Internet Access and Restriction

[Agiesmom]

I recently stopped all internet access for my son (11 years old).  He didn't do anything wrong (the computer is in the family room and I closely monitor the sites he can visit), but I just decided it was better to do this now than to wait until he did do something he shouldn't do or stumble upon a sight he shouldn't have stumbled upon.  While there is a lot of good information out there, there is a lot of really bad stuff, too.  We can visit the good sites together.

And while protecting your child from being exposed to inappropriate material, parents also need to realize that they need to protect themselves, too.  I don't think many parents realize the ramifications of allowing children unsupervised access to the internet.  They don't realize that websites log ip addresses and can track inappropriate and illegal activity back to the parents using that ip address.  And also, the internet service provider also tracks all activity, too, and will turn all the information over to the authorities when asked to do so.  And ultimately, it's the parents who are responsible and may end up in serious trouble over it.

Anyway...I'm wondering how much you restrict internet access for your children.  Do you use a monitoring program or do you just check the history?  I do check the history, but not the history that is obvious--my husband is a computer guy and showed me how to go deep into the files and see searches, webpages, dates, etc.  But searching after the fact isn't very effective.

I'd like to get a program like Net Nanny, but I'm not sure how well they work or which programs are best.  I remember searching for NASA photographs and the second search result was a porn site (they can use any words they want to attract people to their sites via searches).  So I'm wondering how effective some of the programs are in stopping access to inappropriate material.

Also, I have tried to restrict access using just Explorer, but it doesn't recognize whether the banners are appropriate or not, so it requests the password several times on one page (like yahoo mail, for example).  And a lot of sites are not rated, so if you have the settings really high for restriction, you can't go anywhere (even preschool sites) without it restricting you and asking for a password.  Not very convenient.

Anyway, what do you do to protect your children?

[April2]

Amen! I'm glad to see other mom's out there like me! :) We use Spectorsoft. It moniters site visited, every email, everything! We put this on our computer when our son was about your son's age (he's now 19). It was the best $100 we ever spent. We found out the boys in his class were telling each othe about pornographic websites you could visit (yes, these were 5th grade boys!) and my son got curious and had visited them. When we realized what he had seen, we were sick to our stomachs. We sat down and had a long talk with him about how women are exploited and degraded in pornography (not to mention men) and how God meant for sex to be good not dirty, etc., etc. It was a real wake-up call for us. In this day and age you have to be a wise parent, and don't think your child would never do something like that! They all get curious, especially boys, I think.

I also allowed my daughter to have a Myspace account last year when she was 14 but knew her password and would moniter that. I made her shut it down after awhile because I didn't like how the kids were talking. My daughter didn't do anything bad, but I was shocked how these 13, 14 year old boys and girls were talking, sex talk and filthy language. Also these 13, 14 year old girls were passing around pictures of them posing in very sexy poses that I found shocking and disturbing. These were kids in my daughters class and I would never have suspected them of acting like that! It made me wonder if their parents realized what they were doing or if they had ever seen their Myspace page or even realized they HAD a Myspace page.

I used to be pretty niave. I was rather sheltered growing up. I've really wised up the last few years. It's shocking and sad how much kids are exposed to now days. They are WAY too sophisticated and know more than they really should for their age. I'm not sure we can totally protect them from everything, but we can do our best to pass on our morals and values. I talk to my kids a LOT. I try to keep the communication lines open. I think that's really important. It's not easy being a parent now days. We have to be more vigilant, I think, than our parents were. My kids sometimes think I'm overprotective. Someday they'll realize more and thank me! :)

[Agiesmom]

Thank you for the recommendation, April!  I'm going to check it out this morning!

Teko, the stuff that is out there on the internet is NOTHING like what was in the "girly magazines" when we were growing up.  It's sickening to think of a child seeing horrible things like that.  And they don't have to look for it--it just comes up when searching for innocent topics.

We home school, so my ds and his friends are a bit naive for their ages.  And I'd really like to keep it that way for a while longer if possible.

Trial, that's interesting that your 5 yo is deleting history!  Did he see you or your husband do it or did he just figure that out himself?  My ds is very computer saavy--he knows more than I know--and he also deletes history, cookies, and files (I didn't show him how to do that), so he was surprised when I told him he couldn't go to Youtube and look up all those words he was looking up.  LOL!  Thanks to my husband, we can probably stay ahead of him for a bit longer!

[Trialanderror]

I am not at that point yet with my 5-year-old but I will gladly remember your comments here when time comes. For sure TV and computer will always and infinitely be in the family room only, even if it is just to limit the time spent in front of it. I am hoping I will be able to explain the good, the bad and the evil of the internet to my son as we go but have my doubts. At least one moment was positive last week: he played an online coloring game while I was reading and when I looked up again, he closed the site and deleted history, cookies and files even though he can not read yet. So at least there is some awareness of computer "hygiene".