The secret lives of your kids online

Here's a kick-ass suggestion: Don't get little Herkimer and VaJayJay internet-capable camera phones, no matter how much they beg, snivel, or threaten to report you to your state's CPS. You're the (expletive deleted) PARENT, for gods' sakes. Act like it.

Oh, and might I add... The sheer number of typos and grammatical/spelling errors in this article was almost mind-boggling. Do MSNBC's copy editors actually DO anything besides show up and collect paychecks?

How about parents actually get involved with little precious and make sure that their ineternet activities are appropriate. A little repsonsibility, accountability, and ownership would go a long way. Alas, i forget its the Government's problem, or maybe the media, or maybe its the lack of parenting. How about actually accessing parent controls to limti web content or placing the computer in a room where the parents are present. Jumping Jerusalem people are stupid!

You can't really teach people not to be morons. If you tell your kids not to post information and they post it, then that's thier own faults.

Again if the parents were present they could filter the information. Children should not be on the Internet if parents are not around to supervise. There really is no reason for them to be using the internet unless it is school related. Last I knew children weren't allowed to have credit cards so they aren't shopping. Children don't have jobs so they aren't doing work. They have video games consoles which means they don't need to use the computer to play video games. further, involved parents can regulate what game purchases their children make further limtiing access to inappropriate materials. Back when telelphones were the primary means of communication children weren't meeting deviants. Lets get involved here.

First of all I agree with the person who complained about all the typos. It's amazing to me how little people care about the English language.

Next, I agree with most here who believe that additional parental responsibility can curtail most of this. Why should a tween or a teen have a myspace account (or a camera cell phone) at all?

Tertiary on my list would have to be one thing that the article eluded to, and is more difficult to control. That is, one of your child's friends posting information and pictures of your child on the Internet. This is a problem. As I have learned, no one except me ever kept track of their teenage kids. None of their friend's parents ever checked up on them or knew what was going on. In fact, my husband and I were considered overbearing by most of the other parents, and we only checked up on where our kids were about twice a month! (just enough to keep them honest)

The problem is the sheer number of irresponsible parents vs. responsible parents. I can't say that my husband and I are model parents but we try our hardest. We have parental software installed on our teenage daughter's computer and we check up regularly to see what they've been doing. They already learned the hard way that if they do something we told them we don't approve of, then they can kiss the computer goodbye. We also turned off the internet access on their phones to make sure they weren't using them as an alternative.
Other parents I have to wonder about though...one of my 13 year old's "friends" had the good sense to post my daughter's cell number and the cell number of everybody else in her class on her MySpace page, along with the obligatory pictures of the page creator in her underwear. When I brought it to the attention of the girl's mother (and told her I wanted my daughter's cell number removed from the posting) she shrugged and said, "Oh kids will be kids. I'm too busy to keep tabs on her every second."
Well cry me a river. My husband and I both work eight hour days and are holding down part time jobs on the side but we still make time to care what our kids are up to and intervene when we see something that's not appropriate.

Majority of the time the parents don't know how to use the computer, so when the school teaches them how to log onto the internet it all goes down from there. When the kids are in school they see some questionable websites and they want to tell there friends about it. The thing that bothers me is that the parents are concerned about the things on the internet but they never do anything about it until they see dateline or they hear about it trough another parent's problem with a child.