Kids and Blogging: A Call for Parents to Respond!
Apr 30th, 2008 | Post By: Daisy | Category: Blogging for Kids
At the end of one full week of blogging with my son I am seeing some things that work, some things that don’t, and a lot of things that will develop as time goes on. I started writing a Top 10 type blog post and then stopped myself. After all, I have a grand total of one week of experience observing how my son approaches blogging. So instead of claiming to have advice to offer others I would rather gather information from others that are doing this!
With that said, I would like to start gathering stories and experiences from other parents with young bloggers. Here are some things I’d be interested in hearing.
- At what age did your child begin blogging?
- Was starting a blog his/her idea or did you suggest it?
- How involved were you in the beginning
- How involved are you now.
- How often does your child post?
- What types of things does your child write about?
- Is the blog public or private?
- What blogging platform is the blog using?
- Do you have any advice regarding kids and blogging that would be useful for other parents that are considering it for their own children?
- If you are comfortable, leave the URL of your child’s blog. I would love to share it with my son.
Alternatively, if your child does not have a blog tell me about how you think blogging would (or would not) be a good thing for kids to be involved in.
You can leave a comment on this post or use the contact link at the top of the page. I hope to get a lot of responses! I think the information gathered here will be very useful as I plan to spend a lot of time writing about this subject over the next several months (and hopefully beyond!)
The Kids and Blogging: A Call for Parents to Respond! by Daisy Olsen, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Morning,
I think blogging would be an excellent introduction not only to effective communications online, but also to teach monetizing strategies as well. eBay and Amazon let you monetize any topic imaginable, so any theme one’s child might consider can have affiliate links neatly embedded within.
That being said, it helps if your child actually has a desire to make money (mine, alas, do not). Even though they receive no allowance, they have no desire to be consumers. Go figure.
Congrats on your success,
Barbara
I’m not a parent, but I got started doing the web thing rather young… so I figured I’d tell my personal story…. because it’s somewhat relevant to the subject at hand.
My mother was one of those people who wasn’t afraid of the upcoming technology in the 1990s. She bought our first Windows based computer in 1993, and promptly signed us up for the online service Prodigy, making us one of the first online families in town. She was so convinced of the potential of these computers in schools, that she made it her mission to get them into the elementary/middle school I attended (the school had mostly computers of the Apple IIe vintage… which did have great useful educational software, but they were quite dated by the mid-1990s). In 1995, she was hired by the school as the Computer Technology Coordinator, and under her the school had a computer in every classroom, and were all networked together. I remember spending two summer vacations putting together the computers and configuring them for school, spending after school hours helping train teachers on how to use the programs on the computer, being the kid who was called down to the server room on the days my mother wasn’t there to figure out what was wrong with the network when it acted funny… All of this from the age 11-14…
When I created my first website, it was late 1996 and I was 12 years old and in 7th grade. I did my 7th grade science fair project on HTML and creating websites. My earliest journal entries are dated November 1997.
My mom’s philosophy on teaching kids how to use the Internet was “Teach them how to filter through good information and bad information. Teach them what’s appropriate to be surfing for. Teach them what sort of behaviors from other people are suspicious.” and what she’d tell parents (or have me tell parents… lol) is “Be aware of what you’re kids are doing, but don’t hover and try to control them. Blocking software is pointless, your kids are smarter than you are and can disable it. Talk to your kids. Don’t react and ban websites out of fear when you haven’t taken the time to research them yourselves.”
That being the philosophy of our household internet usage, my mom was almost completely hands off when it came to my website endeavors. I’m sure she looked at it in the early days, but by the time I got to be high school age, I’m not sure she knew where my website was. She trusted if there was a problem, I’d bring it up with her.
My journal entries from those days were mostly about likes and dislikes, opinions on various things, musings about my day… It was all public as this was before you could make things private easily.
My personal feeling is that 13+ need to carve their own path… I think it’s the parents responsibility to make sure their kids understand what’s appropriate to blog about and what isn’t… The fact that you need to take responsibility for what you write, and that some things you post may have consequences. How to respond to online bullying. How to recognize people who are unsafe, etc. I fully believe that a LOT of the problems that have gone on regarding teens getting into trouble with people they’ve met online is more due to parents being willfully ignorant and not educating their children.
Under 13, I think there needs to be a little more parental involvement than with teenagers, and at that age, they tend not to be as resistant to parental involvement as an older child. I don’t have any solid thoughts as to whether posts ought to be private or public, but I think if I had a child that age, I’d still rather be adminning their site.
My son doesn’t blog. Not yet anyway, he’s only 3. But I see his face when I sit here and play Ragnarok Online and surf through StumbleUpon. He’s gonna be a nerd like his mommy. Not a greasemonkey like his daddy. xD
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