Helping kids gain from adversity: Inspiration for parents, teachers

I just listened to Aimee Mullins's just-posted TED Talk of last October and thought to myself anyone who loves teaching, young people, and the power of the human spirit would resonate with this. Aimee is an actor, athlete, and model (full bio here) who has not merely overcome and pushed through the adversity of being born without fibula, or shin bones, but used that adversity to find and bring out her in-born potential. She talks about not long ago bumping into the OB-GYN who delivered her in her home town in Pennsylvania and hearing about how, because of her career, he tells his medical students, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise and if given just a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." She adds, "If we can change the current paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to achieving ability or potency, we can release the power of so many more children and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community" – the abilities each child has. She later adds something I think my friend Lenore Skenazy over at FreeRangeKids.com, kindred spirit Tanya Byron in the UK, and a whole lot of other parents would appreciate: "Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well."

Mullins says something important about technology and social networking too (which I feel would resonate with the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out). After reading the dictionary definition of "disability" to the audience, she said: "Our language hasn't allowed us to get caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology." She lists some examples, among them "social-networking platforms [which] allow people to self-identify, to claim their own description of themselves so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing." Think about this in light of bullying and cyberbullying, where kids identified by others as "handicapped" in any way are often the targets. Social media can help remove or at least delay the labels bullies exploit, giving children some much-needed space and peace for identity exploration. Mullins puts it so eloquently: "Maybe technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset." Don't miss the talk, including the lines Mullins quotes from a 14th Persian poet at the end.

ChatRoulette: Heads up, parents!

"If I were still an unpopular 12-year-old, my first ChatRoulette session might have crushed me for a year instead of just an hour," writes Sam Anderson in New York magazine in the mildest possible description of a site that Brad Stone of the New York Times just discovered was created by a 17-year-old in Moscow. It's a video site that "brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world," Anderson writes. Comments from email correspondents of mine confirm what he writes that about 10% of the videos that stream past are of naked males not just sitting in front of their Webcams. Stone writes, "Parents, keep your children far, far away." Anderson adds, "There's no way to manage the experience.... It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom" with a powerful curiosity factor. And there are serious privacy issues, he adds. Because once you click "Play" on the home page, your computer's Webcam is activated, and you are among those streaming across other ChatRoulette players' screens, with any one of them able to grab a shot of your face and whatever else is within the frame of your Webcam.

Another heads-up: ChatRoulette's not only going viral (300 users in December, 10,000 by end of January, now 20,000 any given night), it's a group thing (hopefully not the new "Truth or Dare" or "Spin the Bottle"). When a friend came over to experience it with him, Anderson reports "the experience was different ... easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours." As voyeuristic as it might've felt, it wasn't all "shock porn," he writes. "We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer.... We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco." And another email correspondent of mine just heard over the weekend that ChatRoulette is being played by "some of our middle schoolers in [the US state of] Georgia." There may shortly be a spike in Web-filtering sales!

Clicks & cliques: *Really* meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying

Annie Fox's recent 55-min. interview with fellow educator and author Rosalind Wiseman at FamilyConfidential.com is a must-listen for parents, educators – anyone who has anything to do with teens and digital media. It has a lot to say about working through tough situations like sexting or cyberbullying incidents with young people in a candid, respectful way and, in the process, helping them understand the rights and responsibilities of being human beings as well as technology users. It's such great stuff that I felt key points of this podcast should be searchable on the Web as text and got Annie's permission to quote and paraphrase at length (hopefully accurately!). Because it's a long podcast, I'm splitting this into two parts (which are still long – apologies, but they're important!) – this week's focus is parenting; next week's on school, adding more sources.

Both Fox and Wiseman have new books out which I highly recommend: the third book of Fox's Middle School Confidential series for tweens, this one subtitled "What's Up With My Family?", and the re-release of Wiseman's best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes with a new chapter on the role of technology in teen life. [Here's Fox's blog post about the interview.]

Moral compasses needed for navigating cyberspace

About a quarter of the way through the podcast, Wiseman talks about how she hears what many of us hear from teens: that people have always been mean to each other –cyberbullying isn't anything different from what we've dealt with in the past. So, they ask, what's the big deal?

"The minute somebody says that," Wiseman says, "that is the minute when critically thinking people stop and say, 'Why?!' Because if it involves the degradation of other people – especially if it's done for the entertainment of other people like bystanders – then that is a problem, and that is a tradition that needs to be challenged immediately."

Wiseman says to Fox that, when that comes up with teens, she tells them, "If you are going to be someone who has self-agency in the world, if you in your own way believe you have an obligation for yourself and others to live in the world with dignity, and that you have a moral compass, if you want that ability, then you have to be able to challenge the things that are 'normal' but are not right....

"I think the role of adults," Wiseman adds, "is to pierce this bubble that all of this [mean behavior] is normal now. Children think it's happening so much that [they'll tell you] that they didn't think it was wrong, and it's our role to say, 'No, actually it's not ok, and you're completely in your right to be upset about it." When they say that, teens are reflecting a culture – both online and offline, at home and at school, involving adults as well as kids – in which there has been too much acceptance of flaming, dissing, gossiping about people we know and don't know – too much negative social norming that has got to be addressed (see this about the vital role of positive social norming).

Wiseman's 'SEAL Strategy'

So when teenagers are upset about something mean a peer has said or done to them online or offline, we can calmly help them think through what happened, how they feel about it, and what they're going to do about it. One approach, Wiseman's framework for that conversation, is what she calls the "SEAL strategy" – part of the "Owning Up" curriculum she uses to help educators teach students to "own up and take responsibility for unethical behavior." When doing this strategizing, parents and kids of course plug in their own situation and words. [Don't worry if the strategy seems to be about prepping for a confrontation between bully and victim if that's not what you and your child had in mind. The conversation itself is valuable. It's designed to help the child, if not completely take back control of the situation, at least mentally work her way out of victimization mode.]

Prepping for the conversation

But before we get to S-E-A-L – around 18 min. into the podcast – Rosalind talks about why it's so important for parents to handle this calmly and respectfully:

"As a parent, what I want you to say to your child is [something like], 'I'm so sorry this happened to you; thank you SO much for coming and telling me' ... because your kid is taking a risk to tell you about this. Most of the time they think that going to an adult will make it worse [which is why research shows only 10% of teens report cyberbullying to their parents (see this)]. THEN you say, 'and together we're going to work on this, we are going to think through how we can do this so you can feel that you've got some control over a situation where your control has been taken away from you."

