tangent4ronpaul
02-07-2013, 05:14 PM
Please read the article before answering the poll.
For those of you scratching their heads right now, "pos?" is teen for "Parent Over Shoulder?". Now that a significant portion of the forums members hate my guts, I was searching for news articles on gvmt spying on the Internet and found this rather interesting piece about the UK gvmt advising parents to spy on their kids. Early police state conditioning or good advice? As libertarians, I suspect our answers will be different from the general public.
"to protect the children" was the camels nose under the tent for gvmt involvement in policing the net. See where that got us? This article claims that there are no more "free range kids", something I think most here would disagree with. We have seen free market solutions to issues raised by the introduction of technology that have failed. Programs like NetNanny that any teen worth their salt knows how to get around. GPS enabled cell phones that track and phone home location, but parents quickly discovered that the location of the phone isn't necessarily the location of the kid. There are more draconian tools out there, like ones that will forward the content of every text back to the parents.
Remember, this is the Internet - where men are men, women are men and 16yo girls are cops. A place where 12yo's are 18 and 45yo's are 35. Especially on dating sites. Responding to legal and social lines in the sand.
It's biological instinct to protect children. It's also biological instinct for kids to be curious and post-puberty to want to get laid. Enter technology into that equation and things get really weird.
The article states that the number of pedo's out there has remained constant since the 70's. That's not entirely accurate... The population of "pedo's" has actually EXPLODED! What is responsible for this demographic shift? Who are all these new "pedo's"??? By STATUTE they are YOUR CHILDREN!
Recent research by the NSPCC revealed that sexting is so widespread as to be considered mundane. Girls as young as 13 send topless and naked photographs on their mobile phones without hesitation, regarding it as a form of flirtation.
Think about the 3 teens in VA right now on CP charges. +/- 15yo's looking at spending the next 10-30 years of their life in a rape cage. Yes, the gvmt "protecting" the SHIT out of our children! :mad:
Access to "adult material" - porn, violence. What happens when you slap a 17+ or 18+ label on something? You make it desirable. You kick start curiosity. When you set a rule that you have to be 18 to access a site - what have you just done? - you are conditioning kids to lie! This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I've known and sometimes lived with a lot of ppl with different attitudes and experiences regarding sexuality.
Nudists that walked around the house nude and went to nudist camps.
Couples that invited their children to come up and watch them have sex.
Children of Catholics and Mormons who whipped their kids if they caught them "pleasuring" themselves and pushed guilt. Two rebelled and became a BDSM Dominatrix. Another went into porn and did gang bangs with a room full of black guys.
People who had parents that were control freaks.
People who's parents gave them a lot of freedom but kept an eye on them and their activities.
Hell, My uncle gave me Playboys and my mom was very puritanical. Go figure...
So there are many approaches to "rules" and "attitudes" regarding raising kids (I'm primarily thinking tweens/teens).
So what kind of parent are you?
POS w/ kids knowledge?
spy on them?
let them do whatever they want to do?
It takes a village - the gvmt and my neighbors should control and enforce my child's behavior?
other?
The article suggests that parents should spy on their children, but not get caught! I'm kinda thinking that maybe the best approach would be to spy on them and get caught! Make them rebel, hide their activity and learn to lie. It just might just be the best survival skill you could instill in your kids in this "brave new (police state) world" they are inheriting.
Discuss please...
-t
Should parents spy on their children's emails and texts?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9815906/Should-parents-spy-on-their-childrens-emails-and-texts.html
To snoop, or not to snoop? That is the question on every parent’s mind after the cri de coeur from Tory MP Claire Perry, who has urged us to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged teenagers by taking arms against the pernicious threat of social media. David Cameron’s new adviser on childhood claims that we have a duty to hack into our children’s emails and monitor their texts.
Perry, who represents Devizes and has three children, accuses society of being “complicit” in creating a culture in which youngsters are free to make inappropriate contact with “strangers at all hours of the day and night”.
Not unreasonably, she suggests curtailing online activity late at night by unplugging the internet router. More controversially, she says that children have no right to keep their messages private and that parents ought to feel empowered enough to demand access to them.
Really? If you suspect your child is sexting – sending explicit images of themselves – there is a clear-cut case for intervention. But where do the boundaries lie between safeguarding and surveillance? What you regard as justified protectiveness could be construed as gratuitous prying.
A recent discussion on the parenting website parentdish.co.uk, entitled “Invading your teen’s privacy: nosy or caring?”, threw up a wide spectrum of views. “The parentdish audience is anxious about children and technology,” says Tamsin Kelly, site editor and mother of three. “There is quite a marked but even split between those who say their role as a parent is to police their children while they are under their roof and check on everything, and those who adopt a more trusting position, albeit with parameters.”
