Photo credit: stolensnapshot

Every once in a while, I come across a situation in life-with-electronics that causes me to stop and say, “Hmmm.” While these dilemmas aren’t juicy enough to be fodder for playwrights and priests, they aren’t uncommon and take a little thinking-through as a parent.

1. Lying about the child’s age. This comes up when setting up accounts on adult sites. (By that I mean sites that are generally used by adults and not kids, but for purposes I’ve deemed appropriate for someone younger than the 18-year-old requirement. ) An example would be eBay: We set up an account for our child when he was selling some of his used games and toys. As a role model for my child, it was awkward to lie, even when I knew it was harmless. Non-digital parallel: Lying about age at the movies, or in other situations, when close to the cut-off.

2. Abiding by movie and game age ratings when at friends’ houses. Granted, I apparently care about and use rating systems more than most parents. But this gets hairy when the child goes to a friend’s house and plays a game or watches a movie that I wouldn’t allow at home. (While they’re not outrageously inappropriate, I just wouldn’t have had them at my home.) I don’t want to be such a hard-line mom that I put a damper on play dates, so I generally turn a blind eye. Non-digital parallel: When your kids eat healthy/organic foods at home but go crazy with junk food at friends’.

3. Ratting on other children. There’s a gray area between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, even online. It’s tricky to figure out at what point the offense is serious enough to bring up with the other parents, especially those you don’t know well. While I’d always want to know this information from other parents if my child were inappropriate, some parents are less open to this than others. Hence, my policy: It depends. Non-digital parallel: Telling on other children for their real-life behavior.

What mini-moral dilemmas cause you to stop and go “Hmmm”?