Friends gave their children (11 & 3) a pc, loaded with daddy’s download tools, no (child) protection other than some hacked anti-virus and firewall but they expect the older kid to use the pc for studies. Furthermore, they expect the school to teach about how to use a computer – not only to turn it on but also to stay safe. Of course they also complain that the kids spend too much time playing online games – the 3year old can’t read yet but navigates around the web like an adult.

No matter if the schools offer appropriate computer teaching or not, the problem is the combination of parents’ lack of knowledge and/or interest about the relation of their kids with computers as well as the well too frequent lax attitude towards illegal copies. Asking for a 200HKD complete computer protection is already too much.

My experience of most parents’ lesson to their kids: “get cheap pc, don’t pay for software, download illegally, no need to protect, discover by yourself”.Parents and (many) schools play a convenient game of pushing the ball about who to charge with teaching “Internet”; same as they do with “sex ed”. The punchline here would be that both actually must go hand in hand for some chapters. Reading recent Hong Kong news like “School sees red at little boy blue” are quite disturbing.

Even if parents are capable of teaching everything they should, there is still to consider the “time versus convenience”. When the choice comes down to kids vs. TV drama, you may easily guess what the preferred choice is. This isn’t just a problem in Hong Kong: I remember when I was in primary school, one teacher always complained parents abusing the school as a daycare center.

Parents, schools and kids are a doomed triangle: everyone is expecting the other one to do everything but nobody is doing anything what they are supposed to do.