Parents, don’t leave those kids alone with the computer. I always made sure I visited my son and spend 20 min. or so looking over his shoulder when he was online. I would ask him to explain games to me and to show me the sites he was visiting. A key here, is to pretend you want to learn about a game or online activity. Seeing how they are navigating around tells you lots about your kid. A good quote from this story, by Dave Cole, from Symantec is “Two-way communications technologies-things like VoIP, chat and instant message-were seamlessly integrated into online games, virtual worlds, e-commerce sites and more… the integration happened so rapidly that we never stopped to think that we were really connecting with strangers… what surprised us was how fast this migration has occurred and how deeply it has infiltrated nearly every activity… ”
Parents In The Dark
A recent Symantec study, the Norton Online Living Report, fielded by Harris Interactive, reports how kids and adults are spending their time online,
The study found that parents in the U.S. think their kids are online two hours a month, but in reality, kids report spending 20 hours a month online. And, 41% of U.S. teens ages 13-17 years old agree that their parent have no idea what they are looking at online.
U.S. children report that 16% of them have been approached online by a stranger. However, U.S. adults believe that just 6% of children have been approached online by a stranger.
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Barbara K Iverson 