Raising children in the digital era is giving me gray hair.
I am glad my sons only use the computer once in a while to play games on PBS Kids or Starfall or other such wholesome sites. Bird and Deal are only 5 and 6 (almost 7!), so I know their cyber world will change faster than 140 characters goes from a tweet to a, um, hmmmmm…., well, you get the picture. Geesh.
I worry about how kids interact online these days. I sound old and I don’t give a damn. The online environment is chock full of some frightening shit. While the web offers plenty of amazing resources and writing and recipes and games and tips, it also offers up a shameful dose of predators and scams and plots and bullies. Did my parents think this when we got cable TV, I wonder?
I happen to know a young teenage girl whose parents have the best of intentions. She has given her folks her Facebook login information and has even friended her mom. Her mother seems to think her daughter leads an innocent, upstanding life online. I happen to know that said teen has another, secret Facebook account. This is the account that she actively uses and updates token bits about boys, crushes, parental irks, and the like. It’s all typical teenage fare and rather innocuous. What worries me here is the lie. Wool-over-the-eyes-Mom thinks status updates about studying and term papers are the extent of her daughter’s Facebooking. It’s the modern day equivalent of “I’m going to spend the night at Missy’s so we can work on our science fair project.” Translation: Missy’s parents are out of town and have a stocked bar.
I know another young teenager who has been friended on Facebook by an adult who used to work for the school system. It turns out this man friended a lot of kids. When the teenager I know logged on one day…correction…when his parents logged into his Facebook account (the real one, really), this man immediately popped in wanting to chat (Live chatting is a Facebook feature, one that I hate and have disabled.). It turns out it was during school hours, which the man should have known. Was he fishing around wondering if this teenage boy was home? Home alone? What gives? I smell something sketchy. And so did this kid’s parents. They turned the guy in. Turns out school employees are banned from engaging with students in such a manner. Duh! I don’t know how the story ends but I do know that it gave me a fright.
Creepiness lurks everywhere. I get that. But I am most fearful of the creepiness when I can’t be there to protect my kids. As a mother, my job as a human shield can only go so far. Mac Daddy and I have already agreed to keep computers (and TVs for that matter) out of our sons’ rooms. We purposely designed our home renovation to include a playroom right off the kitchen as opposed to somewhere on another floor out of sight. That playroom will eventually house a couple desks and computers when the Playmobil and Barrel of Monkeys have been cleared out.
I’m not naive here. I don’t think that my sons will exhibit responsible, safe behavior just because they know we’re over their shoulders. We obviously want to raise them with good judgment to ensure they make sound choices when we’re not poking around and underfoot. Forget WWJD. I’m thinking about getting them tattoos that say WWMDWYTD (What Would Mommy and Daddy Want You to Do).
The online environment just gives us parents more to worry about. Bullies have taken to the online superhighway. Creeps have infiltrated cyber social circles. Nastiness is advertised amid blinking lights, and things that make me say ewwwwwww are just a click away. Watching my sons grow up will entail a whole lot more than letting them cross the street alone for the first time. Navigating the cyber highway is gonna be a whole lot scarier.
But here’s the deal, it’s not the Internet’s responsibility to keep my sons safe. It’s mine.
Raising Digital Kids is Stressful | Dirt & Noise: Raising children in the digital era is giving me gray hair. I am… http://bit.ly/aI7vPj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
The digital age ain’t all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to parenting. http://bit.ly/9ZPOYP
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Not sure why anyone would want to accost you for this. It’s hard, it’s scary, it is our responsibility (which is WHY it’s so scary), and like our mothers before us, we’re simply not going to “catch” everything our kids do. We just have to hope the mistakes are big enough for the lesson to be learned, but small enough for the consequences not to destroy anyone’s life. Simple enough, right? Yeah. Right!
Wow, I can’t believe I had never considered that teenagers would have two FB accounts. Interesting and sneaky. I guess that’s just another reason it’s so important to do “vanity” searches on yourself and your kids frequently. As in all aspects of parenting, we can just do our best to arm ourselves with information and tools to be the best examples and teachers our kids can ask for.
I’m with Amy – the second account never occurred to me… which is weird, because that’s exactly the kind of thing I would have done when I was a teen… had cyberspace existed back then.
The genie is already out of the bottle in our household, and I doubt if I could have put it off. There is creepiness IRL, too and much as I want to protect my teen, I can’t be everywhere all the time. This is the world we live in, and we both need to understand how to navigate its dangers. Right now, I think we have good communication and I feel that I’ve raised her with good values. She has a good sense of responsibility.
I can only pray that it’s enough.
I once wrote an article about how to “spy” on your kids. It was about checking in on their online activity, phones with GPS (mostly, I was thinking of using it in case of something creepy happening…. not to check on them where they are every second) and calling parents of friends etc. I was ripped a new one on how I wouldn’t be fostering an open and honest relationship with my kids and they would not trust me enough to share with me. I also said in the article that there is no substitution for talking with your kids.
The reality is that things happen. We are the line. We need to build sensible kids but we also have to keep those with creepy motives out. If we don’t do our job, who will.
I taught in Jersey City. We had a six-grad girl in a neighboring school that was abducted from someone she met from her my-space page. We had six grade and seventh grade students involved in things well beyond their years, when they should have been playing ball, etc.
I will not be so naive.
Another challenge – the cell phone. We decided to get our 8th grader a phone to give him more independence, like riding his bike a couple of miles to the shopping center or the library It was also crucial for him to be able to text me from school to say he needed to stay late, or forgot him homework, or missed the bus, or things like that. Kids can’t just walk up to the office and use the phone at school -they’re basically in lockdown all day until they’re kicked out the door to go home. But unless you get your kid the absolute crappiest, cheapest TracFone out there, they have Internet access wherever they have their phone – on the bus, in their bedroom, wherever. We got him the cheap crappy TracFone, which is good and bad – no taking pictures of your friends and emailing them on FaceBook, no fast texting, no cool ringtones, but no Internet access in his room. It’s a tradeoff. But as smartphones get more prevalent, I think it will be harder and harder to find a phone that doesn’t have a web browser, even a TracFone.
I had been hearing about the multiple accounts idea for a bit now… very concerning. The last sentence in your post is a summary of what I wrote about recently regarding keeping our kids safe online.
June 2010: National Internet Safety Month — Writing to Sanity http://bit.ly/cKAaIZ
Things used to be soooooo easy. When riding your bike down the street was just like walking around in your own house. Can’t we just go back there?
As you say, this is scary shit. My kids (9, 6, 6) are still at the stage where they couldn’t deceive me if they tried, but I know that at some point they’ll want to keep some things private, and snooping around will only lead to deception and lies. I’m not looking forward to those teenage years!
GREAT post! I have a teen and a tween and their friends are amazed that they don’t have access to laptops. They use the family computer in the middle of the house where the screen is visible to everyone. My son is on facebook and is learning how to navigate it. In my daughter’s 4th grade class there were SIX 9-10 year olds with facebook accounts. My answer when my daughter asked if she could have one? Sorry about your luck. (said with love, of course)
And as someone who has worked with young people for twenty years, the adult should never “friend” the kid. Never. If they friend me they go into a limited profile group until they grow up. Whew, babbling on, thanks again for the post!