Internet Monitoring - Part 1

Following on from my post about keeping our children safe the other day I wanted to continue on that theme but drill it down to more specifics on how or why we should monitor our children. It’s likely I’ll split this article into a why we should (or shouldn’t) and then do a follow up on how we can monitor. The morality of it all is something each of you will have to decide upon but I won’t be advocating anything illegal or underhanded - then again I guess that also depends on your point of view.

First off a little background. What right do I have to talk about this topic and secondly what experience do I have? Both are answered by the fact I am a parent so have an implied duty. Next I have 3 children that cover the age ranges from 5 to almost 18 so have an insight to how they think, how they react and the sorts of things they want to do and try to do at varying age ranges. Next, I have been around the internet since its popular birth (mid-90’s) and ran a BBS prior to that as well as my career involving me in telecomms. Finally, I was in charge of installing, testing, monitoring and reporting on a distributed network across 100 plus sites that required in excess of 50 individual policies covering some 10,000 school aged children, teachers and members of the public in publicly accessible buildings (libraries, etc). I know in some terms this is a small network but when dealing with schools in the UK it can soon become a quagmire of red tape, funding bureaucracy and outright opposition to change.

So the first question is should we monitor our children’s internet access? And in this post I am not even going to discuss whether we should provide access or not to our children and I am going to presume we do. Besides, this post shows that not providing access will disadvantage our children.

My emphatic answer is yes we should in the same way we should monitor their growth, their schooling and in fact anything that they may come into contact with. Helping them to understand their surroundings and interact with it is an essential part of being a responsible parent or carer (herein I will use parent to refer to both groups). The difficulty in this question is in how we go about the monitoring.

Let’s look at this another way. How many of you can spot a fake eMail? Try here and here as simple tests. Did you get 100% and if so, do you feel you could confidently pass that information on to a child such that they would spot one? If like me, you may have got 100% but don’t feel confident in passing on that knowledge in child friendly format, then you need to monitor your child’s access.

Do we allow our children carte blanche access or do we provide guidelines?

I firmly believe we should provide guidelines. Recent research would seem to back this up as well …

More worryingly, according to the study, 57% of nine to nineteen year-olds who go online once a week have been exposed to online pornography and 38% have been exposed to pornographic pop-up advertising while doing something unrelated to pornography on their computer. Of the young people studied, 36% have accidentally found themselves on a pornographic website when looking for something else.

It quantifies the above with this “The study found 10% of the young people studied have visited pornographic websites on purpose. Out of this 10%, 1% was aged between nine and eleven and 26% were aged between eighteen to nineteen years old“

The report continues by stating:

it is recognised that even material which is not illegal may be distressing when presented to an audience it was not intended for. For example, pornographic search results or results linking to sites which advocate suicide or self-harm can cause children considerable distress, and may border on illegality.

It also quotes that, “under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 it is an offence to publish material liable to deprave and corrupt a person likely to see, hear or read it, rendering the nature of the potential viewer an important factor in establishing an offence.“

I guess the nub of this is in what guidelines we provide. I don’t intend to restate the many good sites that cover just this subject or even how to care for your children (it’s not my place to do that) but I do want to point out that I believe we should be doing this. Look at it this way … what parent, even those who smoke, willingly accept that their child has started smoking without at least trying to fight against it?

I think more than anything else we need to know and understand what our children want to do and not to necessarily interfere with the process itself. Whether we use monitoring software or not is not my argument here, though again I believe we should, but it is more that we should have our children’s ear or vice-versa so that internet use is seen as a privilege and not an automatic right. That privilege is easily withdrawn or controlled depending on situations.

So what guidelines do I use with my children and advise others to do the same?

Top of any list like this when I get asked by the technophobes I know or come in to contact with is to tell them to talk to their children. Then talk to them again. If we aren’t talking to our children, and here I mean talk to and not talk down to them, then we are already on a slippery dictatorial slope. There is a big difference and I’m not in the market for Kid Psychology 101 so please go ask an expert on how to talk with your child if you need it.

So, without further ado here’s my guidelines - feel free to copy, steal, ammend or use wherever because they aren’t mine of that I’m sure. They probably aren’t even conclusive

• First and foremost talk with your children. Explain your points in a non-emotional manner and then listen to their responses.
• Know what your children are doing or want to do online. If you don’t understand it, get them to show you or ask another parent to teach you - do not remain ignorant.
• As with real life, teach them the value of guarding their privacy. Simple rule of thumb would be “don’t give out what you wouldn’t give to a stranger when face to face”. This includes but is not limited to their (or your) phone number, passwords and other such info that would identify them.
• Teach them about the wisdom of not opening attachments or blindly following links even if sent by friends.
• Same goes for spam - if it’s a shared access computer then ensure anti-spam measures are in place.
• In fact, the same goes for any type of threat whether real or perceived.
• Install and use security software relevant to your operating system.
• As with real life (what is that?) help them understand that there are people out there who are trying to con them, lie to them, etc.
• Impress upon them that unless they know the person then do not arrange a face to face meeting unless accompanied by an adult they trust (NB – this doesn’t have to be yourself).
• Where the software they utilise allows it, e.g. IM’s, then show them how they can block somebody they don’t wish to talk to or makes them uncomfortable.
• Above all, don’t leave them with a sense of fear about this - talk it out if needs be and let them know that they can talk to you about anything to do with the internet.

Even if you don’t know the answer, let them know you care and that you’ll assist them in finding out the answer – it’s a great bonding exercise.

Intrinsic in all of this is that we as parents have a duty to understand what we are providing. Would we blindly allow our children to do whatever it is without our first some understanding of the benefits and also some idea behind the principles? I’d suggest as responsible parents we wouldn’t.

My youngest wants to do a martial art - he’s asked to do karate but my built in bias says do judo because that’s what I did at his age. However, I have learnt to overcome my built in bias over the years I’ve been a parent and so I have set out to research what karate is about (its ethos), how much it costs, where, when and the likely benefits to my child. Once I’ve finished my research I’ll sit down with him and re-discuss the subject and finally along with his mother we’ll come to an agreement.

As a child one rarely sees the entire picture. As an adult one mostly reads too much into any given situation and consequently we respond in one of two default ways. We either ignore the situation and hope our child fumbles their way through or we totally over-react. In the martial art example above, part of the negotiation will be to do with the fact that I work shifts and won’t always be able to take him and so as a family we need to find ways around this. For us this includes using his older brother and on occasions my wife will have to help as well.

Which one are you and will you accept your duty as a parent to better understand?

[tags]internet, monitoring, children, safety, security, guidelines, parents[/tags]