Parental Controls

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I'd like to apologize to the man with whom my child was chatting the other day--the one who likes to wear a bra and panties. The whole thing was my fault, and I feel just sick about it. Not that anything truly bad happened, at least not to my 10-year-old. I suspect that the male stranger who likes to wear women's underthings suffered the most in this particular virtual encounter.

It happened in an AOL chat room. I, of all people, should have known enough to limit my daughter's travels online to the well-prescribed routes--the kid-friendly places that have sprung up like day-care centers along the I-way. But I was harried, busy, too preoccupied with other things to take the time to parse the muddled prose that explained how Parental Controls work on America Online. And so I left the door to the nursery wide open, as Zoe discovered the other day. She clicked on a button marked "People Connection," a collection of virtual rooms where folks can talk about--and do--anything, and she wandered into the first place she saw. Participants in these chat rooms often write profiles of themselves, and Zoe started to read them--quickly zeroing in on a fellow who described himself as someone who wears panties and a bra. This fascinated my daughter, who is looking forward to wearing the same kind of underwear herself someday.

"Why do you like to wear a bra and panties?" she asked the man.

"Because I like the way it feels," he replied. "Weird," said Zoe, who apparently went on to ask the man about a great many things. Eventually, her cross-dresser correspondent got wise to the game. "How old are you?" he asked. "Thirty," my daughter dutifully lied, recalling my admonition to never give out her real age (or any other personal details) to strangers online.

At this point, Zoe realized that she had chatted herself into an awkward spot, so she roused me from the sandwich I was deconstructing in the kitchen. "YOU WHAT?" I shouted, not unreasonably. I don't believe I exactly yanked the cord from the computer, but recollections differ.

How did Zoe and I get into this situation in the first place? When I set up accounts for my daughters last year, I put strict controls in place: e-mail only from people on their buddy lists, no chat rooms and no wandering around the Web. These things were automatically blocked under AOL's pre-set Kids settings. After a while, however, I upped their ratings to Young Teens because adding people to the buddy list every time they got an e-mail address from a friend was a pain. A few months ago, the girls started clamoring for Instant Messaging privileges--all their friends had it! Instant Messaging was something that came only with unrestricted adult access, so I admonished the girls never to talk to strangers...and then I gave them the keys to the kingdom.

What I didn't know is that each of those settings can be customized. In other words, I could have left the Young Teen preset in place, blocking unrestricted Web wandering, for instance, while lifting the ban on Instant Messaging. Better still, I've since learned how to fine-tune the buddy-list setup (under Privacy Preferences) to make my kids "invisible" to anyone but their friends. I mean their school friends, not their new friend with the panties and bra.

For more on kid safety online, see aol.com/info/onlinesafety.html Questions for Josh? E-mail him at [email protected]