Parental disconnect: Good, bad & increasingly nonexistent?

In "What Parents Don't Know," MediaPost blogger Jack Loechner echoes Common Sense Media's own conclusion from its recent survey: that there's "a continuing disconnect between parents and kids when it comes to kids' digital lives." [Pew/Internet reported a "digital disconnect" in 2002, but between students and their schools, which I plan to write about next week.]

But how different are kids' "digital lives" from their real ones? As far back as the beginning of 2007, Pew/Internet reported that 91% of teens were socializing online with people they see a lot in real life. They're not "social networking"; they're just socializing – online, offline, at school, on phones, on Xbox Live, in virtual worlds, on computers, wherever. And there always has been a developmentally normal disconnect between parents and teens, where the latter's social lives are concerned. We can't and shouldn't know every detail of what they're up to when socializing with peers. They need some privacy, psychologists say – growing degrees of it, as they mature – because it's their job to disconnect from us as they become adults. To mix metaphors horribly, I hope that survey conclusion won't stoke the fires of helicopter parenting.

Teen social lives more visible than ever. Because so much of their socializing is visible on the social Web, parents actually have an historically unprecedented opportunity to know what's going on in their children's social lives (does the appeal of cellphone texting as kids' counter-measure surprise anyone?). Common Sense says that, "as our kids increasingly communicate through social networks, parents are cut out of the process of hearing how and what they say to each other." I'm sure that's true, but it's not the advent of social networking that's cutting them out; it's more because parents aren't engaging with their kids about how they're using social sites and technologies (though this has to be changing, now that research shows half of all Americans now use social network sites - see this USATODAY blog post). The need for parental engagement is probably what Common Sense (an organization I think highly of) is trying to get across, but I suspect many readers "hear" more of a blame-the-technology message.

The two points in Common Sense's conclusion that I think deserve much more attention are these:

1. "Social networks and mobile communication connect our kids to their friends 24/7." We really need to think about the implications of this for our kids. My younger child, my first one "texting-enabled" as he entered middle school (my older one "just" had instant messaging in middle school, which isn't entirely different, but it required a less-mobile computer). I'm observing that, for kids with texting, there just are no breaks from the drama. They're literally inundated with gossip or running commentary on their peers' inner and outer lives. Much more easily than their parents, who only had 2-3 phones in the house and often had to ask to use one, our children can be caught up in and sometimes emotionally carried away by this collective drama, their own school community's on-campus, off-campus, 24-7, highly personalized "reality-TV show." At the very least it can be distracting, and sometimes emotionally overwhelming. It can have tragic consequences it involves bullying. I'd love to have a parent summit where parents, psychologists, educators, school counselors, social workers, and teens who've been there can together think through the implications of 24x7 drama.

2. "When teens communicate either anonymously or through a disguised identity, the doors are left wide open for them not to be held accountable." Yup. We're talking about the impact of online anonymity and the "disinhibition" to which it gives rise (borne out in the "skank blogger" story I blogged about earlier this week, and these were grownups). Our "social intelligence" – ability to see, hear, or intuit the impact of our behavior – is impaired somewhat when we're online and on phones (see "Social intelligence & youth"). What happens when social intelligence goes down while social information goes up (or floods one's mental scene!)? We all need to be talking more about what mitigates disinhibition, which what's behind so much online harassment and bullying: training students in empathy and citizenship; showing them that they're not really anonymous online; helping them (and us) "get" that those are human beings with feelings behind those profile comments, text messages, and avatars; maybe all of the above? [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship".]

Then there's the media literacy piece to parenting the digitally literate. Right from the start of their exposure to media online and offline, we can show our children how to take what they read with a grain of salt , think about who the source is and what his, her, or its goal or intention might be, etc. YPulse's Anastasia Goodstein models this traditional media literacy in her commentary on the Common Sense study. When you turn the figures upside down, as she did, you get quite a different takeaway from the survey:

"63% of teens said they DO NOT USE social networks to make fun of other students [emphasis Anastasia's]

"87% of teens said they HAVE NOT posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves.

"76% of teens said they HAVE NOT signed on to someone else's account without permission

"72% of teens HAVE NOT posted personal information that they normally would not have revealed in public."

New media literacy's an ever more important part of parenting (and education) too – the kind that uses and models critical thinking about what we say, produce, and upload as much as what we see, read, and download. That, too, is protective and mitigates disinhibition.

