Jan 22 2007
By Ira Winkler
The recent news of parents, of children who met abusers through MySpace, suing MySpace is a case of parents shirking their responsibilities and blaming others.
Admittedly, what happened to the children who were abused is terrible. However, where were the parents who should have set rules and attempted to monitor their activities? Did the parents put on Internet filtering software? Did the parents tell their children never to meet people they meet online, or to at least tell them when they are meeting strangers?
Of course, the parents will claim not to understand the Internet. They will claim that they never knew that their children were spending hours online. Who’s fault is that?
Instead they blame MySpace for not verifying identities of online people, and a variety of other issues. While there may be some minimal validity to those claims, the parents are exponentially more to blame for the incidents, because they are physically there. Of course they don’t want to admit that. If parents can let their kids sneak around them, why should they expect an anonymous business to do more.
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Posted by Ira.Winkler on Monday, January 22nd, 2007, at 8:24 pm, and filed under Articles.
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admin | 31-Jan-07 at 3:54 am | Permalink
From: sksuchla@gmail.com
I agree that parents should shoulder the blame for computer unawareness of their children’s activities. I work for a higher education institution and we have been working to get student awareness of the dangers or posting everything about yourself to the public. This seems to be a HUGE learning curve for our students who put everything out there, name, address, birthday, when they are out of town when they are in town…. I just can’t believe people don’t understand the risks of what they are doing.