How many things have you Googled today?
If you visited the online giant in the past 24 hours you might have noticed a quaint bucolic scene featuring a random cow minding his own business in a snowy pasture. Then, out of nowhere a monster snowflake falls like the famous New Year’s Eve Ball in Times Square, barely missing the oblivious bovine.
The comical Google Doodle was created to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the largest snowflake, which reportedly landed in Montana in 1887.
For parents around the world that useless bit of trivia could have been the springboard for an interesting conversation with their tech-savvy kids.
After all, these days, it seems that using Google is one of the only things that parents and children have in common.
Only while you are busy looking up “Where are Max and Ruby’s parents?” your tween may be using the popular online search engine to get details on an “ice pick lobotomy.”
If you’ve ever wondered what exactly your kids are Googling, you are not alone.
According to a German newspaper, mega-famous parents Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have blocked their names on all of their kids’ computers.
“They can’t Google their mom and dad,” the 48-year-old actor told Germany’s Bild. “I don’t want to make myself dependent on what other people think.”
Shut down.
Can you really blame them?
Right now if you Google Brad Pitt’s name you’ll be met with 209,000,000 results. Likewise, typing in Angelina Jolie’s name yields 30,500,000 results… and most of those don’t contain flattering information on the good-looking duo.
Yet, Pitt tells People magazine that he and Jolie’s kids will never get to see all of the “noise” circulating on the Internet about them.
Good luck with that.
Whereas I applaud Pitt and his partner of seven years for monitoring what their young children can access on the World Wide Web, I highly doubt either one of them will be able to shelter their six kids for eternity. In a few years those children will be old enough and smart enough to bypass computerized parental controls.
And then the Hollywood heavyweights will be in the same boat as the rest of us.
Do you monitor your kids’ Google searches?
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