Bill Corbett

It may seem strange that I'm grouping television with the other two items, but when it comes to parenting, why shouldn't I? What do they all have in common? They can have dangerous effects on our children. Most parents do good jobs keeping their kids away from the later two, but when it comes to television programming, many others let their kids watch it without supervision. Yet experts continue to warn parents that letting their kids have unsupervised access to TV is not a good idea. In fact, in a recent online article , experts in Australia are concerned about coding changes that will allow mature content shows air well before kids are in bed. If experts are making this warning , why aren't all parents concerned? There are good things about television (or even Internett) programming and bad things. Instead of putting more controls on networks, websites and producers, isn't it time to put more pressure on parents to step up and supervise another thing that is int...

I’m a father, a grandfather and a stepfather, and am speaking on behalf of all the parents who feel strongly about protecting our children and young teens from what they don’t need to see on the Internet.  I’m addressing this to all the parents whose children have smart phones and tablets with internet connectivity and I’ll make it plain and simple, “Please don’t buy a data plan for that internet-ready device you are providing to your child or young teen!”  At the very least, please don’t let them leave the house with it. I have been called old fashioned, too controlling, or even up tight, so any other labels won’t surprise me… bring it on.  We consider ourselves “doing our job.”  We have worked hard at home, providing our children and grandchildren with supervised access to the Internet so that they can enjoy reasonable entertainment, log in to text books for school, and check the latest funny cat videos on Youtube.  Every one of them has done it all from...