Even as the country is rocked by a scandal involving hundreds of Internet-related child porn arrests, Australian parents may be worrying more about how much the Internet distracts their children from daily life chores than what they do or don’t see online, according to a new study by local educators.
“A recent exploration of the everyday Internet lives of Australian families indicates that families manage these perceived risks in a variety of ways and are not overly troubled about this issue,” said authors Donell Holloway and Lelia Green of Edith Cowan University.
“Findings from the research project indicate that Australian parents are more concerned about some children’s excessive use of the Internet than about pornography,” they continued. “They construct the Internet as interfering with time available to carry out homework, chores, getting adequate sleep or participating in outdoor (fresh air) activities.”
Holloway and Green said that in public social debates technology is often held responsible for “a variety of harmful consequences” to children, in ways ranging from drops in social relationships to sedentary living and offensive materials other than porn, including and especially ethnic and racial hatred. Those debates and those arguments are often made at the same time the government, educators, and industry promote new technologies, they said.
“Other digital technologies, such as computer and video games, are sometimes seen as exacerbating these problems and raise the spectre of the ‘Nintendo kid,’ friendless and withdrawn, lacking in social skills and unable to relate to others except through multi-player games – although this caricature appears far removed from children’s normal experience of computer gaming,” the authors said.
But Holloway and Green also seemed to give credence to an older report by the Australian Broadcasting Authority that suggested that, among the real causes of Australian parental alarm over their kids in cyberspace, there lurks “the fear that parents are losing control of their children’s Internet activities because their own technical competencies are being surpassed by their children…. This leads to the fundamental anxiety that parents’ natural power base will be diminished.”
Still, they said, parental supervision of their children’s cyberspace activities involves various “strategies and approaches,” ranging from allowing children their mature autonomy to more direct supervision and even restriction of the children’s Net activities. But the authors also noted parents as often as not lose authority over their children when the children use the Net to affirm their independence from their parents.