And if we're lucky enough that they do come to us, Wiseman says, a lot of times we'll hear them say, "'I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise not to do or say anything about it.' That might seem to make sense [right then, when you so want to know what she's dealing with], so you may want to agree at first, but if your kid then tells you something you have to do something about, you have to break a promise.... So instead you say, 'I really can't make that promise. I'd love to, but we may have to find somebody who knows more about taking care of the problem than I do.... But what I will promise you is that if we do need to bring someone in, you will never be surprised by their involvement – you won't walk into a room and be surprised. I can promise that. We'll work this through together.' Because," Wiseman says, "you [the parent] taking over robs them of the control they need to have to be able to face the bully."

S-E-A-L

As you sit down with your child, "say, 'I'm going to give you a structure that's going to help you think through the really bad feelings in your stomach and put them into words for yourself before you go and talk to someone else,'" Wiseman says, "'because how many times have you had the experience where you're really, really mad at somebody and know exactly what you're going to say to the person, and then you get in front of the person and you totally lose your words? This is going to be a way for you to have a better chance of that not happening, so you can be calm and have as much control as possible in the situation.'"

S means you "stop and think when and where, now or later, publicly or privately" you will confront the person face-to-face (usually pretty short in public, longer in private). I think it's important to note, here, that Wiseman's saying the young person is doing this neither to be the bully's best friend nor to destroy somebody. "It's not a zero-sum game."

E is about how "you explain exactly what you don't like and exactly what you want." Not something vague like, "you're being mean to me," but "when you stole my password, you know I've had the same one since 6th grade and you used it to send an embarrassing message to my entire contact list making it look as if it was me. I hate that; it was beyond embarrassing to me." Then the teen explains exactly what she wants, regardless of whether or not the kid is likely to do it, something like: "I'm asking you to send a message to all those people saying you sent that other message, that it wasn't me. I'm going to be sending that message to everybody, but I'm asking you to have the courage and integrity to do it yourself." Wiseman explains that, in this confrontation, the targeted child is not asking to be treated with dignity, is not appealing to the bully's sympathy. She is being clear that dignity "is something I deserve because it's what everybody deserves."

A is really two As – for "affirm" and "acknowledge or admit ("some kids like 'acknowledge,' some 'admit'"). They're about rights and responsibilities. "The first A is to affirm your right and everybody's right to walk down the school hallway or be in this world without being treated like dirt." As for responsibilities, this parent-child conversation is providing your child some space in which she can ask herself, 'Is it possible that I contributed in some way to the dynamic that I'm now dealing with? What are my responsibilities to other people and have I respected those responsibilities?" Wiseman adds that this is sometimes the hard part for parents – asking their own child about her role in the situation, but it's essential, she says, if we want our kids to have the ability to put on the brakes the next time it happens. She feels this is particularly important with today's technologies because these days it's almost impossible not to have a role, not to be either target, perpetrator or bystander (see this Slate piece by Yale psychology professor Alan Kazdin about the power of the bystander). Cyberbullying situations are very fluid, usually hardwired to the school context, with bullies, victims, and bystanders frequently swapping hats in a 24-7, digitally-enabled school drama that makes it hard to get away and get perspective (see this).

L is "You either lock in or lock out the relationship or friendship with the person you confronted – or you take a vacation from it. With peers, you need to be able to go through the process of asking whether you want to be in this relationship or not and how you want to be in it. As a bystander, you can say to the bully I'm coming to you as a friend (lock in); it would've been easier to say nothing, but I'm saying this to you out of loyalty; as a friend I'm coming to you. To a bully, you might say, 'You've changed, you're blowing me off all the time, bossing me around, ridiculing me, whatever, and it's not getting better, so I need to lock out the friendship or I need to take a break.' [Wiseman reminds always to encourage them to put it in their own words. They just need this structure because this is very difficult to do.]

Perspective-taking good for parents too

"When your kid comes home and tells you something has happened, don't believe that what the child related is 100% truth and there is no other perspective," Wiseman says. "That is their truth. But it's also true that, in a conflict, human nature focuses on what has been done to it, not what it did to others. Two kids will have very different perspectives on what happened." She asks parents who have more than one child if, when something comes up, the two kids don't usually have a difference of opinion about what happened. Nah. ;-) "It's like that at school too. Each child has his own truth."

So "if you go in there [into school], guns blazing, you may find out something more happened, and you're going to be very embarrassed. So it's incumbent upon you" to go in knowing there are other perspectives, say what you need to say, and "finish your story [for school administrators] with 'Is that accurate?' [Repeat: Make sure, after sharing what you heard from your child, you ask the school administrator or the other parents there: "Is that accurate?"] Then really listen." This can make the difference between amplifying the problem and helping to resolve it.

But as important as your behavior is to the outcome for everybody, it's vitally important for your child, who's keenly aware of how you handle the situation. "You're teaching your child how you handle conflict," Wiseman says in the podcast. And Fox points out that "parents are leaders for their kids." She adds that, no matter how much technology is involved in the issue being worked out, "this is not a technology issue; ultimately, it's a parenting issue."

3,000 text messages a month – hmm, might parents have something to do with it?

Wiseman told Fox that her teen advisers say texting "is our primary way we communicate with each other. Yes, we use [social network sites], but texting is faster" (the average is 3,146 text messages a month for 13-to-17-year-olds, Nielsen reported this month). They also tell her that parental communication represents a not-insignificant part of those texts. One girl told Wiseman, "My parents are texting me ... from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed." The girl showed her one of those texts: "Honey, I'm going to the airport to pick up Grandma." Daughter texts back, "Mom, you're driving, stop texting me!" And as, Wiseman watches, the mom continues texting. Maybe, Fox suggests, we parents could check and see what behaviors we're modeling for our kids. Another girl told Wiseman: "My mom sends me pictures of people she finds dressed ridiculously," making snide comments about this or that piece of clothing. Calling this pre-adolescent behavior, Wiseman suggested: "We have to look in the mirror about these things.... We are part of this. It's not just teenagers [dissing others].... "

It'll help, I so agree, "if we really tie [how we deal with their tech use] back to the root issues of how we must be with each other," as Wiseman put it. That, to me, is the core of the cyberbullying solution. "Kids are smart enough to be able to extrapolate, if we teach them the connections ... if we teach them that the way they use technology is just reflective of everything else that we expect of them."

