How to stop worrying and learn to love your kids’ relationship with the World Wide Web
The other day while I was trying to work, my 9-year-old was rooting around under my desk trying to figure out why my printer wouldn’t print his spelling words. He emerged clutching a tumbleweed of wires big enough to conceal a badger and jabbering away, as near I could tell, about my hookah being incompatible with my carburetor.
Transcribing the discussion that followed would not showcase my parenting in the most positive light. Just know that the whole time we, um, talked, my blue-eyed firstborn looked at me with the exact same expression he gets during eclipses when I tell him it’s time to go out in the backyard and bang on pots to fool the evil spirits.
More and more these days, he’s poised on that magical precipice where a kid learns his mama isn’t nearly as all-knowing as his younger self thought. It’s fascinating to watch from an adult vantage, this heady passage. On the one hand, he absolutely adores being the go-to guy on something that’s beyond me. On the other, he’s discovered his protector is fallible.
Since I’ve just confessed that a fourth-grader provides the IT services here at the Bat Cave, I might as well go ahead and admit that he and his sibling sidekick have their own computer, from which they can access the World Wide Web without traversing any parental control doohickey whatsoever. They could, if they wanted to, dial up a Tijuana donkey show.
I got an e-mail last week from the mother of one of the Cyber Boys’ pals. How did we handle the computer at our house, she wanted to know. Could I recommend a filter or a helpful program? I could not. I have an entire shelf of books mailed to Minnesota Parent by publishers claiming to have uncovered the ultimate solution to this conundrum. Some even come with CDs.
The fixes seem to fall into two broad camps: Rely on some kind of filtering technology or monitor everything your child does on the computer, either physically or by spying on them via your own computer. Alas, neither of these really works for me. Not only am I less technologically literate than my kids — who can cheerfully hold forth on the best ways to disable filters — I’ve got enough to do. I’m no more interested in enduring Puff Games than I am willing to sit through everything they watch on TV.
In my experience, kids are much quicker to pick up programming skills than they are to understand why some information is all right to give out or let in and some isn’t. Kids can navigate the Internet long before they can really understand the nature of their parents’ relatively distant and abstract fears.
When one of my boys was about 3, a woman ahead of us in line at the grocery store proclaimed him adorable and handed him a dollar. We’d had the "stranger talk" several times, and you had better believe we had it again on the spot. His reply: "But Mama, she wasn’t a stranger, she was nice." (During that same era we also had an impromptu chat at Marshall Field’s about showing strangers your "shiny heinie," but I digress.)
It was with no small measure of relief that I greeted the recent news that a Harvard University-led task force has found that, on the whole, kids are mostly safe from adults cruising online for sex with minors. No, the big bad threat online is kids themselves, engaging in everything from bullying and harassment to trading in sketchy information about sex, drugs, and alcohol. Most of the sexual solicitations that do take place come from other kids or, less often, from 18- to 25-year-olds.
The study itself doesn’t contain any killer sound bites, so I’ll bottom-line it for you: The mean kid or the one behind the cyber come-on may well be your own or one of his or her pals, and what they need is precisely what they needed before the digital revolution. You know, actual parental engagement.
And good role models. If you’re wincing at the suggestion that your progeny might be taunting his or her friends online, consider whether you ever engage in any chatroom debate, post critical comments to a blog or newspaper story, or, for that matter, look for information you might not want to be seen browsing for in a bookstore. The Internet is doing for young people pretty much what it has done for the rest of us.
With one exception: Young girls seem not to understand the ramifications of posting naked photos of themselves. To this I have two responses: One, in the age of film, we all might have been just that dumb had we not feared facing the clerk who developed the cheesecake shots; and two, really this hyper-sexualized behavior is not necessarily an Internet problem. Have you been in an Abercrombie & Fitch lately? I have, and while we were there, an impossibly glam young man tried to sell Cyber Boy some cologne for back to school.
But back to the good news: Harvard’s reassuring conclusions only buttress last fall’s findings by MacArthur Foundation researchers that socializing on the Internet is not a bad thing for kids. "It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media," one of the researchers told the New York Times. "But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page."
Create a home page? If ever we needed proof that we really don’t have as much control as we think, this is it. I wonder if we parents aren’t in a twist about our children’s lives online precisely because we feel left behind. As a 3-year-old in the grocery store, my son really needed an adult who knew all those mystifying rules. But as he gets older, it’s my job to recognize when he really does know better.
In the end, my boy teased the right thingamajobber from the tumbleweed of wires forming under my desk, hooked it to the right whozits, and printed out his spelling words. When he was done, he asked for permission to go online to finish his homework. He had to complete what back in my day we would have called a book report on Bridge to Terabithia.
Turns out his teacher, a gifted man who truly loves and gets kids, had created a blog for the class to use for this purpose. He’d set minimum expectations for participation, but it appeared that the kids kept posting well in excess of what they had been asked to do. The project had generated a groundswell of genuine excitement; proof positive that a comment thread can be a terrific place to hone any number of skills.
My baby the blogger!
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
For more information
Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf/
Digital Youth Research
digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report
