A new study reveals that parents in Australia are still in need of some primary education about internet safety. Aussie parents fail to provide direct supervision or to use filters (despite the Australian government providing such filters for free).
I am visiting with my colleagues in Sydney in advance of a trip to New Zealand for a cyberbullying conference. How coincidental that today's Sydney paper featured news of a new study from Sensis e-Business Report. I love when you learn such "surprising" news that kids go online at younger and younger ages or that social networking is popular. Ok, so no surprise there. You could have culled that data from simply observing your own children, right?
But I am a bit saddened that one in three children surfs the web "unsupervised" because there's likely another story there. Is it that Mom and Dad simply aren't home? Is the computer in the child's bedroom, away from parental gaze? Or are Mom and Dad using the Internet as a free babysitter, to occupy the kids at home while parents can get chores accomplished? When I was a child, TV was used in this way but there's a big, big difference with the web. TV content is one direction, and there was no interaction with the content. With the Internet, your children can talk to people, post information, watch videos and comment on them and so on.
Even if you can't sit side by side at the computer with your child everyday, you can stop by the computer for a moment. Have a quick look over their shoulder or ask them about a new website they are visiting. Express curiosity, demonstrate you want to learn something, have your children teach you how to set up your own MySpace or Facebook page. And don't stop supervising (as indicated in the study) when your children get to 11 years of age because that's when serious communication begins and so does the risk of issues like cyberbullying.