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SD6 on Internet unsupervised

christinen's picture

For years, DH has been letting SD6 play with his phone. She plays games, watches videos, and gets on the Internet and does God knows what. I always voiced my concerns about this because I think it's completely inappropriate for a little kid to be given Internet access without supervision. Of course DH did not agree and continued to let SD play with his phone.

Today, I noticed DH became "friends" on Facebook with a bunch of people that I did not know from all over the country. I asked him about it and turns out SD was on fb on his phone. I again voiced my concerns about this. I think SD is far too young to be in fb or any other Internet site without supervision. There's too many creepers and pedophiles out there. It's not worth the risk.

DH's response was that she wasn't doing anything, she was just messing around. So I am assuming this is going to continue. I told DH don't be surprised when your kid gets abducted. She knows her address and what school she goes to - what if she tells some weirdo online?

So that was my vent. Now for my question - should I talk to SD about this or am I overstepping being that DH is ok with what she is doing? What would you do?

Stepintime0111's picture

My dh and I have this argument all the time. It's the one issue bm and I actually agree on. Dh thinks the skids know better, but they're 9. They are good kids but could innocently and accidentally find awful stuff online.

onthefence2's picture

I think it's stupid in general to let kids play with your phone. Boundaries, people!

And parental controls don't work. The second you walk away from your "locked down" device, there is a hole you will find the next time you check. I even had a url with "porn" in the name come through. You've GOT to monitor your kids and COMMUNICATE about it regularly.

SecondGeneration's picture

This is worrying.

My BM allowed me to use the internet pretty early on, but she would check history and would basically come into the office and check on what I was doing at random points. I remember there was an online pool game I liked to play but it had a chat feature as part of it, now then I was what? 13? 14? So my BM has a chat with me about online safety and she would often sit with me whilst I was playing this game as she was naturally wary of the chat feature. So she was always pretty savvy when it comes to the internet.
Fast forward a decade and she is now having major problems with my half brother who is 13 and his internet access.
Like most kids he has his phone, tablet, laptop, xbox all hooked up to the internet. Like most boys he and his friends start daring one another and somehow they end up with porn. His searches on youtube would start off with GTA, funny game clips and then turn to sexiest gaming moments and worse and worse it became.
Doing what most BMs would, she took away his access to the internet, so he would use his friends at school or after school, so he got grounded. Weeks turn into months and he was slowly earning his electronics back.
I dont know how it stands now with what he is looking at but she takes the electronics off him every evening and has to turn off the wifi and hide the modem otherwise he will be browsing all night.

The internet is a massive resource and can be great but can be so dangerous, all childrens activity online needs to be heavily monitored. And parents need to have software installed and they need to have enough computer knowledge to know how to do so when their kid is old enough to learn how to wipe history.