Is Cyberspace Safe for Children?

A Dangerous Passage

Offensive and inappropriate material on the net has brought about changes to children and young adults in general. For example, children can be accidentally exposed to numerous obscene pop-up banner ads and extensive pornographic content when they type seemingly innocent key words into a search engine, for example, the name of a singer such as Britney Spears (Cheon & Cho, 2005).

An article published in The Guardian entitled ‘Safe passage through a digital world’ dated August 22 2008 highlights the detrimental effects of the Internet on children. The article is written by Julie Nightingale and touches on what parents can do to protect their children from inappropriate online exposure. Plus, it is also explained on how parents can create a balance between protection and mental development pertaining to their child’s internet usage.

Internet safety issues for children are essential for parents to tackle.

Negative Effects on Children

As the dawn of the Internet has contributed in mental development of children, the negative aspects cannot be avoided. As Walsh (2006) noted, a ‘paradigm shift’ to multimodal texts have affected students in terms of literacy education. However, this shift has occurred so rapidly, it is hard to control the information being fed to children.

One of the effects of the Internet on children is encouraged violence. This violence is most usually promoted through online video games. As Anderson (2003) justified, high levels of violent video game exposure have been linked to delinquency, fighting at school and during free play periods, and violent criminal behavior.

Violent video games can prove to be hazardous to children.

Also, sexually explicit materials can desensitize children to deviant sexual stimuli and encourage them to enact antisocial aggressive sexual behaviors (Fisher & Barak, 2001). Furthermore, the Internet is a lure for pedophiles and often target children through online chatting (Cheon & Cho, 2005).

In the long run, children’s exposure to inappropriate material may lead to stunted social and psychological development such as increased aggression, fear, antisocial behavior, poor school performance, low self-esteem, lack of reality and identity confusion (Cheon & Cho, 2005). In my opinion, gate keeping and censorship of the Internet is essential in protecting children and parents should constantly monitor their child’s Internet usage for the goodwill of the child’s development.
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References

Anderson, CA 2003, Violent video games: myths, facts and unanswered questions, Psychological Science Agenda, American Psychological Association, viewed 9 November 2008, http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html

Cheon, HJ, Cho, CH 2005, Children’s exposure to negative internet content: effects of family context, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol.49, no.4, pp.488-509

Fisher, W, Barak, A 2001, Internet pornography: A social psychological perspective on internet sexuality, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, pp.312-323.

Nightingale, J 2008, Safe passage through a digital world, The Guardian, viewed 9 November 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/22/backtoschool.schools3

Walsh, M 2006, The textual shift: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp. 24-37