• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Kids & teens not only ok, but smart!: Study

June 12, 2012 By Anne 2 Comments

Now for the good news in the youth part of a report from Ottawa-based MediaSmarts’s report “Talking to Youth and Parents about Life Online” (yesterday I highlighted the parents piece). Well, mostly good news. It sounds as if “Internet safety education” has made the youngest among the 11-to-17-year-olds MediaSmarts talked with pretty paranoid: “From [11- and 12-year-olds’] perspective, the Internet is a very dangerous place. They told us that sharing any information put them at risk of being kidnapped, assaulted by a stranger, and stalked.” [This misinformation is called education? See how inaccurate it is here.] And how sad, because – even though “they demonstrated strong resilience when it came to dealing with both offensive content and unwanted conversations with strangers … clicked out of offensive sites, [and] knew not to talk to strangers” – they had been taught all this was necessary because “people were not trustworthy,” they told MediaSmarts.

So here’s a mere sampler of the good news MediaSmarts turned up in a series of 12 in-depth conversations with 66 young people:

  • General state of their safety: They showed “strong resilience about dealing with ‘creeps'” and “almost universally limit online interactions” to people they know offline. “Chat rooms were universally seen as dangerous.”
  • Friendship expressed online (intelligently): Young people have “a clearly defined set of rules about what friends post – and do not post – about friends. Personal attacks were generally forbidden and a sign that a friendship was at an end…. Pictures were highly regulated by all of our participants…. An unrealistic number of online ‘friends’ was seen as inauthentic and a sign of desperation [NOTE that a protective social norm is developing, here!]…. ‘Spam statuses’ were an indicator that someone was seeking an inappropriate amount of attention and was therefore not a desirable friend” (see p. 8 of the study for more)
  • They see the need to disconnect too!: “Although a few of our participants told us that losing access to the online world, even for a week, would be catastrophic, many of them talked about the need to retreat in order to re‐establish a sense of privacy.” [So many adult “pundits” seem so proud of having thought of this – books have been written about it even.]
  • Cyberbullying, resilience & good strategies: Youth find online meanness easier to deal with than the offline kind, MediaSmarts found. That’s because the visibility of online interaction “leaves a digital trail … [and] lets them challenge bullies publicly and hold them to account.” They “demonstrated a strong resiliency when it came to cyberbullying” and “clear strategies: first, ignore it and de‐friend or block the person (typically a very successful strategy); if it continues, then confront the bully face‐to‐face because it is easier to call someone to account in person; and if that does not work or you are not comfortable talking to the person directly, call in your parents and they will help you resolve the conflict.”
  • Big caveat about school intervention, though: “Almost all … were disdainful of school anti‐bullying programs; they felt that, in general, teachers and principals did not understand the kinds of problems they might face and only made things worse when they intervened” (see also “Reasons why kids don’t tell their parents”).
  • Surveillance nation (more noteworthy than good news): Young people feel “the Internet is now a fully monitored space where parents, teachers and corporations keep them under constant surveillance,” so they see “parental monitoring” as “the price of admission” for being able to use connected devices. But, unsurprisingly, they’re forgiving too: “In spite of their frustration with parental monitoring, almost all our participants felt their parents were acting out of good intentions,” MediaSmarts found.
  • About parental monitoring: “The teenagers who did share the details of their lives with their parents were the ones who were not routinely monitored. Trust in this case was mutual,” indicating that “monitoring alone may work against open family dialogue.”

Practices by age levels

  • Tweens’ interest in exploration & pranks: “The Internet was particularly useful when [11- and 12-year-olds] wanted to learn more about things they would encounter in the future, like places they were going to visit on family vacations, high school and jobs. This kind of exploration provided them with a safe way to ‘rehearse’ things and become more comfortable with teenage and adult roles.” They’re also into “‘pranks and ‘trolls,’ where someone would fool you and misdirect you to the wrong site on purpose.” While this may be seen as a risk, it also teaches critical thinking: “Pranks helped them learn how not to be fooled.”
  • Early teens (13- and 14-year-olds): MediaSmarts noted how much this age group “enjoyed online humour and sites that allowed them to post anecdotes and read silly things that other people had done. They enjoyed laughing at and laughing with others who did things that were foolish or silly, and found comfort in the fact they were not the only ones who were likely to do something ‘stupid’.” Some engaged in social action, but “the main uses of networked technologies were for connecting with friends and self‐expression.” While 11- and 12-year-olds found social networking “boring,” 13- and 14-year-olds find social media use an “important way to communicate their feelings, so they could better understand themselves and their social interactions” – though feeling under constant surveillance by adults, as all the age levels did, “made it difficult for them to express themselves for fear of reprisal.”
  • Older teens use social media “to talk to friends, organize events and gatherings, follow celebrity gossip … access YouTube videos to learn how to do things like dance” … keep in touch with friends,” and access “the outside world.” Because they feel so closely monitored by the adults in their lives, “anonymous online self‐expression [such as blogging under a pseudonym] … played an important role in helping older teens make sense of the social world and their place in it.” It may also help explain why Twitter use by this age group is now growing fast)

So note the confidence in young people this conclusion from MediaSmarts shows: “In spite of widespread concerns on the part of adults, the young people we spoke with were aware of online risks, largely self‐regulated their own behaviours to avoid and manage those risks, and consistently demonstrated resiliency and competence in their responses to those risks.”

Based on this research and so many other inputs, isn’t it time to shift the focus of “Internet safety education” from avoidance to literacy – the digital, media, and social literacy that supports their current efforts to turn digital media into tools for effective work, play, communication, and activism in social digital-media environments (as well as offline ones, of course)? “Like” or comment below – or tweet! – to tell me yes or no.

Here’s yesterday’s post about how “effectively” parents have been educated.

Share Button

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: cyberbullying, digital literacy, Internet safety, media literacy, MediaSmarts, online safety, Parenting, Social Media, social media research, youth, youth risk research

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Facebook waning, social media may have plateaued among teens, Pew study … – Christian Science Monitor (blog)Sanok Silik | Sanok Silik says:
    September 23, 2013 at 8:20 am

    […] safety, privacy &#1072n&#1281 reputation management &#1072r&#1077 concerned, bearing out findings &#1110n Canada last fall. Here &#1072r&#1077 &#1109&#959m&#1077 key findings &#959f th&#1110&#1109 […]

    Reply
  2. Facebook waning, social media may have plateaued among teens, Pew study … « Tony Rocha Official Blog says:
    May 27, 2013 at 6:33 am

    […] on teens’ part, where safety, privacy and reputation management are concerned, bearing out findings in Canada last fall. Here are some key findings of this important research, Pew’s first in-depth look at […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Friend me on
Facebook
Follow me on
Twitter
See me on
YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Children’s own views on well-being: Global study
  • Most kids are fine online: New study
  • Datafied Childhoods the book
  • Powerful parenting for child safety online, offline
  • Media literacy and an invasion: The view from Estonia
  • Online safety for 2022: 8 things we need to see
  • ‘Playful by Design,’ a landmark report
  • 9 things that make viral hoaxes challenging

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2022 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.