Regulating Children Content on the Internet
The use of technology has greatly affected the ability of parents to parent their children in a negative way. One of the major impacts is that it has resulted in parental distraction. Both children and parents have been involved in using smartphones and spend the most time on social media platforms (Murti, 2021). While children may find it difficult to concentrate on their academics, parents have been pulled out of reality and end up forgetting that they have children. As a result, they neglect their children due to technology distractions, which gives a child a lot of freedom, including watching uncensored content on the Tv and the internet. These technology distractions are not healthy to both parent and the child as slowly; the parents decrease their level of engagement with their child, which decreases the parent’s ability to bond with their child (Murti, 2021). Children require a lot of attention from their parents and look upon their parents as role models. Parents being distracted on the internet lose the chance to bond with their child and provide the child with ample time to spend on uncensored content without a parental guide. Therefore, technology has greatly impacted how today’s parents raise their children, and most of the impact is negative.
The advent of the internet has made it possible for children to access billions of web pages, images, and videos with ease. Children can easily pick up bad habits off the internet, and this is why censoring children’s content is not only essential but a necessity (Berdik, 2020). Censorship by the government can raise a lot of unwanted resistance as it violates the freedom of speech. Therefore, the government should not be involved in the censorship of children’s content on the internet. The parent’s primary role is to bring up their children in the right manner, guiding them and letting them know what is good and bad. Parents have to be there for their children no matter what, as it is their responsibility. Parents, therefore, can set up the content that they want their children to watch or access as there are restrictions provided in web pages regarding the age of a child (Chaudron et al., 2018). For example, YouTube has access to both adult and children’s content, and therefore, the parent can always set a child’s access to children’s content, and through this, the child will always have access to the right content.
References
Berdik, C. (2020). Revisiting the Potential Uses of Media in Children’s Education. Future of Childhood. In Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. 1900 Broadway, New York, NY 10023.
Chaudron, S., Marsh, J., Donoso Navarette, V., Ribbens, W., Mascheroni, G., Smahel, D., … & Soldatova, G. (2018). Rules of engagement: Family rules on young children’s access to and use of technologies. In Digital childhoods (pp. 131-145). Springer, Singapore.
Murti, R. S. (2021). Raising a Child in the Era of Smartphones: Exploring the implications of parent smartphone use for the parent-child relationship. Journal of Integrative Research & Reflection, 4, 32-42.
