under 18 epidemic

I really hope you don't have children because if you can't understand the difference between these examples and allowing your child free reign on the internet, then your kids are in danger.

Bravo Mia, your son is fortunate to have you for his parent.

There was a 13 year old on the TSO message boards bragging that he used his computer in his room without his mother supervising. When I pointed out that he might not want to advertise this information, dozens of people said I was being too strict. But I thought of all the predators that might approach this child knowing no one was watching him and I had to intervene.

I wish there were more parents like you.

a few things spring to mind

1. its FAR FAR easier to find porn blah blah etc etc on the net than in sl
2. kids will ALWAYS lie about their age
3. how is sl any different than the thousands of chat rooms etc in yahoo, msn etc etc - none

the rule is that you have to be over 18 - if parents let their kids on SL then that is their problem and they are the ones that have to deal with it and take responsibility instead of passing it off onto someone else

the blame culture is getting out of hand

As the parent of a now 20 yr old male, I know very well how hard it can be to monitor your childs activities on a daily basis. When my son was younger, I made it my absolute and complete mission to see that he was not allowed to view things inappropriate to his age whether it was TV, internet, or phone. There are so many freaks and perverts out there, that I had nightmares about my sons safety and made it first priority to see that he was protected as much as I could. I used the block feature on the cable, password and content protection on the computer (his time on it was limited and completely monitored). However, its not possible to block everything. So many inappropriate sites now use key search words totally unrelated to their content that they are brought up in searches when a child is doing nothing more than simple research for a class assignment.

I agree that its completely the parents responsibility to monitor THEIR childs activities. No one elses. I also believe there are other ways to prevent those children from accessing content they shouldnt, especially on sites like SL. I would not be adverse to having a SL representative contact me by phone if my card is used to register for an adult site in order to verify that the card was used for registration by an adult. Make it a requirement to include a real contact number and call that number using the name of the cardholder to verify their order and registration before activating the account. This would very likely reduce if not stop completely the influx of under 18 players from these sites.

While this looks good on paper, lots of parents are working lots of hours and if a child is at home to answer the phone, a simple lie suffices. How many people, young and old have said they were their parents? It's so simple for that.

Talking about parental responsibility is all well and good but it does nothing for the current situation.

Linden Lab provide an adult (over 1 environment, they are the gate keepers to this private members only club, its their responsibility to ensure that children are NOT given free and easy access. The very existance of the teen grid makes it clear they understand this.

It is thiers, but they can point to the 'I certify I am 18 years or older on sign up', leaving the rest of us to wonder.

They don't care... the numbers look good on paper to investors.

I actually have nothing against my kids being exposed to any form of objectionable material, be it violence, sex, drugs or gambling, regardless of age. Whats more important is that they are exposed at an age which they can be made aware of what these things are and are capable of understanding it. It just so happens, your government decided that on their 18th birthday, they are suddenly capable of adult thought.

Seriously though. If a teen was reading us talk like this, they'd be laughing their pants off.

You want me to worry about impotent weapons in SL that doesn't even dismember our limbs? I never mentioned violence, because this is already prevalent in daily news. Adults murdering women and children on a daily basis, especially by those who champion freedom. Its beyond censorship.

Sorry to say Cottoneil... the only thing I read from your words are excuses not to care.... worse, not even want to care. And that is bad in my opinion.
You are denying your responsibility as parent. Worse, you sound as a teen yourself.

Morwen.

oh for gods sake - you sound like children who dont want to take responsibility

wake up

ok i will say this and be dammed - why is it that the u.s. seems basically the only country in the world that tries to blame everything on someone else without looking at themselves

face facts - the net has been around since realistically 1990 (when i joined), there is absolutely NO difference between an underage (ie -1 using a c.c. to join sl as betfair, 888, or any NUMBER of sites that provide 18+ access

deal with the fact that YOU have responsibility of YOUR offspring and stop trying to blame someone else

i can completely understand parents concerns BUT when it becomes "you should do this, that or the other" it goes out the window - how EXACTLY are you going to stop someone who is under 18 from getting on the grid ? - you are not - so stop f***** whinging and be a good parent

whats next? "im sorry were banning all pubs/bars because some under 18's have been able to buy a drink and some peado picked up an underage kid in one"

think about it...

