My 11-year-old has discovered e-mail. God help me. I know, I know: We’re Luddites. Your kids have been IM’ing since they were eight. They txt msg on their cell phones. This is the way their generation communicates.
Call me old-school, but I’ve been perfectly happy having my daughter use the phone or pass notes in class. Face-to-face conversation has always (well, mostly) been pleasant.
But this month two things changed: She moved to a school that gives each kid her own cubicle and computer; and her friend moved to London for six months.
So e-mail it is.
It’s the best way to keep in touch with London — no time difference, no huge phone bill. And it’s easy enough to let her use my e-mail. That way I get their “411s” too.
But school kind of troubles me. They issued my daughter her very own e-mail address on her second day. So far, she just corresponds with her London friend and me, but we all know it’s just a matter of time before she’s sucked in.
Do you even remember what your life was like before e-mail? When you hear “blackberry,” do you think “fruit,” or “handheld”? If a virus shuts e-mail down for even a few hours, you get the shakes. I got hit by MyDoom last week and it felt practically quaint to work for three days only by phone. Quaint and maddening.
I love getting little notes from my daughter during the day. “Where did we get those pictures of Ellis Island?” “I changed my cursor to a pen instead of an arrow. It’s cool!” “Can you bring my lunch? It’s on the kitchen counter.” (Okay, I don’t love them all.)
She signs off “TTFN” or “LOL.” She means “Lots of love.” I read it as “Laughing out loud.” That reminds me how young she really is.
The more she’s online at school, the more I worry. Is she getting offers for cheap Viagra? Has HotEva invited her to play? Will she come home asking where Vicodin and Xanax are outside our solar system?
She’s got an .edu address, so at least school filters are keeping the worst spam out. (I hope.) But we can’t access her address from home, so I can’t monitor it. Will the teachers help her sort wheat from chaff? Keep the creeps at bay? Make sure she’s on-task, not goofing off?
I think 11 is too young to venture into the Inbox alone. After all, she doesn’t ride public transit alone or watch PG-13 movies alone. She shouldn’t take her first steps into the wide, virtual world alone, either.
My big worry is that having their own e-mail makes kids older, faster.
A friend has figured out how to read his 13-year-old’s instant messages. He patrols her computer when she’s asleep. The content terrifies him — blatant sexual flirting, plans to rendezvous after dark, gossip about who went how far — the kind of dabbling we did in our senior year of high school, the same stories we’d swap after football games. It was heady and thrilling then, a rite of passage into adulthood. It’s bolder now, and pernicious, caught there in writing between 13-year-olds. Sex. Thirteen.
My friend doesn’t want to confront her for fear she’ll stop writing — and then the dangers will be invisible. For now, he and his wife casually start conversations about sex, or drugs, to make room for advice and questions.
It’s what parents have always done, I suppose — eavesdrop as best they can, then set the safety nets and hope for the best.
But can we make a net big enough to hold an invisible Web? And strong enough to cradle our children?
Network
