Internet and Children

I think that parents these days have to be extremely careful with the internet. Especially for very young children. Indeed, children are easily manipulated and ill-intentioned people might want to take advantage of this weakness. Also, there have been many controversies with Youtube for example. People posting content not suitable for children (sexual content for example) but also controversies about cartoon videos where the spell that is cast on the princess turns her into a black person. As if being black was something bad. This is why I think there should be a platform or community that certifies certain content as appropriate for children so that parents don't have to watch their children's videos/cartoons before they do.

Today I chose to talk about Tiktok because since the beginning of this year, it has enjoyed a great success particularly among children.
Tiktok was created in 2016 but has known its amazing success at the beginning of 2020 and more precisely during the first lockdown People make short videos dancing, singing, pranking... The trend during the first lockdown was making viral choreographies and I think that children took it too seriously... Now, when you do your shopping, you can see them moving and dancing while they are walking but there is no music ! This is funny but weird at the same time because it shows their dependance.
There are many very famous underage people on tiktok, and the most followed account is Charli Damelio's one: she is 16 and she has 100 million followers ! Also, you can see very young children's videos on tiktok, they can be 6 years old and posting their own videos. I don't think this is good for them especially since they found peadophile accounts.

Honestly I don't like at all the fact that children are present on the Internet and especially on social networks. For example, when I see 13 year olds childs on Twitter giving their opinion on extremely sensitive subjects, knowing that they are easily influenced at that age, I always wonder why parents don't have more control over what their own children do on the internet... Not to mention all the shocking content they can access without any worries ... And it's the same for the contents on Tik Tok or on Youtube for example, which I find extremely unhealthy. When we see that some parents voluntarily exploit their children on Youtube to advertise various products, to the detriment of their private life, I think that the legislation must be much firmer against this situation. Especially when we know that there are many potentially dangerous adults on the Internet for children. Social networks need to take steps to remove malicious content, deny access to young children more effectively and parents need to better monitor how their children use social networks.

In my opinion, social networks bring together a number of elements that are dangerous for children. This is why there is a minimum age for registration. With regard to parents who put their children on internet, I think it depends of the parents in question and their intentions. Firstly, I don't really find it a problem to put his child on his networks, despite the fact that he should be protected from an exposure he didn't want. However, it also depends on the notoriety of the parents. Indeed, many personalities take advantage of their children to promote their views, partnerships, and thus earn money through this process. I think it's a rather unhealthy way to go about it, we're talking about a child and not about a device that makes money.

The internet is a wonderful platform, where you can access a lot of information. It is also a dangerous place, where many dangers exist, and can harm the good of everyone. Children are particularly fragile and curious, which is why they can quickly be affected (risk of cyber harassment, access to shocking content...).

Parents therefore have an essential role to play in education to protect them from possible risks.

I don't have any children, but of course I have been (as you may end up doubting!). When I was very young, I was not allowed to go there. Little by little, I began to take an interest in it and to be allowed to go, but after being briefed by my mother and my big sister. My mother gave me enough freedom, she didn't forbid me to have social networks and she trusted me. She just warned me to be careful not to divulge too much information and to only chat with people I knew (I started by spending hours on MSN, then came Facebook...). From time to time she would ask me questions to judge my ability to protect myself.

But apart from my parents, I find that the school is well aware of this, as I remember attending conferences warning us of the dangers involved.

I think it is not a good idea for parents to expose their children on the internet because they are young and don't know they are exposed. Also, the kids didn't really agree if they wanted to be exposed on social media, internet or not. Some famous people have for example made an Instagram for their children, for me it is useless, they are exposed when they have just been born. They will be exposed all their lives and maybe they don't want to. Famous people should give their children a choice whether or not they want to be exposed on internet when they are growing up. For the teenager, I think they are too much on the internet and social networks, they don't enjoy their life without their phone, internet and social networks, I think it’s sad.

In my opinion, the exposure of children on the internet by some parents is, in my opinion, aberrant, especially on Instagram. Of course, of course, posting pictures of your children on social networks is not bad, far from it, but only if the photo are “normal”. Sometimes when I go on Instagram, I see parents posting pictures of their children (most often young or even very young) in outfits totally unsuitable for their age. And I don't think that's a good thing. It is borderline unhealthy because they are not leading a normal life as children, they are being pushed to become adults and behave like adults when they are only 5 years old. At that age they should only have fun and do what they want instead of being transformed just to feed their parents' instagram account.

With the development of social networks, many famous people have chosen to expose their child to it and in some cases create a dedicated Instagram account for them. Even if the idea can be cut and not badly thoughtful personally, I find it unhealthy to overexpose your child on social media when you know the dangers. You never know who may fall on them. In addition, some use these accounts to partner with brands for their child.
It gives a bit of the image of using your child to develop a larger community as if everything today was seen through the prism of networks.

