Kids and the Internet

I like to brag. For what I have or for what others praise me. Sometimes. For example, now I boast with the fact that although I am a wise man and old according to my ID, I have the face of a child. At least until I’m not stressed by the everyday problems, beer or cigarettes and inevitable and harmful food flowing through my stomach thanks to a reflex and unhappy gesture. I am not boasting myself in vain, but to reach to the essence of this article.

Children and the Internet are engaged in a relatively well-known equation for those who are parents. It is very easy to penetrate under their skin as a “psychologist” and also if you know how to push the buttons of a computer, you will definitely know how to control your kid when it comes to Internet. But the question is: Do you control your child?

As parents, you probably don’t know, even if it is not hard to find, that almost all the boys of 12 to 15 years hit redtube or pornhub (I can’t say this is good or bad, but still you should be able to control your kid and discuss with him/her about some of the problems which are very frequent at this age). You can find details without necessarily wanting this, because you can be friendly with everyone – all ages – and sometimes the younger Internet users can confuse you with one of them.

At any time, millions of young people browse the Internet at home, school or at their friends. With the help of a cell phone or another portable device, they can enter the Internet from wherever they are. If you are a parent, you face a serious problem: your child is probably doing better on the Internet than you and maybe you can’t receive too many details about how you should use it. Because you don’t know where to go. Right? In large, this is it, face it.

The main question is if you should be worried about this or not. The answer is Definitely, you should. Of course, you should be interested in what your child is doing on the Internet, to whom is he talking, which are his friends, what are the topics that interest him and so on, but this does not mean you should turn into a “Big Brother“. It is recommended not check his private correspondence (you will be scared anyway by the language and topics, or you can do it once, but NOT constantly).

You should rather understand that you have to give your child some attention, educate him, explaining him what is good or bad in his favor. Of course, you should explain coherent, not dictating “laws” and imposing them to your child, which would be automatically forced to conform – you will make him even more willing to try potentially harmful experiences.

Interesting stats and info:

* In the U.S., 93% of young people between 12 and 17 years use the Internet. 90% of young people between 8 and 16 years admit that they stumbled across pornography on the Internet.
* “Parents may think that a webcam helps a child to communicate easily and inexpensively with relatives or friends. For a pedophile, this is a window opened to the child’s bedroom ” (Robert S. Mueller, FBI Director)
* In Canada, almost half of young people who use mobile phones access the Internet.
* In India, the number of Internet users has risen sharply: by 54% in just one year! Many of them are young.
* In Britain, 57% of young people between 9 and 19 years, which use the Internet each week have come across pornography. But only 16% of the parents think their children have seen such material.
* Experts say that about 750000 of pedophiles are online every day, haunting the chats or dating sites.

What parents think and what do they know?

Until recently it was thought that is enough to keep your computer in a place where you can monitor it to keep your child safe, so he does not get to see the dark side of the virtual world. Dark side refers to pornographic sites, sites inciting to violence or which show scenes of incredible cruelty, to chat conversations with strangers that can end up really bad.

Ways of  information / communication on the Internet

To understand how life can be negatively affected on the Internet for a minor, how the concersations can spread between a child and an X Internet user, next there will be described some methods of online communication: email, instant chat, web sites (blogs, social networking). Today we will speal only about e-mail and chat, and the other ways of communication will be dealt in another article.

The e-mail system is a means of communication already old, like conventional mail, the “letters” sent from a computer (via internet) come immediately to the recipient – wherever they are, and for sending these letters the price is usually zero. Because the price is so low and the technology allows to simultaneous send a message to millions of users, a child may receive unsolicited messages (aka spam) such as: links to pornographic sites, which apparently seem serious and ask for personal data, like the advertising flyers.

Sometimes the messages contain viruses able to compromise personal data or to destroy the information in the computer. Therefore, it is good to tell children to open emails that come exclusively from clearly known persons and to automatically delete the others, unsolicited. Moreover, by responding to spam e-mails, your address may be passed to others, as active in a database, and therefore will continue to be bombarded with spam.

The instant messaging refers to the messages sent from one computer to another. Unlike the -email, once sent a message from every corner of the Earth reaches instantly the recipient. It works on mobile phones also. The instant messaging can be used anytime, anywhere, if there is an Internet connection. Most such services are free and allow, in addition to text, voice and video communication (through a webcam).11

Watch tweets on: