Editor’s Note. Microsoft was one of the first corporations to step up to the Internet Safety challenge, and over the year’s they’ve created a number of educational and technological aids for parents and kids. This report from Microsoft talks about some of the new tools and resources that help parents make the right decisions.
Home video games and other digital media, so popular with young people today, present parents with serious choices about access, content and time. For instance, they need to decide with whom their children will be allowed to interact with online, what content is appropriate for them, and how long they are allowed to watch or play.

To find out how families have been coping with these decisions, Microsoft sponsored independent research: a survey of 800 parents of children between the ages of 5 and 17, all with a video game console in their home.

We found that parents do take an active role in their children’s media use and nearly all have some household rules regarding it. In fact, just less than half of the families surveyed have very comprehensive rules covering access, content and time. A majority said that enforcing rules was a source of tension at home. As a father of three boys, I can definitely relate to that!

In November, with help from three-time Super Bowl champion and father of three, Jerry Rice, we kicked off year two of a public education and awareness campaign called “Safety Is No Game. Is Your Family Set?” Its aim is to encourage family discussions about children using media in ways that balance school, exercise and fun. A dozen family organizations, including the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) and the Parents’ Choice Foundation*, are participating in this effort.

Together, we have published the family PACT, which helps all interested parties, but especially families, discuss and agree on comprehensive rules on media use. PACT encourages:

• P - Parental Involvement. Parents engaging with their children on media choices and options;
• A - Access. Settling on the access children may have to online play, including how they are allowed to play online and with whom;
• C - Content. Deciding on the content children may view using ratings and parental controls;
• T - Time. Choosing when and for how long children are allowed to play and watch games, movies and other video.

As a leader in interactive entertainment, Microsoft has long worked to help parents manage their children’s video gaming and online experiences. Xbox was the first game system with built-in parental controls, known as Family Settings, for both online and offline play. Windows Vista includes similar controls, which let parents determine the games their children can play, the programs they can use, the Web sites they can visit—and when.

Microsoft has answered a need identified by nearly two-thirds of the parents we surveyed, who said they would welcome a tool to limit time spent playing video games. Using the new Xbox 360 Family Timer, parents can limit Xbox play on a per-day or per-week basis. (A similar feature of Windows Vista helps parents limit time spent at the PC.) The Family Timer became available for download by current Xbox owners and launched globally in December.

Microsoft also provides a Family Guide brochure to give more information about the world of computer and video games. For those who have just purchased an Xbox 360 or Windows Vista PC, the Family Guide helps explain Family Settings for Xbox 360 and Parental Controls on Windows Vista. In addition, it now includes the family PACT.

Microsoft will continue working to give parents the tools and support they need to make informed and effective decisions in their children’s best interests. We hope our efforts will help families manage issues posed by new media technologies, today and in the future.

By Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Global Marketing for the Interactive Entertainment Business
* Disclosure: Parents’ Choice is the producer of The Sandbox Summit

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:20 am and is filed under internet safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.