I would say maybe a little bit of both.

I think you have been doing a good job at home! You seem to care about what he sees while he is with you. The cell phone is a good thing so far because as he ages he can get more responsibility and then add the features with the understanding that is needed by both the legal and illegal issues.
Glad to see you care enough to put this out there.
Wish you luck as he ages.
ttfn AnnieEm

As a parent I cast my vote for good parenting!

I have an 11 yo boy too and I'm pretty strict on his online presence. He doesn't have an email yet, but I'm thinking about it. I do let him go on youtube but I have the computer in a common area so I can keep an eye on him. He does have a cell phone with camera and video. I'd never thought about it until the 9yo got one too and started videoing his friends. That made me uneasy. So no, I don't think you're overdoing it.

I have a few kids myself, LOL (7) I think you are being a good parent. He's only 11, I think you are doing what is best.

i didnt let my daughter do crap on the internet until she was 13.

the camera thing might be going a little beyond?

I'm with zany maybe a little of both. My son is 9 and uses the internet with supervision, he mainly plays games or chats with his school friends. His account on the pc has parental controls on so he can't visit any sites that may be 'too old' or inappropriate for him

First let me say I commend you for simply being involved enough to ask the question. That said, it's fairly easy to adjust account settings so that only his friends have access to anything posted. It's not quite the wild west. The world is NOT really a y more unsafe than it was say forty years ago. Statistically, there are not more predators, kidnappings, molestations, etc. What you do have is a breathless press reporting so mammy stories it makes you feel like it's a war zone out there. When you actually add up the number of actual incidents versus the number of kids, the risks are actually ridiculously low. As it has always been, kids are pretty safe just walking to school, sending emails, talking on the phone, and been plastering their picture across facebook or YouTube. The kinds of pics that could get him in trouble he's not even thinking about, you are. I live in a city of several million. When I was thirteen, I rode the bus twenty miles across town to my grandfather's business five days a week in the summer, alone. The only difference I see today is that some neighborhoods are a bit more dangerous due to vast quantities of street drugs. Other than that, it's still relatively safe for a child to move about. A recent NYT article said that a majority of kids no longer walk to school, even just a few blocks, but there's actually no valid reason for the parmoia or excess security. People think they are keeping their kids safer, ut the trade off is that kids grow up much more slowly and are missing opportunities to develop independence and life skills that will serve them well as adults. Unnecessary paranoia has replaced reasonable caution.

Definitely good parenting. Kids are growing up too fast as it is. Bravo for investing the time in your kids to allow them to have a childhood.

A bit of both. Up until my child was 13 parental controls where on the pc which was in the living room and he knew it . Upon turning 13 the parental controls came off and the computer was mvoed to the office. There were rules tho and they were strictly enforced. I am a tech so getting anywhere the kid had been wasn't hard to do and he was well aware that his movements would be tracked every once in awhile and if I found anything out of whack computer would be lost. IM went the same way. Every so often I would have him pull it up and just tell me who was on his list of friends - they all had to be people he knew in the real. That sort of thing. He got caught once misbehaving quite by accident and lost the computer for a month and that was the only time as he was miserable for that month and didnt screw up again. Its a bit harder to mess up if you know your mother the computer nerd is gonna come in behind you and work her "Magic" better than any parental controls ever could.

On the phone issue I think actually at the age of 11 there is no reason to have a camera on the phone. Too easy to get caught up in sending inappropriate pics or forwarding them and yes it is a charge that is getting more and more attention