Are Parents Pushing Kids Into the World of Technology?

When it comes to technology these days, age is just a number.

Between the child-friendly apps now available on iPads and iPhones and the younger users now more present than ever in the world of Facebook, it’s clear that social media has a solid hold on kids.

Yes, this can be positive in some ways, but it also may lead to issues. Currently, it seems that parents may be partly responsible for their young children’s online presence.

Parents are not just online for their own sake–they are online for their kids, too. They are posting their children’s pictures online, moderating Facebook pages for their two-year-olds, and blogging from their newborns’ point of views.

But what about kids’ privacy? Shouldn’t they have the right to wait until they are old enough to decide what they do or do not want online for the world to see?

For instance, parents today are relying more and more on tools like Facebook or Flickr to display pictures of their newborns a few days after birth. Yes, it’s an easy way for parents to share an important event with their long-distance loved ones, but shouldn’t parents give their children the right to choose whether or not they want to be on the internet?

Maybe this is something parents just don’t think about these days. But it’s something for them to seriously consider. Especially when we take into consideration that, according to a recent survey by a security firm, 81% of children have some sort of online presence.

Is this kids’ actual doing? It’s my guess that a chunk of that 81% of children are too young to even read the letters on a keyboard.