/rant

oh i forgot the u.s. has banned online gambling

anyone remember prohibition ?

idiots

they say that those who forget history are destined to repeat it...

blah blah blah blah blah

Not to raise a kid to be a murderer, a drug addict, a thief, a liar, a cheat, or a pervert.

Its not easy this day in time to monitor a child 24/7, most parents both work, or are in single parent homes, and i think this will be the downfall of our civilization. Kids basically are raising themselves. Parents gratefully look for a game or online babysitter to keep them off the streets.

Actually I'm pretty liberal and say live and let live to most things, except when it comes to children. Its easy to say it wasn't my fault my kid walked past a porn shop, this breeds the basic mentality that nothing is anyone's fault, the "liquor store guy got shot because he wouldn't give me the money" outlook on life.

Its kind of a sad world kids grow up in now, and if i could advise anyone that's not going to be around to raise children, or have the time, or able to put out the extra effort needed to provide the activities and home life required to send a decent adult out into society, just not to have kids...i would.

I think its a sad society that requires a dog owner to be more responsible than a parent. Think about it..

I agree. It is not easy at all... specially out there in the real life. But yes, the parents stays responsible in the end.

But with things as SL it is easy. When they ask for this "game". Do a little research about it on the net (visit the site of the producer, read some forums and so on). If there to be made a registration/payment, do it yourself (so there is no entering a false day of birth or something like that). Make it impossible for them to install things on their own. Just some examples of easy things to do.

One thing I would like to see more often (and NCSoft understood this very well, maybe others too), the account holding the user- and payment-information should have an different password then is needed for logging into the game. This for then one reason.

I tend to agree with your statement of having no children if you cannot or don't want to take the needed responsibility about it.

Morwen.

this is a little bit of a change of direction from all the official statements here. You seem party to a terms-of-use agreement the rest of us haven't seen: can you explain why your interpretation seems so divergent, and why everything has to be kid-safe, everywhere? Sounds a lot to me like the usual lazy-parent demand.

There's ALREADY a teen grid, dammit. Personally I take great care to isolate not just children, but also naive adults, from my interests, not out of shame: out of sheer boredom with coping with the panics and overactive imaginations that arise from culture clashes. What's more, the teens I've seen on the system (in the main grid, misbehaving) a) know PRECISELY what the adult activities are all about b) are hell-bent on disrupting them c) don't give a tinker's cuss for the equal rights of expression of others, and d) think anyones rules are just hilarious - their parents, SL's, mine...

So it's not THEM being protected from US (which is what I see your demand/interpreatation as meaning) - it's US being protected from THEM.

Yes, yes, yes yes yes. You had the kid; you look after it. Especially in the "lewd teacher" scenario, ONLY YOU can be the whistleblower. Note that it's not easy, and moreover, it's not the teacher you have to worry about (statistically, it's semi-near family members who are the highest risk). Also note that not every culture has the problems you imagine need your attention: I have seen magazine vendors in Las Ramblas, Barcelona (RL!), where the kids climb up great bulwarks of porn to pick up and pay for a comic-book. Nobody (seller, kids, parents, cops on horseback...) turns a hair.

As others have said, it's not as if the problem is corruption of infants - it's disruption of adults.

THe biggest issue here is that those whose protection response has been triggered, don't stand back and see whether their protests do any good. I had a very interesting series of enocunters on a certain very large three-letter ISP/playspace/media vendor, a few years back, where in fact, those "freaks and perverts" you worry about were doing a particularily good job in indentifying and reporting under-age interlopers. Eventually, to cut a long story short, I had a conversation in which a rep admitted that they had radically changed their in-house online security and teen safety teams: the old structure was all god-fearing family types from the middle US - the new crowd were a small group of exceeeeedingly kinky male gays from the UK.

I was told that the problem with the old team had been that they were full of brave pronouncements about how to "defend our children" (etc), but no idea what to look for, where to find it, what to do about it, or how to minimise damage to all the participants in an incident. The gays, by contrast, were far more streetwise, much more subtle, adept at identifying both predator and prey, and extremely concerned that situations should include minimal damage to all concerned.

