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My kids aged 10 and 8 years, are slowly getting to know the internet. They are mostly playing online games on friv.com or sending emails to other kids from school. We are limiting their time at the computer to at most 1 hour daily, and we are supervising, checking on them every 10 minutes or so, or using "x11vnc -viewonly -display :0". Also I have modified the "/etc/hosts" to include stuff from a (now defunct) site which contains about 1500 lines that block various unwanted sites where each line looks like "127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net". Also I modified "/etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf" to include line "*.* @my_pc" so that all the computers report back to me (and I have lwatch running on my administration desktop). But I still feel that this is not enough, and I want your advice about protecting kids from the dangers of internet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Tuesday April 22 2014, @12:37AM
> However, BEFORE we had internet access in my house we had had several frank discussions about sex and
> relationships and so forth. I believe that is the key reason why things turned out alright, not the
> open-ness part of the internet arrangement.
I suspect it was BOTH. Children need autonomy in order to practice being responsible for themselves as an adult. That means the freedom to screw up and learn from their mistakes - just as much as they need parents who are there to help them understand the world as they experience it.
Trying to protect a child by isolating him from the world is lazy parenting - easier to put up a wall rather than have to talk about what is on the other side of the wall. Unfortunately, the result is to cripple the child's development, making adulthood where there are no walls, much harder.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 22 2014, @12:25PM
I'd agree with and extend those remarks such that
"That means the freedom to screw up and learn from their mistakes"
Also means the younger they screw up, the easier it is to pick them up, dust them off, have a bit of a talk, and hope they learned something. Little kids just don't get into serious trouble very often, or rephrased, if you think they're hell raisers at age 8, I assure you, you'll be recalibrating during the next decade...
Kids are always going to learn by getting themselves into a situation where they feel its the end of the world, and its a lot easier on parents (and, in the long run, on the kids) when they're little and end of the world means they got grounded for not doing their grade school homework, than when they're late teens and end of the world means someones dead or some girl's pregnant.