I would love your input on all this. Please comment here or in the ConnectSafely.org forum – or send an email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

Related link

"They're Old Enough to Text. Now What?" in which the New York Times's John Biggs looks at what type of texting device is appropriate for what age level - about LeapFrog's Text and Learn, Kajeet, Peek Pronto, and T-Mobile's Sidekick (not the very popular iPhone, interestingly)

Where will online teens go next?

Some of us are watching to see if, now that so many parents are joining Facebook, teens will migrate somewhere else (see this post, suggesting that mobile texting might be a sign of diversification vs. mass migration). In her YPulse blog, Anastasia Goodstein just asked a good (related) question: "Should Large Social Networks Give Teens Their Space Back?" Teens have always needed to have hangouts of their own, away from parents (online too, now). I posted a comment to that effect at YPulse but want to blog about this too because I think the social network space is in a bit of a transition right now, and parents and teens might want to think together about and weigh in on this.

Where online socializing's concerned, I can see merit to both sides of the debate - on one hand, that teens deserve their own space and should have their own social network sites and, on the other, that it's more "normal" or reflective of the "real world" for sites, worlds, and games such as MySpace, Facebook, and World of Warcraft not to age-segregate.

Some social sites and services - such as YourSphere.com, Teen Second Life, and a forthcoming service called "My Secret Circle" - make segregation an actual safety feature, but I think segregation for safety will slowly be replaced by segregation by interest - people sharing interests such as fairies (as in Disney's PixieHollow), slopestyle skiing (as in NewSchoolers), or teens who aspire to be professional writers (as one teen told me is her reason for spending time on YourSphere). Segregation by interest brings a measure of safety with it, I believe, but you may be asking why I think segregation for safety is losing steam....

Because it's a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in US society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline (see the 12/08 Internet Safety Technical Task Force report's Executive Summary). Segregating teens from adults online doesn't address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation, according to UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center), which is a great outcome, but it's not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators. A long-winded way of explaining why I think age segregation is losing steam: the facts are emerging, and parents, schools, policymakers, and businesses will increasingly respond to reality rather than hyperbole (call me an idealist, but isn't this the way it works?) - please post if you disagree.

So my vote's with diversification. Teens will simultaneously: 1) continue to diversify their platforms and channels for socializing (social sites have lost a percentage of teens' social/leisure time to texting on phones, but I think also to a lesser degree to massively multiplayer online games and gaming communities like Xbox Live and Sony Home); 2) stay in the giant, general-interest social network sites just because that's where everybody is and these really are social utilities that for teens have replaced email, chat, IM, etc. as separate social tools; and 3) also increasingly hang out together in vertical sites and other quiet corners of the Web where parents aren't around.

As for Anastasia's question about whether the giant sites should give teens their space back? I don't know about should because I'm sure she'll agree the business question is would they? And the answer is no, because their massive-traffic business models won't allow it. The logical question is where the social Web's natives and early adopters will choose to go not just to hang out, but to do the amazing array of things they use the fixed and mobile social Web for: keeping in touch, comparing class notes, designing, software writing, fiction writing, commentary writing, video producing, being entertained, job seeking, marketing, activism, solidarity - generally just the digital version of living. The answer to that, necessarily, is a vast and growing number of social media and technologies. I don't think it's going to be a giant monolithic thing like social networking again. But I definitely could be wrong about that. Please tell me if you disagree, especially if you know what the next big thing is!

Related links

"Living and learning with social media: Many American youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives," a talk given by social media scholar danah boyd at Pennsylvania State University

For some background on social networking in general: "The Life and Death of the Social Network: The Glory Days Are Over"

MyYearbook helps teens give to 'Causes'

The US's No. 3 social-network site, MyYearbook.com (see this), just launched a new feature called "Causes," YPulse.com reports. "MyYearbook users can choose from a number of causes like ending world hunger, fighting climate change, saving the rainforests or curing cancer. They donate with virtual money, i.e. $40 buys one grain of rice (expensive grain!), and then get a badge on their profile (status)." They also get to choose what advertiser gets to display its ad on their profile, YPulse adds. A percentage of the ad money goes to the cause to which the advertiser's linked. This is kind of interesting - the teen profile owner ups his/her coolness factor through both the causes and the products advertised. As in many sites for young people, virtual money (called "Lunch Money" in myYearbook), is earned by playing games in the site. ClubPenguin, too, has causes to which member penguins can give (but no advertising). MyYearbook is apparently close to reaching $20,000 a month in donations to organizations such as the World Food Programme, CarbonFund.org, Conservation International, Save Darfur, and Child Help.