Many Internet service providers offer filtering services. But because of the need to appeal to the largest audience, they may go much further in their proscriptions than some parents would want. Amy Bruckman, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech, points out that "a lot of these filtering companies are not making clear what their values are, their method for deciding what is acceptable and what is not." That's why it's so important to buy a filter that can be tuned to your family's values.
The Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington advocacy organization, is leading a campaign to make information on the growing pool of safety tools more widely available on the Web. Parents need to be able to find this information in a central, organized place, says executive director Jerry Berman.
Still, even the best of these tools, deployed with the greatest care, work only when they're coupled with bold parental involvement. Bonnie Fell, of Skokie, Ill., is the family Internet cop, making certain at least once a month to open all the files that have been downloaded by her two teenage sons--which she'll do, she says, "whether the boys are there or not. And they know it." Carleton Kendrick, a family therapist in Medfield, Mass., suggests that accompanying your child to a website he frequents is no different from "checking out a playground where your kids go, to see that it's safe, to see who hangs around there."
Of course, if your kids are teenagers, they're eventually going to find ways to get online when you're not around. Or they'll have learned how to disable every filter but the one they cannot break on their own: the human bond between parent and child. "I'm C.J.'s mother, so I'm responsible for what he does," says Kelley Jones, a Detroit single mom who generally allows her 13-year-old son to browse just about any website he wishes on the computer in the living room, as long as he discusses what he finds. Says Jones: "It's a waste of time to blame technology for parents' mistakes." Or, as Jim Lynch, who manages message boards for the Boston-based Family Education Network, says, "Parents are the ultimate filter."
As they always have been. Consider this picture: a kid sits alone in front of his computer, cruising the Internet. In the background a CD player blares misogynistic obscenities. In another room, the television features a teenage heroine contemplating violence against her classmates. The local sixplex is playing a film that spills more blood than a slaughterhouse hoses down in a month. And in most states, if you can't buy a gun with a few phone calls and a couple of hundred bucks, you haven't really tried.
Now you go into that kid's room, unplug the computer and walk out. What have you really accomplished?
Reported by Maryanne Murray Buechner/New York, Nichole Christian/Detroit, Wendy Cole and Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque, Michael Krantz/San Francisco and Elaine Marshall/Reno
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