Toward solving 'cyberbullying': Editorial

Is the following what your teenager would think of as "cyberbullying"?: "Caustic comments, once passed around class as folded notes, are now immortalized on semi-public Web pages, where they can be viewed by thousands. Students are called fat, their sexuality is questioned and their fashion choices critiqued, often in language not fit to print in a family newspaper," the Washington Post reports, citing a number of specific such incidents in Washington-area schools. Educators, online-safety advocates, and many other adults often use "cyberbullying" as a blanket term for all that and more, basically any sort of harassment online. When some friends recently used the term in a conversation with their teenager, the basic response went something like: "Huh? What does this have to do with me? There's no lack of civility at our school." And yet just this year a teacher at that school was "trashed" by students in a social site. It just could be that "cyberbullying" is pretty meaningless to teens. They're familiar with the full range of behaviors but not this new blanket word whose use may actually undermine parents' and other adults' efforts to engage them in conversations aimed at helping kids think about these behaviors.

One Post source suggested that parents occasionally ask their kids if there was "any bullying on Facebook today?" Maybe it'd be better either to read up on some of the specific online behaviors and incidents in the news and talk about those, using them as "teachable moments" they can relate to. Or just ask questions about their school day - the kinds of questions our parents asked us. Then we can ask if they've noticed those things going on with their friends (or them) on MySpace or Facebook and how they'd handle it.

The Post reports that one principal "identified MySpace as the possible source of a conflict" that got physical at school and in a local mall. MySpace wasn't the source; its role was more like that of the school or the mall, the place where the behavior occurs. When we're talking with our children, it'd be helpful to understand this, too. Yes, their MySpace use can help expose their attitudes and behaviors to a lot more peers simultaneously and that certainly is a problem, but MySpace, Facebook, etc. are not the source of their behavior. Social sites are no more responsible for mean gossip or bullying than a locker room is.

Parenting young people who see little distinction between online and offline will get more effective when we stop blaming the places where antisocial behavior occurs (because we're better informed than that) and start asking relevant questions based on their own social experiences on the Net and everywhere else. When we can communicate in language they can relate to, sending the clear message that they are accountable for their social behavior online as much as offline, we'll move much more quickly toward solving the cyberbullying problem.

'The talk' revisited

It's not what you might think it’s about. It's not even a single, now-you-get-it conversation. It's an ongoing, long-term conversation families need to have about safe, constructive use of the Net and communications devices because both kids and technology keep changing. Marian Merritt, Symantec's chief online-safety evangelist, recently wrote about it, and I agree with her: "Your goal," she suggests to parents, "is to understand how your child is using technology, recognize any potential risk factors that need addressing and ensure you are the person your child can go to if something weird should happen when they are on the Web." All of that's important, especially that last point, because research shows that kids don't talk to parents about bad stuff that happens online, and we need to do everything possible to encourage them to. Merritt offers talking points for "the talk(s)" in the form of some questions you can start off with, but don't forget another good bit of advice: "Have the conversation during a quiet time when there are no time pressures," have the online computer at hand in case you want to check things out together, and "keep the chat neutral, not confrontational" so your child will continue the conversation willingly the next time!

Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together

Maybe it's obvious, but for anyone who's not sure the line between school grounds and what happens at home should be crossed, here's the view of a UK researcher who has been following the rise of cyberbullying closely:

"We know from research that bullying puts the emotional wellbeing and educational achievement of pupils at risk and has a significant and lasting negative impact upon children’s lives. In addition, it impacts on truancy, exclusions, participation in further or higher education and the incidence of self-harm and suicide," writes Dr. Denise Carter at the University of Hull in TeachingExpertise.com.

Why a home-school joint effort? Because this problem is not about technology or even behavior and discipline alone. One of Dr. Carter's findings in a survey she conducted was young people's "lack of life experience to deal with these issues on an emotional, psychological and social level." Young people gain life experience wherever they are - at home, at school, and everywhere in between - and adults in these learning environments know that there is no cookie-cutter way all children develop their street smarts or life literacy.

We know, too, that removing risk is not the solution to cyberbullying. It's teaching youth to "anticipate, recognize, and deal with risks as and when they arise," Carter writes. She also refers to their need to develop emotional resilience, as in helping them internalize that "this is not the end of the world," "I won't let this get to me," "I don't need to react," "there is more to me and my life than these people and what they're doing." These very basic concepts I'm tossing out as suggestions are mine, not Dr. Carter's - she may not agree - but they do illustrate her point that because life literacy is the solution, both problem and solution obliterate any boundary between home and school and deeply affect academic learning and success.

I'd add one more essential element: teaching citizenship, or social behavior. Our consumers or students of anti-cyberbullying education are not just potential victims or potential bullies (one can turn into the other in a matter of seconds on the Net); they're participants. In effect, they're stakeholders in their own well-being and education as well as their peers'; aggressive behavior hurts them as well as others because it can come right back at them and then create a downward spiral within the peer group and beyond (see also this article in the Archive of Pediatrics ). So the cyberbullying curriculum necessarily includes life literacy and citizenship. For a lighter but thoughtful take on cybercitizenship ed, see Vanessa Van Petten's "13 holy cybercitizen laws." [Thanks to California tech educator Anne Bubnic for pointing Dr. Carter's article out.]

