At what age is it appropriate for a child to have an email account?

I’m not sure. My oldest is 4 and I’m thinking not this year, :). Perhaps around their time in high school would be my best bet.

I let my 12 year old set one up a few months ago.

13ish. Depends on the maturity of the individual child.

What the hell does a child need with an email address? I think when they’re old enough to drive, then they can have an email account. I feel the same way about cell phones.

I have issues with the Internet and children. I know my daughter thinks I’m the worst but she didnt really start to go on the Internet until she was really 15. And even when she goes on now it has time limits and is full parental. Does not seem to hurt her. I explained to her why I don’t want her to go on sites without me knowing about it. She tries as much as a 15 yr old can to respect my rule that the internet is total corruption. When she turns 18, do whatever she wants but I survived without the Internet so can she.

I can’t see it matters. My toddler grandson has one, and he loves to get messages.

Yes it is an interesting question because there is this element of “protecting” our youth against the unfiltered world of the internet, but at the same time, technology is a part of our world, and to be successful in society in their day and age they will need to be able to navigate technology (even as something as simple as the reasoning ability associated with navigating the thousands of links returned from a search engine). Some of us older folks didn’t NEED the internet when we were growing up, but the reality is our youth will need to learn to master technology just to function successfully in society.

When should internet literacy be introduced in order to ensure that our children are successful in the rapidly growing technological society?

@Evelyn_475 I’m not sure if the “older folks didn’t need the Internet” was directed at me but rest assured just because I have parental locks on full and time restrictions for a 15yr old doesn’t mean she has absolutely no clue what to do or how to use the Internet. They teach them all kinds of computers in school. She can use it for education but entertainment purposes are highly guarded she is ok with that. My daughters only worry is school and grades which she is pulling an average of 86% and is in one of the best schools in the town. She is a third year air cadet and is planning on becoming a pilot. She is a great teenager I have no complaints!

My oldest is 10, and I set up an email account for her, but the only people that have her email address are myself, my husband, my best friend whom she calls “aunt” and her grandparents. She’s not allowed to give it out to anyone, and so far she’s had NO spam mail. She really loves to open it up and see cute pictures, videos and love notes that we send her.

My kids got email accounts through school in third grade. They are set up as walled gardens and they are monitored very closely. The kids mostly communicate with classmates. They also use their email accounts to talk to their grandparents and their dad when they are with me and vice versa. When it comes to social networking though, they are going to have to wait until they are at least 15.

The youngest my children had e-mail accounts was 9. They wanted to be able to e-mail his grandparents and cousins.

The best thing you can do to protect your kids from Internet predators is to have your computer in a very central place in your house. This has worked wonders for us.

My youngest tells me only old people use e-mail…it’s all about the text message and FB.

My daughter just poo-poohed me when I said it would be fun if she could email a guy she met!

I was thinking along the same lines as @BarnacleBill. I would be more likely to allow email before facebook. I am not super young, but even I FB and text more than email. Outside of work reports and such….

I started going on the internet when I was maybe 10. And I think that’s a reasonable age to let a kid have an email account, because that’s when kids start wanting to talk to each other when they’re not at school but can’t leave the house to see friends.

I think it all depends on whether you see your child as an intelligent entity that you feel that you have raised to act responsibly and to have a decent code of morals/ethics or whether you are a paranoid control freak who sees your child as either an extension of your own body or as a non-human, and who believes that the world is so corrupt that they should be sequestered from it.

Putting a number on such a thing is hard and really has to be done a bit on a case-by-case basis. I was able to cook for myself, do some shopping, and could basically survive a weekend alone well before I was 10. My mother raised me to not get into the sort of trouble many kids today do, but did so by making it uninteresting rather than making sex, drugs, and alcohol “forbidden fruit”.

On the other hand, we have lots of people, not all of them children either, who can’t be trusted to use anything responsibly. Look at some of your guys and gals in their mid/late-20s. The cast of Jersey Shore are all (technically) adults. There are many gullible adults out there that need to be protected from their own stupidity the way many believe children need to be protected from their own naivete.

So there is no “too young” unless you raised your kid totally wrong, in which case they will never be old enough. If your kid isn’t already sneaking beers, smoking pot, and/or having sex then the internet won’t make them do that. Conversely, kids were doing all of that long before the internet and e-mail hit mainstream.

Regardless, there is no “magic number”.

@Meego I see so many issues there that I don’t know where to begin. Suffice it to say, I think someone is in for a rude surprise when they hit the really real world.

@jerv I think your totally taking what I said out of context. And you don’t need the Internet to know about the real world. I would love to know how you see so many issues. I can control what my child sees but I can’t control what is put out here to see, which is a virtual library of anything, from real to fake to gore to whatever. I never said she CAN’T go on the Internet but I want my own “grading” system if you will. If she wants to know about life, she asks me. She has a life with a lot of friends and to be honest she hardly even asks to go on the computer. When she does I allow her. She has a very good life thank you very much in the real world.

Most websites, email providers etc, require that the account holder is 13 or over, for legal reasons.

