Just to help out anybody who thinks that cyber-bullying the fault of the collective Internet, it’s not — its root cause are parents who give their children free reign on the web. Some people just refuse to believe that their little snugums might be a sociopathic monster (as many children tend to be!) living in a bubble of entitlement (often a reflection of the people who birthed them), or that they’re enabling awful behavior by letting their kids run around unsupervised on the Internet.
The Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center found this out by surveying third graders. Among their findings: 20% of them had a cell phone. By fifth grade, it’s 40% and by middle school, it’s over 80%.
Also, 90% of third-graders are online.
Captain Hindsight has an apt summary of the problem, but we’ve really got to ask: how &*%$ing stupid are these parents? Didn’t these people read “Lord of the Flies?” Aren’t they familiar with the Greater Internet F***wad Theory? Yes, your kids are being horrible to each other on the Internet, because that’s what kids do. Kids do awful things to each other, because a moral compass that lends itself to respecting others is derived from life experience, and young children don’t have any life experience yet.
Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever to buy your child a cell phone, except you want to show the other parents how rich you are. Are these mostly iPhones? We bet they’re mostly iPhones. America’s parents suck.
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At the risk of exposing my horrible parenting skills, my son had a cell phone at age 8 (3rd Grade) because (gasp) both of his parents had to work and (double gasp) we are a cell phone only household. His cell phone was the only way we had of contacting the house when we were at work and he was with his babysitter. And at $10 a month, it was much cheaper than a land-line.
Here’s another shocker … he was online at an even younger age playing Club Penguin and visiting the Sesame Street site. He wasn’t given unrestricted access, nor was he unsupervised, but the article didn’t make that distiction.
Really, Dan, you should be ashamed of this article. To automatically jump to “all parents are buying their kids expensive iPhones and roaming the internet unattended” from this article … well, it’s the kind of thing I would expect to come from the whackjobs who want EA to ban all homosexuals, not the kind of thing from a usually well-reasoned tech-saavy geek.
My three youngest cousins — aged 5, 7, and 9 — all have iPhones, iPads, and a Wii (each!). Well, now they’re down to 2 Wiis since the 5 year old had an accident and pooped on hers.
Their parents bought me a pair of headbands for my birthday. I’m 25. When I asked where the hell was my iPad, I got lectured for being materialistic and greedy.
I’m thinking of taking a dump on the other two Wiis and blaming it on the 5 year old.
I don’t know if it needs to be said, but the three of them are raging d*ckheads, even by kid standards. ::sigh::
I AM OUTRAGE
It is amazing useful to be able to contact you kid. The best is to buy a cheap cellphone like a Tracfone for $10 and Limit the minutes available each month, which you can do with a prepaid phone. If your kid ever goes missing, you will spend the rest of your life wishing that you had got them a cellphone. It can be tracked and could save a life.