Related links

"Another Teen Beating Videotape, This One in Indiana"

"Police think Indiana teen beating inspired by Lakeland [Fla.] case"

Tennessee fight video: "Two Southwind Middle School girls were suspended Monday after their locker room fight was posted on the Internet," reports the Commercial Appeal in the Memphis area.

"Video Beating Stokes Debate Over Fame, Violence" in TechNewsWorld.com.

New guide to videogame parental controls

The videogame ratings board and Parent Teacher Association have teamed up to help parents get a better handle on videogame safety. They've published a free parents' guide to both the ratings system and the parental controls on game consoles, including step-by-step instructions for the controls' settings on PLAYSTATION 3, the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and PSP, as well as the game controls in the Windows Vista operating system. You'll also find advice from "GamerDad" Andrew Bub about online gaming and a family discussion guide with talking points. "The booklets were distributed to all 26,000 PTAs, and are available in both English and Spanish on both the ESRB and PTA web sites," according to the organizations' press release (there's a link right to the guide from the presser).

'Running l8, luv, mom'

Kids are seeing texts like that from their parents more and more, the Washington Post reports. "Parental text messaging is outstripping the growth rate among younger generations. In the past two years, use of texting among people 45-54 increased 130%, the Post added, citing M:Metrics research - compared to a mere 41% increase among people 13-17. Apparently, it starts with k2k (kid-to-kid), then it's k2p (k2parent), followed by p2p (not file-sharing but rather parents texting each other to coordinate kid drop-offs and pick-ups and possibly other errands). And now it's even s2p and s2k: "Schools have caught on. Fairfax County and Montgomery County send automatic text-message alerts for weather-related school closures and other emergencies." If you want to learn texting lingo fast (some phones offer a menu of phrases), check with your cellphone carriers; it's quite possible Sprint, Verizon, etc. has a guide for parents and others getting up to speed quickly. Web resources include Lingo2word.com and netlingo.com.

Mother-son digital divide bridged

A recent discussion in ConnectSafely.org that illustrates what's still missing in best-practice guidance: dealing with the third-party code and hacks that, increasingly, are jeopardizing users' computers (and maybe sometimes their relationships with their parents!). This exchange also illustrates how parents' tech illiteracy can widen the parent-child digital divide referred to in the Byron report (see Part 1 last week). Parents need to know that the links and inappropriate content and messages they sometimes see in their children's profiles and blogs aren't necessarily created and shared by their kids.....

The mother, "WorriedMum," posted this in the forum:

"I am writing this because yesterday I have seen on my 13-year-old son's Hi5 page. Under the 'about me' section there is a link to [a site called] 'sexplaycam' with a picture of a naked woman. I went to the site and saw that you have to register to become a member of, now I am worried my son has joined this site. I asked my son if he'd put the link there and he said he had no idea it was there and went on his profile and deleted it. I know it is awful, but I am still suspicious. I also have Hi5, and the 'about me' parts, etc., can only be filled in by the person who owns the profile, right? But he swears he didn't know it was there and it must have been put there by someone else. So anyone out there with technical knowledge, please tell me if this kind of thing is possible."

We forwarded this question to our contact at Hi5, who explained:

"This was a spam attack on Hi5 members. A hacker inserted malicious code into profiles that either were 'phished' for email and password or clicked a link on a spam profile. We patched the vulnerability last Wednesday and will be cleaning out the innocent member profiles."

WorriedMum's response: "Thank you so much everyone for your help. I'm sure you can understand that at first it looked very bad to me, but I didn't want to accuse my son or tell him off before I was sure. Good thing I didn't now. Thanks again."

On monitoring online kids

Some parents continue to wonder how privacy they should allow their children, where online activity is concerned. Of course, there is no simple answer even in a single household. Even in a family we may have rules and values that apply to all, but in so many cases different ages require different rules, and each child is individual where rule compliance, maturity, and trust levels are concerned. Having said all that, though, I will add that no parent should hesitate to use monitoring software if s/he's concerned about a child's safety. If you feel your child's communicating a little obsessively online with someone you don't know and the child's otherwise acting a little strange (for example, spending too much time online or being secretive about his or her online "friends"), her privacy is simply not an issue; you're keeping her safe. But a commentator in the New York Times suggests there are other reasons to use monitoring software that make it perfectly justifiable, and he makes a compelling argument, but - again - I think it depends on the child. "Will your teenagers find other ways of communicating to their friends when they realize you may be watching? Yes. But text messages and cellphones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. They are usually one-on-one with someone you know. It is far easier for a predator to troll chat rooms and MySpace and Facebook." I agree about the trolling that happens on the Web, but he's missing the fact that 1) young people can share phone numbers via chat, IM, and social-networking sites which can be used later to call them on their cellphones (see "Grooming by phone too"), and 2) 90% of child sexual-exploitation victims know the offender (see "Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context"). But, speaking of MySpace and Facebook, this other perspective on teen social networking might be helpful too: "Dispelling 2 social Web myths."

