Parental monitor? Good or bad?

[Nikolas]

I grew up with no Internet and when I found myself on the net, I was on a unix machine in my uni, so there wasn't really any chance to do anything bad. By the time I had my own connection, I was 25 or so, which is when I found AGS (btw) and you guys taught me everything there is to know about the net pretty much.

Fast forward quite a few years: My boys are now 10 and 11 years old and as such they do have their own laptop and their own tablets.

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A necessary sidenote: For the past 3 years I was raising my kids alone, since my wife was working abroad. This year, starting in August, the kids moved with their mother in Kuwait (!!) and I moved to London (welcome me back everyone). I should also note that my wife knows VERY little about computers. This means that I had my eye on my kids for the past three years and I'm sure I did an excellent job (!!!) raising them, but now that's done... This also means that my kids NEED the tablets and laptops to keep in touch with me, their friends, etc... So there's no way around that! Plus my older son (almost 12) is on year 7, which means that he's in sort of a 'high school' which requires the use of a laptop.
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In any case I do understand their need for certain stuff on the net, including games, porn, etc, but I'd like to keep an eye on what's happening. In fact both their tablets are linked to one of my emails (android) in which case I get to see their searches (they haven't figured that out yet). So that's settled.

BUT,

Should I install some kid monitor software on their laptops and their tablets? I mean porn is totally (1005) prohibited in Kuwait, so unless they go searching on "how to make a bomb" I don't think there's much wrong to be found (then again you never know).

So..

Advice? Links? Thoughts? All are welcome!

[Darth Mandarb]

My wife and I were having a discussion about this recently (our boy is only 14 months so he's not on the web too much (yet)). 

We figured, when the time comes, we will definitely monitor what he's doing. 

I'm pretty laid-back with most things (if he wants to look at boobies, so be it) but there is a LOT of garbage on the web that I'd like to shield him from for as long as I can (violence, death vids, etc).

Basically I don't think it's a matter of if it's a good or bad idea to monitor them on the web.  I feel it's my "job" as his dad.  I think it's the modern equivalent of my parents preventing me from seeing certain movies or reading certain books when I was a kid.

[cat]

Isn't that more like reading the mail and diary?

I'd rather sit down with them and explain what is dangerous in the web, especially in Kuwait and discuss with them.
It would also be a good idea to talk about what private information to share on the web and what not, how to be safe with payment, passwords and stuff.

[Darth Mandarb]

I wouldn't read his e/mail or diary (without a very good reason).

Mostly just monitoring the sites he'd be going to.  If he wants to get a job and get his own internet connection he can have full privacy then.  My roof/rules type thing

And he will, of course, know what's safe/not safe to share on the web.  Though I think that concept will be second-nature to his generation (never knowing a world without the web).

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

I say no unsupervised internet. They can use their devices in the living room when others are around, not in bedrooms or when home alone. We have a son, and kids are curious no matter what. They also go to school and get links to some extremely obscene stuff from their buddies. Yes, kids need to learn how to be socially responsible and have self control by exposure to the real world... but no child should be exposed to some of the stuff that's all over the internet and easily accessible.

[Nikolas]

I say no unsupervised internet. They can use their devices in the living room when others are around, not in bedrooms or when home alone. We have a son, and kids are curious no matter what. They also go to school and get links to some extremely obscene stuff from their buddies. Yes, kids need to learn how to be socially responsible and have self control by exposure to the real world... but no child should be exposed to some of the stuff that's all over the internet and easily accessible.

Like Darth said... They will need to see boobies and forbidding them to do so, by having all equipment in bare view is not a great idea. I do hope that I've taught my kids, already, some stuff, but more needs to be taught.

[Retro Wolf]

I'm more concerned about them coming across paedophiles online. My eldest is only three but I think about these things for later.

I will take an interest in what he uses the internet for and when, but they're gonna come across crazy shit in life no matter what.

One lesson at school some kid put a porn VHS on while the teacher left to look for some educational video. The porn was certainly educational!

