Do you know where your children are?

I had an experience I will never forget in 1995.  I came home from school one afternoon to what I expected to be an empty house.  I knew my sons were at work with their father.  When I entered the house, I found one of my youngest son's friends on our computer.  When I asked him what he was doing, he told me my son had given him permission to use our computer.  I called my son and found out the scoop.  My son was not aware the boy was still at our home.  He supposedly left right before my son left for work.  The house was locked, so I wondered how he was able to be in our home. His father was called and after a lengthy discussion with his son the father found out that the boy had hidden in our home until after my son had left for work. The father explained that he had taken computer privileges away from his son in their home for viewing inappropriate websites.  Therefore, the boy decided he was going to find a computer any way he could.  This experience was very disturbing to me and my family.  In this time of recession, most households are forced to have both parents working.  How do you keep our children from doing what the young man in my story did?  You can be the best parent you know how to be and your child can still make a poor choice.  This situation was a wake up call for my family.  We purchased more effective filtering software.

Overall, I see mostly positive developments from computers and technology. My sons moved from Atari Systems to video games and on to computer games. Now they are both earning a great living with computers as the center of their lives.  My eldest son has been working for Intel Corporation in Hillsboro, Oregon since 2000.  He started out as a Robotics Automation Specialist.  Additional education has moved him into the area of physical and chemical deposition onto the Pentium and Centrino Processors.  I have toured the Fab he works in at Intel.  It is amazing.  The tool he works with is larger than my living room.  He tells me a car can sit in the center of the tool with room to spare. Unbelievable!  My youngest son makes a better salary than I do at age 27.  He is a Visual Communications & Graphic Design Specialist.  I'm very proud of both of them.