The Place Of A Parent Is In The Wrong
June 13, 2008
Being a parent has to be one of the hardest jobs in the world. When we were children it all looked so easy, and we constantly criticised our own parents for making disastrous mistakes, all of which we swore we’d never make if and when we ever got to be parents ourselves. So here we are, making whole reams of mistakes of our own, and finding that whatever we think is the right thing to do, our children, or our children’s friends have other ideas. We look at other parents, who seem to manage fine, and then we look at our own mess and wonder what went wrong. Being a parent is very much like being up a creek without a paddle, and the boat’s leaking. Each day seems another battle has to be won.
The biggest change in the world which we as parents can see is the introduction and proliferation of computer equipment and technology. As young children ourselves, some of us would have had some experience of innocent little units that could do relatively little, others of us had no experience at all - it was another world. Today, we are bringing our children up in a world we could not possibly have imagined, and seems as far removed from our own childhood as is possible to conceive. Whereas we spent hours riding round on empty streets on our bikes, our children are stuck indoors mesmerised by the images on their computer screen. Our challenges involved cycling all the way down the hill as fast as we could, our children’s seems to be to unlock the secrets of the Shrine of D’Gaarn or kill as many Wailing Jarpees as possible in the hope of a good drop. If this leaves you cold, or dazed, then welcome to the club.
Most of us are quite literate when it comes to using computers, and indeed most of us have to use them for work each day. Sending and receiving emails, creating letters and documents, working through spreadsheets and databases is of little difficulty. Yet our children seem to find depths to the computer that leave us perplexed. We are the generation who is aware of identity problems, and shred our paperwork rigorously, protecting our personal data at all costs. Yet our children seem to relish the idea of publishing photos, journals and intimate secrets with rash abandon for the whole world to see and do what they will with the material. We’d never stand in the street handing out our email address, phone number and a bunch of photos to any individual who passed us. Yet this is exactly what our children seem to be doing in the digital world. They claim to have hundreds of online friends, yet have never met any of them, and this goes against our very concept of what friendship means.
Few of us can have missed the numerous stories on the news about children who go missing after meeting up with someone on the internet. The statistics are grim, and the reality is clearly that there are predators who use the internet as a way of accessing children. It’s easy to view the computer as the problem, as the cause of danger, and the temptation is to remove its presence from the home entirely.
Of course, the truth is that computers, and the internet, are no more dangerous than any other aspect of our lives. Yes, we could easily get knocked down and killed crossing the road, a tree might fall over and crush us, or we might go on holiday and get killed by a falling coconut, but we stand more chance of being killed in any of these ways than of any harm coming to us using a computer or the internet. It’s simply a matter of common sense. After all, crossing the road is a fairly straightforward and relatively safe procedure, but lying down in the middle of the motorway is clearly being ludicrously cavalier with our safety. Similarly, using the internet safely is fine, but there are stupid things that we, or our children, can do which we need to be aware of.
It’s important, therefore, that we appreciate what the real risks are when using the internet, because the more we know and understand what the real risks and dangers are, the better we can help inform and advise our children. If we allow them to take advantage of the incredible technologies that surround us, but hold their hand through the learning stages, then we are all far more likely to come out the other side unscathed. If you can understand more about chat rooms, messenger clients, profiles and online games, then there will be more of a chance to chat with our children about what they are doing. We all accept, I’m sure, that we can’t ban them from living in the 21st century, and so we have to accept that, just as we had to learn the dangers of the road, which was not an issue back in our own parents’ or grandparents’ days, our children have to be taught the dangers of life on the digital highway.
We spend time as parents teaching our children about ’stranger danger’, and make sure they understand not to interact with anyone they don’t know. They have it drummed in to them from an early age that they should not talk to strangers, go off with them, accept lifts or sweets or invitations, and that if they suspect anything is wrong, run back home or to safety straight away and tell someone. This same policy and understanding is often lacking online. The strangers are still there, most of whom are perfectly decent, but many are sadly using the anonymity of the internet to hide behind fake profiles. Our children understand about strangers in the street or park. But online, people aren’t strangers. They have photos, names, hobbies, backgrounds, families and favourite music. The fact that these profiles may be entirely fake seems to pass our children by.
Possibly you may already be aware of the fact that there is a wealth of security software available for parents. These enable you to lock down and protect your computer, installing filters and logs, restrictions and blocking tools, guards and scanners, but to be honest most of this will simply cause our children to be ever more curious about what really is on the other side of the wall you’ve built. We were children once, and we know that the first thing you want to do if told not to look over the wall, is to look over the wall, and most children are smart enough to work out a way of getting past the security. A far more effective way of supporting and protecting them is to communicate with them. To have the computer somewhere publically visible so that you can see what they’re doing, share an interest, and talk with them, is far better than trying to lock everything down and then running away to pretend the dangers will go away.
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