Raising a daughter in the digital era

I’ve been thinking a lot about what people are saying about raising children with the Internet and OMG all the porn!  Actually, I was inspired by this very level headed approach.  While Josh apprears to be starting out on the grueling raising of a daughter, I’m at the other end.  Daughter has left home and is attempting to find her way in the world.

I’m thus contemplating how well I did in raising a daughter at the dawn of the digital era.  Mind you, we didn’t have the internet early.  For most of her formative years, we lived in rural towns and I don’t really think I had much to do with the Internet until I did my Diploma of Education in 1995.  I remember taking her to uni with me so she could get online.  I also remember thinking that it wasn’t all that impressive, after all, in those days, you really had to know what you wanted before you could find anything.  There were heaps of pages created by people to show what they had found.  Link farms, I think we call them now, but that’s another story.  I was fairly unimpressed and really couldn’t see much value to it[1].

By the time 1998 came round, we had dial up access (in Bundaberg).  I do remember watching what she was doing occasionally, but pretty much left her to her own devices.  I know at times she was Up To No Good (TM), but I trusted her.  From the time she was about 13 or 14, we had often gone to the video shop (Tuesday nights cheap rentals, FTW!), and I pretty much let her get anything out.  This includes R rated videos.  She could get them out, on one condition: That anything she didn’t understand, anything out of the ordinary, anything that angered her, anything that challenged her, we had to discuss.  This meant that practically every movie needed to be discussed (mostly on the last three points).

Throughout her life, she has been able to ask me just about anything without me falling over in a faint and complaining that nice girls don’t need to know that.  She has been able to watch anything she wants, provided she discusses it with me.  She has had almost unfettered access to media in multiple formats.  She reads and writes what she thinks.

Did I raise a monster? A psychopath?  No, I raised a film and tv critic, with bachelors and masters degrees. Oh, and one of her majors was Ethics.

I suppose the moral of this story is that we need to respect our children and treat them with respect.  We need to recognise that they have minds and nurture them, feed them whatever information they need, then help them make sense of it.  If we treat them with respect, they will learn self-respect.  If we help them to think, they will do it.

We don’t need no stinkin’ clean feed to raise healthy, happy children!  In fact, we need the opposite!

1. The irony is that I now teach about it at uni and everyone thinks I spend waaaayyy too much time on the ‘net [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.