Posted on 05/16/2011 7:07:43 PM PDT by decimon
A recent Consumer Reports survey found that roughly 7.5 million Facebook accounts belong to users younger’ than 13 and that as many as 20 million are under 18. While that might seem like a relatively low number given Facebook’s 500+ million users, being a minor with a Facebook account is increasingly becoming a scary thing: Cyber-bullying on the site has reached frightening proportions and child predators are a well known concern associated with the site.
Considering Facebook’s apparent reach with children and the risks associated with having an account, it’s surprising it took this long for a bill giving parents increased access to their kids’ profiles to be proposed.
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For now, the bill has only been proposed in California, so those would be the only parents lucky enough to have such powers. Of course, with such power comes responsibility, and Facebook isn’t entirely certain parents can handle it. Spokesman Andrew Noyes called the bill a “serious threat,” and it stands to reason that parents could abuse the system, asking for heaps of information to be removed from children’s profiles. There’s also the problem of objectivity: Some more conservative parents might want reasonably tame photos removed, or wall posts with foul language taken down – which could eventually become a large expense for Facebook not to mention the complicated moral objections this bill may raise.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Discreet “surveillance” is not at all improper. After all the kid is using your internet service. But confrontation if any needs to be done with equal discretion, since it’s like the proverbial squeezing of the wet bar of soap, it will likely scoot away.
Discretion is urged, because while the kids may be whining to you about “oh I have no Facebook” they may actually have one set up through a friend whose parent is not so careful.
>>The children are minors so the parents have, or should have, extraordinary rights and responsibilities regarding their welfare.<<
Would you support your child if they refused to listen to a socialist teacher and walked out of the classroom during a dissertation on the benefits of socialism. Let them know ahead of time you would and then don’t be surprised if they do it.
We cannot control what our children will be exposed to in their life while under our care. Open non restrictive, non-confrontational conversations during dinner of after supper give parents the opportunity to hear what the kids are thinking and to guide them away from making poor decisions.
A great opening line to these discussions is, “What did you do or say today that you wish you hadn’t done or said?” or “What happened today that you wish had not happened?”
It doesn’t hurt to say grace before dinner — sets the tone for the evening.
“I guess I’m overly sensitive, but this kind of stuff — arguments opposing what amounts to parental responsibility drives— me nuts. That the government is getting involved just rubs me the wrong way.”
Dittos. My 16-year old boy has FB and my wife (also on FB) keeps tabs on it to a degree by being a “friend” or whatever, and also having his password. She keeps him honest once in awhile. (Last time it was because he made a quip about Obama being dead - “opps, I meant Osama”.) As much as you can’t stand the guy, you shouldn’t be saying stuff like that - especially when your name is attached to it!
My 13 year-old daughters don’t have it, but every so often they mention it. One of these days they will.
And the only on-line computers they can use are in family areas of the house.
I’m not a control freak. That stuff usually backfires anyway.
How about bars? What if there were no laws against children entering or being served in bars? Think maybe a lot of kids would be coaxed in by others despite the efforts of their parents to keep them out?
My daughter will be 13 in July, so she’s basically the same age as yours. She has FB and I have the password. Except when she’s at school or a friend’s house the only online access she has is either my laptop or my husband’s laptop, but since his is a company one, she doesn’t have much access to daddy’s puter :)
She knows the rules about being online and she asks one of us to check out something, that she’s interested in signing up for before she does it. So far I haven’t said no to anything. about 90% of what she does revolves around various book series that she’s into and involve writing their own concepts of scenarios involving the characters.
i will ask him... he is a computer geek...
There were no such laws before prohibition and things worked fine. It wasn’t until the moralist busybodies got involved that those laws appeared.
I doubt that.
Doubt it all you want, it’s reality. There were very few laws concerning the consumption of any kind of chemicals in the US iuntil well into the Prohibitionist movement. Except in rare standout cases, morality was left up to the common man to decide. If a bartender/opium dealer/marijuana grower didn’t want to sell to a kid, they didn’t. Government was rarely involved. The only reason such substances are regulated now is because of sticky tax reasons. People get sold the nonsense “moral” reasons for the laws, never realizing it would be more moral to let individuals govern what they take in and let the details work themselves out.
Prohibition was federal. Most laws regarding children were state and local.
You don’t understand the word “movement”, do you? “The Prohibitionist movement” encompasses both state and local laws. It covers the entire mindset that government needs to be our nanny to protect us from the big, bad drugs.
If you have some tangential drum to bang then you bang alone. This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
If that were true, then you wouldn’t have responded in the first place. Prohibition is always going to be the perfect example of out-of-control oversight. And it’s a great parallel to giving parents oversight in regards to FB. Oversight is oversight, and an overreach is an overreach.
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