Group Assignment |~Question 2~|

Should parents allow children under the age of 12 to go on the Internet without adult supervision? Discuss.

Due to the technology development of Malaysia, no matter female or male, from the age range from 12 to 50 years old or even the children that under the age of 12 years old, they are using internet. The main purpose that they using Internet is to search for information, play online games or join those social networking sites. As my opinion, parents should not allow children that under the age of 12 years old to go on the Internet without adult supervision.

The main reason that parents should not allow them to go on the Internet without adult supervision because the thinking of the children that under age of 12 years old is not mature. In this age group, most of them can’t differentiate which of the online user whether are good or bad. With this, the children can easily get cheated by those online users who have other purpose other than make new friends or search information. For example, a robber who decides to rob a house can plan to get the home address from a child during online chatting by cheating him that he need the children’s address for sending gifts to the children. Besides, the immature thinking of the children tend to post out some sensitive issues likes prejudice toward the races to express their anger but they didn’t know that this will occur and bring up the conflict among the races.

In addition, children will also easy get the attracted from the online games and fall in the fantasy world without the supervision of adults. Once they get addicted in those online games, they will spend almost 12 hours a day and sit in front of the computer from morning until night. It will affect their healthy and academic indirectly because they rather spend a plenty of time online than doing their homework or communicate with family and friends. Besides that, they will also learn some bad language or short form through playing online games. As an example, WTH means What the Hell and Laugh Out Loud means LOL. This will affect their academic when comes to write essay. They will write out the short form without notice because they already get use to it.

Furthermore, the reason that parents should not allow children that under the age of 12 years old to go on the Internet without adult supervision because the curiosity of the children. For the computer that affected by the virus, sometimes there are some windows pop out while we surfing the Internet. Some is an advertisement whereas some of it is the photo or preview of some porn websites. With the curiosity of a child, they will just click in the website to check out what is the content about. They will find out a lot of pictures or preview once they access to the pornography website and this will totally affects their thinking in the future.

According to a Chinese proverb said that, ‘’curiosity of a person can kill an elephant’’ which means that it is very serious if a child been affected by those pornography websites since the age are only 12 years old. To prevent this happen, parents can just set a password to lock their computer in case that child wants to open. Then, parents should guide the children by scan or limit the sources before let their children go on the Internet.

As a parent, one should take the responsibility to take care of their children but not just focus on the career, especially in this advanced technology era. Children could easily get carried away in the internet without the guidance of the parents. Therefore, parents play an important role to look after their children.