[Readers, everything above is much more compelling when you hear it coming from its sources, so do yourself a favor and listen to the podcast. Next week: behavior and technology at school.]

Related links

"Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village" at Slate – by Yale professor of psychiatry and child psychology Alan Kazdin and Boston College professor Carlo Rotella

Annie Fox's Middle School Confidential: What's Up with My Family? ($9.99, 96 pp.) is comfort food for the mind – a middle-schooler's highly social, overloaded, hormone-challenged, technology-tethered mind. When my 12-year-old saw the pdf review version on my laptop screen when we were sitting on a plane together last fall, it was his idea – not mine – to read through the whole book then and there. That says it all, think! This is solid, respectful, caring advice for kids.

Video: CBS News's Katie Couric interviews Wiseman about children's privacy: "If we don't value their privacy, we're sending a message about respect." Ok if we monitor them surreptitiously? "Sure, but what if you find something you need to talk to them about? It's taking a risk that if you get caught, the kid can focus on the "violation of privacy" instead of on the content of their behavior – they go into self-righteous mode when the focus should be on their risky behavior.

Couric and Wiseman talk about sexting.

Annie Fox's podcast with Rachel Simmons, whose most recent book is The Curse of the Good Girl (here's Simmons's site)

"A different sort of back-to-school tip: Kindness"

The last time I wrote about Fox and Wiseman: "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Kids' top toy for 2010: iPad?!

Apple may not have thought of it that way, but Children's Technology Review editor (and former teacher) Warren Buckleitner thinks the iPad just may be Toy of the Year, he writes in Gadgetwise at the New York Times. Some of the reasons: Lots of available games and other software already; no controller or mouse ("the screen *is* the controller and it sits in their lap, which works for children (and their grandparents, too, by the way"); that big high-res screen and gorgeous color palette that brings imagery to life; road-trip activity center; and Warren adds "a fair price," but I think parents will be waiting for that $499 starting price to come down – which is not to say there won't be plenty of parent-hounding while they do that waiting. But before anybody succumbs, give it some thought. The iPad also makes the Web very attractive and portable. Basically, it's a very big iPod Touch, which led to lots of family discussions after the recent holidays, when parents realized all of the Web was now in their kids' pockets wherever they went, and they hadn't thought about parental controls before giftwrapping. The iPhone and iTouch's App Store – including all the games and some parental-control apps – will be available for the iPad too. Check out the possibilities before giving 2010's "Toy of the Year" to your child (because the iPad will function very similarly, see "How To Setup Parental Controls on iPhone & iPod Touch."

PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation

Cyberbullying & bullying-related suicides: 1 way to help our digital-age kids

How do we help our children maintain some detachment from the drama, sometimes cruelty, of school life? This, I think, is the central question of online safety, if not child development, in the digital age. It has just become national news that 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, Mass., and very recently of western Ireland, committed suicide January 14 because of fellow students' social cruelty online and offline, in and out of school, according to ABC News and the Boston Herald. Last month the country learned of 13-year-old Florida student Hope Witsell's suicide last fall (I posted about that in ConnectSafely's forum here).

Detachment from 'The Drama'

Each of these cases is highly individual, but what they all seem to have in common is the 24/7, non-stop nature of the harassment the teens faced – the tech-enabled constant drama of school life turning into 24/7 cruelty. Phoebe's and Hope's tragedies indicate an urgent need for all of us to help our children come up for air, to maintain some perspective about the "alternate reality" of school life, especially in the middle-school years.

Technology mustn't be the focus of either blame or solution development because it's not the source of the problem; social cruelty is. But technology – if not used with a sense of perspective or balance – can "tether" a child to the cruel behavior. I get that word from MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who refers to today's communications tools (the social Web, cellphones, etc.) as "tethering technologies" in her paper about "The Tethered Self." She discusses how they remove us from our physical surroundings. I think their constant use can also affect our sense of context psychologically too – everybody's, not just kids', but adolescents have a lot to deal with just developmentally, so perspective can be extra helpful to them.

We hear a lot that we need to think about the implications of giving our children mobile devices that make them as available to their peers as they are to us. But let's look at one of the implications: Kids' and their peers' moment-by-moment mood changes, blow-by-blow gossip, and good and bad behavior mutually accessible as long as their communications devices are on. In other words, constant drama – often heightened by kids who enjoy fueling it, whether for entertainment, as a prank, or out of malice.

How we can help

What we don't hear enough is that there are ways we – parents, school personnel, police, and policymakers – can help our kids and teens. We can help them...

Get perspective and maybe a little mental detachment from peers as well as "the drama"

Do the identity exploration that's a key task of adolescence as themselves," as individuals, and not only or always in relation to their peers

Have a little time for reflection

Realize the importance of self-respect and know they have our respect.

In other words, we can help them to be able – when needed – psychologically to disengage just so they can think straight and actually see that their life is not that drama at school or online, and they are never the person any bullies could ever make them out to be.

Tampa-area schools are discussing (I think much-needed) parent-notification rules, the Tampa Tribune reports and Massachusetts lawmakers are "stepping up efforts to pass an anti-bullying measure," the Boston Globe reports. These are important pieces of the puzzle, but I hope that school officials, legislators, and parents 1) don't create policy and law based solely on the worst tragedies and 2) do help children learn how to maintain perspective, self-respect, and respect for others amid the info and behavioral overload of the digital age. This is the protective nature of social-media literacy and citizenship – the new online safety.

Related links

Whether or not they all make sense for your family, at least some of Marian Merritt's 7 household tech-use rules (at the bottom of her post) can help parents help kids keep "The Drama" under control. Merritt, Norton's Internet Safety Advocate, is blogging about the Kaiser Family Foundation study on US 8-to-18-year-olds' media use – I posted about it here.

Youth (and parent) mentor Annie Fox helps a girl having suicidal thoughts: "For teens: What can I do about these rumors?"

How the social Web helps stop suicide (in The Daily Beast) and an example of suicide averted, thanks to social networking

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline says peers are the best source of referrals to the Lifeline, usually via social network sites, especially MySpace – not a toll-free phone number – but that number is 1-800-273-TALK. The Lifeline coordinates the work of more than 100 toll-free help centers around the US, getting calls and cases to the center nearest the person needing help, and help not just for suicidal crisis, but depression, domestic violence, and all sorts of needs (more people need to know about that).

