Monday, December 28, 2009

Parent Pointers


January's focus for Sage Ministry Online is "Media = Becoming a Christ-Conscious Techie in a Technology-Consumed World." You can see my article for parents about giving your child the Benefit of the Doubt when it comes to setting boundaries with them regarding their technology usage.

Hope you parents out there find it useful. Would welcome any comments or discussion about my particular views.

Q4U: What do you see as the biggest technological danger to young children today?

Wordle: signature

4 comments:

PatriciaW said...

Great pointers, Jeannie. I use these same guidelines with my teen son as he navigates his online presence. It's a bit scary but I trust him to make good decisions (and I "purposefully" check up on him).

Young people don't quite grasp the permanence of their web footprint, or the possible long-term repercussions.

Nighfala said...

At the moment, it's the amount of violence in the video games. My son is very young and just starting to
play video games and looking at content such as The Clone Wars@Cartoon Network. There are certain things he's not allowed to do or watch that I know about, but I can't be there looking over his shoulder the whole time. He won't do something I have told him not to, but I don't always know ahead of time what's there. And I have to say no to several games he wants that are too violent, such as The Force Unleashed (bad guys killing good guys) and Lego Batman (bad guys killing cops) and Battlefront (clone's eye view of battles, which intensifies the identification with the violence).

Nighfala said...

One more comment to add to your excellent article: Don't "double dip" on punishment. My husband and I have a tendency to separately notice an infraction and assign punishment. So the poor kid gets two (possibly conflicting) consequences. Or just mixed messages. One punishment is enough.

Jeannie Campbell, LMFT said...

christine - excellent point, thanks for adding that.

patricia - hey, girl! long time, no "see"! :) love the idea of a permanent web footprint. great analogy.