Trend afoot: Cloud socializing

We all know that kids socialize and share media on computers, phones, Xbox Live, etc. They don't think much about the delivery device. Pretty soon neither will we. The New York Times reports on "pocketable" and "cloud" computing, pointing among other things to Adobe's new AIR software that will help "merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.... But," it adds, "most people may never know AIR is there. Applications [sub in "socializing"] will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk." I'm subbing in "socializing" because that's how mobile everything teens do online will be. They already make nearly no distinction between devices or online and offline. We're all just going the way of the online teen. The mobile Internet has only begun. Now think about filtering or monitoring software in this context. It can be useful, but how much control does it reliably give parents when online socializing is wherever the Internet is, wherever kids are? I'm not trying to discourage, just offer a reality check. Increasingly, the only safeguard as mobile as online teens, is the software between their ears. But loving, engaged parenting can be very flexible and spontaneous too and (most important for teens - though they'd be reluctant to admit it), parenting is there running in the background when it's most needed.

Ireland's social-Web guide for parents

Ireland's Ministry of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has just published a parents' guide to social networking, technology news site ENN reports. "The guide explains what social networking Web sites are and how they operate, all in a user-friendly format." The beauty of this is how available the booklet will be and that it's free. The government will distribute it through libraries, community information centres, credit unions, and Web sites, and mobile-phone companies will do so through their retail outlets. Please see the article for links. And - forgive the shameless self-promotion - my co-author and I published such a Parent's Guide to Teen Social Networking in the US and UK a couple of years ago (see MySpaceUnraveled.com) with Peachpit Press and Pearson Education.

FBI agent's practical advice

The headline on this interview in the Houston Chronicle states the obvious, but its subject - FBI Agent Randall Clark of the Houston Area Cyber Crimes Task Force - does not. This online-safety expert is clearly basing his message on reality, not fears. He says things borne out in the research of people like Dr. Finkelhor (see above): "The first thing that [parents] need to know (is) what the real threat is. A lot of parents think if their child's profile is online that someone will come in and attack them. The predator will go through the grooming process first," and if our kids know not to respond (and most online kids do), there can be no grooming process (see "How to recognize grooming"). Always ask your child first what he's up to online. [News-media generalizations work less and less because a child's social-Web experience is what she makes of it; it's a reflection of her and her social life - very individual.] If your child's evasive or secretive about who he's talking with online, there could be a problem, and you need to get more involved. "Parents need to understand that their child might be actively trying to deceive them. One of the things I actively advocate is that you have got to keep an eye on your child online. You can't let them have their computer in their room. You have to check up on them. You have to visit the sites they visit." If you have the sense that she's being manipulated or influenced by someone she doesn't know in "real life" and who may be an adult, it might be good to call your local police and the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (CyberTipline.com or 800.THE.LOST). But when the Chronicle asked Agent Clark if young people should be banned from social sites, he said, "I don't think so. Social networking sites are not evil. Just like anything else, they can be misused."

Tech first aid for '08 & onward

Filtering, monitoring, and other parental-control technology can be useful items in the family Internet first-aid kit, depending on kids' ages and maturity levels. But the most effective, always-age-appropriate tools these days are information and communication - as kids' knowledge of workarounds and malicious hackers' use of social engineering grow. Ideally, parents and kids are working together to develop children's mental filters in three areas - online safety, cybercitizenship, and computer security - folding both kids' tech literacy and parents' life literacy into the discussion.

Online safety and citizenship overlap, because now, as Internet access becomes ever more available beyond the home, young people's best protections online and off are critical thinking and intelligent behavior. We all hear so much about "predators" in the news media, but a lot of the "predation" or sexual solicitation targeting teens comes from peers or young adults and a lot of it has always been called "flirting." Aggressive behavior toward others online (mean gossip, dissing, acting out, seeking out risk for its own sake, talking with people they don't know about sex) puts the aggressor at greater risk, research is now showing - at risk of being cyberbullied as well as sexually exploited (see "New approach to online-safety ed suggested"). We need to think of our children less as potential victims and more as participants in this space, calibrating our parenting and online-safety messaging to the social Web.

Please don't misunderstand: Pedophiles seek out kids online, but they can't hurt your child if he or she doesn't respond. It's the kids "looking for trouble" - those most at risk offline - who are most at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim").

So ongoing communication about the importance of thinking critically about what kids say and how they act and react online is the most vital element in the first-aid kit (household or classroom). Another need: media literacy and being smart about what they click on and download - checking out widgets before they add them, analyzing the source and value of info encountered online, asking a friend if s/he really sent a link or attachment before clicking, researching a product before buying it online, checking out someone's profile before adding him as a friend, deleting weird comments and blocking the creeps from commenting again. Parental critical thinking needs to be in the kit, too, as parents ask questions appropriate for their own children's maturity levels - whether Mom should require that she knows everyone on a child's friends list or Dad should be on that IM buddy list, whether or how much to monitor a profile, whether parents help set preferences in an application or privacy features for a social-networking profiles, etc.

Here are some basic articles to include in the kit for developing mental filters: "How social influencing works," "How to recognize grooming," "If Gandhi had a MySpace profile," and this week's "Social networkers = spin doctors." As for computer security, that's essential too, and here are 7 clearly written steps to that end from Washington Post tech writer Rob Pegoraro. And if you feel a child is immediately at risk of victimization, contact your local police and CyberTipline.com (or 800.843.5678) at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

2008: Whose info is whose?

