Safety & not snooping – monitoring kid’s internet use

There’s a growing argument between parents and their children when it comes to monitoring young online activities. These behaviours are becoming more frightening and are spilling out on today’s media coverage.  We’ve all seen real-life tales about teens being bullied on social media, sexting scandals with underage kids and even worse, young girls being abducted, injured or killed by online predators.  But if you think your sons are safer than your daughters in these types of brutal attacks, you should think again.

Like many other young people who aren’t very schooled when it comes to these types of online adventures, it’s up to us as the “grown-ups” in this equation to look after them. But given all of today’s technology, this task is becoming increasingly more difficult.

Opening Our Eyes And Ears

While there’s plenty of valuable services, information and important scholastic activities to be found on the internet that benefits children, there’s also an ever larger number of hidden, dangerous dens filled with “dark” media lurking online. As parents, we may see innocent, playful activities streaming on the internet underneath our children’s fingertips, but these can be a gateway to a kid’s ultimate demise.

Think of it this way, when most of us were young, our Mums insisting on meeting all of our mates face-to-face before we interacted with them in “real life.” During this bygone era, many parents were privy to these young conversations found on a single telephone in our flat somewhere in a common area. But today, kids could have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these internet “friends” found on their handheld devices.

They’re interacting with these blokes online, opening up themselves to dangerous conversations and interactions that grown-ups can be completely oblivious to and could be overlooked during our daily lives. This is why it’s more important than ever to be more vigilant and follow their activities more closely when they’re connected to the world-wide-web.

Winning the Argument

If your kid is complaining that monitoring their time spent on the internet is an invasion of their privacy, it’s better that they’re alive and upset with us rather than gone from our lives completely and unhappy about us parenting them. For more information, our friends from Teensafe, makers of an online app that allows parents to monitor their children’s online activity, has provided us with this powerful infographic: “How Parents Influence Their Kids’ Media Use.”