It’s 7 o’clock. Where are Your Children?

That used to be an easy question to answer. “Oh, they’re down the street at the Johnson’s”. “They’re right here reading books”. “They are upstairs playing Monopoly”. Not so easy today. The more likely answer is “Oh, they’re on the computer”. Really? That tells us where their bodies are located, but not their minds and souls.

“Hi Ann-Rachel, how was your day?”, I asked my beautiful little eight year old brown hair, brown eyed girl as she climbed into my dark red mega cab Dodge Ram truck (with a hemi, I might add). “Great!” she responded with a big smile. I had just picked her up from her friend’s house. “So, what did you and Carly do after school?” I innocently asked as I pulled out of the driveway and into traffic on Old Hickory Boulevard. “Nothing. We just watched videos on You Tube”.

With that, I almost went off the road. You Tube. Hmm. Never really surfed that site. Better do it soon.

And I did. That night I logged on, got my own “user ID” and went surfing. Amazing. Sprinkled in with really funny, high quality video vignettes was a lot of absolute pure raunchy stuff and lots of video bordering on porn. Goodness gracious! Please, not my sweet Ann-Rachel!

So, what’s a parent to do? I immediately went into family-protection mode and moved the family to a remote Amish community in Pennsylvania. Just kidding. Sometimes I think that might not be a bad idea, though. I am not at all optimistic about the future of this country and its moral foundation. The best we can do as parents, in my opinion, is to add a layer of protection on our childrens’ Internet portal, so that they have a fighting chance of staving off what would otherwise be the inevitable entry into the underworld of porn and sub-culture.

I’ve tried a number of different brands of “Internet police”, but the one that makes a lot of sense is See No Evil. This program utilizes a very different control based on new technology. You can check it out at www.SeeNoEvil.com . Let me know what you think. After all, we (as parents) are all in this together.