What Are Your Kids Looking at Online?

1. Curiosity vs. Obsession
   Many parents have found out that their kids have visited porn websites or pro-anorexia sites, and freaked out. Before you break out the handcuffs and throw the computer out the window, I think there needs to be a distinction between what is simple adolescent curiosity and what is a real problem. I am just going to say it: I do not think a teenager checking out a porn site once or twice is that big of a deal. We have all wondered… But there becomes an issue when visting such sites becomes a habit.
   
   Parents should talk to their kids about what they have seen online. Your kid might be more disturbed by what they saw than you know, and you need to be there for them.
   
   
2. Intention
   One of the members of the Norton Online Family Advisory Council recenlty made a wonderful point about the intention of what your kids are searching for or how they got to a bad site. Often times, children will mistype a URL or accidentally click on a website that takes them to an inappropriate web site. Then, if the parent checks the web history or has installed spyware on the computer, they freak out and punish the child.
   
   I ask that you try to find out what your child’s intention was for visiting that site or for carrying out their behavior online. This also holds true for cyberbullying, posting on social networks and cursing on IM chats. The "why" can greatly affect the punishment, consequence or outcome.
   
   
3. Forensic Parents
   Marian Merritt of Symantec has a great story about when she saw that her daughter had accidentally visited a voyeur porn site. Like a detective, she used her the Norton parental control software to work backwards to figure out what had happened before freaking out. She discovered that her daughter, 14, had searched “Bride Wars” into Google, which brought her to YouTube. There, she watched a number of videos and trailers for the movie. Then, she read a comment with a link which said “If you like these clips, check out this one!” This link took her to a porn site.
   
   Marian was relieved that her daughter and was upset by what she saw. She actually asked Marian to turn on the blockers for those sites in the future. Often times, kids do not want to go on those forbidden sites as much as you do not want them to.
   
   
4. Facebook is the new Playground
   I am often asked by freaked-out parents if they could just "unplug" the Internet, keeping their kids from going nline at all, but this is not realistic. Twenty years ago, parents could prevent their children from going on the playground to avoid a bully, but they wouldn't have taught their kids resilience or how to handle bullying. Similarly, kids need to learn how to measure that uncomfortable feeling in the pit of their stomach and ask for help when they need it by letting them live a little online. Resilience is key.
   
   
5. Protect Them and Tell Them
   Recently, a teen client of mine got a new computer before heading to college. Within a few weeks, the computer was totally unusable because of a virus that had been downloaded. When we asked the teen why he'd clicked on some of these unreliable downloads, he said that in the past he had done it and nothing had happened. Turns out, his parents, being awesome parents, had always either blocked dangerous popups with parental control software and/or had really great virus protection on their computer, but they never told him! So when he was on his own, he learned the hard way. If you are protecting your kids or your computer, let them know about it, so they don't take it for granted!