Raising Kids Online

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And it was frightening evidence of how, as the medium has matured, its architects' noble commitment to the user's privacy was becoming inverted. What was once a protective shield has now morphed into an obscuring cloak of anonymity. Inventive screen names and coy e-mail addresses have replaced those conventional signs of identity: a name, a face. Under the banner of privacy, Internet anonymity has become the ultimate plain brown wrapper. Some parents who decline to monitor their kids' online chatting liken it to eavesdropping on their phone calls, which they say they would never do. But there's a difference: when your child's on the phone, she knows who's on the other end of the line.

Privacy can be as dicey an issue within the household as it is out on the Web itself. There are thousands of families in which reading the kids' e-mail, monitoring their chats and tracking their Web travels is a solemn parental obligation. "I have every right to read their e-mail," says Bruce Cohen, a Reno, Nev., father of two. "Legally, I'm responsible for them until they're 18." Yet many others believe that invading an e-mail file is no different from opening a pen-and-paper diary that your daughter keeps under lock and key in a dresser drawer. A lot of parents--not to mention kids--find that a breach of parent-child trust.

But even if e-mail is considered inviolate, there are tactics by which the alert parent can control it. America Online, the Internet service provider used by nearly 17 million households, allows parents to limit incoming e-mail to a finite list of correspondents. In any e-mail program, a scan of the senders' addresses can give you a good idea of the nature of your kid's correspondents. The proliferation of mailing lists being such a Web commonplace, what's coming in can sometimes tell you what's been going out: even unsolicited e-mail--from, say, a Ku Klux Klan site--can be a clue that someone's been surfing some pretty scary pages.

In fact, this sort of Web transparency can actually be a boon to worried parents. If your teenager is going places in the material world and doing things that you wouldn't approve of, you may never know it. If he's connecting with the world's ugliness on the Web, you may have a chance to track it down. Some parents make a regular practice of typing their kids' names and nicknames into a search engine, which gives the parents a shot at discovering what the kids are saying on their own websites or on message boards and what others are saying about them.

Everyone agrees that the most effective way to monitor kids' online activity is...to monitor it. Literally. To stand beside the computer from time to time when your son is at the keyboard, watching his every mouse click, mindful, of course, that when he starts typing numerals--1,2,3,4--he could be using the chat signal that says "parental unit nearby." If the count reaches five, he's telling his chat partners there's a parent reading the screen.

Every parent should also take advantage of the wonderful excuse the Web has given us to keep credit cards from our teenage kids. Entry past the first or second level to most porn sites--and to other beyond-the-pale operations of hustling Web entrepreneurs--is governed by the ability to key in a valid card number.