One of the things we'll all need to sort out on the social Web is what content belongs to who. Is your profile your content or that of the service hosting it? Are your friends' comments in your profile your content, theirs, or the host's? Sound complicated? It is. But it needs to be worked out in order to meet another need people are voicing: "data portability" or social-networking interoperability. "There is a crying need for some open and standardized format to allow social Web users to manage and move their data around," reports a San Jose Mercury News blog. "The data that your 'friends enter about themselves? Well, they've shared it with you, but is it yours to export? And since you've entered into an agreement with Facebook to voluntarily add information to Facebook's database, does the company have some kind of claim as well, (not to mention some obligation to prevent one of your "friends" from exporting your contact information without letting you know)?" These are not just copyright or content-ownership questions, they're privacy ones. Great fuel for family discussions on how information we post can not only get away from us but also may no longer be "our" info.

Wii-related 'parental challenges'

A California mom was "lucky" enough this past fall to walk into a toy store right after a fresh shipment of Nintendo Wii consoles had been received. So she bought one for her child as a gift, only too soon to discover some "hidden costs." "Be prepared for "post-Wii stress disorder," she wrote in the Los Gatos Weekly Times. In the last four paragraphs of her story, she suggests how parents of Wii players can prepare themselves (including if they get hooked themselves).

Parents speaking 'txt'?

This is probably not news to you: Many technologically challenged parents are being introduced to the world of texting by their children, the Denver Post reports. "Statistics point emphatically to kids and young adults under 25 driving the tidal surge in text messaging - up fourfold in the past two years to almost 30 billion messages a month," the Post cites wireless industry figures as showing. But I love the basic message of the article, that "the process of young people instructing their parents can be gratifying for both." It tells of an Arizona computer services company advising parents that it's fun to surprise your kids by sending them an out-of-the-blue message like, "I love you" or "What would you like for dinner?" Meanwhile, it looks like 2007 is the year when Americans will have spent more on cellphones than on landlines, the Associated Press reports.

Parental controls improving

We - parents - are the winners in the "showdown of new parental controls in Apple's Leopard versus Microsoft's year-old Vista," CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports. The reason is, filtering, monitoring, and time-control features are increasingly built in right at the operating-system level on both PCs and Macs now. That means it's all easier for parents to use and tougher for kids to find workarounds (younger kids, anyway). The huge key thing parents need to keep in mind, though, is that the idea of "the family computer" is beginning to fade - at least in the world's wealthier, more connected countries. More and more households have multiple computers, which might require rules restricting kid use to particular computers. But even so, the Web is available on more and more devices, most of them highly portable. It's also available at friends' houses, or course. The friend's house (or public library, or local wireless hot spot, etc.) is probably the No. 1 "workaround" for which no parental-control software you buy or set up works. Even so, Olsen reports, "parents are clearly paying more attention to technology for managing their children's computer use, especially as more kids venture online at younger ages." She cites NPD research showing that "sales of parental control software were up 47.3% percent in the first nine months of 2007 over the same period last year," and some of the top-selling off-the-shelf parental-control products are Enteractive, Microforum, and ContentWatch.

Librarians: Parents' best friends

Here's a thought to bookmark, parents of teens: If you have questions about how social networking works or a particular site, a really good person to ask is your local librarian. So many people now log on to their profiles and blogs at public libraries that librarians (and not just youth librarians) have become experts on the subject. See this article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, for example. So, either come to our forum, ConnectSafely.org, to talk about social networking online, 24/7, or talk to the social-Web expert at your local library. Some libraries are actually conducting "Social Networking 101"-type classes for parents and other adults looking to learn about the social Web.

For videogamers' parents

Less than half - 43% - of parents of kids who play video games play them with their children, the Associated Press reports, citing a just-released AOL/AP survey. "Overall, the survey highlighted how pervasive - yet age-related - interest in electronic gaming is today." The survey found that 81% of children 4-17 play computer or video games at least occasionally, compared with 38% of adults. As for those parents who aren't familiar with the games their children play, there's an alternative. They can read reviews of the games at a new site called WhatTheyPlay.com, which is a great idea. Surprisingly, a Los Angeles Times article about the site makes no mention of another helpful service for parents of videogamers: ESRB.org, where they can look up any game's rating (the site of the Entertainment Software Rating Board). Type a game's title into its search engine box - e.g., Halo 3 - and its rating will turn up (for this one, it's "M" for "Mature," for violence and blood and gore). The ratings guide adds a little detail, e.g., the appropriate-age recommendation for M games: 17+.

Parents on kids' Net use: Study

We're a little more ambivalent about our children's Net use than we used to be - but that doesn't mean more of us think the Internet is bad for them, according to a just-released study on this by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"While a majority of [US] parents with online teens [12-17] still believe the Internet is a beneficial factor in their children's lives, there has been a decrease since 2004" in the number of parents who believe so (67% then vs. 59% now), study author Alexandra Rankin Macgill reports. She adds, though, that there has not been a "corresponding increase" during the same period in the percentage of parents who see online activity as a bad thing (7% now vs. 5% then). "Instead, more parents are neutral about whether their children have been positively affected by the Internet, saying the Internet has not had an effect on their child one way or another [30% now vs. 25% then]." ["Now" should be qualified a bit, because the survey was conducted about a year ago.]

