Basics: Who's There? How Parents Can Be IM Watchdogs

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Basics: Who's There? How Parents Can Be IM Watchdogs

An article on parental paranoia-child-control is in NYT today, suggesting that parents must monitor activities of their children online as well as offline. While this topic is not new, some work in the UK by Sonia Livingstone and her colleagues suggests that parents and children have very different perceptions of what the other knows and what the other does online. Children are also far more relaxed about the "dangers" of the Internet, showing a significant amount of understanding that some things should not be done, others one has to pay attention to.

HomeNet's own work has shown that teens rarely comunicate with strangers. It is curious that strangers are the brunt of concern of the article, which cites only that as an articulated reason for parental control, leaving others to imagination (although implying there are many). Teens from the HomeNet interviews were very clear that meeting strangers online was not something they did for the most part. It was a rare occurance and, really, they preferred chatting with their friends anyway. Certainly these claims are subject to questioning - were the teens actually honest with experimenters? considering, however, that "meeting new people online" is still a fairly low-frequency activity in the US population in general as well as among Internet users, it seems plausible. In fact, the teens from the interviews spent most of their time chatting to their friends with whom they have just parted at school. This kind of "always on" connectedness seems in quality similar to the SMS-trends of EU and Asia and fits well with theories about demands of relationship development in this age group.

While parental controls may make parents feel better they may also build resentment from the children while trying to fix something that isn't entirely broken. Filter systems have been shown to be inept and blocking far more legitimate sites than the illegitimate ones (see the court cases for library-filter use from several years ago in the US). In Livingstone's data, children are not only aware of this, but find it both amusing and frustrating as well as largely useless. Just imagine if you live somewhere like Essex or Sussex in the UK... all the websites regarding these locations or web searchers with these names would be blocked.

Yet Parental Paranoia - the demand that one must always be watching their childs every move in order to be a good parent - has been perpetuated in this country over the last decade or so. Children with over-scheduled activity calendars almost have to rely on IM and/or SMS to build relationships that they don't hvae time to build as they are involved in a myriad of activities, always controlled and observed by the watchful parent. As such, parental-gard software sells itself on the wave of such paranoia-demands and NYT writes promotionl articles for this software, AOL and MSN. Go brand-advertising in the name of our children.