photo credit: Tanya Ryno

I recently had to send this email message to my normally well-behaved 12-year-old:

Hey, Cheechooguy (or whatever your screen name is these days),

You seem to be circumventing (that means “going around”) parental controls lately by asking permission to add people to your instant messaging list, then signing into my email and giving yourself permission. This is NOT how parental controls are supposed to work. Please don’t do this anymore,

…

For me, one of the major aggravations of the digital age is that each of us must manage a collection of passwords, just to access what is ours. And now I’m finding even parenting is not immune from password issues.

Andy has a multitude of screen/user names for Web sites and a few different passwords. His password path has paralleled his parents’. He started out with one very easy password to use everywhere, but that has mutated in several directions depending on site requirements (too short, too long, not the right mix of…

I was recently talking with a friend — a parent of teens — who said she suspected game developers purposely insert violence and questionable content deep enough into a game so that when parents “test” a game through play, they never reach it. While that’s possible, it seems unlikely, given the process used to rate video games. Which totally underscores why I think it’s important to read these ratings carefully — and to trust them.

The Entertainment Software Review Board (ESRB–esrb.org) determines games’ ratings and enforces advertising guidelines.…

Kids’ developing funnybones make them an eager audience for silly videos: A dog riding a skateboard or two guys lip-synching a song about e-Bay can elicit endless laughs. For such entertainment, we can thank YouTube. But this weekend, a friend related a story about her 10-year-old searching YouTube for “spin the bottle” and finding X-rated material that came up. I thought our family was well-protected by our parental controls, but I hadn’t before considered user-generated-content sites and unexpected consequences of well-intentioned searches.

YouTube does not have a “safe search” option, as other sites…