As for how we regulate our kids' Internet use, interestingly, as with videogames and TV, we tend to do so in terms of the content of the medium more than time spent on it - 68% have rules about what sites their kids can use, compared to 77% concerning TV shows they can watch and 67% concerning videogames they can play. So we're pretty engaged in their Net use - "despite the stereotype of the clueless parent," Pew/Internet found. Some 65% of parents say they've checked where their kids have been after they've been online, and "74% can correctly identify" whether their children have created a social-networking profile others can see.

There's a fairly predictable difference between teens' favorable view of technology and that of parents, though the percentage of parents with a positive view is high: 71% of parents say the Internet and cellphones, iPods and digital cameras make their lives easier, compared to 89% of teens. I noted with interest that 63% of US 12-to-17-year-olds now have cellphones, compared to 89% of parents. For iPods and other music players, it's the inverse: 51% of teens have them, compared to 29% of parents.

Related links

A pdf version of the full 6-page report is linked to here.

The headlines on this report from Pew/Internet ranged from "The Net is a bad influence" from a Fox TV news station in Indiana to the Associated Press's "Parents more ambivalent about Net."

In a closer, more local look at attitudes about the Net, the Orlando Sentinel found them "more nuanced" on the part of both teens and parents.

Parental concerns key

eMarketer points out how important parents' views of social networking are to this social-Web business. It cites the research of Parks Associates as showing that "virtual world advertising in the United States will increase tenfold to $150 million by 2012 from the 2006 level. That spending could be cut, however, if parents deny permission for teens to visit virtual worlds. And parental approval is not a given, since some aspects of virtual worlds are still discomfiting for parents." What Mattel's BarbieGirls.com does is require girls to pick a username, password, and age range ("the choices are 5 or under, 6-7, 8-9, 10-12, 13-15 and 16+"). The also have to provide a parent's email address, "which is used to send an automated permission request. Once the parent approves, a child can access the site." Of course kids can find workarounds: It's impossible to verify that the email address really is the child's parent's, and the message "simply asks the recipient to affirm 'that you are the parent of the child')." And proof of the child's age can't be required because children don't have ID cards or personal information in any national database against which sites could check (a scary thought - see this on child age verification). [eMarketer this fall issued a very expensive lengthy report on kids' virtual worlds.]

Keeping kids' phone bills down

"Australia has one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the developed world among children," the Sydney Morning Herald reports, so its Communications and Media Authority issued some tips to help keep kids' cellphone costs under control. Developed with the help of London-based Childnet International, suggestions include considering pre-paid phone services with built-in limits, using providers that track use between billing periods, using services that block extras like Internet access. For more suggestions, see "Ask these questions first" at the bottom of the Morning Herald article. The paper cites one expert as saying this can be a good opportunity for early family discussions about budgeting time and money. Children as young as five have mobiles in Australia.

Parents exposed in social sites

Kids talking about parents online can be good and bad. Some parents deserve more privacy, but the behavior of others should be exposed. Cases in point, reported by SmartMoney.com: A mom in Oregon arrested "for buying a keg of beer for her son's 17th birthday party, after the boy posted photos of the festivities on his MySpace page; a dad who lost his job after his daughter blogged about his "drinking a lot because of his boss, whom he considered a 'jerk'"; and a couple in Maryland facing trial for child abuse after their 12-year-old daughter posted in MySpace about their giving her pot and cocaine. In any case, it's not just teens' reputations that are at stake on the social Web.

Parent-teen connectedness, online & off

Pediatrician Trish Hutchison and ob-gyn Melisa Holmes, authors of the "Girlology" books for girls 11-16, say that "leaders in the field of adolescent health" call parent-child connectedness a "super-protector" for teens. They say it can have positive effects like fostering teen self-esteem and coping skills, reducing violence and drug use, and improve social relationships. In their book site the two docs have 10 tips for parents on how to connect with their teenage children. It looks to me like they apply just as well to parents of boys. I especially like the last four and have used variations of them many times myself when talking to fellow parents (the authors elaborate on the following on the page I link to above): "Be a parent more than a friend…. Learn the art of active listening…. Don’t freak out over anything [they] tell you - at least not in front of [them]…. [and] Encourage safe risk-taking." All the tips are applicable to their online lives as much as their offline ones.

Not 'the new Dr. Spock'

The headline of a recent CNET interview with MIT professor Henry Jenkins suggests he might be, but - though he isn't a pediatrician or child development specialist - he is one of the US's top experts on social media. So he knows a lot about how young people's social producing and creative networking with digital media. Referring to research showing that "57% of teens online have produced media and about a third of them have produced media that they shared with people beyond their immediate friends and families," Dr. Jenkins told CNET that those 57% "are kids who are learning to share knowledge, to collaborate over distances, to work with people from diverse backgrounds, to participate in a global culture - those are really powerful things that are emerging in this generation. But they're also facing dilemmas about intellectual property, cyberbullying and how to navigate these environments." It's challenging to parent them as they do this navigating, he says, challenges that "are not anything their parents taught them how to deal with. They don't have a language to talk to their kids about a lot of the issues they're facing online." It's becoming more imperative to learn enough about social networking to try to talk with our kids, I'd say, because - if we try too hard to control or even ban it, communication breaks down and kids go underground. They have so many workarounds and opportunities to connect without our knowledge. "Turning your home into a surveillance culture where you don't trust your kids is dangerous because you're going to make it harder to communicate with your child," Henry told CNET. "So part of what I've argued is that the kids don't need someone looking over their shoulders, they need someone watching their backs." For more on his research and views, see "Participation: Key opp for kids."