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely.org's "Tips to Help Stop Sexting"

Tech-induced mini generation gaps?

That's what the New York Times's Brad Stone has noticed, citing examples like his only-just-verbal 2-year-old calling his Kindle – a device he says he's not completely sold on – "Daddy's book." But even 9- or 10-year-olds wouldn't call it that – it wasn't ubiquitous enough when they were "growing up." Now all sorts of Kindle-like handheld readers are coming out. They – the Alex, the Que proReader, the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, the tablet Apple's supposed to announce soon, and the "smartbooks" aimed at teens I blogged about earlier – were all over the Consumer Electronics Show floor in Las Vegas this past week, Stone and Nick Bilton report in another article. But, to the generational question, I wouldn't call them mini generations just because the term itself suggests solid starts, stops, and gaps that I'm not seeing, even at my house, with five years between two teenage and almost-teenage kids. The whole construct doesn't allow for all the individuality and diversity so evident in young people's (and everybody's) use of new media and technologies. I think kids' tech use has more to do with their interests (and those of their friends, of course) than their ages, and I'm seeing more social flow across age groups in this generation than in mine. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not the technology that dictates kids' tech use so much as the kid who uses the technology (and not entirely either way). If that was clearer than mud, argue with me – here or in the ConnectSafely forum!

And as for these new "books," I don't care what devices we get into school, but we do need to get social media into school, pre-K through 12, all classes – to narrow the gap between formal and all the informal learning kids are doing with social media outside of school, make school more relevant and interesting to students, and get school doing for social media what it has done for books for hundreds of years: guide and enrich students' experiences with them (see "School and social media: Uber big picture"). I'm pleased to see others saying this too now. Here's Nicholas Bramble in Slate: "Schools shouldn't block SNS." [See also "From digital disconnect to mobile learning" and "School & social media."]

'Soft power' works better: Parenting social Web users

We're in quite a fix, we parents, over this "sexting" phenomenon. On the one hand, sexting "is causing growing concern among parents," HealthDay cites a University of Michigan survey as finding. On the other, "the real problem sets in when grownups get involved," writes DailyBeast.com columnist Conor Friedersdorf, pointing to the evidence: "In most cases, teens who conceal their sexting from authority figures suffer negligible adverse consequences.... Perversely, however, tragic stories that begin with 'sexting' are all too frequent when principals, police officers, or district attorneys get involved. The two known suicides attributed to 'sexting' actually resulted from adults who exacerbated, rather than stopped, the abhorrent 'slut-shaming' that peers callously directed at girls whose naked photos were spread around school; and authority figures in at least six states charge less troubled teens who send naked pictures of themselves with distributing child pornography!" [And I can't resist quoting where Friedersdorf goes with this child-porn-law point: "Should technology ever permit humans to download our brains' mental images to a hard drive, every last teenager in America will wind up prohibited from living within 10,000 feet of themselves" – but maybe quite a few adults too, no?]

I think he's right. Whether or not you agree that sexting is digitally exacerbated normative adolescent behavior, I hope you agree that adults need to tread very lightly or at least carefully in these situations, with child-pornography law a factor (see ConnectSafely's tips). But forget about school policy and law enforcement for a second and just think about parenting: Certainly we need to apply our values to our parenting and, if those values call for it, try to mitigate the sexualized media environment surrounding us all, but it's best to spread that teaching and parenting out over time and not allow ourselves to be so shocked by what we're seeing as to react in ways that send kids into determined resistance, "underground" online, where our values probably don't have much influence at all.

Cornell University assistant professor Sahara Byrne, while presenting a survey of parents and kids about online-safety strategies at the Harvard Berkman Center last week, found all kinds of evidence that "the more angry kids are, the more they're going to try to restore their freedom" – or assert it. That's why sudden changes in parenting style like overreaction or anger, banning technology (which to a teen can be like banning a whole social life), or suddenly installing monitoring software can have unintended, sometimes risky effects and workarounds.

So we're not really in such a fix, fellow parents. We just need to mindful of the concerns we have and channel them wisely. Trying to make our children avoid risk altogether can be riskier than being consistent about "our family's values," letting them do developmentally appropriate adolescent risk assessment, and being there for them when stuff comes up. I love how parent and media professor Henry Jenkins says it – that we need to "watch their backs rather than snoop over their shoulders."

Related links

Latest data (from Pew/Internet last week): "Sexting: New study & the 'Truth or Dare' scenario"

Prof. Sahara Byrne's presentation on parenting & online safety (I'll be posting more on this)

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth"

ConnectSafely's tips to prevent bad effects from teens sexting

Social lives, media in their pockets

If our kids text, 80% of us do too, according to The Nielsen Company. Nielsen doesn't say why, but we all know: Our kids "hear" us better when we text them, and – besides – it's fun to text with them! Here's some more interesting cellphone data from Nielsen:

Phone owners are getting younger: Last year kids typically got their first phone at age 10.1; by the beginning of this year 2009, the phone ownership age "was down to 9.7." Same for borrowing: In 2008, the average age when kids started to borrow a cell phone was 8.6 years"; now it's 8.

How they use phones: 66% of tween phone owners took photos with their phones in the past year; half played pre-installed games; 40% activated the speakerphone feature; 28% filmed a video clip; 24% listened to tunes. We've already seen this reported, but "the average 13-17 year old sends more than 2,000 text messages per month."

Younger phone owners: more than half of 8-year-old owners "used their cell to send text messages in the last 12 months. "That figure soared to 81% for 12-year-old mobile users," with "the vast majority" (90%) of those texts going to friends and family."

Parental controls: More than half of cellphone users' parents don't use parental controls. Among the minority who do, "20% limit the number of calls, texts or instant messages, followed by download limits (17%), talk time or voice minute allocations (16%), mobile website access limits (15%), locator services and restricted in/outgoing number access (13% each), time of day restrictions (11%), and alerts to unauthorized texts, IMs or callers (6% each); 60% of parents "forbid downloads onto their children’s phone for financial and security reasons."

For parents' own views, see also a piece in the Washington Post about when texting becomes nagging; "When Dad banned text messaging" in a New York Times blog; and another mom's view of her kids' texting at TMCnet.com.

Posting pix: How cautious should we be?