Kelly believes that technology should be part of family life with the sort of set of rules and expectations that you have for table manners or bedtimes. But she cautions against “hysterical nervousness”.
“I wouldn’t demand that my child hands over their phone for me to check, but I would expect to be their Facebook friend, for them to leave laptops downstairs at bedtime and to have ongoing conversations with them about potential dangers,” she says. “I also think it’s my role as a parent to keep up-to-date with any new technology that my children might want to use.”
Maintaining communication is crucial. If you are caught spying on your child, you risk creating a situation in which the child keeps secrets, is angry with you and rebels by leading a separate online life.
Overt scrutiny relies on mutual agreement, but can work – at least with younger children. I have a 10-year-old daughter and, yes, I routinely cast a benign eye over the texts and emails she sends. We have discussed the reasons why she must never write anything she wouldn’t say to a person’s face, and she is happy – for now – that I am keeping an eye on her and out for her.
But as she gets older, it will be harder to keep tabs, not least if she changes her PIN. I suspect that I’ll find a way, although discretion will be the byword.
Teenagers have a natural desire for privacy, which doesn’t necessarily equate with illicit behaviour. Yet there are dangers. A friend, a father of two daughters in their late teens, discovered some years ago that his younger child had been entering chat rooms, despite being expressly forbidden from doing so.
“The computer was in a family area, and one evening when I walked in, I noticed my daughter, who was then 13, scrambling to shut down the site that she had been looking at,” he says. “I made her put it back on the screen and discovered she’d been using a chat room and had been getting deeply inappropriate messages from a man with an unthinkably crude logon.”
The girl had been bewildered and upset but the man was so persistent that she hadn’t known how to end the exchange.
“I fired off a furious a message saying I was her dad, that I was calling the police to find out if he was traceable and that, if he was, I would get his details and go around personally to 'have a word’. That stopped the messages.”
Thereafter he maintained a watching brief, but was conscious not to appear heavy-handed.
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to know who your children are talking to online,” he says. “But once they get older, you have to ease off. You can’t micromanage their lives.”
Recent research by the NSPCC revealed that sexting is so widespread as to be considered mundane. Girls as young as 13 send topless and naked photographs on their mobile phones without hesitation, regarding it as a form of flirtation.
While middle-class parents might be horrified, evidence suggests that socio-demographics do not play any role in dictating who engages in the practice. According to psychologist and author Oliver James, as soon as a parent hands their child a smartphone, they have “entered the Wild West” and are virtually guaranteed to explore the furthest frontiers of cyberspace, including hard-core pornography. Most will have a quick peek but won’t linger.
“If you have a good relationship with your children, you have nothing to worry about,” says James, blithely. “The vast majority of kids don’t come to any harm; if you think you have the sort of troubled child who is vulnerable, then what are they doing owning a piece of equipment that can lead them into difficulties?”
With a son aged eight and a daughter who has just turned 11, James, whose most recent book is Love Bomb: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat, is resigned to giving them technological freedom, while ensuring that they feel loved enough to turn to him for support if and when they need it.
“Yes, there are people online pretending to be 16 when they are really 30 or 50, but what can you do?” he says. “If your child has half a brain they can spot a fake. And besides, I have absolute confidence that my children will be moderate and sensible.”
But his views clash with those of fellow psychologist Prof Tanya Byron, who has sounded the alarm over children being “raised in captivity”, because of paranoia over health and safety. “Children are not free range any more,” she told the North of England Education Conference last week. “There are no more predators on the streets, no more paedophiles, than when I was growing up in the 1970s, yet children are rarely seen out. Instead, they are having a blast in this fantastic global space. I would argue that they are more vulnerable there than if they were hanging out on the street.”
Lucy Russell, director of campaigns at the Young Minds charity, stresses the importance of children learning how to experience the world and build up emotional resilience by dealing with problematic situations. Trying to cocoon them isn’t the answer; helping them if they are floundering is much more beneficial.
“You have to have conversations so that they can ask for help,” says Russell. “Children are incredibly savvy in terms of technology, and they will find ways to do whatever it is you want them not to do. Parents are kidding themselves if they think they can control social media.”
Also, rules imposed in the later years of primary school won’t be appropriate for teenagers. “When my children were younger I insisted I was a friend on Facebook, but now they are 15 and 16 they have blocked me,” she says. “I accept that, but I have friends who tell me what’s going on. The relationship with your children should be one of trust and honesty – but with a little well-intentioned spying, via a circuitous route.”
So, if to snoop or not to snoop is the question, the answer would appear to be: yes, but for heaven’s sake don’t get caught.
