Mother’s New Li’l Helper: Netsnitch

You might have read in the newspaper last week about a new software program called NetSnitch.

The idea here is not to block the Internet off from your children, but rather to track where they’ve been and how much time was spent in each location.

“Sounds to me like Orwellian parenting,” Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in the Associated Press story I read. “You might as well drop a video camera in your kid’s bedroom.”

And the point is?

I’ll tell you what the point was from my parents’ point of view: Every single aspect of my life was under their scrutiny and, to the best of their ability, their control as well.

Good thing, too.

I wasn’t nearly as smart at 12 or 13 as I thought I was. Heck, I wasn’t nearly as smart at 25 as I thought I was. Now in my 50s, I am finally learning that I just may be as dumb as I often think I am.

My newspaper thought the article on NetSnitch was important enough to run on the front page, prompting renewed contemplation on my part of a recurring theme I find disturbing in our society:

Some seem to think there is a teenage Bill of Rights that by its very existence negates the rights of parents.

In that same AP story, NetSnitch manager Bob Reardon said he wants parents to tell their children the program is in place, not try to catch them unawares.

“It’s not like we’re trying to sneak up on these kids. It’s to remind them that they shouldn’t be there and that there might be consequences,” he said.

Now, there’s a novel concept.

The AP story went on to say that “NetSnitch could appeal to parents who are concerned about their children spending too much time at the computer, but believe that some exploration of taboo material is inevitable, or even healthy.”

I suppose it may be at least inevitable.

It didn’t take boys in my hometown very long to learn that the trash barrel outside the police station jail often contained interesting reading - perhaps “viewing” is a better word - material.

And so it became a regular stop for some of us.

That, combined with the underwear ads in the Sears catalogue, was about all the education some of us got in anatomy, if you know what I mean.

But the material we had access to was as different as night and day from the material our children have access to.

Steamy love scenes, partially clad men and women who can’t keep their hands off each other, suggestive and revealing clothing - and that’s just in the ads.

You can already see that as the competition for viewers increases with the proliferation of television channels available via cable and satellite, the content of commercial television becomes more and more risque.

It’s not that I am a prude. I just think that some things are adult fare and some things are not, and I think it is the parents who get to decide.

Some parents are not equipped to make that decision well, and I don’t know what we do about that.

But I suspect that the vast majority of parents have a pretty good idea of what’s right and wrong for their children to see and read. It’s just that as society becomes more complex, they need help from one another, from the content providers and from programs such as NetSnitch.

There’s just a few ages in there during which protection seems to be crucial, and most of them begin with a “1.” After that, our children are pretty much free to make whatever choices they wish.

But the better the grounding, the better the choices.