Parental Monitoring: Should Children Be Limited In Their Internet's Use

“Mrs. Roura?” I knew that the tone of voice belongs to a police officer and my heart shrunk. “Yes, how can I help you?” “Mrs. Roura you will have to come to pick up your daughter at Oakwood Park.” My thoughts start going a hundred miles per hour, Is she safe? Why is she in the park if she was with my mom at home? “We found your daughter sitting in a car with an adult male. She is safe but you will have to come to pick her up, we can talk better once you get here.” “Ok, thanks, I will be there in fifteen minutes.” On my way there I kept thinking and asking myself who is this guy? Where she met him? She just moved to Virginia four months ago. Facebook? Snapchat? I could not remember when was the last time that I checked her phone or her laptop. I realized that I knew so little about her online activities and pretty sure her dad knew a lot less as he does not use social media. Technology is evolving faster than ever. This delivers a lot of advantages in areas like medicine and the economy, but as fast as the benefits grow also grows the dangers our young ones are exposed to. Parents should be monitoring children’s activities on the internet and social media to keep them safe from dangers.

Monitoring what children do on the internet can help to detect and stop cyberbullying before the damage is irreversible. A boy starts receiving cruel texts on social media, on his phone, and even by email. Within months the messages are more frequent and have escalated to threatening to his life. He starts to suffer from anxiety, insomnia and then cutting himself to handle the situation. He does not want to tell is parents, until one day cuts too deep and needs to be rush to the hospital. Now the desperate parents looking for answers founds all the messages and all the situations his son was going through. Even when it is not the parent's fault the way his son chose to deal with cyberbullying if they had been monitoring his son’s activities and devices, they would have identified the problem and would have to be able to help him deal with it more safely. A lot of parents feel that they do not have the time to be inspecting each text, post or email that their children send or receive. Living in a busy world makes it harder and leaves parents with little free time. The good news is that the same technology gives us the answers. Nowadays some apps allow parents to monitor children's activities online easily and without consuming all our time. Monitoring what children do online is an effective technique to detect cyberbullying, help the child and stop it on time.

There is a considerable amount of child predators that use the internet and social media to establish contact with children and if parents are not monitoring, they will never know who contacted the child online. Children go online to vent their problems looking for support from their peers. Predators know it and they use the same forums to reach for victims. They stay up to date on what children like, games, music, anything that can help make a bond with the kid. They start gradually grooming the child to gain their trust until they convince the girl or boy to get into more private chat rooms, to send nudes and in some cases, they even convince the child to meet in person and kidnap him. The only way to know what is happening and stop it from escalating to a fatal culmination is by monitoring our child’s activities. Again, a complaint is that they do not have all the time that is needed to supervise all their children's activities. Remember that there are apps and software that help busy parents staying on the loop with what their kids are doing online. Also, parents have a concern about violating their child’s privacy by spying on them. There is a difference between spying and monitoring. Spying is secretly gathering information. Monitoring is checking what our kids are doing while they know they are being observed. Monitoring is about setting rules and communication. These rules should be discussed with the child and should have consequences if broken. By including the child in the conversation to establish these rules we will open a door for communication and trust. Let them know that these rules are to keep them safe from predators. If you ask your child about his school friends, ask them about his online friends too. Because children cannot effectively assess dangerous situations by staying on top of their activities, we can identify red flags before they do. If you still feel bad because you feel that either way you are invading their privacy, please do not be. Think that you might be the only wall preventing a predator from reaching your kid.

The best technique to help our kids to stay safe in the online world is to monitor their internet activities. Preventing cyberbullying and keeping them safe from child predators are two good enough reasons to do so. Ignoring the existence of these dangers is not going to reduce the chances of our kids being victims of either one of them. Cyberbullying can lead to the suicide of the victim. Child predators can kidnap a kid. Let’s help stop these sad outcomes by monitoring what they do.