Jinked

After reading the book Exposed today, I started thinking about my adolescence, my parent’s rules growing up and the magical place called the Internet.

Oh, the Internet. Shiny. Wondrous. Definitely limitless. However, I know the Internet is definitely different now compared to when I was fifteen. So much has changed. I kind of yearn for what it was like in the olden days. (Does that make me sound like a crotchety, old person? Next I’ll be calling people “young whippersnappers.”)

Back in the day, there were no profile sites like MySpace and Facebook on the Internet. Digital cameras were still very new and very expensive and very few people even bothered with them. No one streamed or uploaded video. The technology didn’t exist until after I was a legal adult, and even if it did no one’s connection would be able handle it. We thought 56K modems were the shit!

That didn’t mean the parental fear of online stranger danger didn’t exist. I remember when we first got the Internet, my parents were reluctant to let us have private email accounts and chat handles. They told us never to give out our real names or addresses. I remember it being a huge deal for me when I first met an online friend when I was seventeen. Maybe my parents thought she was going to be a forty-year-old perv at first. Maybe even a serial killer. Rapist? Who the hell knows.

I couldn’t imagine being a parent now, raising kids with the Internet how it is today: fast and able to just about anything. Are there more pervs and pedophiles now than when I was fifteen? Probably not, but I bet a whole lot more of them are online now than they were in 1997. Everything is so much easier now, and readily available… both the good and the bad.

If you’re a parent, what rules do you set for your child when it comes to online time. Do you monitor what they do? Do you use those internet filters and parental controls on your computer? Have you ever talked to your children about Internet predators?