Kids Online: Where Are The Parents?
The resounding message I kept hearing is that we parents are,
by and large, abdicating our duty to our kids. If parents took a more proactive
role, many of the problems kids are running into would be mitigated or stopped
before they even began.
Unfortunately,
too many parents have no real idea what their kids are doing online. Many adults
are afraid of or freaked out by the technology and stay removed from the entire
subject. On the other side of the coin are those of us who spend our lives with
or around computers and just assume our kids are savvy because they've grown up
around the technology. We make our living off, or with, computers—what could be
bad?
Both
scenarios can do a grave disservice to the children involved.
The experts I talked to, including psychiatrists,
psychologists, and educators, understand that parents can't be looking over
their kids' shoulders around-the-clock. But often we leave too much to chance or
force the kids to figure out too much on their own. Sometimes it's difficult for
parents to remember that, as sophisticated as today's generation is with and
around anything electronic, they're still children. They don't have the maturity
or the skills to know everything they need to in order to keep themselves safe.
They need adult help and guidance even when they don't want to hear it. But too
often we don't talk to them until after they've run into problems.
Ideally, we would talk to our kids before they become victims
of cyberbullying, or post an inappropriate page on MySpace (one with personally
identifying information or explicit photos, that is), or spend five hours each
day online to the exclusion of any other activity.
You may think, as many adults do, that children are just
fundamentally "wired" to push the limits. That pushing is, in fact, their job,
and they're quite good at it—and it has ever been so. Some kids will just always
find a way to get into trouble, as did generations before them and, hey, (insert
good-humored chuckle here) we all lived to tell the tale. It's just part of
growing up, right?
That may be true. But the big difference nowadays is that
unlike sneaking off to smoke a filched cigarette or look through an "adult"
magazine with the guys, kids online can get into very deep trouble, and they can
do so very quickly. It can then escalate to the point of having "real-world"
ramifications—kids who are threatened by schoolmates online may not want to go
to school. Or they may become depressed, school grades start to suffer, and so
on. Self-cutting, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, attempting suicide—all have
been "side effects" of problems that started online.
Just as we wouldn't allow our kids to go into a physical
situation where we don't know the players, or what we do know isn't good, we
need to follow that same advice and exercise a wallop of good old-fashioned
common sense when it comes to online matters, too.
What do you think? Have you dealt with these issues in your
life, and how have they worked out? To read more, or to comment, please see my
blog post.
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Johanna
Ambrosio
