Trust but Verify Teenage Internet Behavior

The teenage time spans seven years. During the sixth and seventh teenage years, we are talking about legal adults. So these are not the ones we are concerned with. Certainly, people aged 18 or 19 ought to have completely unlimited access to the internet. But what about the teenagers who are not yet 18?

Only you know whether you should place internet restrictions on pre-adult teens. If you know that your teenager needs to be on a short internet leash, there are excellent parental software products that let you enforce internet access policies. On the other hand, you might have a wise and mature teenager who doesnt need such a heavy hand. If you dont want to directly control this teenagers behavior, you can use parental software to simply monitor activity. Either approach can be consistent with loving parenting.

You already know which approach to take with your teenagers. Or do you? How much do you really know about how adolescents use social networking sites? Are you sure that your child is not receiving unwanted solicitations from strangers? If your child were a victim of a cyber bully, how would you discover the fact? Some adolescents are impressionable and will experiment with philosophies that you might not approve of. If your child were to visit a hate site more than once, would you want to know?

We find Net Nanny, WebWatcher and McAfee Safe Eyes to be effective parental software to control or shadow online activity. There are arguments in favor of giving teenagers unlimited access, but letting them know that you are monitoring. Then, when you need to talk about a triggered event, you have not violated your child's trust. Instead, it is the teenager who has violated your trust. If you want to block certain sites based on content or limit access time, thats your prerogative. But if you are not quite comfortable with leaving your teen to go wherever, there are monitoring software products that reveal what your child is doing online without restricting anything. Trust but verify.

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