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An animated cartoon, Billy's Balloon, which can be found on YouTube, is a hit with four-year-old Jasper Tan even if he has yet to master the computer keyboard.
It is his favourite video on the popular video-sharing website and he can spend hours watching it.
Jasper's father, Mr Michael Tan, 39, an IT distribution firm's director, helps him to enter the key words.
Mr Tan thinks it is all right for the little surfer to watch videos on YouTube.
But he recalled that they once accidentally stumbled upon pornography while searching for balloon-related videos. 'I explained to him matter-of-factly what it was. He said he didn't like it and we just moved on to the other search results,' said Mr Tan.
Jasper may not be typical. He grew up in a home with at least five to six PCs. He has his own 7-inch Asus Eee PC 700 mini-laptop, on which he watches cartoons on YouTube as well as homemade videos uploaded by his father.
He also has two Sony Playstation Portable handheld game gizmos.
So savvy is he that once, he surprised Mr Tan by suggesting that an item the family could not find in the shops here be bought online.
Mr Tan does not set any restrictions on the amount of time Jasper spends on the Internet. He also has no plans to install filtering software on Jasper's Internet browser.
'It slows down the computer and is not effective at all. If children want to see what they want to see, they will find ways to do it,' he said.
Instead, he prefers to inculcate moral values in Jasper so that he will make the right decisions and choices online.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
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