Youth Ministry Ideas has posted on Youth Ministry Easter Ideas and Links – it is a great round up of resources for Easter so go and have a look around if you are in need of resources. Following posting our Easter assembly I will post up some of the activities, lessons and service ideas in the next few days.
Any scheme that’s attempted should take account of and have researched the many existing systems from parental advising websites.
One system is to have a ‘meta tag’ in the html code of the webpage that states it’s rating/content type(the website manager adds the meta tag, possibly after official approval). This sits alongside other meta tags that provide the viewer’s computer with information about the webpage title, description, creator, text-only version, etc..
The trouble is that it can be unclear what rating the website is. The ratings need to be clearly defined with strict boundaries. But as you point out, some children watch certain older movies.
The other problem is you need wide spread adoption. The internet isn’t one country and has no overriding authorities. The bigger thing is that alot of websites won’t bother to take up a system until 90% of over websites do it, catch 22.
If you want to go down the search for bad websites and block them, this is the same concept as anti-virus. Website blocking software has been easily available since 1997, it’s nothing special.
A side effect of this is when The Beano chat room blocked me saying I come from middleSEX. Kids will find a way to get around a block just because it’s there (and there will always be a way around). I would rather teach my kids the dangers of things you find, and watch over them when they’re really young.
Thanks for the post. Rather than assigning an age rating (with its built-in assumptions re: appropriateness) I’d rather see a fact-based assessment, like IMDB does. Here’s the Kung Fu Panda parent’s guide, for example: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0441773/parentalguide