The other day I was talking to a psychologist who described a time when he was driving into a busy 4-way intersection on a highway frontage road – one of the craziest intersections I've ever heard described. He came to a stop, he said, and suddenly found he just couldn't take his foot off the brake, paralyzed by a voice in his head saying, "Be careful. Don't move. Don't get in that driver's way. Careful!" He said it was then that he realized he'd heard those words countless times as a child, and that they'd become almost a mantra in his head, making him overly cautious as an adult. For him the solution, he realized, was simply to go forward, make that move. He has since been much more decisive, he said, and – as he related this experience – I was thinking about the similar messages kids and parents are getting from so many directions about young people's Internet use. Of course we want them to be safe, but we don't want to clip their wings altogether. This article at AnnArbor.com offers that perspective – it's one of the few I've seen in the news media questioning the message that posting pictures in parenting and family blogs is highly risky. For more on both sides of this, see "Violating our kids' privacy" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control."

Echometrix: Monitoring *and* selling kids' chat

With its Sentry Parental Control Software, Echometrix sells what kids say online in the name of protecting them. Once installed, Sentry – like other products in its category – monitors kids online activity and communications for risky speech and behavior and sends parents alerts upon detection. What isn't like most other such products is how the company packages the kid communications (in aggregate) into a product it sells to marketers, reports ConnectSafely.com's Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com. Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene, told Larry that "the company doesn't collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children" but "says that it delivers the unsolicited raw conversations in real time. It gives marketers immediate, unique information about what teens are saying in their own words." Here's how Echometrix describes itself in its blog: "a leading developer of opinion mining and sentiment analysis applications for user-generated digital social media content with specialty industry focus. We have specialized in delivering brand metrics, real-time business intelligence and consumer market research for the teenage consumer segment." See a detailed commentary on this in Amy Jussel's Shaping Youth blog. And here's the story in Yahoo Tech news .

Violating our kids' privacy

Kids aren't the only people who need to think before they post, but the latter half of that sentence is an oversimplification, of course. New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin brings new meaning to the phrase "Protecting Your Child's Privacy" in her Motherlode column this week. Where's the line between "exploiting [a child's] pain" – as one teenage subject of his parent's published memoir put it – and blogging about your parental struggles (or joys) with that child in the public blogosphere? Belkin asks: "At what point do parents lose their right to their children’s tales? When do things stop being something that happened to 'me' and start being something that happened to 'them,' and therefore not 'mine' to tell?" There is no blanket answer to those questions, partly because the answers are highly individual and the surrounding conditions change (kids grow up; they can become mortified teenagers). Also, as Belkin points out, the questions didn't first arise with blogs and social network sites – or even the Web or newsgroups or email. At the core of Belkin's post is the story of a mom who felt she had to un-adopt a child after 18 months and wrote about it. Some detractors "scoured everything she has written in the past, finding a post that used the boy’s real name and country of origin, and circulating it around the Internet" and then, after the mom deleted as many references as she could think of, they "found old cached versions," Belkin writes. The questions are age-old, but there are some differences now: e.g., the Web as both permanent, public, searchable archive and - sometimes - amplifier (see also "The Net effect" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control").

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)

Undercover Mom in BarbieGirls, Part 4: Peer pressure to pay up

By Sharon Duke Estroff

Among the cardinal (albeit unfortunate) rules of the schoolyard social jungle is that the more cool, expensive stuff you have, the higher you climb on the food chain. And what kid doesn’t wish to become king or queen of the jungle? Children’s virtual worlds like Barbie Girls understand this fundamental truth about their target audience, so they lay the groundwork for a social caste system by offering privileged paid memberships (i.e. Barbie Girl’s VIP Club) - and let peer pressure take care of the rest.

While I was allowed as a non-paying member to select a single stylish outfit on sign up, purchasing additional attire requires a premium membership. With only the clothes on my back, I couldn’t swap out my wardrobe on the quarter hour like my VIP peers. I couldn’t catwalk the contents of my closet through town - or accessorize with funky jewelry and purses. Instead, I was forced to wear the same lame sundress 24x7, a Barbie Girl social faux pas of the highest order.

I faced similar stresses over my Barbie Girls room, a loft-looking studio apartment with a double bed. Not that my room wasn't nice. The floors were hardwood and my comforter was swanky. But my VIP pals' pads were lavishly furnished from wall to wall and decked out with Jacuzzis, entertainment centers, and indoor hammocks strung between breezy palm trees. I cringed at the prospect of hosting a party in my spare, humble abode. But, alas, it was a non-issue, since subprime citizens such as myself cannot invite guests to their rooms.

Truth be told, the materialistic messaging and pressures I encountered on BarbieGirls weren’t really any different than those that kids face daily in our consumeristic contemporary culture. Yet in this particular virtual-world setting - a societal microcosm populated by mallrats and would-be super models - the overall effect was admittedly more intense.

But here's the sparkly silver lining: BarbieGirls.com provides modern parents with an ideal (albeit unlikely) teaching tool. So sit down with your tween and explore the Web site together. Use the magical hyperbole of Barbie's online world as a launching pad for essential parent-child conversations about marketing and materialism; possessions and popularity; friends and peer pressure; happiness, gratitude, and balance. Help her understand that while glitz, glamor, and fabulous clothes can be cool and lots of fun, our personal worth and value ultimately come from the inside out - and not the other way around.

Related links

Screenshots that show what Sharon means, for example, the difference between BarbieGirls Basic and BarbieGirls VIP at a glance

"Paying for Points" broadens out this picture. It's an analysis of payment and reward systems (and the social hierarchies they create) in virtual worlds, starting with WeeWorld - by analyst and blogger Tim Howgego in the UK .

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

US sex-offender laws, registries not conducive to child safety

The US's burgeoning sex-offender registries are becoming more of a problem than a solution. "Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded," The Economist reports in a thorough look at the subject. "As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders."

The problem is when people "assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes.... No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers." Only a small minority of registered offenders are the "predators" so widely referred to in the news media. Take Georgia, for example. That state "has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders," according to The Economist. "Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other." The state's Sex Offender Registration Review Board found that “just over 100” of the 17,000 could be classified as “predators,” "which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences."

Disinformation and fear are not conducive to calm, constructive discussion about young people's online activities - in families or in policymaking circles. Overreaction by parents causes kids to go into online stealth mode (which gets easier and easier with proliferating access points and connected devices) at a time when child-parent communication is very much needed. Focusing too much on registered sex offenders causes people to forget that most child sexual exploitation is perpetrated by people the victims are related to or know in their everyday lives, most likely people who haven't been arrested, much less convicted, and therefore not people in sex-offender registries (see "Why technopanics are bad").

