It's a scary world out there for a kid. What's even scarier is nowadays is parents have to worry about what their kids are doing online, chatting with predators, giving out mommy's credit card number to people in Siberia etc.
I have to say as a child my parents didn't worry about what I was doing online. Back in our days, the most we did online was go onto AOL messaging and chat/gossip with our friends.
My parents also did the unspeakable thing and kept the computer in our living room. The computer was always in plain sight. Problem solved. Thanks mom and dad for not giving me privacy. But it certainly prevented me from participating in any questionable online behavior. (Not that I really wanted to, but some privacy while chatting about cute boys with my friends would have been nice.)
The day I got my own personal laptop for college in the summer after graduating high school was the greatest day of my life. And now what do I primarily use my laptop for? No, not talking about cute boys with my friends, but watching TV shows online and occasionally a bit of homework.
I guess I grew up.
To go along with parents not knowing what you were doing online because it wasn't must at our age besides AIM. I think that one of the solutions that helped in controlling what were were doing online was having a dial-up connection. For as must as we all hated hearing that annoying buzzing sound, and the slow connection speed, it actually allowed parents to create an account to what their kids had a certain amount of access to. I know my parents created me an account that was for my age, and besides I didn't do anything other than AIM, it gave me a cage that I was acceptable living in where I could do some research and not worry about the horrors of some content.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. I like the idea of keeping the family computer in the living room. I might have to try that.
ReplyDelete