Teach your kids to be careful online. They never know who they might meet.
Every once in a while, Jay over at Parents Behaving Badly, can get my goat. Don’t get me wrong, I love him and his blog. It makes me feel like I am somewhat of a good mother (and I offer bribes to keep me off his site:) ) But the story of a mother who tried to teach her son to be careful online has my neck hairs up in arms!
The story goes like this… A mother was challenged by one of her friends that she couldn’t get her son to become attracted to a fictitious person on the internet. Anne Atkins accepted the challenge and succeeded. In doing so, she broke her son’s heart as he truly fell in love with this person he thought he knew so well. Let’s talk about the obvious stuff here.
She lied to her son. That is the whole point but I will get to this later. She didn’t mess him up in the head for life. If that did happen, there is more to the story because everyone can remember their parents lying about something. Remember the fat man in a red suit who gets chauffeured by a bunch of animals this time of year? And I don’t think that we who believed in Santa are warped because of it.
He got his heart broken. Hey folks, he is a teenager. This isn’t the first time nor will it be the last. It is very rare to have a forever marriage to your high school sweetheart. Although I think that is so sweet.
She is a Christian. This is probably what most of the readers at PBB will squawk about. I don’t think this has a whole lot to do with trying to prove that your kids need to be careful on the internet. Wanting to show your kids how to be safe online is just good parenting.
She “seduced” him. I hope that her point was never to actually meet him. Just show him that he needed to be more careful online. Showing him only works if she wasn’t explicit or inappropriate in any way. And I hope she wasn’t. I pray she kept it clean.
My point to this rant is this, we as parents need to show our kids why it is so important to be careful with who you talk to online. There are so many places to get in trouble online, like MySpace, that it IS our responsibility to supervise who our kids are talking to. You see it all the time in the news that some child is abused by someone they meet online. MySpace, themselves, is in the process of trying to get sex offenders to register their email addresses so they can ban them from talking to kids on their site. Note … I think it should be their responsibility and not the government’s to patrol their site. They should not be so scared to take responsibility themselves. But that is just MHO.
So way to go, Jay, for hitting such a nerve with me. I work with teenagers all the time and see how they are willing to talk to anyone. I don’t think my daughter will consider me super strict about the computer, but she will have limits for her own protection. I wouldn’t let her go to a bar as a teenager because it is unsafe. Nor will I let her talk to just anyone online.
So in a way, I am glad Anne taught her son that he never really knows who he is talking to online. I am sorry that he got his heart broken. I ask you just to look at it from a purely safety issue instead of a crazy wacko Christian mom “seducing” her son online issue. The way I see it, there are always two sides to every story and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Tags: Anne-Atkins, internet-safety, Parents-Behaving-BadlyRelated Stories
POSTED IN: blogs, celebrities, news
4 opinions for Teach your kids to be careful online. They never know who they might meet.
Karen
Dec 15, 2006 at 8:49 am
There certainly is a lot of trouble to get into on the internet. I’ve seen too much inappropriate stuff on MySpace. I’ve had some people contact me on there too. Parents certainly need to be involved and informed of what their children are doing while on the internet. And the worst possible thing that they can do is to allow their child to have a computer in their bedroom.
kellys
Dec 15, 2006 at 11:16 am
I realize that I will get slammed for such a way of thinking but I just don’t think we should let our kids have free reign online without some restrictions. There are other ways to teach this lesson and I do think she went a little far by letting her son “fall in love” with her character before ending the charade. But I bet he will be a little more cautious when chatting online from now on.
What if the character had not been his mom and it had been an online predator? He would have gone to meet this person and then the family would have been in the news for another reason altogether. How would we all feel then? Would we be mad at the parents for not being more restrictive? Don’t we always say when we hear stories like this that the parents should have known who the kids were talking to.
Karen
Dec 15, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Unfortunately, there are many predators out there. There will be many to criticize her way of teaching him a lesson. There may even be some that criticize you for the way you feel. At least her son is safe at home with her. We are all entitled to our own opinion. It’s a shame some people have to be rude about it though.
Susan
Mar 11, 2007 at 8:12 pm
just came across a new site called http://www.yokidsyo.com that seems to be targeted at pre-teen kids. There are parental controls available (i.e. buddy list must be approved by parents) and neat stuff for both kids and parents. My kids are pre-teen and they love the site and I control who they can message and who they can receive msgs from…I’m interested to see how it does…
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