On parents' minds

Your comments and experiences can be valuable to other parents, so - with the writers' permission - I like to publish as many as possible. Five readers have emailed me recently about Neopets.com, parent-teacher e-conferences, and the Net in the lives of children. For their complete comments, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter. On email communications between parents and teachers, Paula in Wisconsin wrote: "I have to tell you that this is a WONDERFUL way to use email. I keep in touch with the teachers of one of my sons on a weekly basis...." Carol in Massachusetts wrote: "I think that email is a great replacement for the typical teacher-written note: friendly comments, reminders, simple questions, and some kid praise, but I think that it would be a disaster to use email for a parent conference, because email can be misinterpreted...." But she thoughtfully provided some practical guidelines for real-time conferences via email, and they make a lot of sense. Ron in Massachusetts, parents of girls 13 and 16, wrote: "I am not an unabashed fan of the Web, but I am convinced that ... if a Web service (most likely a 'walled garden' on the Web) offered carefully chosen, professionally produced and imaginatively presented games, activities, news, arts and adventures with well-researched learning value, a healthy interactive [children's] community would flourish." Mom and reader Julie emailed us a "warning for all parents of teen-age/computer literate kids" who spend time at Neopets.com, a very popular kids' site, where - after registering - they can create, care for, chat about, explore, shop for, and play games with animated pets. She wrote: "This is my warning: Their message boards are not monitored by responsible adults." She gives some examples of people (ostensibly kids but there's not way of knowing) swapping personal information in chat and ends with, "Please supervise your children's online activities!"



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