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Three years ago, British software engineer Ian Hayward pondered a problem echoed by parents around the world: how to introduce his young children to the Internet without exposing them to its threats? So with Willem-Jan Schutte he created Glubble (www.glubble.com), a free plug-in that turns Firefox into a secure Web browser for children under 12.
Attempts to give kids an early jump on computing are not rare. The next generation of programming languages for kids are Phrogram (www .phrogram.com) and MIT's Scratch (scratch.mit.edu). And two grade-school teachers in the U.K. had their students blogging on behalf of their teddy bears (www.talkingteds.blogspot.com).
But educational psychologist Jane M. Healy, author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—and What We Can Do About It, is appalled that children are being targeted for Internet use. In 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested no usage for kids under 2, and 1 to 2 hours per day for older children. Healy, however, discourages any computer time before age 7.
"Between ages 5 and 7, there's a huge surge of development in children's systems," Healy says. "These are language systems, thinking systems—not looking-at-screens systems."
A recent study conducted by Elizabeth A. Vandewater, professor of human development at the University of Texas at Austin, found that 27 percent of U.S. 5- and 6-year-olds average 1 hour of use a day. Though she says an hour is a long time, she stresses that what really matters is what they're seeing.
"The way to make the Web 'safer' is to make sure the places kids are going are building the skills they need," she says. "And there are tons of Web sites that do that.—next: Most Expensive Domain Names >