Perhaps what makes an ongoing broadband TV commercial so hilariously effective is the absurdity of it: a lola glued to a social networking site, ordering her tech-challenged apo to poke her back in Facebook. In truth, ask any lola (and parents for that matter) and neither will be able to tell you that being poked is not necessarily painful and that Facebook is not, god forbid, a bible for make-up artists.

Today, kids will have, more often than not, chatted up a storm in ym (yahoo messenger) long before they learn in school that the word messenger has two S’s in it. And despite the age limit, children as young as 6 years old are already updating their statuses in Facebook and are already giving twit-by-twit accounts of their daily lives.

“Kids are really advance. My 8-year-old already spends the whole afternoon in front of the computer. He even has his own email address. I guess, it’s because they see us doing it, ginagaya nila kami. Computers are also a big part of their curriculum. Buti na lang I know my around computers,” says work-from-home mom Rizza Mayon.

Digital Divide

Unfortunately, not all parents are like Rizza. Most belong to a generation eons away in technology compared to their kids. A Pew Research Center study in the United States found on this decade the widest generation gap since 1969. The gap is attributed to how technology dominates people’s lives today, especially kids.

A landmark study conducted across the globe confirmed how kids of today and their gadgets are joined at the hip. Recent findings from the Norton Online Living Report found that 86 percent of the 8- to17-year-olds surveyed, send text messages, 23% use Twitter-like services and 73% email from their phones. This means that not only do these kids have mobile phones of their own; they have access to the Internet even when they are outside their homes.

This is not good news considering how online contents are rarely censored. Everything is available with just a click. Thus, kids can so easily fall prey to online bullies; hook up with sexual predators in chatrooms; and engage in online gambling without their parents ever knowing about it. In the study, one in five parents have actually caught their children accessing illegal and uncensored materials and these are by parents who are already monitoring online activities through online security software, manual checking of web cookies and monitoring usage.

Never be too sure

But as the study also revealed, parents cannot be too sure. What they think they know may not be the whole truth. With internet access increasingly available, kids can log on anytime and anywhere they want. According to the survey, kids and teens spend an average of 39 hours every month surfing. Not a bad number except that, and here’s the kicker: it is only half of what their parents think they are spending online. And despite the fact that 90% of parents do realize their responsibility to monitor, only 33% actually set parental rules while 70% just talk about it. The Child Internet Risk Perception Survey, in fact, found that 27% of children are left completely unsupervised while 34% are not even told what they can or cannot access.

“This is perhaps the biggest challenge that parents face today: monitoring their kids’ online activities. Supervising has become increasingly difficult with content so readily available and access so easy to acquire. True, some parents are not as familiar with Internet and other tech gadgets but this is not an excuse to not do anything. Parents must get rid of the mindset that just because they don’t know much of how the Internet works, they won’t set rules for their kids. Parenting online is the same as parenting offline,” says Effendy Ibrahim, Consumer Business Lead for Symantec Asia South Region.

Taking actions

There are actually a lot of ways that parents can keep track of their kids’ online activities. One of the most common is using the history command in web browsers. Upon clicking, parents will see all the sites that were visited in recent days. Others try to “be-friendster” their kids. That way, they can also check the people who are part of their kids' circle. Some also adjust their internet filters and turn on their computers’ security features. Settings of search engines like Yahoo and Google can also be changed according to preference.

Although effective, these only provide short-term solutions. Kids can easily delete illegal sites from the history or unblock sites as controls are found in the computer’s system settings. Thus, more and more parents are finding parental control software relevant and convenient despite the hefty price tag. For one thing, it allows them complete control. Parents can also check with their Internet service providers or ISPs whether they offer the add-on service. Some do.

Recently, Symantec came up with its own parental control software - the Online Family Norton. Since it is new, it can still be downloaded for free until January next year. The software allows parents to not only block sites but also dictate how long kids go online and monitor who they talk to, what sites they visit and what information they share with people.

For instance, the software can show parents what messages their kids are sending through instant messenger. They can also limit online access to a specific time period. Sites are blocked with the use of categories so even if a fresh site on a subject crops up, it will still be blocked. Specific sites and search keywords may also be added to the “block list.”

And because it uses profiles, parents can customize settings according to age. What is after all “adult content” for a 5-year-old may not be so for a teenager. Knowing that sometimes kids need to visit some sites for school research, the Family Norton also gives parents the power to block or unblock sites remotely.

For parents who don’t want to curtail their kids’ freedom, they can just use the software to monitor. They will be given everyday reports on the sites their children visited plus the time they spent on each site and what they searched for on that site. These are useful information that they can use when they talk to their kids about internet rules and online conduct.

According to Ibrahim, setting ground rules on internet usage is still ideal and is essential in keeping kids safe online. Having the Online Family Norton in the computer should not be an excuse to just watch from the comforts of the monitor and keep mum. Nothing beats talking to children and making them understand the dangers that they face when they are online. Good old fashion one-on-one talks still win any day.   

To download the Online Family Norton for free, just visit http://onlinefamily.norton.com