For those of you scratching their heads right now, "pos?" is teen for "Parent Over Shoulder?". Now that a significant portion of the forums members hate my guts, I was searching for news articles on gvmt spying on the Internet and found this rather interesting piece about the UK gvmt advising parents to spy on their kids. Early police state conditioning or good advice? As libertarians, I suspect our answers will be different from the general public.
"to protect the children" was the camels nose under the tent for gvmt involvement in policing the net. See where that got us? This article claims that there are no more "free range kids", something I think most here would disagree with. We have seen free market solutions to issues raised by the introduction of technology that have failed. Programs like NetNanny that any teen worth their salt knows how to get around. GPS enabled cell phones that track and phone home location, but parents quickly discovered that the location of the phone isn't necessarily the location of the kid. There are more draconian tools out there, like ones that will forward the content of every text back to the parents.
Remember, this is the Internet - where men are men, women are men and 16yo girls are cops. A place where 12yo's are 18 and 45yo's are 35. Especially on dating sites. Responding to legal and social lines in the sand.
It's biological instinct to protect children. It's also biological instinct for kids to be curious and post-puberty to want to get laid. Enter technology into that equation and things get really weird.
The article states that the number of pedo's out there has remained constant since the 70's. That's not entirely accurate... The population of "pedo's" has actually EXPLODED! What is responsible for this demographic shift? Who are all these new "pedo's"??? By STATUTE they are YOUR CHILDREN!
Recent research by the NSPCC revealed that sexting is so widespread as to be considered mundane. Girls as young as 13 send topless and naked photographs on their mobile phones without hesitation, regarding it as a form of flirtation.
Think about the 3 teens in VA right now on CP charges. +/- 15yo's looking at spending the next 10-30 years of their life in a rape cage. Yes, the gvmt "protecting" the SHIT out of our children! :mad:
Access to "adult material" - porn, violence. What happens when you slap a 17+ or 18+ label on something? You make it desirable. You kick start curiosity. When you set a rule that you have to be 18 to access a site - what have you just done? - you are conditioning kids to lie! This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I've known and sometimes lived with a lot of ppl with different attitudes and experiences regarding sexuality.
Nudists that walked around the house nude and went to nudist camps.
Couples that invited their children to come up and watch them have sex.
Children of Catholics and Mormons who whipped their kids if they caught them "pleasuring" themselves and pushed guilt. Two rebelled and became a BDSM Dominatrix. Another went into porn and did gang bangs with a room full of black guys.
People who had parents that were control freaks.
People who's parents gave them a lot of freedom but kept an eye on them and their activities.
Hell, My uncle gave me Playboys and my mom was very puritanical. Go figure...
So there are many approaches to "rules" and "attitudes" regarding raising kids (I'm primarily thinking tweens/teens).
So what kind of parent are you?
POS w/ kids knowledge?
spy on them?
let them do whatever they want to do?
It takes a village - the gvmt and my neighbors should control and enforce my child's behavior?
other?
The article suggests that parents should spy on their children, but not get caught! I'm kinda thinking that maybe the best approach would be to spy on them and get caught! Make them rebel, hide their activity and learn to lie. It just might just be the best survival skill you could instill in your kids in this "brave new (police state) world" they are inheriting.
Discuss please...
-t
Should parents spy on their children's emails and texts?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9815906/Should-parents-spy-on-their-childrens-emails-and-texts.html
To snoop, or not to snoop? That is the question on every parent’s mind after the cri de coeur from Tory MP Claire Perry, who has urged us to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged teenagers by taking arms against the pernicious threat of social media. David Cameron’s new adviser on childhood claims that we have a duty to hack into our children’s emails and monitor their texts.
Perry, who represents Devizes and has three children, accuses society of being “complicit” in creating a culture in which youngsters are free to make inappropriate contact with “strangers at all hours of the day and night”.
Not unreasonably, she suggests curtailing online activity late at night by unplugging the internet router. More controversially, she says that children have no right to keep their messages private and that parents ought to feel empowered enough to demand access to them.
Really? If you suspect your child is sexting – sending explicit images of themselves – there is a clear-cut case for intervention. But where do the boundaries lie between safeguarding and surveillance? What you regard as justified protectiveness could be construed as gratuitous prying.
A recent discussion on the parenting website parentdish.co.uk, entitled “Invading your teen’s privacy: nosy or caring?”, threw up a wide spectrum of views. “The parentdish audience is anxious about children and technology,” says Tamsin Kelly, site editor and mother of three. “There is quite a marked but even split between those who say their role as a parent is to police their children while they are under their roof and check on everything, and those who adopt a more trusting position, albeit with parameters.”
