Thursday, July 29, 2010

Event Viewer

It's summer vacation, but I still go go school during the week days. My 12-year-old daughter Yvonne stayed home alone this afternoon. She called my wife, asking her whether she can play computer and my wife said ok. We usually set 30-minute limit to our kids when they are playing computer games or just surfing the Internet. Therefore, we supposed that Yvonne would turn off the computer after she had played the computer for 30 minutes. However, as most parents can expect, we should not test our kid's self control. It is too tempting for kids to break the rule that we set if they are not under our supervision.

Tonight I turned on the computer she had used to check the 'Event Viewer'. I found that she had used that computer from 2:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. rather than half an hour as we usually said. I didn't punish her, but it comes up some issues. First of all, there has been a heated debate in Chinese ancient society on whether people are born good or evil. From Yvonne's example, can we confirm that most people are born 'evil' because it is not easy for us to control ourselves and keep ourselves away from temptation? Maybe we can't make that kind of conclusion, but at least we should know that most kids still need parents' guidance, supervision, and advice. Second, Yvonne kept asking me how I knew that she had played the computer for three and a half hours. Of course, I didn't tell her how. I guess that she may find out by herself one day. I promise my son and daughter that I am going to teach them computer skills next summer vacation. I am afraid that once they learn more computer literacy, they may know how to delete all the records in Event Viewer and also the view history of browsers. I should start to look for freeware that can monitor what websites kids have surfed or how long they can use the computer.

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