Parenting Magazine

How Young Is Too Young?

How young is too young to start your kids on the internet? I keep thinking I need to run a parenting course on this subject. Unless I can some how find a way to charge for it though I am not sure I can afford the time to do it. It needs to be done though. Someone needs to put the internet into perspective for parents who just don’t get it.

With a new baby on the way and a nine year old I am forced to visit the question of how young is too young all the time. Katy and I are rarely separated from out computers when we are home. They both sit in the living room. Everything we do is for household consumption. This is has been a way of life since we got broadband replaced with streaming television, clear radio broadcasts from around the world replaced the crap we could pick up locally, and last but not least the plethora of interesting information replaced most of our non-fiction reading materials. It is lots of cheap entertainment in one package.

Liam knows we are always connected, and is really starting to take an interest in it himself. His interest right now isn’t so much socializing as it is a substitute for traditional television. He loves the available online games almost as much as he loves my Xbox or his old Sega. The cartoons on Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network sites have the potential to keep him occupied and out of trouble. Where the television was my babysitter, so be it the computer for this generation. There will come a time when those interests grow beyond that.

There are those who criticize electronic babysitters, but I usually tell them to kiss my furry ass. There was a time when parents could spend more time with our kids, and didn’t have eighty million other things we have to be doing. You take what you can get, wherever you can get it. I can look across the room, see where my son is sitting, and know what he is doing. If I am working, yes blogging is a full time job even if it isn’t bringing in a full time income yet. The same can be said of the short stories I write and send out for professional publication regularly or the novels at various stages. Writing anything, be it code or prose, is work. If I ever hope to make more than my disability payments, I have to devote time to that work and use any babysitter I can.

This brings me back to the question of how young is too young to let your kids go online and do their own thing. I am not talking about staying on half a dozen sites with no social interaction. I mean letting them explore for themselves, finding their own cool stuff, making their own friends? When do you do you start letting them create their own identity?

I am not suggestion that we abandon all supervision; you can’t ever do that if you are going to be a responsible parent. If your kids are going to use a site, service or the any new technology that comes along, it is your job as a parent to make sure you learn it too. As a twenty year internet veteran, I don’t have a problem with this. This isn’t the case with a lot of parents. While some kids might be too young to get involved with internet activities, the fact remains if they have an interesting in it, being too old to get involved just isn’t an excuse.