Kelly believes that technology should be part of family life with the sort of set of rules and expectations that you have for table manners or bedtimes. But she cautions against “hysterical nervousness”.
“I wouldn’t demand that my child hands over their phone for me to check, but I would expect to be their Facebook friend, for them to leave laptops downstairs at bedtime and to have ongoing conversations with them about potential dangers,” she says. “I also think it’s my role as a parent to keep up-to-date with any new technology that my children might want to use.”
Maintaining communication is crucial. If you are caught spying on your child, you risk creating a situation in which the child keeps secrets, is angry with you and rebels by leading a separate online life.
Overt scrutiny relies on mutual agreement, but can work – at least with younger children. I have a 10-year-old daughter and, yes, I routinely cast a benign eye over the texts and emails she sends. We have discussed the reasons why she must never write anything she wouldn’t say to a person’s face, and she is happy – for now – that I am keeping an eye on her and out for her.
But as she gets older, it will be harder to keep tabs, not least if she changes her PIN. I suspect that I’ll find a way, although discretion will be the byword.
Teenagers have a natural desire for privacy, which doesn’t necessarily equate with illicit behaviour. Yet there are dangers. A friend, a father of two daughters in their late teens, discovered some years ago that his younger child had been entering chat rooms, despite being expressly forbidden from doing so.
“The computer was in a family area, and one evening when I walked in, I noticed my daughter, who was then 13, scrambling to shut down the site that she had been looking at,” he says. “I made her put it back on the screen and discovered she’d been using a chat room and had been getting deeply inappropriate messages from a man with an unthinkably crude logon.”
The girl had been bewildered and upset but the man was so persistent that she hadn’t known how to end the exchange.
“I fired off a furious a message saying I was her dad, that I was calling the police to find out if he was traceable and that, if he was, I would get his details and go around personally to 'have a word’. That stopped the messages.”
Thereafter he maintained a watching brief, but was conscious not to appear heavy-handed.
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want to know who your children are talking to online,” he says. “But once they get older, you have to ease off. You can’t micromanage their lives.”
Recent research by the NSPCC revealed that sexting is so widespread as to be considered mundane. Girls as young as 13 send topless and naked photographs on their mobile phones without hesitation, regarding it as a form of flirtation.
While middle-class parents might be horrified, evidence suggests that socio-demographics do not play any role in dictating who engages in the practice. According to psychologist and author Oliver James, as soon as a parent hands their child a smartphone, they have “entered the Wild West” and are virtually guaranteed to explore the furthest frontiers of cyberspace, including hard-core pornography. Most will have a quick peek but won’t linger.
“If you have a good relationship with your children, you have nothing to worry about,” says James, blithely. “The vast majority of kids don’t come to any harm; if you think you have the sort of troubled child who is vulnerable, then what are they doing owning a piece of equipment that can lead them into difficulties?”
With a son aged eight and a daughter who has just turned 11, James, whose most recent book is Love Bomb: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat, is resigned to giving them technological freedom, while ensuring that they feel loved enough to turn to him for support if and when they need it.
“Yes, there are people online pretending to be 16 when they are really 30 or 50, but what can you do?” he says. “If your child has half a brain they can spot a fake. And besides, I have absolute confidence that my children will be moderate and sensible.”
But his views clash with those of fellow psychologist Prof Tanya Byron, who has sounded the alarm over children being “raised in captivity”, because of paranoia over health and safety. “Children are not free range any more,” she told the North of England Education Conference last week. “There are no more predators on the streets, no more paedophiles, than when I was growing up in the 1970s, yet children are rarely seen out. Instead, they are having a blast in this fantastic global space. I would argue that they are more vulnerable there than if they were hanging out on the street.”
Lucy Russell, director of campaigns at the Young Minds charity, stresses the importance of children learning how to experience the world and build up emotional resilience by dealing with problematic situations. Trying to cocoon them isn’t the answer; helping them if they are floundering is much more beneficial.
“You have to have conversations so that they can ask for help,” says Russell. “Children are incredibly savvy in terms of technology, and they will find ways to do whatever it is you want them not to do. Parents are kidding themselves if they think they can control social media.”
Also, rules imposed in the later years of primary school won’t be appropriate for teenagers. “When my children were younger I insisted I was a friend on Facebook, but now they are 15 and 16 they have blocked me,” she says. “I accept that, but I have friends who tell me what’s going on. The relationship with your children should be one of trust and honesty – but with a little well-intentioned spying, via a circuitous route.”
So, if to snoop or not to snoop is the question, the answer would appear to be: yes, but for heaven’s sake don’t get caught.