Karen Wills, child psychologist, Girl Scout leader, and mother of Emma, 12, says that “back in the day” - of her own childhood, that is - she and her friends tested the waters of independence by getting together at the playground, the corner store, or even the vacant lot down the block to talk, check out each other, play games, and spend time away from home - but not too far away.
“Now,” observes Wills, “it seems like you have the Internet or the mall.”
Indeed, a whopping 87 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, according to “Teen Content Creators and Consumers,” a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and 57 percent of these have “have created a blog or web page, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online, or remixed online content into their own new creations.”
Well that sounds like a great way to stay out of trouble in River City.
Parents and experts agree that online communities provide opportunities for kids to weigh in on current events, stay in touch with friends, and even work through personal or relationship issues with peer support and feedback. But, says Dr. David Walsh, founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family, parents need to know the increasingly obvious dangers of the exploding online culture and how to mitigate them.
Recently, Walsh said, two East Coast teens were murdered in separate incidents by someone they had initially met online. Of course, children should never provide personal information online or agree to meet someone they know only through the Internet. But beyond this worst-case scenario, parents should also be concerned about the quality of discourse on these sites.
When Emma asked to create a web page on one of the popular sites offering free space, Wills investigated both Xanga.com and MySpace.com, browsing about 40 pages belonging to Emma's schoolmates (she did a school name search on both sites). What she saw surprised her. While she was impressed by the good design sense and obvious effort that many kids had invested in creating their pages, she was put off by what she considered highly inappropriate content on some of them.
“A lot of parents are shocked to find out how raunchy some of these sites are,” said Walsh. “Kids have always been interested in pushing the limits. But the limits in cyberspace are a lot broader, so kids can push them a lot further.” One parent told Walsh she discovered her son and his friends were exchanging sordid stories of sex, drinking, and drug use. When she confronted her son, he claimed it was all lies. “'Nothing on MySpace is real,'” he told his mother. Or is it? And even if it isn't literally true, many parents would despair that their kids were wasting their time inventing such lies. Sure kids will exaggerate and test limits, Walsh says - always have, always will. But parents should be just as diligent in monitoring their children's cyber-whereabouts as they would in finding out where their kids are going on Friday night.
Wills is not interested in censorship or in monitoring every little detail of what kids do online, but she says, “The whole thing felt like there needed to be a parent[al] presence in the [cyber] world and there wasn't. [The kids] were treating it like there is a parent free-zone. I feel like I walked in there and became that parent[al] presence.”
She draws an analogy with a time-honored kid ritual, the slumber party.
“I am not going to throw my sleeping bag on the floor in the middle of the party,” she said. “But I'm not going to take a trip to Europe that weekend either.”
And that is precisely the right approach, says Walsh. So let your kids have a page on one of the sites, but get their password and let them know you'll be dropping in from time to time. Chances are they might secretly welcome a lifeline to keep them from getting lost in cyberspace.
Web sites for parents
Media Wise:
http://www.MediaWise.org, an initiative of the National Institute on Media and the Family. Take a tutorial about how MySpace works. Links to lots of resources for media-savvy parenting and child development.
Wired Safety:
http://www.WiredSafety.org, a resource for Internet safety, privacy, and security.