[Mandle]

I think it's the modern equivalent of my parents preventing me from seeing certain movies or reading certain books when I was a kid.

For me this is the main point to be concerned about. It's not really so much a new thing that kids can gain access to stuff that their parents would not approve of: they always have and always will.

What has changed however is the speed with which this access is accelerating at:

Three or so decades ago I was a very lucky pre-teen in that I had access to my father's massive "hidden" collection of Playboy magazines (there were also Penthouse, Hustler, and Mayfair (...gasp...Samantha Fox...gasp...Britty-Boobies), but the bulk of said collection was Playboy...

Playboy had comics involving sexual encounters. Penthouse had the infamous "Letters To Penthouse" supposedly written by actual readers describing fantastical erotic experiences but were actually just the on-the-side literary efforts penned by struggling writers needing a few bucks to pay the monthly gas bill. Hustler had...erm...the equivalent of Architecture Weekly's interior layouts. And Mayfair had actual short stories of an erotic nature following the three-act structure (Trust the Brits, right?).

What none of them had was actual porn: They did not show the act of sex.

Well, sometimes they kinda did...But even then it was ambiguous in that two people of the opposite sex just happened to be in the possibly correct alignment for some particular thing to be maybe happening: What we call a "music video" these days...

To possibly expose such a treasure-trove of "porn" to my peers basically meant that I had to invite them over to my house between the hours of 4PM and 5PM, the window of opportunity after school let out but before the first of two working parents' cars could potentially appear and the frenzied put-everything-back-the-way-it-was operation commenced...

I think I held only about two or three of these actual "porn-overs" before an idiot friend secretly ripped out a centerfold and smuggled it home for later study only to have it found by his parents who grilled him until he sang like a fucking canary.

There was no showdown between both sets of parents thankfully, like what TV had told me would happen. That "friend" was just banned from my company and I had to avoid eye-contact with his parents during school events, and also miss contact with his amazing in-ground pool during summer holidays...The whole "Centerfold-Gate" never escalated to the level where parental superpowers had to duke it out...Phew!   

I have strayed from the topic, but not all that far actually:

What I was trying say say I guess was that this entire drama from my childhood which played out over weeks, and involved intricate logistics and pre-planning, can take place now every day in a few seconds with the mere sharing of a link...And the content of the porn shared is light-years away from the fairly innocent glimpses of the naked human body that myself and my mates enjoyed at the time...

God help parents these days as society demands even more of them as bread-winners on one axis of the graph while the availability and intensity of the porn increases on the other axis...

Mirroring a comment above: The only real answer is that parents somehow find the time to educate their children on the pitfalls of what they are going to be inevitably exposed to...

Hopefully a little better than the dad in American Pie did...But red-faces all around are pretty much a given either way.

[selmiak]

... What we call a "music video" these days...

great read Mandle!

[Snarky]

I am a little torn on this. On the one hand I think parents have a right and responsibility to exercise some oversight over their children's media consumption and social activities â€" I don't think porn is really the biggest issue here; I think things like online bullying and joining unhealthy communities like the AGS forums are more serious.

At the same time I believe quite strongly that even children, certainly once they reach their teens, have a right to a certain degree of privacy. And I don't think it's good enough to say "I'm cool with them looking at the things all teens look at" (whether that's creepypasta or boybands or boobies), because it makes a huge difference for a kid whether you have your mom or dad over your metaphorical shoulder: part of the whole point of the process is to start breaking away and becoming your own person.

The problem, I think, is that the Internet encompasses EVERYTHING today. Whether it's watching videos, chatting with friends, gaming, reading, shopping, creating stuff... it's probably going to be online. Parents can't be excluded from that whole aspect of their children's lives, but they shouldn't have complete access to (even secretly!) monitor every part of it, either. You might as well place hidden cameras in their bedrooms and on their clothes.

I would suggest an Internet filter set as strictly or loosely as you feel is appropriate, and a rule that they have to either "friend" you or offer your password access to any social network account they have, along with trying to maintain a general awareness of what they do online and educating them about good principles and practices for online behavior, would be the best course.