2. The internet diluted my influence on my children, broadening their world views and creating teens less bound by the parochial constraints of their time and place. In an earlier age my children would have seen the world through my eyes or that of media I had paid to have delivered to our home. Instead from an early stage they began to ask questions of Google and Wikipedia, and with that I lost some control of what they knew and how they knew it, and it all happened much younger than I imagined.