Whenever this comes up in an online context (and I've seen it 4 times, now, in total), the "family first" faction throw their hands up in disgust, rather than actually taking the steps required to fix the problem.

Which is what's happened here...

How many of you have left a child between the ages of 13 and 18 at home? Aside from making your home Fort Knox, kids can bypass whatever they want if they want to.

My father used to lock the computer in the room with a padlock and I still found ways to get inside.

In some studies, parents were asked to used the 'safe' programs to block internet and TV and set it up. The children then came in and were asked to get into these media's. One child could not only get into a computer within 2 minutes, but the TV within 1.

9 out of 10 kids in a 500 family study were able to get into either or and 7 out of 10 made it into the computer. The problems sometimes aren't the parents not bothering, it's that the parents think they are doing the right thing and being responsible, and the kids are just smarter than that. Hell, some high schools teach some of it in computer classes. Most kids know how to bypass an initial password on start up and most of the time, even with all these 'blockers' on the internet, lots of them depend on reported sites or keywords to block them.

We all can obviously guess porn, sex, etc. is blocked, but many of the sites that some may or may not find objectionable don't include those words at all. The homepage and download page of Second Life has none of the trad words, so if it isn't in an update to block the site, it's free game to a kid who has some knowledge of how to bypass passwords and connect to the internet.

And if your child is befriended by someone who later on convinces them to meet with them, then that would be okay as well?

Amen

But if I were to talk to my kid and have some connection on a regular basis, check out the computer, see what programs are on it, what was being billed to the kid's credit card or any of these things, I would find out that the kid was using Second Life. You make it seem as if there was nothing the parent could do. In Columbine, the parents of the killers were oblivious to the purchase of guns even though there was evidence in the kid's room.

Look at your kid's computer, speak to your kids, watch your kids on the computer. See who they are chatting with. Leaving a kid to play on a computer alone is like dropping them off in Time Square.

Only useful information If you have a clue what secondlife is and what is there, most people simply dont know about SL and its not like they can gain any useful information from the website on the matter either.

That is why I said, make it impossible for them to install anything. So when SL needs to be installed, you have to do it yourself (or, as in our case, someone with the needed knowlegde). Do all registrations/payments yourself, not the child him/herself.

Do a search "Second Life" on Google and you will learn a lot about the game and its content.

Morwen

No. What you should be worried about is the mentality of a person who, when given the tools to make anything they can imagine, goes right to nuclear weapons.



Are you suggesting that sex isn't prevalent on the news and in popular culture?



That's just such a bizarre non-sequitur I don't even know how to answer it.

You've missed the entire point of the post, obviously. Leaving a kid to play isn't the issue so much as them able to get through safeguards that parents think are working. Do you honestly expect a babysitter 24/7? Who's gonna work to pay the bills? Not every family has the luxury of hiring a live in nanny or a stay at home mom.

And if you have a connection with your kid on a regular basis, especially a teen, most of the time you aren't snooping around through their room without a reason. If you did, you'd certainly lose the connection you had. We've all been teens before, but mine came recently so I know that you can't just blame the parents no matter what. Sure a parent should know what their kid is up to, but ANYONE can hide whatever they want if they wanted to.

You say check the programs, yeah... I've heard that one too. But most comp savvy kids aren't dumb enough to install shortcuts on desktop. I embedded a game I played (it was a harmless text based free RPG but still) into such an obscure file, that no one had a clue. Clearing history (or deleting the location, and a rotation of the address sticks it out of ever being a trace it was there). Once you downloaded the game, you could go on as much as you want without ever once having to use the internet browser.

And as far as the kid's credit card, no you couldn't unless they bought with it. They could get verified with it and nothing shows up on the statement that they used it to get verified.

You, and several others in this thread think that kids are dumb and oblivious and parents are completely techno savvy. It's just not the truth. It's actually mostly backwards for parents of teens right now. Who the hell does my mom call when there's something wrong with her comp? Me. And I've never had one computer class. Same with my roommates, they have had parents calling them for info and we were only teens 5-7 years ago.

Kids are sneaky, they lie if they don't think they will get caught, and they are smart. Don't make it out to be the parent who thinks they've done everything they can, a kid shouldn't be able to bypass. It happens everyday.