I have to admit to liking You Tube and also enjoying it with my kids. Just recently, I emailed my daughter of a Rap song skit done by Taylor Swift that I thought was hilarious. We are also using a homeschool math program that is homeschool based called Khan Academy. So you can see that I have nothing about YouTube as a whole.
Still, there are some things about YouTube that I find troubling. When my kids get together with their cousins, they tend to lay on the floor in front of the coupon and view You Tube videos. This seems like an innocent enough activity but there is great deal of the videos have sexual content on You Tube. Even when they are not looking for questionable content, it doesn’t take much to stumble upon it.
Granted, YouTube is attempting to censor the site, but when people are constantly coming up with ways to slip pornography through the censors, it can only go so far.
Beyond what kids are seeing on YouTube is what kids are uploading on YouTube. It is my contention that kids probably should not upload videos without first showing them to parents and also having parents check their account to make sure they are not putting too much information on the web.
So how is a parent to balance the good parts of this media and the very bad. Well, you can just have good internet use rules in your home. There should be no computers behind closed doors. If a child is looking at something he does not want you to see, then he should not be looking at it. Talk to kids about how they use the website and how they should use the website and try to keep dialog open.
Also as parents, you should be able to look at the website history and check to see what kids are looking at. In addition, if you should come across innapropraite videos, you should block that video.
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