'eBullies': Coping with cyberbullying

This is the kind of incident that adds to school absentee rates these days: In Texas, a student "posted a page that he attributed to a classmate, complete with the girl's picture and numerous photos of her alleged sex partners. Other students … were invited to view the page," the Detroit News reports. Within two days 100 students had posted comments on the page. "The boy eventually was suspended for a few days … and the victim transferred schools because she was so distraught." The victim was hesitant to tell her parents, worried she'd lose her online privileges (a fairly common reaction, research shows). The Cleveland Plain Dealer has some at-at-glance statistics on bullying, though the first one - 3 in 4 students say they've been cyberbullied - is high (the Pew Internet & American Life's latest study on this puts it at close to one-third).

Meanwhile, parents, a book by two social workers cited by the Detroit News points to "the importance of parents getting kids to feel comfortable talking about their Internet time," offering us this advice: "Start with nonforced, nonjudgmental questions about their online experiences, ideally in a casual setting, they say, such as when you're shopping for back-to-school clothes or walking the dog together. Even if the child seems bored or annoyed, he or she actually may want to talk about it. Then listen." No doubt unwritten codes of conduct are naturally developing in peer groups, in school social scenes, and all over the social Web. For students, here's a blogger on Facebook etiquette who's encouraging a discussion on her page. For educators, there's a new set of courses at BullyingCourse.com from Canadian educator Bill Belsey, creator of the award-winning Bullying.org and "the world's first Web site about cyberbullying," Cyberbullying.ca. In the US, Nancy Willard's book Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats has a section on legal considerations for schools.

'Old guys' on Facebook

You might find a 17-year-old's perspective on 40+-year-olds in social-networking sites as interesting as I did, so see this CNET piece by summer intern Sabena Suri. "Before I get to why I think most of the older folks hanging out on MySpace and Facebook are creepy, here (in the spirit of open-mindedness) are a few of the more semi-legitimate reasons they might be using the sites," she writes, pointing to six, except the last one is "Being just plain creepy." Concerning those, she says most teens "learn at a young age not to add friends they don't know personally," and - though it's "sometimes hard to distinguish the creeps from the nice older folks" - the creeps often try a little too hard. Posers do stand out and look pretty "lame," Sabena says. Here also, from Newsweek, are 20- or 30-somethings on "Why I love Facebook" and "Why I hate Facebook."

Parents of college-bound in Facebook

Parents of the college-bound are beginning to use Facebook too - to find out what their kids' roommates will be like - and schools aren't sure this is a good thing! "A growing number of schools say they're getting more requests for changes — from parents who don't like the roommates' Facebook profiles," USATODAY reports. The article says housing officials cite party photos as referenced most by complaining parents, but one Syracuse University "says race, religion and sexual orientation are the top three concerns from parents contacting officials there," and an administrator at Suffolk University in Boston said sexual orientation was the No. 1 parental concern she heard about. Most schools USATODAY contacted said they don't make changes because of these calls, and the University of Chicago said it never allows changes until the third week (at Syracuse the wait is between 8 weeks and the whole fall semester). Meanwhile, you know social networking's mainstream not only when parents are checking up on potential roommates but when Wal-Mart's advertising back-to-school products in Facebook (see Reuters on this.)

Teen news editor

His screenname is Gracenotes and, “after his homework is done,” he works on cleaning up breaking news stories on Wikipedia for six hours at a shot, the New York Times reports. We all know how popular Wikipedia has become as a source for term-paper research (the Times article takes you behind the scenes at Wikipedia so you can see how viable this actually is, as long as other sources are in the mix). Wikipedia has also become a very viable news source, the Times article illustrates. It’s like compressed real-time news, a blend of encyclopedic summarizing that keeps up with news as it breaks. Its writers’ sources are usually the wire services (e.g., AP and Reuters) in Yahoo and Google News, and the difference is a “constantly rewritten, constantly updated” summary of a breaking story (as in Wikipedia) vs. “a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments” (as with conventional news on paper and the Web). Gracenotes and his fellow editors expand and correct a one-liner “stub” (almost like a headline) that someone posts about a breaking story (such as the Virginia Tech shootings). They almost compete for the greatest accuracy and “N.P.O.V.” (“’neutral point of view,’ one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars,” the Times reports. Note this comment at the article’s end, something very impressive to a baby-boomer journalist: “The Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding [the current culture of proud] subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.”

5 good tips for parents

…in a financial news site of all places - MarketWatch.com. It’s a good sign that intelligent tech parenting is going mainstream. I like these online-safety tips because they’re simple and smart, and they promote parent-child communication. Points worth highlighting: author and dad Adam Thierer’s “layered approach” to online parenting, layering tech tools (like Google’s SafeSearch and maybe filtering or monitoring software) with open communication; reaching out to other parents (tech parenting does “take a village”); and keeping up on kid-tech news (I’m showing my bias).

