After a UK report finding that a quarter of 8-to-12-year-old British Net users are on Facebook and a US principal calls for a Facebook ban for middle schoolers (see below), I thought you’d appreciate some perspective from some top US educators and risk-prevention specialists….
“1. What used to be activity generally done by older students is moving farther and farther down the age groups…
“2. In the meantime, ‘cyberbullying,’ as we are generally using the term, is moving up into the adult group, and…
“3. The teen/young adult groups are going deeper and deeper underground (Formspring-type sites) – e.g., ‘my Facebook is shiny and spotless; my nastiness is harder to find’).”
Donlin’s last point about using different sites for different purposes or behaviors is not particularly new but worth highlighting for parents, educators, and healthcare professionals inclined to focus heavily on a handful of sites as “the problem.” It’s also important to note, I feel, that Donlin is not suggesting that “nastiness” is in any way typical, just that youth are making it less public.
“Nowadays every school we visit has 4th or 5th graders with a Facebook account, and we have heard through the ‘kids grapevine’ that there are 3rd graders with accounts. Keep in mind that Facebook itself began as a site for people 18 and older. Two years later, they moved their minimum age requirement to 16, and then two years thereafter to 13.”
“I’m also a little cautious about making correlations between social networking and deviant behavior. I don’t believe there is any evidence to support that social networking = bad choices, bad behavior, etc. I do believe that mobile devices and media have created an opportunity for impulsive behavior to have greater consequences.
“I also hear about behavior from 7th and 8th graders that, when I was a kid (forgive me for that), did not really start happening until 11th, 12th, and beyond.
“I like to encourage adults (myself included) to really think about how the paradigm of social interaction has changed with new mobile devices and online tools (such as Facebook, etc). My experience with kids has led me to believe that these forms of communication are every bit as valid as the old way of doings things (face-to-face, phone calls…).
“Rather than more restrictions, I encourage moving in the direction of increasing the ability/accessibility for adults in education to guide students in the use of these new tools” (I wholeheartedly agree – see “School & social media”).
Readers, your views would be most welcome too! Please comment, if you’d like – via anne[at]netfamilynews.org or in our forum at ConnectSafely.
Related links
- “Technology & the Adolescent: Paring Modern Media and Technology with Mental Health Practice,” by Donnel Nunes (quoted above), Brian Raley (Temple U.), Kavita Rao (U. of Hawaii), Cameo Borntrager (Temple U.), Kandis Rohner (HI Dept. of Education), and Sujan Shrestha (Towson U.)
- “Lots of underage social networkers” linking to a recent study in the UK on the subject
- “Parenting & the digital drama overload”
I believe that kids need to have permission from their parents before they create an account in the social media. I am in the IT business. My children 12 and 10 both have a google accounts. I created one for the oldest and their mom created one for the youngest. We told them that these are our accounts. They are to use them appropriately. I went through the details of letting them know about how great it is to be able to communicate. I went through the details to let them know that they need to let us know as soon as the see a strange email or something that is uncomfortable be it from a friend, family or a pure stranger. I was disturbed to just fiend out that my oldest has had a facebook account for a year. I asked him to log into my machine to answer an email that came from our pastor to both of us. As he logs in, there was a facebook email right on top. He came up with all kind of lies to try and make it less hurtful to me. Unfortunately for him, I have an investigator in my blood. He had to admit it all at the end. The lie is not acceptable to me. I went on and changed both accounts passwords and he will get them back after we process all this matter. I feel cheated. I do not agree with younger kids having their facebook at a younger age. More things for parents to deal with. When things get out of hands, then the public blames the parents. That is wrong.
Thanks for your comment, Moose. It is so troubling for most parents, I think, when we find out we’ve been lied to, and social network sites’ minimum age based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in the US has led to a lot of lying, I think (though I’m aware of no research on this yet). But try not to feel cheated; kids feel so left out when “all their friends” are in a certain site that it’s pretty normal to want to join them. And, anyway, how would they learn if not by making mistakes that lead to solid family discussion about what’s right and wrong, based on each family’s values? If useful, I really like author Rosalind Wiseman’s own family tech policy, shared in podcast with educator Annie Fox earlier this year (I posted about it here), and it links to another post about some research about parenting in the digital age.