HW 7: Are You There For Your Kids?

I think that, just like everything else, kids need to do things in moderation. While I don’t think it’s necessary to monitor everything that kids write online, I do think it’s a good idea for parents and guardians to know what their kids are up to online. There are many dangers that kids can unknowingly get into, and they don’t have the capacity to protect their selves from it, that’s their parent’s job. If parents could keep an open dialog with their kids about what they are doing online and the names of the sites they use etc., that would alleviate some of the fear of unchecked online consumption. Another idea is to have the computer in the family room, that way kids know they can be looked in on at any time by parents. In a piece called My So-Called Blog that Emily Nussbaum wrote for Dan Burstein and David Kline’s Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture she complicates matters further by asserting that, “this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy” (Nussbaum 351). In other words Nussbaum is saying that now kids are spending so much time online and staying in touch with their friends, that they are losing out on the real intimacy of face to face conversation and relationships. They are putting themselves out there per say with their online confessionals and some would say giving in to being judged, but isn’t that what we all do in order to have an intimate relationship with someone? This goes back to having the parents there to act as a sounding board for these kids, so that they have someone to explain to them the complexities of relationships and life in general. On the computer or not, my point is that parents need to be there for their kids to help them sort out the hardships of life.