This brings up a situation I just went through with my youngest son, who at the time was 10. I was pulled to one side by a mother and advised that my son showed her son TONS of porn when he was over at her house. My brain did some pretty amazing acrobats as I tried to figure out just when my ds would have had access to a computer to search for said porn. He is a Minecraft freak and that is pretty much all he does on the computer. Besides that we have two computers (side by side) as we homeschool and for sure either me or one of my other children would have seen what he was looking at.

After that uber uncomfortable conversation I spoke to my son about what happened. He was furious. It turns out that what actually happened was that this boy kept asking my son, “do you want to come and watch some porn?” as they were playing with Lego in this kid’s room. My son’s response was “No, I just want to play with my Lego”.

The main difference between the two boys is that I do not filter the Internet at all and the other boy’s mother doesn’t allow this boy to touch the computer (he got access to the Internet through an iPod touch unbeknownst to her). What I do do is have many, many talks with the kids about safe Internet surfing practises.

This situation led to a giant talk about the whole porn industry.

@Meego You can control what she sees on the internet when she is on your computer, but the rest of the world is a bad place, and I’m talking offline reality here. I feel its better to educate your kid about what to avoid in general; their internet habits will follow their morality, not the other way around.
As for the rest,i have reasons that I’ll PM you later I’m at work and time is limited

I guess I need to be more specific when I mentioned my daughter never really started going on the Internet until the age of 15 I actually mean that she started going on without anyone being around and the parental block on. For years we have had 1 pc and and only until recently it was hooked up to our 52 in TV, also the only TV we had, so if you needed the PC everyone else was either not using the TV or we used the PC together. The cause behind not having an email is trust, she had an email account before and broke the rules, she can have it back when she builds the trust up again which write now to me doesn’t look like until she is 18. My daughter is an amazing girl her only problem is that she can sometimes be a little sneaky about things, she has a minor issue with authority which I mean she likes to push limits. I am trying to teach her about authority without giving her cold showers and hot sauce thanks. She knows about the world, she is very independent and probably a little too much because of her authority issue she is 15 going on 25. She knows about the world she has 3 cousins all around her age who live this life of Internet and emails from age of 7, every video game box alive, let’s think the youngest one is 15 and around new years went to his girlfriends house and got totally drunk, why? They think it’s funny they see it on the Internet and think it’s funny…Internet education at it’s best!!

My daughter knows why acholhol is bad and what could happen.

I think I need to add that I had a small stroke some years back which affected the communication part of my brain, sometimes things I say come out totally different than what I think, sometimes I can edit and re edit and I can never find the words I’m looking for. Rest assured my daughter is in safe hands. Why even after losing her father and her grandfather two major male roles in her life and she is starting to come back out of her shell. Geez I never had to feel like I needed to defend my parenting skills in a non-Internet environment. All because it is faux pas to not let a child have an email. Really to each is own. It’s about guidance you should know your kid, and you have your own rules whatever they are. I mean if I never married my husband I wouldn’t even have a PC so we wouldn’t even have this conversation…then what? My kid would be screwed I guess.

@Meego…which brings us back to having to take it on a case-by-case basis.
I myself have always had issues with authority. That complicated my time in the military a bit, but one thing that has always worked to keep my ass in line was reason. Punishment never worked for me and only made me more spiteful and rather ingenious when it came to finding ways to sneak around the rules.
I assume that you would prefer that your child decided on her own not to break the rules in the first place, so banning email seems counter-productive to my mind.

I am an Aspie, so I know all too well about words coming out wrong.

@Meego Check your Inbox before you reply ;)

@jerv Well in a way that is what I did. She had the email, didn’t follow the rule as the girl she was exchanging emails with had gang affiliations…this ended up a major discussion in our household at our nightly dinner table. Something had to be done we lived in a bad area when we had our first home as at that time that’s what we could afford. We moved to a much better area with no threats. But I certainly was not going to have my child choose a gang life, so yes her email was taken. If she is going behind my back I am not sure when and then so be it, if she can get it by me that good maybe I don’t need to know about it and it’s a learning experience for her, not my type but I can’t always be everywhere but I try :)

My daughter is 11 now, but started asking for her own email address more than a year ago. A few weeks ago we finally set her up with one, but first went over the “rules” and made sure she was aware that we would always have her login information to make sure she was staying safe. The first week, she checked her email twice a day. Since then, she hasn’t checked it at all. The novelty quickly wore off because her best friends either don’t have email or don’t use the email accounts they do have.

The “right” age will vary from kid to kid like others have said. It’s a judgment call only parents can make and will hopefully involve discussion and oversight from the adults.

I think @BarnacleBill is right, and texting/Facebook will be/is to today’s kids what email was just a short time ago. In work and school situations email will probably continue to be more practical, but for social contact it’s easier to use that little phone you always have with you.

@MissAusten Pretty much. I mean, who needs email when you have IM, texting, Facebook, and all that? Email has it’s uses, but it doesn’t really fulfill the communications needs of todays kids the way other methods do.