Live - From Duxbury. It's XBOX Live!

The great XBOX live experiment start on Christmas Day. The kids had been asking about it for some time. This was a last minute decision by Demi and me. If you had asked me a week before Christmas about getting this, I would have said no way. But after some debate, we decided that this would be a joint present to them both. While it would be a nice gift for the boys, the fear was that it would create more stress and more arguments. In our reasoning, it was also another round of ammo in the arsenal for redirecting desired behavior. Yeah, that's right. We could yank it away, if they acted up.
XBox live is another new cyber frontier for parents. Like any other aspect of parenting, there is a lot of due diligence to be done before just allowing the kids on line for gaming. This little feature allows kids to play the same video games as their friends, at the same time, while they are all in their own homes. That parts is cool. But it also allows user to play anyone on-line that wants to play. Random strangers. Any user name who could put a false profile on-line. Unless of course you allow them too.
As a parent, I wanted to know all about the security and privacy features of this application. While Microsoft does put a lot of information on-line about XBox, they don't put this kind of information at the forefront for parents. I had to take to the XBox user forums for any real kind of parental help.
It did not go over well, when the boys noticed that while they could play with other random users, they could not communicate with them. XBox live lets a user don a head set an talk real time, like a phone. A user can also instant message, set up private chats, share music, videos, games and websites, and browse playing history. I don't think most parents see it right off, but it's potentially opening Pandora's Box. It's too easy to get XBox on-line and just hand it to your kid. Why would you just set up an account and allow access without researching the impact? Have they not heard of To Catch a Predator? Would you hand your child a knife and say have at it? Of course not. But you see these technological dangers, XBox, iTouch, iPads, lap tops, smart phones, etc, just handed to young kids without a second thought. The boys can rant all they want about what other kids get or what other kids can do. But as I tell them. I am not those other kids' Father.