Safer Internet For Kids

Do you ever wonder what all those acronyms your children are using online mean? Let’s face it. It’s not possible to know every acronym and terms used online and still have a life. Thankfully, there’s a place you can go to quickly look up what those terms and words mean and if you should be concerned or worried. NetLingo is like a virtual Internet Lingo Dictionary. It even has a special section just for parents. They cover all kinds of terms and acronyms
that might come in useful for other areas in our tech centered life.

Technorati Tags: internet, lingo, parenting, safety

I’m a part of a very tight knit group of moms and I trust many of these women, a few of them have even become close friends and business partners who handle my money and my business every day and every month. Recently, a few of us got together since they lived close to each other. This kinda started a thread in our private forums where everyone is so we could maybe get together.

It’s totally innocent and quite harmless. One suggested we create a map so it’s easier for us to visualize and create these local chapters so to speak. So, I thought I’d be the one to do so. Well… while I was creating that map, it kinda hit me square in the face. What if my kids were creating maps that are perfectly harmless like this one? Do I really want people to know where we live exactly? Especially in a small town where we live… even the ZIP is a little too close for comfort.

With that in mind, I set out to examine the features of this mapping site, Frappr. There doesn’t seem to be any settings to make the map private or by invite only. You can take the map off the directory but still, if you post the link to the map in a public site it’s pretty much wide open.

Guess mapping is another one of those things we need to add to that already long list of ‘rules’.

Due to my involvement in SaferInternetForKids.com and my own kid’s interest too, I troll a lot of sites about security and your child. Many of them are found on sites where many ‘geeks’ gather… I am rather ‘geeky’ after all. Extreme hot points are whether to install logging software or not or if a parent should ‘spy’ on their kids or not. But what I find kinda sad is how parents and non parents bicker.

Now I’m a reasonable person. I don’t like to tell people “You don’t understand” and like to see all points of view. But when it comes to parenting, sad to say it’s one thing I absolutely stand by. If you don’t have kids, your opinion on how to parent a child in cyber space does not count. You see, when I was single and carefree, I had a lot of opinions about parenting. Many of them to the tune of “That happened to me when I was young, I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen to my kids” and I’m not talking about serious
stuff here just everyday parent/kid stuff.

When my friends started having kids leaving me one of the few who were childless, I resented it deeply when they told me “You don’t have kids, you don’t understand”. The day after I gave birth to my firstborn I realized how wrong I was and how right my friends were. I understood but I didn’t empathize. There’s a difference because where empathy is concerned, you have a stake in the issue. A person without kids no matter how hard they try will never empathize because they do not have a stake in
the future of the child. That is the pivotal point. Much like people think it’s easy to be the boss until they actually become one.

So, I’ve decided to not let these non-parent opinions bother me too much. If you’ve been bothered by them too, join me. What matters most is what works for each of our families.