By Angel Kane
Like all parents, I have become keenly aware that the World Wide Web is much more than Facebook, amazon.com and Pinterest. For me at least, that has been the sum total of my basic internet world. Throw in a crock pot recipe search and an online symptom checklist here and there and that is what I spend my time doing when I’m surfing the net.
I suppose, however, I’ve always known there is more “bad stuff” out there but considering we live in the country and our internet was slower than a slug, I’ve never worried much with what our kids were looking at online. If they did try to search anything inappropriate it would take an hour to search for it and another two hours to download it and by then I’d be onto them! Thank you Jesus for buffering!
But recently technology came to our part of the world and with the dawn of technology came the need to monitor what they were now looking at online, losing my ever loving mind when I found out and then restricting them to all access!
And like any mom, when it comes to my kids, I went overboard.
I not only put all sorts of restrictions on our iPads, computers and televisions but for extra good measure restricted our verizon phones plans and then the icing on top was a program that tracks, restricts, and then reports their every move.
It’s called Mobicip and it’s the number one monitoring program in the country. For just $39.99 a year it has the works.
Problem is it’s going to cost me way more than that to hire an IT guy to undo it!
So I spent several hours downloading, uploading, putting in my special codes by which I now literally control every device in the house.
No one can watch anything without my approving it. No one can go anywhere without my being able to track them and find them. No one can search anything without my getting to search it right along with them.
That includes my husband. (Woops!)
So on Sunday I’ll turn on the family locator app to find all my teenage children and my husband, who is in our den watching football, will call out “Why are you trying to locate me, I’m right here!”
In war, it’s called collateral damage! Problem is I don’t know how to remove his devices or mine from this nightmare.
Family locator is the least of my problems. We can’t watch anything not age appropriate for anyone under 7 years old without my phone sounding an alarm. Searching anything requires me to remember my 10 digit code! And every few hours I’m having to approve a search that is completely appropriate, that is if you consider searching “Why Jalen Hurd quit UT?” an appropriate search from a middle aged man.
Arguably, I could just remove the restrictions but then I would be admitting defeat. Not to mention the fact that I would have to have my 14 year son show me how!
Oh how I long for the days of AOL and dial up!
