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Computer and TV rules at your house

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Pringle, Jan 31, 2011.

  1. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Well said. You're clearly monitoring things and know what's going on. You're a good parent. I doubt most parents are as diligent as you are.

    As far as the "inappropriate google search" goes, I think that's today's equivalent of having a Playboy under your mattress. No harm, no foul as long as the search isn't for something too over the top.
     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Of course, they can friend you and then block you from seeing certain things...
     
  3. Captain_Kirk

    Captain_Kirk Well-Known Member

    Almost typed the Playboy reference in my post.
     
  4. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Have to disagree with the Playboy part. There, at the most you're going to see some boob, and if you really scored and got a Penthouse you'd see the downstairs. That doesn't come close to comparing to the vileness -- and video -- available within five minutes on the Internet.
     
  5. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    Yes. Yes they do.
     
  6. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    That's why parental controls are available. It might not block everything, but it at least makes it harder to find.
     
  7. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    No argument there. Just that often when we're talking parenting we compare it to something we experienced growing up -- riding your bike, playing hoops at the park instead of in an organized league, etc. -- but the whole porn/Internet thing has an intensity and a jarring effect like nothing most of us experienced.
     
  8. Wenders

    Wenders Well-Known Member

    Yup. I finally had to tell my parents (through writing a persuasive paper for my writing class, in which I actually called up the three dial-up companies in my town, got pricing and got pricing for a computer that could handle the Internet) right before I started high school that it was going to be impossible for me to get through high school without the Internet at home. Every year, I had at least one major (if not two or three) research projects to do, all of which did not involve in-class work.

    As for the diminished family values, my mom and her 50+ hours a week work schedule, plus my insane extra-curricular activities schedule meant that we ate one meal a week together if we were lucky.

    The TV thing...I didn't get a TV in my room until I was in seventh grade (and that's mostly because my grandma died, so I got the TV out of her nursing home room) and have basically had one in there ever since. When I was in high school, I would turn it on and set a sleep timer because I slept in a basement and it was dark and I liked falling asleep with a little bit of noise.

    I very rarely tested the limits with my parents as far as the TV and Internet went, but they also disciplined me properly when I was a little kid (by taking away my books) and I was home so little during high school that I really didn't have any desire (or energy) to see how far I could push it.
     
  9. Captain_Kirk

    Captain_Kirk Well-Known Member

    Certainly won't argue with you that the internet gives porn opportunities to the nth degree compared to the pre-computer days, but one point of clarification to your statement: I go back a ways and I can say with 100% certainty that in Playboy going back into the 70s,

    [​IMG]


    we got bush....
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  10. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    On the camera issue...

    My same friend who has a seventh grader tells the story of a 14-year-old girl in their neighborhood. Nice kid, used to babysit for several families in the area. Straight-A student, basically the kind of kid everybody would want their daughter to grow up to be like.

    Her boyfriend convinced her to lift her shirt for him on the webcam. Several weeks later when they broke up, guess what had been emailed to every student at their school?

    The kid is being homeschooled now.
     
  11. zebracoy

    zebracoy Guest

    My family purchased a computer for the first time when I was in sixth grade. I remember there being a big to-do when we first got it and having access to what and when; when the Internet started spreading, things got especially heated.

    As the oldest child, I asked my parents for permission to write the computer rules. They could look them over, and then we all agreed to them. I remember throwing in some silly provisions that were only beneficial to myself and not my siblings (one I remember was that I could be the only one to go on the computer in the morning before school; I justified it by mentioning that the others woke up later than I did and that I had time to kill because I showered first, etc., but in reality I just didn't want to deal with their bullshit). Then, of course, I modified them as I saw fit.

    I don't know what I would have done if I ever had a computer in the bedroom while growing up. My parents bought us all TVs when we turned 13, and then cable when we turned 16; by the time I left for college, I had video games, a stereo and a mini-fridge in there, and I never left the place. Then again, my father would always just loaf off in his bedroom whenever he got home from work and was never interacting with the rest of us, so that's probably what I learned it from.

    It was tough to make an effort to be social with the rest of my family at that time. With computers and Internet and all kinds of crazy devices, I foresee it being tough to get my kids to be sociable.
     
  12. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    The only rule we've had is that we haven't let our teen and preteen join Facebook or any other site. My 13-year-old has social media through Gaggle, which is on the school server and highly monitored. Otherwise, we really don't have rules.

    We have talked to them about inappropriate sites, and not responding to people you don't know, etc. It helps that my kids are generally good about this stuff. Plus, there are four of them, so it's not like anyone can get five straight hours of TV or video games without someone else bugging them for a turn.

    My wife and I are not so tough about rules in part because we've made a bit of our living from the online world. My "wasting" time on message boards, Facebook and Twitter have made me a de facto social media expert in my place of employment, so I'm getting more responsibilities, and as an aside I'm now handling my church's Twitter page. My wife does work as an Internet consultant, and even in her magazine editing does some online and social media work. We'd rather our kids (ages 5 to 13) know what they're doing online and learn from mistakes, rather than arbitrarily restrict time. Also, all that happened when my parents tried to arbitrarily restrict time or whatever on me as a kid was that I plotted ways around it. My kids will do their thing, then be done.

    Believe me, we're as worried as any parent about online perverts (especially because we knew a real one, the father of my daughter's friend on the block, who got arrested a few years ago) and cyberbullying. One thing that's good, though, is that kids are learning enough at school about those issues that I think they're going to be more savvy about them than even kids a few years older.

    Speaking of mistakes, when my oldest daughter was 5, my mother-in-law (not computer-savvy) was watching her, and my daughter asked innocently if she could play on "girls.com." My mother-in-law typed that in, and you can guess what girls.com was. Fortunately, my mother-in-law could figure out how to X out girls.com before my daughter was scarred for life.
     
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