But the trend is bigger and bigger registries. "Sex-offender registries are popular," the Economist reports. "Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders."

Writes parent and public-policy analyst Adam Thierer, "If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex-offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country." For example, a case I mentioned last April: 18-year-old Phillip Alpert will be in his state's sex-offender registry until he's 43, CNN reported. He is no predator, the way CNN tells the story. He had just turned 18 when he made what turned out to be probably the biggest mistake of his life. He and his 16-year-old girlfriend of two and a half years had had an argument. He told CNN he was tired, and it was the middle of the night when he sent a nude photo of her (a photo she had taken of herself and sent to him) to "dozens of her friends and family." Under current child-pornography and sex-offender laws, this scenario could be repeated in many other states. "Thirty-eight states include juvenile sex offenders in their sex-offender registries," according to CNN. "Alaska, Florida and Maine will register juveniles only if they are tried as adults. Indiana registers juveniles age 14 and older. South Dakota registers juveniles age 15 and older."

Mamapedia: New parenting resource

A cross between Google and Wikipedia for parents, Mamapedia just makes sense. And so did its CEO, Artie Wu, when I asked him how he came to create the two-month-old site.
"We have two kids [3 and 9], and when my wife, a doctor, and I were new parents, we were the first in our circle of friends who had kids. Like all parents, we'd struggle with the kinds of questions you aren't going to ask a pediatrician - like what kind of stroller to buy, or should we have car seats in both cars so we don't have to constantly move them back and forth?"

With questions like that, Wu said, you want to ask the experts: "other parents at exactly the same stage as you in parenting." And remembering back to when my kids were little, I heard him when he said you also want a range of views to choose from. "There are no right answers" for everybody, he said.

So it makes sense to allow users to type a question into the search box, as at Wikipedia or Google, and turn up a whole bunch of answers, with plenty of opinion but no judgment. Wu says moms "don't want to be judged," and I think he's right. Better to have opinions on what to do than on what *you* do as a parent.

I asked Wu how Mamapedia's different from other parenting sites. He said they generally "fall into two buckets: slick, professionally written sites with a lot of 'official answers' and dos and don'ts from experts and then the other end of the spectrum: social-networking-like sites for moms with chat and discussion boards. They provide a great social experience, but it's more about meeting fellow moms and bonding with them - like C-section moms, July-baby moms." He should know, since his company's other project is Mamasource, local online communities for parents in all 50 states.

"We wanted to create something in between: a Google for moms, if you will," he said - "the real scoop from real moms with real-world wisdom."

I obviously appreciate that, because it's the premise on which we built ConnectSafely.org, a forum for parents to share family lessons learned on kids' use of tech and the Net.

I asked him why not a Papapedia? Are dads welcome too? "We're totally open to dads too, but there's something special about the way moms help each other and communicate with each other that's unique ... they really have a culture of sharing around these topics."

Our history of technopanics

I appreciate the historical context Adam Thierer has just given to the technopanics discussion that needs to continue gaining volume (the discussion not the panic, I mean!). "The children of the 1950s and '60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the '80s and '90s. And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook," Thierer blogs. He adds that "these techno-panics are almost always disproportionate to the real risk posed by new media and technology, which typically do not have the corrupting influence on youth that older generations fear." His essay, which also appears in Scribd, quotes others in this school of thought, where I place myself too. But Thierer also provides a great tip for parents, who like the idea of actually talking with their kids about these technologies and media that are so compelling to them: "Ask three simple questions to get that conversation started: 'What is this new thing all about?' 'Tell me how you use it.' 'Why is it important to you?'” That gets the ball rolling - then, he suggests, "good ol'-fashioned common sense and timeless parenting principles should kick in. 'Do you understand why too much of this might be bad for you?' [i.e., moderation is always a good thing, right?] 'Will you please come talk to me if you don't understand something you’ve seen or heard?' And so on." Ah, music to my ears (and not a broken record, I hope)! [See also my post last April, "Why technopanics are bad" and "To catch a predator? The MySpace moral panic," by Alice Marwick in FirstMonday.]

Webkinz for little kids

Now there's a Webkinz virtual world for preschoolers, the New York Times reports in its "Kid Tech" blog. The price of admission to Webkinz, Jr. "is a plush animal about a third larger than a traditional Beanie Baby, with a proportionally higher price of about $18." The games are good, as good as pricier sites for this age group, and parents have a good deal of control over their children's experience in the VW, writes blogger Warren Buckleitner, but "children also can figure out that they can add more $18 pets to their account, and then switch between their animals." Shopping is part of the experience too, with play money, of course. But, hmm, is the site also teaching preschoolers how to shop?

Facebook: No. 1 tool for parenting? Maybe. Use wisely.

In fact, "the No. 1 tool in our lifetimes for parenting," according to B.J. Fogg, who runs Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and teaches about Facebook with his sister, Linda Phillips, parent of 8, in a free, noncredit class. Their reasoning: "Because it enables parents to ask about specifics." Absolutely. That's a great point. But, please, parents, think this monitoring option through carefully. Every child's different - at some point in the spectrum of age, maturity, and trust levels - and parental questions and monitoring need to be calibrated to those levels. Why? If we go too far and really hover - try to friend all their friends and maybe embarrass them (not that Fogg and Phillips are suggesting this) - we risk losing their willingness to engage with us and communicate. That, I contend, is, always has been, and always will be the No. 1 tool for parenting. If kids stop wanting to communicate and go into stealth mode online, which is very easy for them to do, we're even farther out of the equation, the one in which they use us as their chosen backup. For a teen's view on this, see Aseem Mehta's blog post here. Also don't miss "Parental Faux Pas on Facebook," by author and blogger Sharon Cindrich. Meanwhile, Lisa Belkin, the New York Times's "Motherlode" blogger seems to have declared the end (or at least rapid decline) of helicopter parenting in "Let the Kid Be." [Thanks to Susan Fassberg in California for pointing out the Stanford Alumni magazine article.]

Schools twittering parents

More and more schools are keeping parents informed via Twitter. “Tweets” - little 140-character messages and updates like phone text messages in a Web site - "about student achievement, homework, school plays and school boards in Georgia and across the nation are being sent to [parents] like breaking news bulletins interrupting network programming," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. As of the article's pub date this week (4/29), the Georgia Department of Education had the beginnings of a following, at 62 followers. "Forsyth County Schools, which debuted as the first metro Atlanta public school on Twitter in March, has 300 followers. That’s more eyes glued to its posts than the nation’s largest district, the New York City Department of Education, which only has 220," according to the Journal-Constitution. But - get this - Florida's Broward County School District has a whopping 900 followers, adding new ones at a rate of about 200 a week!

