amount of time their kids spend online, while 81% of those parents surveyed said they had a good idea of what their kids look at online, but just 31% of kids agreed. All this happens in spite of more than half of British parents saying they put filters or other sorts of controls on the PCs their kids use, suggesting that -- surprise, surprise -- those controls aren't particularly effective. Furthermore, the survey would seem to indicate that what's lacking here aren't technological controls on kids' online behavior, but rather a lot of parental attention. Trying to outsource parental responsibility to some technological solution isn't going to work -- but the responsibility shouldn't be to fully or accurately monitor kids' online behavior (which is largely impossible anyway), it should be to educate kids to protect themselves and behave responsibly on the internet.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: kids, online activity, parents
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Isn't that what TV is for?
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Experience
We also had a laptop that was dying that I used to prove a point with the teenager - stuck a program that took photos with the webcam every five minutes, then pretended to have intercepted the images on the router. She refused to so much as walk in front of it from then on, and had a very healthy respect for malware and bad sites. It took a bit longer to teach her what she should be suspicous about, but in the end we had two girls who could do a better job of using the net than their mother.
Of course, this takes time and knowledge. Something a lot of parents seem to be sorely lacking in unfortunately.
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Impossible to monitor?
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Re: Impossible to monitor?
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Vchips, internet filters, GPS kid locators, and draconian legislation (please! think of the children!) when all that was really needed to truly keep kids safe online was for the parents to invest time and effort in their children and become *gasp* responsible parents.
People who think that moving responsibility for the raising of children from the parents to *anything* else are the same people who want an Orwellian nanny state. Take responsibility for your own (in)actions with the raising of your kids.
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What about blocking all their other devices
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Greed.
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Re: Greed.
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Parental Oversight on top of controls
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WHY?
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WHY?
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