Porn star calls parents to protect their kids online

It’s easy for parents to listen to the hype surrounding what’s on the Internet and fall into one of two traps.

Either the Web consists solely of pornography and other nasty stuff that they don’t want their kids to see, or it’s safe enough to let their children roam unmoderated.

Neither situation is true.

In an interesting, and welcome, twist, US adult film star Ron Jeremy has called for parents to install filtering software onto their computers to stop children gaining access to porn.

“Porn is definitely not for kids. Take it from someone who has worked in the industry for years,” he said at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Leaving aside for the moment the rights or wrongs of pornography — something that was debated last Friday in the Mommy Tech area of the show — it’s extremely important that parents are vigilant when it comes to what their kids can access online.

This goes far beyond simply installing software, but also means that parents must talk to their kids, rationally and clearly explaining how to stay safe online.

The fact is, most kids these days are more web and tech-savvy than their parents, and many know how to circumvent filtering software. That’s why dialogue is also vitally important.

We’ve covered the issue of Internet safety in the past. Here’s a selection of articles you might find useful:

• Stranger Danger in the 21st Century: Internet dos and don’ts for parents and children
• UK parents worry about but don’t monitor kids’ online activities
• Kids doing stuff online their parents wouldn’t approve of
• Young children using online social networks, three-quarters of parents “spying” on them
• Parents failing to monitor children’s Internet usage
• Unique family-oriented broadband service offers peace of mind to schools and parents
• Computer sellers partner with NSPCC to guide families in safe practices
• “Mum Says No” software allows parental control over children’s online time, reduces confrontation
• Children’s advocacy group launches NetSmartz411 online safety programme for kids

Facebook bad for marriage says new research

Social networking phenomenon Facebook is at least partly responsible for one in five marriage breakups, if you believe the latest research from a British online divorce service.

By scanning their divorce petition database, they found that the word “Facebook” was used in 989 out of 5,000 cases sampled.

It seems that virtual infidelity, often starting with “inappropriate sexual chats”, have caused the most upset.

Of course, the research isn’t perfect by any means.

Firstly, this is from a scan of their own database, and therefore implies that their clients are technologically savvy.

Secondly, it only scans for one term, and doesn’t imply that use of such Internet services are wholly responsible for people filing for divorce.

Perhaps if there are already problems in a marriage, one or both partners may make problems worse by their online behaviour, but generally I think this would be a byproduct rather than the initial cause.

Having said that, it’s interesting that seven in ten Brits say online flirting is acceptable.

We also have interesting, albeit sensationalist, stories like that of a couple driven apart by online games.

So, I’m not surprised that Facebook and other online activity can play a part in marriage breakdowns, but it’s certainly not the sole cause in most cases.

Full control of kids’ mobile phones now available to British parents

With parents worrying about their children’s use of mobile phones, a new service from Mobile Sentry could be just what they’re looking for.

Claiming to be the UK’s first full parental control system for children’s mobile phones, Mobile Sentry is mobile phone software that allows parents to set up allow/deny contact lists, monitor SMS text messages, block the mobile Internet, install download protection, track the phone via GPS (when available), and report on all communications sent and received.

It might seem a bit “Big Brother”, but it may help those parents who recognise the need for their kids to have a mobile phone but aren’t totally comfortable with them having free reign.

It costs £5.99 per month to keep the service active, and it only works on Symbian-based phones (which includes a lot of the Nokia mobiles and some Sony and Samsung models, but not the likes of the iPhone).

The Mobile Sentry website will even monitor the phone to check that the software hasn’t been uninstalled.

It’s not a foolproof system but, particularly for younger children, could provide the peace of mind that parents need.

Mobile Sentry

Seven out of ten Brits in relationships say online flirting is OK

For many, flirting by those already in a romantic / committed relationship isn’t seen as a problem, and even less so when it comes to doing it over the Internet. This is borne out by a new survey which found that seven out of ten Brits don’t believe there’s anything wrong in flirting with people online.

Ironically, the research was carried out by a web site encouraging online flirting. Of the 2,600 who took part, all of whom said they had a spouse or full-time partner, about the same number of men and women answered the question “Would you consider flirting online as cheating?” with a resounding “No!”

Many see this as harmless entertainment, but I’m not convinced.

Several years ago the phenomenon of online flirting was being studied, and Nathan Tabor wrote a great article titled Adultery is killing the American family which touches on how Internet usage can affect a relationship.

And do you remember the recent report of a Second Life affair which split a couple up?

Harmless fun or something more sinister?

I realise that there are such things as “open” relationships, and that flirting and eyeing other people up even when romantically involved with someone is often thought acceptable, but I’m a little concerned that 70% of Brits think absolutely nothing of doing it.

There’s something insidious about doing it online, too, because of the increased perception of anonymity.

