I am sorry, this another rant about age.

The internet should not be your child’s fucking babysitter.

If you don’t know what your kids do online – do not have the fucking internet, if you haven’t learned about parental controls STOP LETTING THEM ON THE INTERNET UNSUPERVISED. And yes, a lot of you who are parents need to hear this and stop being so fucking naïve.

The internet, whilst being a wonderful thing is also a terrifying cess pit of addictions, lies, content and images young minds should not be exposed to.
It also should not be the thing that you and your kid default to without talking to each other. You get home from work a big stressed and want to scroll Facebook to compare yourself to other parents? Awesome… great… you don’t need to do it but if that is your default, what is your kid watching upstairs and unsupervised?

A few months back we had a child infiltrate the channel and lie about their age, I think it was about 3 weeks before it was clocked. In that time the amount of adult conversations that kid had been exposed to was a lot because where I have an 18+ channel, I only expect people to censor themselves so we stay within TOS – which gives you a HUGE scope for what you can do and talk about. What was WORSE is that when we found this out, it took less than 5 minutes to find their school & local sports club so I could email said places to point out the horrific risk the child had put themselves at by being so easily found. Thankfully they no longer have a internet footprint so I assume this was acted on appropriately. What could have happed though, if I hadn’t been thinking about safeguarding, if someone was really fucking bent on snatching a child had found them? That is scary.

Now I care about protecting my community, just as much – if not more than protecting YOUR child on the internet. Why? BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS MAD!

Seriously, if you confiscated all their devices now, and read through their messages I am quite sure the majority of you would be sick to your stomach. And if you don’t think you need filters on your home internet or for them to have their computer in an open family space, you are dead wrong.

Do they have comms when they play Fortnite? Are they calling everything ‘gay’ or calling people they don’t like ‘faggots’? You know here they got all that from – THE FUCKING INTERNET (unless you use that sort of language at home, in which case stop reading now and go and have a word with yourself).

Twitch is not an interactive babysitter for your kids, they shouldn’t have Facebook or insta until they know the ramifications of what having a digital footprint really means.
Educate yourself on how to lock your home internet and their devices down, and if you can’t – do not let them have them.