Being up front about monitoring online kids

I see no point in parents secretly monitoring kids' online activities - except if a parent feels a child is in danger and the child is unwilling to communicate or make a change in those activities and is being secretive him or herself. If those exceptional criteria are met and a child is at risk, surreptitious use of monitor software is very probably necessary. Otherwise, the only kind of monitoring I'd recommend - for the average kid who's not at risk offline and is lucky enough to have engaged parents (the vast majority of online kids) - is open monitoring involving lots of communication and maybe technology. Which is why I like the whole concept of Norton OnlineFamily: It's not just about technology. I'm not aware of any other online-safety or parental-control product or service designed from the ground up around in-person parent-child communication. "OnlineFamily is meant to be completely transparent between parent and child," writes USATODAY's Ed Baig in his review of the product. Also good: It's free till next January. "Symantec isn't committing to a price after that but says a one-year subscription is valued at $60," Baig adds. For video on the product, see Good Morning America.

'Kids being raised in captivity': UK's Byron

This may sound about right on this side of the Atlantic too: UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron - prime minister-appointed author of the 2008 Byron Review of child safety on the Web and in videogames - told an audience that their risk-averse society was keeping children cooped up at home on a "global playground" called the Internet, where they can be at greater risk than if allowed out more, The Telegraph reports. Speaking at the annual gathering of Britain's Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, "the industry body that regulates sexual content in publications for young people," Byron suggested that adults need not only to understand the potential risks but the nature of the playground itself, how - if parts of it have curfews or are deemed off-limits to youth - they can simply move on to more risky areas. "Professor Byron said that many adults had responded to her review by suggesting that the Internet should be shut down completely, or that a 'watershed' must be imposed so that children cannot access it after 9pm - showing their failure to understand it.... Instead, she said parents and teachers ... should learn more about what young people are doing online." [For related links, here's video of her speaking - as a parent, psychologist, and researcher - at the Oxford Internet Institute, "Beyond Byron: Towards a New Culture of Responsibility" (I found it fascinating to hear her talk about her Byron Review development process, working through all the various perspectives); coverage in The Guardian of another talk, at a conference held by UK regulator Ofcom, where Byron cautioned against overregulating the Internet; and the Byron Review's own Web site and my coverage upon its release.]

Virtual helicopter parenting

We've all heard of helicopter parents, people who hover a lot over every aspect of their children's lives. Well, now there's some hovering happening in cyberspace too, with parents setting up social-networking profiles and attempting to friend their children and all their friends. It's a bit much, and it can get creepy too (and not just from a teen's perspective), when the result is like insisting on being present at their social circle's every hangout. Author/blogger/parent Sharon Cindrich has a great list of tips for guarding against parental Facebook faux pas - "a few basic rules for parents" of social networkers. The overall rule of thumb, I think, is to try to think about how our teens would feel about having a friend's mom's every tidbit of workday and PTA "news" on their "wall" all the time. Check out Sharon's blog for some very good reasons for not letting this happen - and finding a happy medium between helicopter and fly-by parenting.

Email for kids: If? When? How?

Is someone at your house begging for his or her very own email account? Maybe because "all my friends have one"? The question usually comes up before middle school, when "everybody" is getting IM accounts and cellphones too, as - developmentally - the social scene kicks into gear. As kid virtual worlds get increasingly ubiquitous, though, adding another social outlet, the pressure to get any single communications tool may ease somewhat. In fact, pretty soon kids won't even care about email addresses because it seems most teens only use email when communicating with adults (they prefer messaging via social-network sites). We'll see (nobody's researched this yet, as far as I've seen). Anyway, in case you'd like to see a bunch of other parents' views on this question, there was a lively debate (in Comments) over at Slashdot about giving kids email accounts and how (it is "news for nerds," after all, so there's some great stuff about proxy servers and technical means of spam avoidance), as well as some interesting evidence of different parenting schools of thought (don't be surprised by the one or two off-color comments, though they're much in the minority). We didn't feel rushed to get our 10-year-old one - it seemed more a necessity as we were traveling overseas, so he could keep in touch with friends independently. Now that he's 11 and we're back in the States, he hardly ever checks or uses it and, interestingly, IM seems to have been replaced by Google Chat and phone texting as the primary social tools of 6th graders. Would love to get fellow parents' views on electronic communications, kid-style - via anne[at]netfamilynews.org, or in our forum at ConnectSafely.org.

Tech parenting going forward

Just a heads-up on something that might be useful to parents: bNetS@vvy, a project of the National Educational Association Health Information Network, asked me to write "Net Savvy Parenting in the New Year: Five Things You Need to Know" for its Web site and newsletter. Here are two more things we can look forward to:

More and more virtual worlds. There are more than 150 kids' and teens' virtual worlds now or soon-to-be available, and all the videogame online services - Sony Home, Xbox Live, and Nintendo Wii's "Mii's" - have avatars moving around in some semblance of virtual worlds. This is a serious trend: fun, compelling, but - as with anything online - involving a certain degree of risk. Parents will want to look into what those avatars can look like and do (what state of dress or undress and what actions and communications they're allowed). See also "Top 8 work-arounds of kid virtual-world users."

More and more mobile. This can't be news to any parent with a kid hounding him or her for a cellphone. Unless the Web is blocked (as it can be by every major cellphone carrier), everything that's online is also on more and more phones - including social networking, blog posting, content uploading, media sharing, and video producing. But game consoles and media players are connected to the Net, too. So everything we online-safety advocates say about kids on the Web holds for kids on just about any other connected device too. Wherever they are, the Internet is - including friends' houses, where your rules don't apply.

[Along these (parenting) lines, see also a Live Discussion my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid and I had with parents at the Washington Post last month.]

App as parent-child talking point

Here's a good talking point for the tech part of parenting: Facebook Grader. It's a mini application ("app") that tells users their "reach and authority" on Facebook, TechCrunch.com reports. "The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means [maybe based on how many "friends" on their lists?]), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to." Billed as a profile grader, for some kids it may be more of an indicator of how cool, sought-after, or popular they are. So it could fuel a discussion about whether your child uses a grading or rating tool like this, what s/he likes about social-networking, what it's best for, whether something like Facebook Grader is really any indicator of what a good person s/he is, and what s/he feels (and you feel) the real indicators are or should be.

