Lewis Carroll’s story of Alice in Wonderland is played out today in the lives of your children as they fall into the rabbit hole of a virtual world. Instead of meeting Mad Hatters and Cheshire Cats and Queens of Hearts, however, in the digital world of the internet (the aptly-named World Wide Web) your children are meeting, engaging and sometimes befriending the types of unsavory and depraved characters you would never allow them to associate with in the “real world.”

Two or three times a year, a parent whom you know, discovers by accident that one of his or her children has been carrying on a vile chat through text-messaging or twittering. The parent is shocked and horrified to discover his own child – not just exposed to – but expressing such viciously hateful or fragrantly “dirty” ideas in the course of days or weeks or months, without thee parents having an inkling of it. Sometimes the parents have been too trusting; in other instances parents feel guilty about invading their children’s privacy as though reading a diary. But internet communications are not private. They are broadcast to the world. Dozens of “friends” might know what the children are broadcasting, but the parents remain blissfully ignorant of what is happening right under their noses.

Parents who have internet access in their homes must have complete control over it. They must regard it as a venomous serpent looking for an opportunity to strike. Parents must carefully consider the friends of their children through whom they could have easy access to the very devices and media those parents are careful to avoid in their own homes. The greatest danger to the children is the naiveté of their parents.