The internet is a really vast place. It can be dangerous and not appropriate for Children. If parents don’t secure the using of internet, kids can lose control and find things that are not good for them.
They can easily buy something they want behind their parent’s back, it can be a game or a subscription for example. People with bad intention can make contact with them and harm them or scam them. They can also spend a lot of time on it and lose their childish creativity and innocense.
So parents have to be really careful.

I think that the way children use the internet today is a really important debate.

We are talking about future generations and how they will evolve in society.

For this topic, I would like to focus on one particular aspect of the internet and the cloud: that of leaving traces of our actions.

When children use the internet they are often left to their own devices. They have access to a lot of information, which is a good thing, except that they can also consult subjects that are not their age and that they are not yet able to understand. Moreover, any activity on the internet leaves traces. The problem is that social networks are no longer an anonymous platform and anything children post on them is likely to be seen by people outside their family or friends. Children can also use social networks in a bad way.

More and more children are being harassed, especially at school. This is not a new phenomenon but through social networks it takes on a different aspect. Now it is very easy to spread false information about a person and share it with many people. This false information leaves traces and can be very difficult for victims to remove it. Content posted by children must be supervised by an adult to avoid this kind of abuse.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that the Internet is not a "diabolical" tool, which exposes children to dangers, but a tool that they must learn to master in order to make them responsible when they use the net.

As some parents use their children to earn more likes on social media or let them on the couch hypnotized by screens for having a little moment of peace, I stand with those who are against children overexposure to internet. In fact, children are very easily influenced by all that is said and showed on the internet and the consequences may be irreversible. First of all, they could see a lot of inappropriate content (such as scary, violent or sexual content) which may cause a real and long-term trauma. Then, they could become totally addictive to the Internet, and generate a lot of diverse problems such as antisocial, violent behaviour, mental and sleep disorders, overweight… I think it is a shame that this kind of content is so easily reachable, even for a few years old kid, and that some parents do not care enough about what their children are exposed to.

Internet and children, a huge topic and verry modern, because more and more parents use internet or more precisely social network to talk about their children. Some of the celebrities show pictures of their children and other creates an account for one of his children. I can understand parents who wants to share pictures of their newborn baby but form me creating a special account for the child is too much. The child has plenty of time to do that later and to decide if yes or not people can see his/ her face, if he wants people to know he is the son of … It is a sensitive subject with different point of view, and it is hard to determine who is right and who is wrong.
There are more things about the topic. Children who are too much expose to internet. For me it is a family choice, the parents decide if they their child playing all day on internet for example. If they don’t want their child on internet, they have to impose limits of time for example.

There is a lot of discussion about the use of internet by children, many of them show the negative effects and the consequences and I agree that children are too young to be able to know what is better for them or not and I definitely think a control need to be done by the parents.
But I wanted to talk about something that we don’t necessary are conscious about. Today’s children are born with internet everywhere, even me I remember when I was in secondary school the government talked about institute tablets for readings and more. So how could we ask them to not use all the devices they have access to? I read that today we talk about a societal necessity of Internet, it’s important to educate children at the right age of course. I think it would be more efficient to avoid or to reduce some negative effects by teaching children how and when they can use internet, what are the dangers and what are the possibilities. But we cannot prohibit Internet to a teenager because it would put him out of the actual society and make him uncomfortable and it would really slow is life down.

Should children be allowed to surf freely on the Internet?

Frankly, I'm mixed. The new generation has always known internet, it was born in it. So, it is normal that children are used to social networks and screens. But I am still overwhelmed by the situation.
Like any invention, the internet has both positive and negative sides. No one is safe from danger, and even less so children, who are easy targets for pedophiles for example. This reminds me of a video from Victoria Charlton, a youtube user who talks about disappearance cases, serial killers and conspiracy theories. In this video she talked about a theory about Youtube Kids that would be fed by sexual videos for kids and managed by pedophiles. She showed some video clips that the children can watch and some of them incited the children to have scatophile behaviors, or to practice the golden shower for example... It is not normal to find this kind of content on a site dedicated to children.

On the internet it is easy to pretend to be whoever you want. Accustomed to using it to play games, watch videos or chat with friends, children are not aware of the danger the internet represents.

To answer the above question, children under a certain age should not be allowed to use the internet alone. But the internet is part of our daily lives, and I can understand that dealing with a child's whims must be exhausting for parents. If leaving them in front of the screens for a while can soothe them, who am I to judge? We don't yet know the full potential of the internet, its advantages as well as its dangers, but is this a reason to cut children off from this medium? I don't know.