I have an almost-14-year old daughter who has discovered the joys of blogging and the internet. 

As a parent, I feel it's my responsibility to somehow manage to prepare my children for the uneven playing field that is life but at the same time not blow their innocence away too soon.  It's hard, especially when you have a child who thinks they're worldy and society-savvy and wants to stake their claim for a little independence.  I want my daughter to know that I trust her, but to also know that I'm her parent and will step in if I think she's out of her depth.

The trick, of course, is not to LET her get out of her depth.  I don't want to come in and fix things; I don't want there to be anything to fix.  There are precautions that we take: 

She has to ask for permission to use the computer.  It's password protected, and she doesn't have the password.  She has to ask her father or I to unlock it.

The desktop computer is in the living room, and none of the kids are allowed to be on the computer when there's no adult in the room.  There's always an adult in the room whenever she or her brothers are online.

We don't have any messenger programs on the desktop, and we don't allow participation in chat rooms under any circumstances.

We have the user ID's and passwords to ALL email and ID-protected sites. 

Those are all good precautions, right?  I think so.  But I also think that they're not enough.  There are a million things that she could be looking at or writing about without my knowledge.  Things that, despite my wanting to give her a sense of privacy and respect, I need to know about.

So I snoop.

She knows that I snoop occasionally.  She knows that I am able to see exactly what she looked at and how long she looked at it for.  She knows that I am able to uncover what she wrote and see who responded.  She knows that I'm looking and monitoring, and whilst I think she might be slightly frustrated at my snooping she knows that I'm doing it for her protection.

She knows, because I've told her.  When I found an article that she wrote on her blog about how she was upset at her grandfather's death and how she felt unhappy enough to wonder how she could get rid of the emotional pain she was experiencing, I sat down with her in her room and talked to her about it.  She asked me to leave and then cried herself to sleep, but the next day she was able to tell me why she had written in and discuss how we could deal with her pain. 

When we found that she'd been visiting some pretty dark vampire/goth sites we again asked her what she was doing there and why.  She'd only been there briefly, but the content of those sites was disturbing enough to us that we felt the need to ask her about them.

She still visits some places that are not exactly my cup of tea.  She has her style and is developing a pretty strong sense of self.  She also has a well-defined sense of right and wrong, so I'm not terribly worried about what she does online.

I don't want to have a net-nanny.  I don't want to micro-manage the content of my kid's lives.  I don't want them to feel like I'm always in their business....but I want them to know that I'm still their parent and I WILL do whatever it takes to protect them from things I don't believe they're ready to see.

I snoop, and I'm not ashamed of it.