Online parenting tools: Long list + context

Marking National Internet Safety Month**, Adam Thierer - parent, author, and online-safety public policy specialist – commented in his blog: “This remains one of the great mysteries of the parental controls debate: Why is it that so many parents say they want more and better controls, but when they are made available many of them choose not to use them?”

Adams says some people think it’s because the parental controls aren’t easy enough to use and others because they’re too basic. I hope it’s because parents instinctively know tech tools are no blanket solution. Different tools (Web filters, phone filters, IM monitoring, Net curfew software, etc.) can be useful at different times, but nothing ever replaces parenting, even though we’re figuring it out as we go along!

Adam just released a book - Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: a Survey of Tools & Methods - that provides a very comprehensive survey of what’s out there for us, but saying in his introduction something very similar to what I just said: “If there is one point I try to get across in my book, it is that regardless of how robust they might be today, parental control tools and rating systems are no substitute for education - of both children and parents.”

Related links

Controls in the OS. Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg recently reviewed parental controls at the operating system level in both PCs and Macs. For PCs, he looks at the fairly comprehensive controls in Microsoft’s new OS, Vista. For more on Vista controls, see this item in my 1/12/07 issue .

PointSmartClickSafe: The cable industry has partnered with a number of national nonprofit organizations to offer PointSmartClickSafe.org, an online-safety-ed resource for parents and kids. Here’s the press release. Here’s Adam Thierer’s commentary on the project. The cable industry’s trade association, which spearheaded the project, is the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

**The statistics in the Senate's resolution on National Internet Safety Month, which haven't been widely corroborated in the online-safety research community, shouldn't be the focus of this document. For data, check out the research at the Digital Media & Learning Project, Pew Internet & American Life Project,and the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire - or search for "research" or "study" in the 10-year-old NetFamilyNews archive (search box at the top of each page).

Job interviews in Second Life?!

Yes. Business suit not necessary, just send your avatar. The Wall Street Journal reports that a big recruitment-advertising firm hosted a job fair in the Second Life virtual world “with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sdexho Alliance SA” and there’ll be another one in August. it’s now possible to meet with recruiters without actually showing up for a job interview.” So a ZDNET blogger decided that, with “future job prospects in mind,” it might be prudent to revise some earlier statements about Second Life, for example, changing this comment… “Second Life has gone from zero to cliche in record time as people sit around admiring their avatars. The dirty little secret: It’s a productivity drain”… to this view: “Second Life is great. I love my avatar, which is some rabbit type thing if I recall. It’s a great productivity tool.” Not that I’m suggesting we parents need to do any backpedaling from comments about teen time spent in virtual worlds. But a little open-mindedness might not hurt.

Tragic teen grooming case

Most teenagers know they’re too smart to fall for the manipulations of online strangers young or old, but they’re not, is the message of parents Danielle and Robin Helms in Orange County, Calif. They say that because their 15-year-old daughter, Kristin, committed suicide after she and her parents “tried everything” to overcome her depression over the end of her mostly online “relationship” with a man who had groomed the girl online for over a year and convinced her they were in love. “She was a smart, well-adjusted kid who was close to her family,” the Los Angeles Time reports. “She got good grades, got to school on time, ran on the cross-country and track teams and was an artist whose talent landed her in advanced classes,” the Times reports. When they found out she was communicating with this man, her parents banned Net use for five months. But parents need to know that “even in the strictest of households, children can flout access rules by hopping on computers at schools, libraries, coffee shops and copy centers and by using gadgets as handy as their cellphones.” And that’s what Kristin did, she later told her parents. She kept in touch with her “friend” via email and phone outside her home. [See also “How to recognize grooming."]

Parent videogamers

I love the parenting message in this Associated Press story, and I think it applies to teen social networking as well as videogaming. Across the US, according to the AP, many parents say hanging out with their children in the virtual worlds of videogames brings kids closer “by providing a safe, convenient way to stay in touch and talk to their children on their own terms.” Eighty percent of the parents who play videogames (35% of US parents) play with their children, according to an Entertainment Software Association study cited by the AP. One dad said “the time spent with his daughter … matters much more than the games themselves,” and the AP cites an expert saying that “videogames equalize the physical size differences between fathers and their kids. That means children often have the edge in a video game, and they may feel more willing to communicate.” That’s something I’ve been suggesting since I started writing this newsletter – that empowering kids (letting them be, e.g., the family chief technology officer or just asking them to guide a parent through software preferences) fosters both communication and mutual respect, which is increasingly protective of online kids. It’s protective because on the 24/7 user-driven Web it’s so easy, when parent-child communication breaks down, for kids to operate at greater risk online “underground” where parents can’t be involved.

Parenting with profiles?

I co-wrote a book for parents that includes instructions on how to create a MySpace profile. I’ve often suggested to parents that they create their own profiles so they can monitor their kids’ social-networking activities. But I have no illusions that this is the solution for every household with teenagers. Fellow mom Michelle Slatalla’s fun-to-read account in the New York Times of where creating her own Facebook profile got her definitely confirms that I should have no illusions that this is every parent’s online-safety solution. But it also confirms my growing conviction that – just as their social-networking experiences are just an extension of teens’ offline social lives – so does a parent and child’s online relating mirror their experience in real life. (Don’t miss Michelle’s account of her exchange with the Facebook spokesperson on p. 2 of her article.)

