Stand Your Ground, Protect the Family

This site is largely devoted to what SSO calls “internet parenting.” We exist because we want to assist parents in going into “web protect” mode.

One of the most difficult parts of being a parent or a responsible big brother or sister is coping with the disappointment, anger and frustration of the very people you are trying to protect. This is especially true with children who are intelligent or at least who have consumed so much information that they interpret with an inexperienced mind. That information can arm them and because we genuinely want to be fair, to be just and to make them happy, we can find ourselves on the losing end of the argument.

For internet teens the challenge is even greater as they may be experiencing the normal phenomenon of teen rebellion. For internet parenting the obstacles to imposing a solid web protect plan just keep on compounding.
But, quite simply, you must stand your ground.

Some of the more common dilemmas parents are presented on this site with and some thoughts on how they can be approached.

The Great Spy Debate –  Kids’ Right to Privacy

There is a sadly misguided argument that unfortunately is picked up by many rebelling teens to challenge their parents. Any net nanny approach, or sound internet parenting tools are attacked as invading the kids’ right to privacy.

“Spying” is a particular thing. It includes the notion that the monitoring activity is illegitimate and especially that it is unknown to the subject of the monitoring. Spying is intended to deprive the victim of something of value such as trade secrets or money through blackmail. Spying is monitoring someone without proper authority to do so.

Supervising your family, even aggressively, is not spying.

Those who get themselves worked up into a self-righteous fervour should consider this scenario:

Your child has heard about this house where some kids go to have unusual experiences. Some of them even come away with money.

The way it works is that the kid enters the house in complete darkness, there are people there with hoods over the heads, but the hoods don’t really matter because the only light is being shone directly on the child. He can see nothing but he does hear soothing, encouraging words to come forward.

Some of the voices sound like other children. They tell him how much fun it is here. He is told this is a special room where nothing can hurt him but that he could hurt the people there. His clothes are dirty from being outside and the people in this room are vulnerable to such dirt. It might even kill them.

For him to continue his experience he needs to take his clothes off and put them on a table that suddenly gets lighted. The other “child” voices tell him that it’s okay, they just clean the clothes and it is so much fun…

You can see where this goes.

Now, child privacy advocates, tell me this: would you allow your child to go to this house unsupervised in the name of protecting his rights?

The scenario is much much more innocent than the reality to sending your child onto the internet without supervision. The people he comes into contact with on the web are in the darkness, hooded, able to pretend to be children, able to exercise influence over a potentially long period of time. To not supervise these excursions is the opposite of protecting the child’s rights, it is irresponsible parenting and in our view constitutes child endangerment.

Ask your own child if he or she would expect you to allow them to enter an unknown building, with complete strangers that will be hidden and disguised. Your own child knows this is a stupid suggestion, of course you would insist at minimum to be present and probably simply forbid it outright.

Rather than forbidding access to the internet all you are trying to do is to ensure that your family has as strong supervision and protection as possible.

To call that spying is more than silly, it is dangerous to the safety of our children.

Children have no more right to be free from parental supervision on the internet than they do to cut themselves with razor blades in the privacy of their own bathroom. If you have ethical qualms about it, then get real.

Children actually have and will suffer serious harm, including death, due to a lack of parental supervision.

To post your own views about “spying” or any matter dealing with internet parenting, ask questions or just share a story, join the discussion in the parent fourm.