Sarah Caden on your children online,
All the device restrictions in the world can’t protect children if our own online behaviour is anything to go by,
RECENTLY, after a friend’s child saw some intimate kissing images that cannot be unseen, I went at the safeguards and restrictions on my iPad. I googled how to make the device’s own restrictions as tight as possible and then got to work on limiting the scope of the browser. Then, once every box was ticked, I googled again. Boobs. I got a lot of results about breast feeding, but then it struck me that boobs is pretty tame as searches go. So I went again. Hot boobs. A lot of mastitis. And some people who are contouring their boobs to look like reindeer. None of it was too alarming, although there were a few celeb items concerned with sexy cleavage. It wasn’t alarming, but neither would I love my nine- or seven-year-old daughters looking at any of it.
Even the safe stuff is stuff you’d rather your children weren’t exposed to. Not that this made me take away the iPad or anything crazy, but it gave pause.
Involvement in your children’s online activity is one thing they encouraged at the Cyber Safe Ireland talk at my daughters’ school. They suggest that you have a contract with your kids, not only about time spent online, but about giving out personal information, talking to strangers, even talking to friends.
You talk, you regularly access and inform yourself as to what they’re doing online and you stay in charge of their life in cyberspace. They tell you this and it all sounds reasonable and doable to the ears of primary-school parents, but they also emphasise that as they get older, the kids will try to outfox you.
Your little darlings will circumvent restrictions, they will set up lives you know nothing about, they will, in time, behave like teenagers have always behaved, but in a world that is utterly different to that which we inhabited as teenagers.
When Cyber Safe Ireland visited my kids’ school, I went along to the talk feeling confident that I knew my stuff and that the worldwide web wasn’t wreaking havoc on my home. I could do a better job at placing time restrictions on the screen use, but all my girls’ interests didn’t alarm me.
The older one is fascinated by girls who bake and who make lip balms out of crayons, and the younger one regards the iPad as a mini portable TV, where she binges on Horrid Henry and cartoon insects who sing Beatles songs. Incidentally, Horrid Henry, with his bad attitude, is verboten in some households, but he’s better than her stumbling into unrestricted hot boobs any day.
I left the Cyber Safe Ireland talk feeling far more uneasy about everything online. Pri- marily, I had undergone a complete mental shift in how I think about stranger danger.
Games such as Movie Star Planet, it was explained, see your child associating with other players who may not be who they claim. Instagram filters require that you turn on your location settings, thus allowing people to see where your child is located while photographing themselves.
They told us about a slew of apps where, alongside the main activity, children get to chat to one another. And children will be given to believe that they are chatting to other children and may not see themselves being manipulated into situations where they could be blackmailed.
Yes, blackmailed.
That’s when I realised that I knew nothing. I realised that focusing on early exposure to porn or sexual imagery and information is distracting us from modern-day stranger-danger, which sees children manipulated into a shameful act that they then fear having revealed.
The fear of revelation then allows the manipulator to coerce them into other acts, and sometimes drawing other children into the web.
This 21st-century blackmail put in the shade any worry about your child being snatched in the street. This is your child being snatched in your home, under your nose, through a device that you probably gave to them and imagine you control.
My older daughter is fascinated by her food hackers and make-and-do artists on YouTube, but she does not engage with them or their other followers. There is no “liking” in our house, no thumbs up, no posted reviews or commentaries.
She doesn’t sign up to anything and she seems to have a healthy disdain for the cacophony of the modern world, where to be silent is to be invisible, is to be inconsequential. She seems to be happy to be invisible.
I am only too aware that she feels this way now, at almost 10, and that this might change utterly in the next two years.
Friends with children in the first years of secondary have spelt out the transition to me, a change that is exaggerated by the arrival, for a lot of kids, of their first phone. With that phone comes social media and with that comes so many rules and so many ways to make yourself a pariah.
Your profile pic must be flattering, but not so much that you seem up yourself — cute, but quirky cute is best, apparently. Then there’s a very specific followers-to-following ratio to be met, there are rules on how many photos can be family-related and so on. Needless to mention, it’s all too easy to make a misstep and be considered an uncool outcast.
Last September, at the new-school-year briefing with my daughter’s fourth class teacher, it was suggested to the gathered parents that if our children have devices on which they are chatting to or messaging each other, they advise a cut-off point of 8.30pm.
A lot of us looked horrified by the idea that they would be online and involved with each other at that hour, but a quick examination of our own behaviour, as adults, shows just how badly we’re leading by example.
The extent to which we are welded to our phones, sending work texts in the evening, answering work emails at night, on our iPads in bed, is hardly leading by example.
Nor is our own social-media activity, our need to be constantly commenting on each other, seeking the affirmation and likes of strangers and filtering and flaunting of the best bits of our lives. We worry about them being over-involved online, over-exposed online and in the firing line of questionable material online, but while we continue to live that way ourselves, what hope is there of shaping our children’s activity healthily?
The reality is, though, that there’s little hope of either young or old ditching the internet entirely.
We adults aren’t going to send it back to where it came from and our kids regard it as part of the fabric of life. So our best hope is that we limit and restrict and warn and watch what they’re doing while they’re young, in the hope that it will form a healthy habit of a lifetime.
And all the while we know that the adults are googling hot boobs, and the rest, like there’s no tomorrow. To expect the children to grow up behaving differently, no matter how hard we restrict them in childhood, is possibly a tall order.
Plonking them down in front of the telly seems such a quaint option now, but I’m not sure any of us can get back to that relatively innocent place.
‘Horrid Henry is better than stumbling into unrestricted hot boobs’