I just updated my kids’ laptops (yes, I know how insanely privileged we are…) to Tiger. In the process, I discovered that my younger son has been doing some Google searches with his friends for items that I would not consider to be entirely appropriate for unsupervised 8-year-old consumption. <sigh>
We went through this a couple of years ago with my older son, so I wasn’t exactly shocked. Gerald and I talked about what to do, and I was leaning towards taking the computer out of his room and limiting his use to public areas of the house. Then I remembered that I’d seen some information in the Tiger feature list about parental controls, so I took a closer look. Eureka!
So, for the time being, I’ve enabled controls on his computer for Safari, Mail, and iChat. It’s a whitelist approach—Gerald or I have to approve any new contacts for email or iChat, and add new domains to his approved list in Safari. I prefer whitelists to blacklists in this context, since it’s so hard to anticipate the many ways that kids (and spammers) can get around filters.
This won’t be a permanent state—I trust my 10-year-old to administer his own computer, despite a rough patch when he was around 8. But as a short-term response to the situation I think this will work. Yet another reason to be glad of the upgrade to Tiger.
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