This story isn’t really worth rehashing further, and for those who don’t know, Jessie Slaughter is the latest cautionary tale about why kids shouldn’t have unlimited access to the Internet, especially social networks. Good Morning America provides a pretty neat summary.

The story isn’t interesting or new: maladjusted tween, absentee parents, and a virulent rash of cyberbullying and plain old pranking (including the tried and true $1,000 worth of pizzas), but what I do find interesting are some of the comments to the article. Here are a few that caught my eye and why:

It is no place for unsupervised children and letting children play alone on the nets is akin to dropping them alone in a bazaar in ancient Persia or throwing them to the lions in some Roman circus. To say otherwise, as you have done by not saying it plainly, is to lure more victims to their eventual doom.

Why are none of these so called “experts” telling her parents that allowing an 11 year old girl to have a webcam in her bedroom is a recipe for disaster? This whole video was disappointing. The fault was pointed outward at the Internet, when the blame lies solely with her parents.

I can’t believe that you turned the problem into the victim. You have covered the real story here. the issue is bad parenting. How can you let your child visit websites that are obviously not for children, posting pictures and videos of that nature. You must control your children or they turn into the problem, provided that they are not the problem already.

This case should be a textbook example on how parenting and common sense is going right out the window. You’d give your 11 year old daughter a web camera, considering how much “sexting” is in the news?

These types of stories are maddening. People act as if social networking is as vital as oxygen. How about some anti-Nike..Just Don’t Do It?

While our media outlets and “experts” are telling parents that simply blocking their kids from these sites isn’t the answer, parents are not buying it. Most of the parents commenting on this article seem to think that it’s perfectly within reason to prohibit a child from having unlimited access to the Internet for the good of the child. In other words, for every news story where we see parents throwing up their hands and claiming there’s nothing they can do, there are thousands of parents who believe in actually acting like parents.

Filed under: Internet Safety News