Kids have so much time on their hands in the summer and much of that time will be spent online. For parents who use OnlineFamily.Norton, the new and easy-to-use family safety service from the makers of Norton Internet Security, there's no mystery about what your kids are searching for and where they are clicking. OnlineFamily.Norton has just released a study showing what kids are searching for (the Norton Top 100, if you will) from the millions of searches monitored by OnlineFamily.Norton during the survey period of February 2009 through July 2009.
We also found that kids continue to test their online limits . At least in the context of an easy-to-use family safety service, a broken House Rule can be a teachable moment. These teachable moments occur when parents are informed by OnlineFamily.Norton that a house Internet rule is being broken, like kids visiting a restricted website, entering a false age on a social networking site, or going over their time limit on the computer. During a short time period, from our first beta release in February 2009 until today, over 90 million of these events have occurred.
Additionally the service can track what your children search for on the Internet. And not just in the big search engine sites like Google, Yahoo and Ask, but related sites like Craigslist, Ebay and YouTube. Did you know that YouTube is a top destination for even the youngest elementary school children and is even the #1 search term in our study? Many kids use search engines as a way to get to a known site, as they find it easier than typing the address themselves.
Kids are also searching for celebrities, both the teen and adult varieties. They search for elements of pop culture, like top music videos or new dance routines, like "I'm On a Boat" or Hannah Montana's "Hoedown Throwdown" from her motion picture release. And naturally, kids are looking for sexual material and forbidden sites like porn. As a parent, I'd like to be informed about my child's evolving interests and thus, be better prepared for important conversations with them. It's crucial that our children receive their sex education from their parents and not from random sites found on the Internet through search.
Using a family safety service like OnlineFamily.Norton can help a family become closer by helping parents discern what activities are just online mistakes (‘oops, didn't mean to click that link') and what indicates an interest in new topics. And when those new interests indicate an opportunity for parental education, the associated guidance and adult wisdom will be a tremendous and lasting gift for parents to give their curious children.