How to protect my child from the harms of the internet

-- By EungyungEileenChoi - 05 Dec 2019

My daughter's Christmas list

Having put all the craziness of Halloween and the hassle with the big bird behind me, there's still the biggest (at least for my 8-year-old daughter) one left - Christmas! We have a tradition of making our two children write a letter to Santa and the main reason to do so was to figure out what presents they would most appreciate. However, for the last few years, I didn't feel the need to secretly open the letter addressed to Santa by my bigger daughter. For years, her only item on the list has been a smartphone and since I have been strongly contesting to the idea, this year she has shifted to Fitbit - or any other fitness tracker alike.

We just moved from South Korea where most Kindergartners already had their own mobile devices - a watch called "kid's phone" featuring instant messaging on side of phone call services and rather simple games. When my daughter was 6 and entered school, roughly half of her classmates possessed a smartphone despite the school's policy that no personal digital devices were allowed to be kept on within the school during ordinary hours. The rate of children carrying around a "smart" watch or phone kept going up and up as my daughter advanced to the next grade until my daughter was the only one in her class and one of only a few in the whole school without a phone.

But why?

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A GOOD mom

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