We hope our children understand when we tell them that life experience counts for a lot and that without getting some real adult experience under their belts, they simply are not equipped to be making all their own decisions.
Perhaps internet parents should take that advice in reverse. As we mature we also lose the particular exuberance of youth. It is time to recapture some.
If your kids can figure out how to sign up at MySpace and FaceBook, so can you. If degenerates are comfortable posing as teenagers, I’m sure you can pull it off also.
So try this. Sign up for MySpace and create for yourself a profile of a 12 or 13 year old girl. Check out some of the other profiles first if you need a sense of what kinds of things to post. But really it doesn’t much matter.
We posted a profile of a “13 year old girl” with accompanying information that should have turned away even the least discerning (like suffers extreme acne, lives in one bedroom flat with a single mom, 5′ 5″ tall weighing 172 lbs and so on). Within two weeks we had been propositioned four times.
The point of this exercise for parents is two-fold.
First, you will see how quickly the predators can move in. (Or follow the predator news on SSO’s news consolidation site.)
Second, you will get a sense for what exactly it is your child is doing. If you fully participate for a couple of weeks you may come away with enough perspective to be noticeable to your children.
The worst that will happen is you’ll come away with some more life experience.
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