Google Made My Son Cry Too or How Google+ Ruined Our Evening

First, I have to let you know that this post's title refers to Martin Sutherland's post Google Made My Son Cry, written a week ago. You should read it (or at least check it out), as well as its follow-up post, because our experience tonight was very similar to his and he explains it all so much better than I can/could.


OK, I am feeling a bit better and more at peace after reading Martin's posts (I read them with my son), but I'm feeling a bit disgruntled and sighing a lot, because after all, it was a hard and sad experience. Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Soon after our sons were born, back in 2002 and 2004 after we had been using gmail accounts for a bit (I cannot remember find out when we started using gmail, it's just too hard to do it using my inbox, does anyone know how I can do it more easily?), we created gmail accounts for our sons because we wanted to save their names. In the end, K forgot Kelvin's password and that account was lost (and that name cannot be used anymore, blah!) and only Linton's original email is still available.

Then, three years ago (I blogged about this, but I'm too lazy to look up the exact date/post) I got an email for Kelvin and he used it sporadically to email family. This email has just been disabled today and will be permanently deleted, with all its content, in 29 days. As I understand it, until fairly recently (up until last year is what I was able to surmise from forum postings online), one didn't need to provide a birthday to open a Google account, one should only agree to their terms of service. And it is in this respect that Martin and I did wrong -- since we should have been aware, from something that is not even clearly stated in those terms, had we read them, that our sons could not have an account until they were 13 years old.

Well, but our sons did have gmail accounts and when they tried to join Google+ and entered their birthdates, they lost access to their accounts. What made Kelvin most upset of all was that I, unaware of what could happen, had agreed to his suggestion that I add him to Google+ (I honestly thought it'd be OK since he already had a gmail account -- we were both aware that he was not supposed to be part of facebook until he was 13). So I had failed him big time. :(

Losing that email account is not such a serious problem for Kelvin (perhaps only for the code for Bejewled Twist that he had in an email there) since most emails he exchanged with friends and family were fairly short and unimportant, but it was still very upsetting for him. And obviously I feel/felt very guilty about all this.

I'm very thankful that I found Martin's posts, but I'm upset that my son had to go through this. He does have other gmail accounts and I hope we can keep those. One thing my husband was wondering about is about the username -- will he be able to use the same username in three and a half years?


It's strange moments like these that remind me that we're definitely living in a "brave new world" and that so many of the things that people and, most importantly, kids nowadays take for granted are, indeed, very recent and new.

I haven't been that excited about Google+ and now I'm definitely very upset at this -- according to Martin -- unintended consequence of its roll-out: depriving children of their cherished email accounts.

How would you feel if you could no longer use your email?

P.S. Martin received lots of really nasty comments for his original post. I hope I don't get those here. I supervise my son's use of the internet. He would check his email once a week, sometimes once a month at best. I am actually very relieved that it was not such an important thing to him. PHEW!