Online Safety and Children

Yesterday, I attended an interesting presentation by Anne Collier and Larry Magid of BlogSafety.com. They came to my work to discuss their new book, MySpace Unraveled. I went into the presentation with the expectation that they would be discussing specific cases that MySpace has been confronted with (child predators, bullying, etc.) and how MySpace has delt with it. Given that I am a product Manager for a social networking product, I tought I would be able to take away a few key points that we could implement for our product to increase our overall safety for underage children.
Instead, what we got was a more general discussion around web 2.0 and general facts of what is taking place in this new landscape and some proposed legislation on the table to really restrict underage children's usage of the new web. With that being said, I did think that the larger point they were trying to make, and one in which I totally agree with (more so now that I am a parent), is that we as technology companies can make all the technologies in the world to protect our children and we can institute all sorts of laws to protect them, but they will find a way around it. What we as a society need to do, and this is where I think their greatest point was, is do a better job in parenting. It really all comes down to this, if we spend more time with our children explaining to them the dos and dont's, what is right and wrong, and instilling better morals in them, we may not have as great of a problem on our hands as we think we do. With our busy lifestyles, I think society as a whole has gotten away from this, and instead look for reasons as to why these things are happening instead of taking a look at ourselves and thinking for a moment that perhaps if we spent more time parenting and less time placing blame on everyone or everything else, that these things may not be happening. Absentee parenting is the problem, and we need to focus out time an attention on fixing this first!