I'm baaaaaack!
And can never resist a cj survey! Hope I'm not too late!
1) How many children do you have and what are their ages & genders?
1, 11/F
2) How much time do they spend on the Internet each week?
At least 20 hours, most weeks
3) How do you supervise Internet time in your home?
By physically walking in and checking on her fairly often, by having her email account blocked from receiving anything other than mail from allowed email addresses (she has an AOL address; if I didn't employ blocking, her box overflows with spam of every stripe, including porn). We've also discussed at length the dangers of giving ANY personally identifiable information, and she knows and understands that beyond her first name and her general geographic location ("Los Angeles" covers a lot of ground), she's to give no other facts.
4) If your children are of varying ages, how do you differ your rules in television and internet usage between children?
N/A
5) What type of web sites do your children most commonly visit?
She mostly plays the online RPG "Dark Age of Camelot." Actual web surfing for her is primarily limited to cartoon sites, sites that are little more than giant ads for the toys she simply MUST have (Bratz, at the moment), and those "paper doll" kind of sites where the kids can pick dolls and dress them. She does a bit of research for homework on the 'net too.
6) Do your children use the Internet for homework or leisure?
Both
7) Have you ever had a 'situation' arise, funny or serious, through your children coming into contact with inappropriate Internet material?
Once my daughter accidentally went to some site or another that tossed her into a circle jerk. She immediately started yelling, "Mom, all these windows are popping up and I can't stop them! There are naked people on some of them... yuck!" I got her out of it, laughing the entire time.
8) What are you most scared of your children accessing on the Internet?
Some psycho pretending to be one of her peers.
9) How do you feel about the accessibility of adult material to children?
If I had my way there would never be any hardcore available on sites that are accessible to children. However, I think it's the responsibility of parents to monitor their children's internet usage, with the full knowledge that their kids can find anything for free if they look hard enough. I also hold the rather unpopular opinion (among the general public, anyway) that even if my (or any other) child happens to run across even something as far out as bestiality or scat content, it's not going to cause irreparable psychological trauma or deviant behavior. They might get grossed out or be gripped by a hysterical laughing jag, but I highly doubt there's any reason to worry about serious emotional damage.
10) What steps do you take in daily life to protect your children from inappropriate material (such as magazines, television advertisements, music video clips and at school)?
I don't take any steps to protect her from mainstream "inappropriate content," other than extreme violence in the REAL world (e.g. news pictures of war casualties, as opposed to blood and gore in a horror movie). Education is far better than proscription, IMO. We discuss the realities of marketing, and the #1 mantra that "sex sells." In fact, in our household it's more of a priority for me to make my daughter understand the psychology of marketing, and point out certain "Public Service" campaigns and programs that are complete horse manure, or manipulate statistics in order to support their position.
We run a very open household here, and I feel that the only way to encourage open and honest dialogue between ourselves and our child is to never make her feel like a topic is forbidden. If she's "not allowed" to see one thing or another, how can she possibly bring up any questions she might have if she IS exposed to it, or just curious, if she feels like she'll get in trouble for going there in the first place? In my opinion, parents do their children a disservice when they have all sorts of rules forbidding access to any sort of information, and really end up just pushing their kids toward those things (it's human nature, after all). The end result is usually a kid who's now seen/heard something they're "not supposed to," and doesn't feel comfortable discussing the subject with the people they should be able to go to for answers.