May I ask. As someone without children. Why not just educate your daughter on the topic of pedophiles? With that awareness, she can play whatever she wants.
To add on to what others say, not only are children naive, but you have consider pedophiles as adversaries not unlike you would consider a skilled hacker. Just like a hacker may set up an entire company page and prepare a series a mock interviews just to get a senior engineer to open a malicious PDF; so will pedophiles who target children online. They don't wear an "I'm a pedophile badge", it starts with a slow build of confidence and trust that someone without experience will be vulnerable to.
Also the kind of damage they make is worse. Companies can be rebuilt, money can be regained. Pedophiles start at “infancy trauma for your child” and goes up. As a parent, I would cut my own hand in order to spare my child from that. This is not an exaggeration.
This. The network of lies may be intricate. The child may believe to be interacting with someone their age that they come to consider their best friend.
Think of the elaborate long-term deception that can be involved in regular heterosexual marriages. Some people have multiple families that don’t know about each other! Now consider what it can be like if that same dark energy is applied to lying to a child online.
I our case, they didn't present as pedophiles (obviously). It was a kid that was the same age (obviously not). She believed that he was another kid with older siblings, that lived wherever, and was bullied at school. How does that seem like a pedophile? At some point he started threatening that he had a bigger brother that knew where she lived, but the nice kid would protect her... or something. Turned out that they were a ring operating out of Indonesia that would, at the right time hand over to locals.
You can't educate kids to identify pedo's. Online and in Roblox they are exectly the same as them. With siblings, parents that stop them from doing stuff, and so on. There is nothing remarkable about them to educate kids or yourself about.
Fair question and I had too when I didn't have my own. The best way I can explain is - Think how stupid and emotionally strong is the average adult, now scale by a factor of what you think a person who has a fraction of experience and emotional strength.
It becomes scarier once you factor in that kids' learning is not linear, and a 12-13 old kid is simultaneously dealing with hormonal changes as well and you have a situation that most parents can barely deal with!
Think how stupid and emotionally strong is the average adult, now scale by a factor of what you think a person who has a fraction of experience and emotional strength.
Counterpoint: the very phenomenon you mention could be a consequence of overprotective parenting.
By the age of 12, it's time to start explaining some uncomfortable things to your kids. Especially if you're going to let them interact with strangers (of any age) online.
Trust (2011) is a movie that shows us how the pedophile works. Trust is a movie about a 14 year old girl that falls prey to a man, and the process by which he got what he wanted.
My ex and I just talked about this and for the record, we both like how you think. We have a six year old together and she has two older children from a previous relationship.
We are going to:
a.) Educate her on the general concept of pedophiles.
b.) Arm her with specific tactics about specific communities.
c.) Monitor.
d.) Get her permission to constantly log into her accounts and play as her.
I'm thinking about introducing our eight year old to basic computational literacy, but I'm planning to have that be without any internet access at all. He can learn to type, write, program, do digital painting / photo editing, movie editing, sound editing, and 3D animation without general internet access.
How is playing online multiplayer video games a need for a child?
Even if you think it is for some reason I'm not seeing, why not have het play games where you can run a private server, so you have control over exactly who can log in and can keep an eye on things like chat logs?
Children now engage in play and social dynamics online. If your child's peer group engages in online interactions with each other and your child does not, your child will risk the struggles of bullying and isolation. Children are forced to be with their peer group for most of their waking hours and practice social rituals like hierarchy establishment, identity formation, boundaries, in-group/out-group dynamics, etc. with each other.
This is a really good question. I'll answer but if we could go back in time, I think we would make a different decision. To be very blunt, I think we fucked this one up.
At first, we started with a strict 'hands off' policy because we didn't see how it was a need for her. But then the pandemic hit and due to a variety of factors, it ended up being our best option for her to socialize with other people her age.
Private servers are great, but we discovered an interesting vulnerability that created a need to both educate and protect her. I was surprised by how many 'age appropriate' (whatever that means) Youtube videos provide detailed steps on how to connect to private servers.
That introduced a need to trust her completely. We have to trust her to never sneak away and never get access to a device without supervision. If we misplace our trust, she could end up a victim. We hope she doesn't and in reality, she likely won't, but I can only say 'likely'.
So now we're backed into a corner. Technical guard rails are one option but she's been obsessed with figuring out how things work since she was very young. Again, if there's a small possibility of danger, that's too much for us. So we're left with the least bad option - educate, trust as appropriate and verify.
Or alternately, some nice person on HN could build a parent time machine so we could go back in time and make an entirely different decision. The more time goes by, the more I agree with you. But again, we really fucked that one up and now that the cat is out of the bag, there's a risk that major changes will make sneaking around even more appealing. And again, that's just too much danger.
Ah. Speaking as a parent who has made many, many mistakes, that makes all too much sense.
I will say that longer-term I absolutely do plan to give my kids unfettered internet access. The day will come they need to learn to cope with it, so might as well have them do it when I'm around to hopefully be of some help.
One slightly out-there idea for how to roll it back - ditch WiFi entirely. Internet access is by using a physical cable at one or two locations in the house.
Harder to subvert, and the kids see that you share the constraint, so it may be slightly more palatable.
We homeschool. Our friends are about as careful with devices and children as we are, so far as I can tell, and more often than not we're seeing them in non-internet contexts like playgrounds and parks.
He does use the Netflix Kids interface to start the next episode of shows during their daily allotment of screen time (which we keep a close eye on, so they're only watching shows we approve), but he has no concept of the web or that he could use that interface for anything other than TV time.
In addition to what has already bern written, notice that children and teenagers often need to test limits to define their own identity and independency. So there are good chances that prohibiting something is going to make it even more appalling to them.
This is not bad on itself, I think it's a fundamental step of becoming young adults. And it doesn't mean parents can never trust children. But neither can they assume that what was discussed can be always given for granted.
