A few years ago, as a fairly new and keen young parent, my wife and I went on a First Aid course to learn what to do if a child was injured.
One of the themes of the course was that, to an extent, kids have to learn themselves what’s dangerous and the consequences of that danger – the hard way, unfortunately. They gave an example of a paranoid parent worrying about her kid getting his fingers trapped in doors, so she simply took all the internal doors out in her house.
Sure enough, the kid never got his fingers trapped in a door – until the day he went round to a friend’s house. So, he had to go through the learning and howling process, at some point.
Mike Masnick makes a very similar point at TechDirt today, making an appeal that we should be teaching kids how to use the internet and avoid the "bad stuff" rather than just filtering it out. He says, like the finger in the door story, that sooner or later, kids will find them on a computer without filtering and won’t know how to handle this.
This is a very good point and one that I’d endorse wholeheartedly, with a small caveat. Very young kids use the internet these days – certainly 5 and 6 years olds, if not younger.It’s difficult to teach these kids anything to apply critical judgment and I think it’s this kind of age where filters are useful. Once they’re maybe 10 or older, you can start teaching them to think for themselves and they certainly should be capale of this, at that age.
Once they’re about 13 or 14 though, they’re going to look at the bad stuff anyway and they’ll be able to bust out of any filtering attempts you care to put in place. So while I’m not advocating encouraging them to try the stuff – like you wouldn’t give them packs of cigarettes to try – if they want to look, they will, as that’s juts part of growing up.
The place where filtering is much more useful, for all ages, is filtering out the nastier examples of spam email that pervades all our in-boxes, including our kids’. Irrespective of how tolerant you are as a parent, no one can possible thinking advertisng stuff like bestiality and worse, to children is anything but completely unacceptable.
Of course, these issues are about to be faced by mobile as well as the computer based access. The difficulty here is that, unlike a computer which can be relatively easily monitored (just keep popping into the room they’re using, unexpectedly from time to time) the mobile is almost impossible to police. This means that we’re going to see a lot more debate as the media and parents wake up to the possibility that their kid can look at nudey ladies on their phones.
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