No safety locks for the wired generation

Last November, a group of Manhattan moms met at their kids' private middle school to hash over concerns about parenting in a technological age. One bugaboo they raised was their kids' access to built-in Webcams on Apple's newest laptop, a feature hard to permanently disable.

Not wanting their 8-year-olds to be the next stars on YouTube, the mothers put their heads together with a child-safety advocate, Parry Aftab, who runs the education site Wiredsafety.org.

"You can't turn (the Webcam) off so we thought of taking a hammer and nail and breaking it," said Aftab. "We finally came up with the solution of red nail polish."

The collaboration required for that relatively simple fix underscores the challenges parents face as their children acquaint themselves with Web technology and the social complexities of the online world. How do they stay on top of new technologies and gadget features that many kids are exposed to every day--tools that could easily be useful to the child's education and social life, but that could also be harmful? After all, protecting kids from technologies like Webcams isn't as simple as installing software filters.

Parents nowadays have to ponder strategic issues that simply aren't pertinent in the offline world, such as the appropriate age to begin using new technologies such as instant chat. And what about video cameras? Sure, they could be helpful for schoolwork, but should parents allow their 8-year-olds to broadcast images of themselves to the world?

The correct answers are largely a matter of common sense. The problem for many parents is that they aren't informed enough about technology to ask the right questions. Knowing what technology is out there and how kids are using it, in other words, has become the real battle.

Aftab characterizes the situation like this: "All bets are off. Every day there's a new technology, a new use of technology, and 10 times more, there's a new abuse of technology. No parent can stay up to speed on this."

Just 10 years ago, most parents didn't worry about what their child was doing online because kids simply weren't there. Their chief concerns were still about kids talking to strangers and saying no to drugs. Even during the dot-com heyday when home-based use of the Net gathered some steam, parents were largely dealing with how to filter out adult content. While that's hardly a small task, the Web at the time was still very much a static, one-way medium created by online publishers.

Now, as Web 2.0 reaches full bloom, the Internet is interactive, dynamic, and always on. An estimated half of all the content on the Web is created by the people who use it, which makes it that much harder for parents to filter out the new videos, podcasts, and other content on sites such as YouTube and MySpace that they consider inappropriate for their kids. Relatively new services such as instant chat, cell phone text-messaging, and Webcams--essential networking tools, in the eyes of many adults as well as children--add layers of complexity to how kids socialize with peers and strangers alike.

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