Wired: Son, Call Me Big Brother
July 12, 2006
While the issue of what the Philosopher Kids see and do online is a few years away, this short article is an important reminder that we need to keep tabs on what our kids and teens do on the web.
Mr. Know-It-All remembers when all his parents had to worry about was his pen-and-paper diary. It would have been tough to read in any case – it was hidden under a stack of Green Lantern comics and written in secret code. But that was a gentler time.
Now things are more complicated. Odds are you’re worried about the public implications of your kid’s behavior online – such as whether your tween is passing herself off as a sultry 19-year-old on MySpace, or he’s nursing an outta-control Internet poker and porn habit. Or maybe you’re concerned that Google’s cache will cough up their explicit blog to a prospective employer in 2016. “In a teenage brain, impulse control is still under construction,” psychologist David Walsh says. “The job of the parent is to act as the surrogate prefrontal cortex.”
It is important to understand the technologies that kids are using to find information and to express themselves online. Parents need to know how MySpace, Flickr and MSN Messenger work. As with many things, the most important thing is to work at keeping an open dialogue with your kids.
