[Hidden-tech] Email for kids

Will Loving will at dedicationtechnologies.com
Thu May 18 09:03:15 EDT 2006


My almost 10 year old son has just recently gotten an email account which I
am monitoring using OS X's Parental Controls (only available in 10.4 and
higher). He brings me any new addresses that he wants to add to his "white
list" and I put them in for him so he can only send to and receive from
those addresses. If he were to send to any other, it comes to me first.
Ichat (the OS X built-in IM client) has a similar white list feature.

Internet dangers aside, one of the things I did to make sure he got a good
start in this was to require him to do at least 5 hours of Mavis Beacon
Teaches Typing before he could get an email account. He gets paid a small
amount per hour for doing it (it is work to my mind) and is very proud of
how much he has learned and his current typing speed of about 15 words a
minute.

I agree with Peter's point of view about web access being the real danger
and about the need to supervise very closely (I feel the same way about
video and have turned off more than one movie in the middle due to
inappropriate subject matter). We've talked pretty extensively with our son
about why we are supervising so closely and why he should always check with
us about before entering any information, even if it's just Lego.com where
he spends most of his web time. He regularly checks with us over any
questions he has.

As a former teacher, I know that children primarily from other children. It
has been my experience that the biggest danger lies in those children whose
parents are not supervising closely, showing other children "interesting"
websites and how to get to them. This has only come up a little bit so far,
but I think it's only a matter of time before we get to talk about what
pornography is and why it's there on the web.

While OS X's Parental Controls can create a white list for websites, I
haven't yet decided to do that because I don't know how to deal with the
need to do searches in Google or Wikipedia without keeping him from
legitimate sites. It comes back again to that close supervision...

Will

Will Loving, President
Dedication Technologies, Inc.



on 5/16/06 7:10 PM, B. Kimo Lee at bklee at azurelink.com wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> An interesting topic, this. I'm surprised that kids have got email
> addresses at age 9. Sorry, I don't mean to be judgmental. You may
> have specific controls in place, Peter.  I'd be interested to find
> out what other parent's think an appropriate age is for kids to have
> email privileges?
> 
> Maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy, but it seems a really young age to have that
> exposure to the perils of the Internet. Matt's suggestions sounded
> pretty good with OSX. But even with that, you know that kids are
> signing up at user forums that don't have any scruples (to require
> parents permission). Kids just click the over 13 button... So their
> addresses could end up anywhere.
> 
> Education and observation, eh?
> 
> Best,
> Kimo

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