Ireland: Guide for parents on mobile bullying

Ireland's cellphone companies - Vodafone, O2, Meteor, and 3 - got together and created a parents' guide to protecting kids from phone-based bullying, the Irish Times reports. Available on the companies' Web sites and at retail stores, it explains the mobile operators' service called "dual access," with which "parents can check the numbers their child has been calling and texting, and keep an eye on the amount of money spent. Parents can also ask operators to block certain services." To see what mobile carriers on this side of the Atlantic are doing for parents, see this item last May. Also: ConnectSafely.org's "Tips to help stop cyberbullying," "Cellphone safety tips," "Mobile parenting," and - for more on the discussion in Ireland - "Cellphone cos. & bullying." [Thanks to the EC's QuickLinks for pointing the above story out.]

Tech parenting from our POV

"Is it smart or sneaky for parents to have accounts on facebook or myspace to monitor their children's behavior?" "I won't let my teenager on Facebook or MySpace. Is that a mistake? Should I?" "Of the social networks, which do you consider to be the most safe, and which do you consider to be least safe?" Those are just a few of dozens of questions from parents around the US my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid and I enjoyed answering in a one-hour, live online discussion at the Washington Post last week. It's now archived at the Post's Web site here. (Whew! The virtual version of thinking on your feet.) Do check it out and tell us what you think (or ask us your own questions) in the ConnectSafely.org forum.

Where do these parents come from?!

This mom seems to have gone to the Lori Drew school of parenting. "Police are investigating whether an Elgin [Ill.] woman used nude photos of her daughter's 13-year-old ex-boyfriend as blackmail to get the two back together," the Chicago area's Daily Herald reports. As of yesterday (10/6), charges hadn't been filed, but the police say they're "actively pursuing counts of intimidation, harassment and child pornography possession." The investigation began when the boy's parents complained about receiving "hundreds of threatening emails and text messages" after the breakup. "The parents told police their son admitted he and the girl had taken naked photos of themselves while dating, sharing them with each other with their cell phones," according to the Daily Herald. "The parents said that after the breakup the girl's mother told the boy she'd tell his parents about the images of him and post them online unless the youngsters started seeing each other again." She also allegedly created an email account the kids could use unbeknownst to the boy's parents. A small but growing category of online-safety risk: parents. [Thanks to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing this story out.]

Parents' videogame concerns

"Parents are more concerned about their children’s exposure to video games than alcohol, violence and pornography," according to in-site polls at WhatTheyPlay.com. The site gathered responses from "nearly 3,000 respondents in two separate polls," its press release said. One of the polls asked parents "what they’d be most concerned about their 17-year-old child indulging in while at a sleepover." They said they'd be more concerned about "their child smoking marijuana (49%) and playing the video game Grand Theft Auto (19%) than [about] watching pornography (16%) and drinking beer (14%). In this case unfamiliarity breeds contempt: The site's press release offers some perspective on this from Cheryl Olsson, author of Grand Theft Childhood, as saying that "To some parents, video games are full of unknowable dangers. While researching for Grand Theft Childhood, parents we spoke with in focus groups often bemoaned the fact that they didn’t know how to use game controls - and felt unequipped to supervise or limit video game play. Of course, parents don’t want their children drinking alcohol, but that’s a more familiar risk." Here's coverage in the Los Angeles Times and a commentary on the study in Red Herring.

Texting for parent avoidance?

That's according to an executive in Disney's US mobile-phone division: that kids will let parents' calls go to voicemail, then text Mom or Dad about what's up, CNET reports. They prefer texting to talking with parents (and friends) "so that they can continue doing other things like play video games with friends." Check out the texting numbers CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports, citing C&R Research in Chicago: "The average teen generates between 50 and 70 text messages a day, or as many as 18,000 a year." Nearly 50% of US 10-to-13-year-olds and 83% of teens own cellphones.

New iPhone: A parent's view

The last time I checked, there were almost 2,000 articles worldwide in Google News about the very cool, $199 smart (3G) iPhone just unveiled by Apple's Steve Jobs. I'll bet not one of them offered a parent's-eye-view of this product. But the view is clear across these relatively uncharted waters: the pressure is on, parents; a whole lot of young cellphone users will want one. The reasons: it's cheaper, they'll argue (than the first iPhone at $399), and "you'll be able to find me anytime," a smart teen will tell you, "because it has GPS technology." What they probably won't tell you is that, with it, they - the ultimate multitaskers - can surf the Web and do mobile social networking twice as fast as on the old iPhone (the new one "runs on AT&T's high-speed network using 3G technology," the Washington Post reports), so they can watch video, get directions to parties, etc., "even when they're on a call," Apple marketing says. Also attractive to teens, who really like to download and mess around with software applications and games on phones, in social sites, and on the Web in general, my ConnectSafely co-director and CBS News tech analyst Larry Magid reminds me, will be the iPhone's App Store (some of the apps will be free, Apple says). Here's Larry's piece on the new iPhone at CBSNEWS.com. Avid music and video sharers may prefer the 16 gig $299 version, but they might keep that wish to themselves in case it lessens their chances of getting an iPhone at all, right?

Then there's the safety question: What parents also need to know, though, is that this and other 3G phones are basically mini Net-connected computers that go everywhere with their users. With one significant difference: this little mobile computer's movements can be tracked. With GPS technology, you can pinpoint your kids' locations, as they'll tell you, but so can their friends (with social-mapping services such as loopt) and - potentially - non-friends, if they're using a social-mapping service and aren't careful about giving their numbers out to and keeping friends lists restricted only to their real-life friends. We are clearly way beyond putting filtering and other parental controls on a single family computer plugged into a wall in a high-traffic area of the house.

The iPhone does come with parental controls, the Seattle Times reports, but I couldn't find any specifics on them yet at Apple.com. The phone has to be used with a two-year AT&T service contract, and AT&T and the other major US carriers also have parental controls, but parents will need to check with AT&T to see if its service's controls work with the iPhone's. To see what controls are available from the major cellphone companies, click to "What Mobile carriers need to do for kids" (see also our forum ConnectSafely's "Cell-Phone Safety Tips"). [See also the New York Times on how 3G or smartphones are taking off and how 71% of women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)]