Does your baby send email?
Starting young: Having fun on Daddy's computer last year!
Maybe I should backtrack here a little and explain exactly why I set up an email account for Little Man. I had two reasons really. The first was that I thought it would be cute to send personal notes and thank yous to family from Little Man. And the second reason was that I want to teach Little Man how to interact in the online world.
I know we could have just as easily taken care of the notes and thank yous through phone calls and cards, or even a handwritten letter. But, I write so little by hand these days that I’m completely out of practice with it, to the point where I can barely read my own scrawl. So if I need to contact someone, it’s email all the way. And I expect it will be the same for Little Man.
The second reason is the more important one to me. I know it might sound crazy to be concerned about how a toddler interacts online, but like everything else, I figure the sooner you start laying down the ground rules and setting the boundaries, the easier they will be to enforce down the line.
Obviously right now, Little Man’s only email contact is with his grandparents and his aunts and uncles. But in the coming years, we’ll teach him how to use that email account to communicate with others. We’ll teach him what is acceptable in an email and what isn’t. And we’ll make sure he knows when it’s okay to give out his email address and when it isn’t. In his lifetime, it’s possible that Little Man will do as much or more communicating online than he does in the real world, depending on what path he follows. And, starting with those thank you notes and birthday wishes to family, we’ll be here to guide him and to teach him along the way.
