Cogs can think.

I regularly wonder, how on earth do you teach your children proper use of the computer?

On the ‘children’s news’ just now, they reported on an application for Windows which parents can use to timely shut down a computer. This functionality is of course built-in into Vista and OS X (parental controls), so I don’t really know why they had to report on this particular application, but hey.

I just don’t get this. What kind of parent are you if you cannot even control your own chlidren’s computer usage? When I was younger, my parents weren’t exactly very strict on this issue - they gave me enough time to play on the computer, and they quite effectively distributed computer time between my two older brothers and I. However, when my parents said, “and now it’s enough, shut the thing down”, I did just that. Of course, I did try to sneak in an extra few minutes, and of course tried to whine until they let me play longer, but in the end, when my parents really said “end”, it really did mean “end”.

I can remember one time I was playing Age Of Empires online, and since I did not want to ruin my online ranking, I kept on playing despite my father telling me to stop - he went back the living room. Since I didn’t stop, my father got quite angry (and rightly so), and after that, I never did it again. That is proper parenting.

I really don’t understand the present day culture in parenting; parents try to shove all responsibilities they have as parents towards the schools and teachers, the government, to programs that block computer usage, censorship, and more of that nonsense. ‘Modern’ parents in this country expect schools to teach their children morals and values, because they themselves are too busy at work and going out. They expect the government to teach their children condom use, the dangers of smoking and - of course, our biggest problem - alcohol (ab)use. And now, they expect computer programs to stop their children from sitting behind their computers for too long.

But in the end, all these things won’t properly raise children. Children ought to be raised by their parents. That is your job as a mother and father. Sure, it ain’t easy, but did anyone ever say it was? As a parent, you have to be strict, but at the same time, you need to be able to compromise. You need to make harsh decisions, but you also need to know when to let your children decide for themselves. And to make matters worse, each of your children requires its own specific parenting style - trust me, my own parents know a thing or two about that one.

You also cannot just take the easy way out - prohibing your children from everything won’t exactly work. It’s the classic story of Bluebeard - tell someone he can enter every room in the house except one, which room will that someone most desire to enter? Prohibiting your child form doing anything even remotely dangerous will not help in raising him - in fact, it will make him weak, unable to cope with the harshness of real life. In other words, a pussy.

My children will most likely be taught computer usage the way my parents taught me. Sure, you can use the computer, and do whatever you want with it. But when I say schluss, it’s schluss. If I have to rely on software parental controls, I probably failed as a father.