Internet Behavior is Public Behavior

by John Carosella

If parents have kids at home using the computer, they are a first generation Internet Parent. They are probably struggling to recapture—or perhaps establish for the first time—authority over their kids’ Internet behavior. It’s a serious challenge, and mastering it is critical to being an effective parent. Trust me, I know. I have three teenagers at home.

No invention in the history of man has had a more dramatic impact on a child’s world view, in such a short period of time, as the Internet. The entire range of human behavior, from the most noble to the most depraved, is available to children online. A parent’s job is to manage and modulate their kids’ exposure to this wide range of content, good and bad. Unfortunately, credibility on the topic is hard to come by with kids. However, there is a solution: Approach the problem from familiar ground. You’re the parents. You’re responsible for the family. And in particular, you’re responsible for the family's behavior in public.

Public behavior is anything that is seen, heard, or otherwise witnessed by other people in a public place, whether at the high school football game or at the local Starbucks. When kids go out in public, parents expect a certain kind of behavior. Most parents have taught their kids this discipline since they were toddlers. The reality is that kids accept that parents have the right to set boundaries on their behavior in public.

So why not accept the same boundary-setting for the Internet?

The Internet is the world's largest small town. Parents can find nearly everything – and everyone – in this virtual world being weaved. Social networking (socializing over the Internet) is a new form of behavior. It’s being invented by kids every day. MySpace.com, consisting of more than 70 million active accounts, is the most well known locale for social networking.

Most kids today probably have a MySpace page – or some other social networking page. These sites are very public places, and yet they don’t feel like a public place to kids. It may seem obvious to a dispassionate observer that it's not a diary, or even a journal, but, surprisingly kids, and even some parents, probably haven’t considered just how public these sites are, much less what an open door they provide into a kid’s life. The content posted by kids today is widely circulated, and is likely to live on into their adulthood. This information gets searched, shared, and forwarded – and not just by "nice" people.

The upshot is simple: Internet behavior is public behavior. Certainly true for activities on social networking sites. But the same is true of email, chat rooms, and instant messaging. It may seem like a private conversation, but it's not. And the Internet is forever. Once information is out there, it can’t be taken back.

Parents have the right and responsibility to monitor (and manage) their kids' Internet behavior precisely because it is public behavior. Parents need to be more engaged, and not be afraid to ask questions: Is this behavior in the best interest of my child’s future? Does it represent our family’s best? Is it something we’re content to share with our neighbors and our broader community? Parents need to open up the dialogue with our kids in order to get them to focus on these questions.

Parents also need to open up dialogue within their communities so that, in spite of their personal best efforts, their kids aren’t at the neighbor’s house surfing porn, gambling online, or chatting with a predator.

Establish the relationship. Establish the rules. Remove the computer from the bedroom. Put monitoring, filtering, or logging software on the home computer. It’s not spying – it’s supervision – a normal and relevant part of a parent’s job.

Always keep in mind that kids have a strange view that as long as parents don't see it, it's not public. When parents can make clear to their kids that the Internet is a public place, they help them avoid the pitfalls and dangers of excessive Internet behavior, from a perspective they can understand and appreciate.