Relationships really need all the help they can get, and I’m not at all convinced this developing trend will encourage healthy couples.

What do you think?

Photo by believekevin

Gadget Watch: Firefly glowPhone

Here’s a really simple mobile phone designed for younger children. The bright pink (or black) Firefly glowPhone is simple to set up and only has five main buttons, arranged in a butterfly pattern, so is much easier and less fiddly to use for small fingers.

Two of the buttons can be assigned to call mum or dad, while the middle one has arrow keys for moving around options. There’s a 1.5-inch colour screen which can display customised wallpapers, and there are also built-in games and ringtones.

Important features include an emergency button on the side of the phone, and the ability for parents to lock the phone to allow certain calls to be made or received.

The phone works on Pay-As-You-Go, so your child won’t rack up a huge phone bill.

If you think your younger child should own a mobile phone (half of under-10s in the UK do, apparently) then this might be worth considering. It’s likely that older kids and teenagers will want the latest, expensive, “grown-up” mainstream mobile phones.

The handset launch has been delayed but it’s expected to cost around £85 and you’ll find places to buy it at the Firefly Mobile Ireland web site.

(Via Tech Digest)

Gadget Watch: The rise of Blu-ray

This post looks at one of the latest bits of home entertainment kit. You’ve probably started to hear “Blu-ray” mentioned at the end of adverts for films. Read on for an explanation and find out how you can enter the world of high definition.

The rise of high-definition TV formatting and Blu-ray has seen a change in home entertainment and we are now able to create a full cinema experience within the family home, which is a great bonus during the currently economic climate.

What is Blu-ray? Blu-ray is a high-definition disc format and DVD is a standard-definition format. The higher definition means that Blu-ray is a significant improvement over DVD in terms of picture and sound quality, delivering a whole new exciting way to experience movies, games and music. Blu-ray discs play through either a BD player or Playstation III enabling the highest quality viewing experience available to date.

This new technology often sounds intimidating, however it’s surprisingly simple to use! You don’t have to throw out the existing collection of DVDs as they still play on these machines and in fact the Blu-ray player will even enhance the quality of your DVDs. Price has also been a worry in the past but this is a another surprise, with BD players now starting at £80.00 and Blu-ray discs available nationwide.

So, is Blu-ray here to stay? It’s a resounding yes, as 3D TV is still a little way off the HD images that Blu-ray provides are second to none. I recently viewed Disney’s Enchanted on both DVD and Blu-ray, the difference was astounding and I was able to create the cinema experience from my very own living room with a little help from the kids.

The science bit, how does it work?

The Blu-ray Disc offers better video quality and to do this each disc needs to hold more information so it is burnt using a different laser to a DVD. As these discs can hold more content they also have an array of bonus features and many players now offer connection to the Internet. This enables you to download additional content or features about the program or movie you are viewing.

With Blu-ray sales predicted to exceed 15m in 2009 we have been quicker to switch to the format than we were to relinquish the VHS. Recent sales figures from Disney home entertainment show that 1 in 10 sales of Wall-E were purchased on Blu-ray rather than DVD.

It’s actually quite simple:

1. Make sure your TV is HD ready – check to see if there is an HD symbol on your TV as nearly half of all homes in the UK already have an HD TV.

2. Get a Blu-ray player. There are over 67 different players now available, prices starting from £80.00.

3. Connect your Blu-ray player to your HD TV with an HDMI cable – it should be in the box with your Blu-ray player.

4. Blu-ray not only looks better but it sounds better too. Enjoy this enhanced audio quality with a simple surround sound system.

5. Connect to the Internet through your Blu-ray player to download bonus features and games that you and the kids can enjoy (most modern Blu-ray players support this feature – look for ones that say “BD Live”).

For more information on family titles available on Blu-ray visit http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/bluray/

Gadget Watch: B(l)aby belt, Memoir digital photo frame

Welcome to Family Relationships Magazine’s weekly roundup of family-friendly gadgets.

B(l)aby belt

Though currently only a prototype, the B(l)aby belt is like a hi-fi system for the womb.

It’s a wide, contoured belt equipped with a touch-sensitive digital music player and three vibration-based speakers that effectively transmit music directly into the womb.

Based on research which suggests that music (particularly classical) may help boost children’s intelligence, Canadian design student Geof Ramsay built the device.

It’s not commercially available yet but Ramsay is looking for developers.

Read more

Memoir digital photo frame

Digital photo frames are pretty popular these days. They allow you to view the photos taken on your digital camera or stored on your PC and have all sorts of fancy features.

However, getting the images on to the frame has potentially been a stumbling block for those not so au fait with technology, particularly if the photos are prints.

Here’s a solution from Skyla. The Memoir FS80 digital photo frame is also a scanner, so you can add those printed pictures that you haven’t got round (or been able) to get onto your computer.

