For The Kids

Tim Stevens of Granger Community Church is a pastor, blogger, author and father. In a post last week he outlined his family's rules and expectations for media usage. I found this post interesting because my parents had similar rules for me growing up. Fortunately for me, my parents also shared Stevens' idea that restrictions must loosen as kids grow up if parents expect their children to be able to make their own responsible choices once they're out on their own (IWU Code of Conduct anyone?).

I emailed Tim's post to all of the parents of youth on my church email list. I really thought it was too valuable not to pass along. Probably close to 100% of your students regularly use either the internet, email, social media, or an Ipod Touch, or a regular basis. I would guess that far less that 100% of their parents have any kind of guidelines in place to monitor and govern what their kids are doing/watching/listening to.

Here is one of Tim's thoughts that I really liked. You can find the rest at LeadingSmart.

iPod Touch restrictions – our 7th grade son saved his money for a long time until he was able to buy an iPod Touch. The first thing I did was took it, enabled the “restrictions” feature, locked it out from Safari (internet surfing) and YouTube, set a password, and gave it back to him. I don’t need my adolescent son walking around with a pocket full of temptation.

What do you think? Are parents that monitor emails invading their kids' privacy? Or are they doing what's best and keeping them safe? Should we let kids listen to what they want because "they'll hear it somewhere else anyway"?