Not too long ago when we were little kids, the mere knowledge that it was finally summertime again sent us into a state of delirium as our heads filled up with excited thoughts of all the mischief we’d now be able to get up to under the sun. You tend to look forward to just being able to jump into the pool and make a proper water bomb, or head to the beach to experience summer the best way we knew how. You only need to look at the printed photographs some of us still have of those good old days to see how times have changed. Kids no longer really get excited by small matters such as summer coming into full effect, the evidence of which is visible through a comparison of the photos they have now of themselves – photos (selfies) they took themselves, with their smartphones at that.
Things have changed in more than just one way though. I mean while the smartphone cameras some of the kids have take better pictures than the expensive cameras which only a few people owned back then, some of these changes that are associated with this type of technology need to be monitored. While smartphones mean kids have high resolution cameras in their pockets, what they also effectively have in their pockets is the entire internet. We all know that not all which circulates online is good, especially not for the delicate and impressionable brains of kids who are still growing up and developing. Pornography, violence and a lot of other disturbing material is all accessible at the swipe of a mobile device’s touch-screen and the continued exposure to some of this negative stuff can have long term psychological effects on the kids which can be quite challenging to try and rectify. What would happen if your kids saw something like the beheading of a man in the name of religion, for instance? How on earth do you try and explain something like that to a developing child?
Draw a Line
At some point you’ll have to take responsibility and put measures in place to protect children from getting exposed to the dark side of the World Wide Web. In conjunction with using software such as Net Nanny, a service which blocks access to adult material, sit down with your kids and talk to them about the boundaries within which they can use their devices. You’ll have to be a little stern about measures such as confiscating their phones or barring them from using their computers if they feel the need to clear their history or delete suspicious activity. Look, mistakes do indeed happen – I mean who would have thought Googling something like “outdoor summer camera fun” could get twisted into some adult material with dirty connotations?
Encourage them to ask you if something they think they’re not supposed to see pops-up while they’re using the internet for legitimate reasons. This in conjunction with agreeing to have you check on their internet activity every so often will bypass sneaky tricks kids get up to these days, using their seemingly inherent tech-savvy to deploy services such as proxy servers to hide their naughty online activity.
