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March 28, 2008, 02:17 PM ET
Curbing Bad Student Behavior Online
There is a growing sense that bad student behavior online—pirating music files, posting drunken photos on their Facebook page, passing along malicious gossip about other students on the Web—has roots in earlier childhood, when they were not taught that, even online, there are boundaries.
Now a British psychologist, asked by her government to review how parents and children are affected by new technology, has weighed in with some support for this notion.
This week the psychologist, Tanya Byron, released her report, noting that in an increasingly risk-averse world, where children are not allowed to play outside without supervision, they are naturally drawn to the Internet as a place for exploration, to test their skills and their limits.
Ms. Byron says, however, that just as parents have taught children to cross streets safely—by doing it in stages, achieving more independence as they show more responsibility—parents need to exercise the same careful allowance for growth with the Internet. Parental controls on Internet searching and content retrieval should be pervasive, Ms. Byron argues, and gradually relaxed as children show they know right from wrong, and harm from health.
And perhaps, by their college years, parents won’t be facing a lawsuit from the recording industry because Johnny downloaded 40 songs in his dorm room without paying for them. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Student-Life
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