It has a decent eight-inch colour screen and a slot at the bottom for feeding in photographs. It can even be used as the “go-between” for getting photos onto a computer thanks to its standard USB port – the same as you find on most modern PCs and digital cameras.

It costs around £178 and will be available from the end of this month.

Product page

Internet Watch: adult games sold to kids, Internet addiction, Twitter challenge benefits UNICEF

Welcome to Family Relationships Magazine’s weekly roundup of news about the Internet, particularly as it relates to children and families

Adult games sold to British kids

Trading Standards recently discovered that a number of online retailers are selling “mature” video games to children.

“The teenage volunteer visited 16 separate outlets and found that a dozen of them sold games. Only U.K stores Gamestation, Game, PC World and WH Smith refused to sell the titles.”

Read more

Children dependent on Internet

A new survey has discovered that Taiwanese children are more dependent on the Internet than ever before.

“Cartoon Network, from Feb 24 to March 23, interviewed a total of 1,001 children (aged between 7 and 14 years old) and 1,001 parents in Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung in order to find out more about the local children’s lifestyle habits. It released its survey results yesterday and found that more than 90 percent of child respondents use the Internet frequently, with nearly 50 percent of children whose age falls between 13 and 14 years old using the Internet to play online games, download music, write blogs, send e-mail or use instant message services on a daily basis.”

It’s inevitable and a trend that’s likely to be reflected in other industrialised countries across the world.

It reinforces the need for parents to remain vigilant when it comes to their children’s Internet usage, including setting rules and boundaries.

Read more

Twitter challenge raises money for UNICEF

Whether you’d heard of the “Twitter challenge” between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, or even cared, the real winners appear to have been children, as UNICEF announced on Friday that it has received $100,000 from CNN designated for the provision of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) meant to stem the spread of malaria.

Kids doing stuff online their parents wouldn’t approve of, survey finds

We’ve covered the subject of children’s usage of the Internet quite a bit already, as understandably it’s a subject of concern to parents.

Last year, a survey found that three-quarters of parents are spying on their kids online activities, despite another report suggesting that parents are failing to monitor their kids’ online habits.

Well, if the latest survey is to be believed, kids are still running rife on the Internet with their parents nearly clueless about what’s going on.

Bit black and white, eh, but then this was commissioned by a security software company (Symantec) so you might expect them to be pushing the virtues of their PC monitoring software.

In any case, their survey found that although three-quarters of parents are talking to their children about staying safe online, kids may still be bending the rules.

When questioned on how much time their children were spending online, parents answered with an average of 18.8 hours per month. In fact, the data suggests that kids are online for over twice that amount – 43.5 hours per month.

More worrying than simply how much time kids were spending online was that, when questioned, one in five said that they had looked at content on the Internet they knew their parents wouldn’t approve of.

“Having an open discussion with your children is something we really encourage,” said Marian Merritt, Symantec’s Internet Safety Advocate. “It’s not about coming down hard on them when they encounter inappropriate content, as the Internet is a great place to learn and to play, but there have to be boundaries. Kids in the UK are pretty Internet savvy, and parents need to keep up. We are encouraged by what we’re seeing, but there’s still work to be done by parents.”

Other interesting statistics from the survey included:

• 93% agree it’s their responsibility to protect kids online.
• 54% have set parental controls on web usage – the highest percentage globally bar India at 55%.
• 81% are confident they know what their children are looking at online.
• 31% of UK kids say their parents don’t know what they view online.
• 65% of UK parents feel very or extremely knowledgeable about discussing whether and when to share personal information on the Internet with their children.
• 16% of parents prefer to chat about sensitive subjects online rather than face-to-face.

There’s a load more information at the Norton Online Living web site.

Family Relationships Magazine is the #72 British parenting blog

Wow, we’ve actually made it on to a “top 100″ list! Thanks to Totsy’s Place for publishing the the first ever Tots100 Index of British Parenting Blogs and Bloggers and for ranking us at number 72.

The ranking is actually based on some pretty nifty online measurements, namely

1. Technorati Authority: number of blogs linking to this blog in the last six months
2. Technorati Inlinks: number of inbound links, excluding self-referring hits
3. Yahoo Inlinks: number of inbound links in last six months (excl self-referring hits)
4. Google Blog Hits: number of posts/links/weblinks in Google
5. Google Hits Recent: number of links from the last 30 days
6. Readers: number of subscribers based on Feedburner and Google Reader
7. HowSociable: the blogger’s visibility outside the blog, measuring activity on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Don’t worry if that’s all gobbledygook to you – basically it’s just a measure of how many people are linking here and interacting with us.

It’s quite an honour to be listed next to a number of fabulous parents who are blogging personally and passionately about their kids and their lives.

