Raising Kids Online
What Can Parents Do? We want our kids to use the Net but worry about what they'll find. Here are some ways to steer them straight
By DANIEL OKRENT

On the morning of Tuesday, April 20, as the sun rose over Littleton, Colo., more than 14 million American teenagers punched off their alarm clocks, scarfed their breakfasts, brushed their teeth, rushed off to school...and did not kill their classmates. On that day, like other days, 40% of those teenagers--a number that has doubled in the past two years alone--logged on to the Internet. The vast majority did not encounter recipes for pipe bombs or deranged rants about white supremacy. Most were getting sports scores, downloading the most recent Britney Spears cut, chatting with friends. Some were even doing their homework, tapping into colorful libraries of information on the rain forests, data about particle physics, essays on Hamlet.

These are things, true things all, that we try to impress on our children, and ourselves, as we struggle to come to terms with the slaughter in Colorado and the vivid gash it has left in our psyche. We know that the Internet couldn't possibly be the source of the demons that drove the two killers. We want our kids to use the Net; we know that this technological wonder, every bit as revolutionary as the light bulb or the telephone, is going to shape all our lives in the century ahead.

And yet we worry, because we are parents and because we are citizens. Since Littleton, we worry not so much about our kids' or their classmates' being turned into mass murderers as about something more persistently troubling: that even if our kids aren't playing blood-soaked computer games or plotting violence in the dark crannies of an online chat room, they are plunging into a whole world of influences and values and enticements that is, most of the time, hidden from our view.

At any moment, those same kids exploring jungle fauna or listening to ...Baby One More Time are just a few keystrokes away from Pandora's hard drive--from the appalling filth, unspeakable hatred and frightening prescriptions for homicidal mayhem that the Littleton massacre evoked. If you listened to the conversations at PTA meetings and around Little League diamonds last week, it was as if we'd already forgotten that the Internet brings us vital medical information, cross-cultural dialogue, vast stores of learning and beauty and virtue. Yet what comfort is that to a parent who came across a website last week in which the index included the following entries: "Counterfeit Money," "Hot-Wiring Cars," "Breaking into Houses," "Thermite Bombs," "Tennis Ball Bomb"? Such is the power of Web technology that the simple act of listing the phrases here will make it possible for anyone to type these words into a search engine and immediately locate the site that houses them.

Read this page, then burn it.

Would that it were so easy. The Internet is as persistent as it is potent, an indelible and uncontainable presence in the culture. In fact, the Internet isn't separate from the culture at all; it is the culture. All the trash, flotsam and spillage of our society gets its moment there, where the tiniest obsession has its spot on the shelf, right next to Bach and charity and sunsets. The Internet lets a million flowers bloom, and a million weeds.

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