Digital life starts early, in toddlerhood, and
accelerates at the speed of light. Kids who chat on Disney's
popular online club, have avatars before they have permanent teeth. Kids
giggle over goofy YouTube videos and stumble across a treasure trove of
knowledge and everything else imaginable on the Internet. Our moms used to
overhear our phone conversations with our friends but now so much communicating
goes on silently, via e-mails and IMs and texts which is out of our range.
We want to protect our children, and in an increasingly
digitized society, that instinct is carrying over into the online realm more
and more. You can do as much or as little monitoring as you want based on the
privacy decisions you make. And, while keeping tabs on online activities, the
amount of time our kids spend on their phones means a lot more worried about
the activities that are taking place on those devices. Luckily, a lot of
developers out there recognize this and mobile monitoring apps abound. Still,
we almost need an app to help go through all the options available out there. We
worry, of course, that kids might inadvertently give out personal information
and put themselves at risk. But there are other concerns as well. There's a new
level of communication between kids these days. They may say things to or about
each other online that they'd never say in person. Which can lead, of course,
to toxic gossip, cyberbullying, and damaged reputations.
Sexting, a scary new trend where teens send nude or semi-nude
photos via cell phone and e-mails which is popping up throughout the country.
Children can be prosecuted and marked as criminals for the rest of their lives
if they're caught with a provocative photo on their cell phone. So, it is very
important to monitor online activity of kids.
It's a given that we generally know where our kids are
each day, whom they're with, and what they're doing. But in the digital world,
where even our youngest children are spending a growing amount of time, we're
often reduced to the role of spectator, and many of us are reeling from a case
of digital whiplash. The kids, even little ones, may very well understand
today's technology better than we do.
Most computers have some sort of parental controls in the
system settings, where you can monitor online activity of kids to prevent them
from accessing “R-rated” sites. So, as it’s rightly stated, prevention is
better than cure. Only you can save your child from this digital world. It’s
solely the duty of parents to monitor the online activity of the children and
secure them from the bad digital world out there, which has an easy access.