The top ten is as follows:

1. Petite Anglaise
2. Wife in the North
3. Jo Beaufoix
4. Alpha Mummy
5. My Boyfriend is a Tw@t
6. Crystal Jigsaw
7. Babyccino
8. A Modern Mother
9. Single Parent Dad
10. Notes from Inside my Head

The press announcement also offers up five tips for being a “Mummy Blogger”

1. Sign up for an account with a blog provider. Blogger is free and simple to use. Typepad and WordPress are a little more complex, but offer more features (for a price).
2. Choose a blog name and write your profile. Think about how much personal information you feel comfortable sharing – you can always remain anonymous.
3. Start writing! A blog is a bit like an online diary, but there are no rules on what you can write about. Recipes, days out, comment on the news – whatever you like. Just make it authentic, and remember to update once a week or more.
4. If you want people to read your blog, make sure you read other people’s blogs. Include links to their work on your blog, and try to leave comments on their blogs. Eventually, people will start to visit and comment on your blog, too.
5. As you settle into the ‘blogosphere’, consider creating a blogroll (a list with links to your favourite blogs) and creating an RSS feed (a simple way of publishing your blog content in a form that people can subscribe to).

So, thanks for compiling the list, Talking Tots.

Babylolly.com: share baby’s life with friends and family online

Letting friends and family from around the globe keep up with the latest news, pictures and videos of new baby just got easier with the launch of BabyLolly.com.

Secure and easy-to-use, the service allows an online “baby book” to be created, that can include photographs, videos, baby journal, baby “firsts” and favourites, and the opportunity for friends and family to interact.

The free service ensures that only trusted contacts can have access to the book.

BabyLolly.com was founded by UK-based BabyLolly Ltd.

Get that computer out of our bed! Virtual reality drives wedge between couple

There’s nothing like a bit of tech sex to sell tabloid newspapers, so the recent report that a wife wants to divorce her husband because he took part in virtual gay sex in the online game Second Life isn’t much of a surprise.

I reported on the threat of virtual adultery over three years ago, with some counsellors agreeing.

It’s easy to blame the Internet for all sorts of relationship problems, but as far as I’m concerned the reality is that anything can come between a husband and wife if the communication channels become blocked.

The trouble is that, while a husband’s uncontrollable urges for football or fishing or snooker or cars – or whatever other pastimes may take his fancy – can still be limited to some extent, computers and the Internet are available 24/7 and offer access to a huge range of things that could help to undermine a less-than-happy marriage.

Take the case of Lisa Best, as reported in the News of the World (not the most reliable of sources, granted, but let’s use this as a case study).

Lisa woke up in the middle of the night to find her “computer-mad husband … having virtual sex with another man on his laptop while he was in bed with her.”

For the uninitiated, Second Life is a type of virtual world where you adopt a character (called an avatar) and embark on adventures and relationships with other people. It’s escapism. It’s a fantasy, and one that many people find themselves increasingly hooked on.

John, her husband, said that there was no issue because it wasn’t real life.

She said “As far as I am concerned, having virtual sex with a man is the same as having sex with him in real life.”

He said “Second Life is just an escape and my avatar was just exploring things that I’d never sample – or want to sample – in real life.”

So who’s right?

Well, though I have my own views on this, I’ll attempt to sit on the fence and say that there’s no absolute right or wrong answer.

However…

If a wife (or husband) is unhappy with how their spouse is behaving, then there’s a problem.

It’s not for me to say whether John Best fantasises about being with other men, though it seems strange to me that you’d entertain such things – even in a virtual world – for so long without having some desire for them.

For me, that’s not the main point of the story, though I can sympathise with Lisa that it must be causing her a great deal of stress, confusion and inner turmoil.

The main point is why is one member of the marriage so attached to something that their marriage is suffering?

Granted, John may not have realised that his marriage was in trouble until that fateful night – he seemed keen enough to brush off the incident when confronted. However, anyone with such an obsession is in real trouble of messing up significant real-life relationships.

The article notes:

[Lisa] blames John’s computer obsession for destroying their sex life and any social interaction they had.

“Sex became less and less until in the end he just didn’t want it any more. In the past six months we only had it once-and that was after I pestered him for it,” she said.

Houston, we definitely have a problem.

“Over the course of 18 months I basically turned into a computer widow. He was more interested in his Facebook and MySpace friends than in me.”

Think this is extreme?

At one level, perhaps, but don’t believe that you could never fall into such a trap.

I know that, in my own marriage, we’ve put in boundaries and safeguards so that neither of us ends up neglecting the other.

For me, it’s ensuring that I don’t continue to work late into the evenings.

It’s also about maintaining communication. Spending time on Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, or indeed anything else in itself isn’t a problem. What is a problem is when it becomes obsessive or secretive.

What do you think?

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