Extreme cyberbullying: 2 cases

By “extreme,” I mean bullying that has led to teen suicide attempts. Two such cases involving three New Zealand girls have come to my attention in the past week – one through our BlogSafety forum and the other covered in that country’s national news media.

The Sunday News in NZ reported this week that two 15-year-old secondary-school students were tricked by another girl into believing two teenage boys whose online profiles she’d created with scanned photos of magazine models had become their online boyfriends. The scam was discovered by the mother of one of the victims, according to the Sunday News, when she “found a scalpel under her daughter's mattress and an email on the teen's computer from her ‘boyfriend,’ instructing her how to kill herself.” When the mother called the imaginary boyfriend’s cellphone number, she found it belonged to the bully’s mother. The girl had conducted these online “relationships” with her victims for 10 months, the Sunday News reports, even going so far as to send both victims a number of gifts from the “boyfriends,” “including flowers, teddy bears and T-shirts.” This peer-to-peer grooming process culminated in an unfulfilled suicide pact between the two victims, the Sunday News.

My awareness of the second case started with this post in the forum: “Four weeks ago, my daughter, in a weak moment, attempted suicide because she was grieving a boy that she had met and communicated with” online and via phone texting. The mother, Karen, later emailed me a copy of her full story, detailed in a letter to New Zealand’s Health Ministry (published here, with her permission). The “boy,” she wrote, was - as in the Sunday News case – imaginary, the creation of another teenage girl, who enlisted the help of another friend to create the profile of this imaginary surfer sponsored by Rip Curl and named “Ben.”

I had read many posts about imposter profiles created about real people; this was the first I’d heard of profiles created about fake people – yet another kind of cyberbullying.

But that’s not the worst of the story. Before this experience, Karen wrote, three young people in their small community had been lost to car accidents and suicide, one a friend of the family. Then this past January “Ben” committed suicide while texting her daughter, Karen wrote. “Sophie [who believed he was a real person] was obviously desperate and was furiously trying to call him and text him, telling him not to do it … to no avail…. On asking Sophie more about this boy, she proceeded to tell me that he had suffered from depression, partly because he had witnessed a previous girlfriend hang herself, and that [another girl] had swallowed razor blades a few months before…. This was Sophie’s reality.” I’ll leave the full story to Karen.

If you're interested in my own take-aways from these cyberbullying cases, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Net-safety perspective

This Charlotte Observer columnist makes a darn sensible point. He points to a “National Survey of Children’s Health” by University of Michigan’s Children’s Hospital finding that Internet safety was ranked as the No. 7 children’s health problem by the US public (smoking, drugs, and obesity top the list). What’s interesting, he writes, is that “suicide, depression and cancer didn't make the top 10,” even though “suicide was the third leading cause of death for children aged 10 to 19 in 2004 … cancer is the leading cause of death by disease among children 1 to 14 years old … and “about half of the estimated 19 million new sexually transmitted disease cases occur in people under 25,” he cites research as showing. He concludes with something we and our kids do need to think about where Net safety’s concerned: “Kids think the Internet is a great way to meet people. It is a great way to meet people. It's also a horrible way to meet people. You can't see them. You can't look in their eyes, read their body language or ask for ID. There are no witnesses…. We've done a poor job educating our kids about online safety in general. But put it in its place. Computers you can turn off. Cancer, depression and AIDS you cannot.” Balanced reporting seems to be a trend. Here’s the Contra Costa Times on how the Internet is “safer than it seems."

Kids: Chief technology officers

Or maybe that should be families’ chief information officers. Because of their Net literacy, young people are increasingly becoming their families’ top product researchers and online shoppers, the Christian Science Monitor reports. “Three-quarters of students between the ages of 8 and 14 say they have completed an online transaction, according to a national survey released May 9 by Stars for Kidz.” The Monitor adds that nearly 25% of kids shop with their parents’ credit cards, 26% use gift cards, and 8% use their own credit card. “Almost half say they help with electronic transactions because their parents are ‘clueless’ online” and a third help because parents don’t have time to shop.” But parents turn to their kids for a lot of other tech skills – from learning about sites like Wikipedia and YouTube to editing and printing digital photos to finding directions for parent drivers. The Monitor quotes experts as saying this development is great for children’s developing self-esteem and independence, and I think it fosters healthy and necessary parent-child dialogue about constructive use of the Net.

No screentime for a week

This mom and news correspondent says it right up front: Working in her favor in banning TV and computer use at her house for a week was the fact that her two sons, 8 and 10, are pretty outdoorsy and they aren’t yet teenagers (aka social networkers). On Day 2, she writes in the UK’s The Times, it’s like having toddlers again (no time to one’s self, etc.). Day 4 is the high point – when all the rewards are glimpsed. Day 6 sees a relapse (you may be surprised whose). At the end of the article, which you can probably tell was fun to read, you’ll find “A mother’s [slightly tongue-in-cheek] tips to cut screen addiction.”