We’ve given AdoptaTeens (14 yog & 15 yob) internet access in their rooms. We set down some safety rules which included no profiles on My Space, Face Book, Bebo, Tagged, etc.
I knew my son had been spending a lot of time chatting online with his friends, which he said were from school. Periodically I would go into his room, sit behind him and read over his shoulder what he was chatting about and who to … just as an effort to make sure he was chatting to kids from school and neighborhood friends. I never saw anything I was overly concerned about, but I wanted him to feel my presence and know that we were watching our for him. (Yahoo, AIM)
Tonight, our phone rang and it was someone he’d given our number to. It turns out this was a girl he met online, who lives out of state and he’s never met IRL, and I got upset because he was giving out personal information. A little later I discovered that he has profiles set up on all of the above mentioned websites - strictly against our online safety rules! I’ve spent the last couple of hours reviewing those profiles and frankly, other than a little flirting and a lot of exaggerating about himself, the profiles and the people who’ve responded to him are relatively clean.
I pulled his computer power cord and keyboard as punishment for breaking our rule, but honestly he’s been accessing these sites from school and responding to messages during class so I don’t know how much good that’s done. I also changed the passwords on all of his accounts.
So, give me the Straight Dope folks. While I’m angry that he’s disobeyed us, I don’t know if our rule is reasonable in light of how teenagers communicate now a days. Our rule was put in place for personal safety reasons, but am I out of date? Is he relatively safe in these online communities? Should we allow him to keep the spaces but monitor the exchanges? I’ve read horror stories of pedophiles posing as teenagers, arranging to meet them, and gruesome things happening to them, which is why we originally put the “no profiles” rule down.
I definitely think having these kinds of profiles is pretty common. You may want to consider letting him have them, but making sure he follows some basic safety rules - no full names, no addresses, no phone numbers, no information that could be used to locate him, etc.
Definitely do your best to get him to quit giving out personal info! Don’t let him say where he’s from specifically (state is enough), what school he goes to, phone number, address, anything! Tell him to do a voice chat over AIM if he wants to speak to someone from the net. MySpace and Facebook profiles can be set to private so only people they allow as their friends can see them. You can join Facebook from a regional network now and not put what school you go to. Make sure if he keeps the profiles, these security settings are in place.
When I was younger, mom and dad didn’t monitor my net too much except for looking at the history. But back then (7-8 years ago) I knew not to give out info like that. I talked to a lot of random people on chat, but only said I lived in Missouri or at the most St. Louis, which encompasses a LOT of people. Other than that it was just “what’s your favorite band?” and stuff. This was before chat rooms were nothing but spam.
My little cousins (junior high, high school) have MySpace and Facebook and all that, but their parents check their profiles regularly (and mine too, damnit!) and I try and keep tabs on them too.
IANAP(arent/sychologist/olice officer etc), but IMO this is a dodge. The issue is that being on the Internet, period, puts kids at increased risk of being stalked. Whether they’re on MySpace or not isn’t what will make the difference. What makes the difference is whether or not they understand how to keep themselves safe by withholding information. IMO the only thing your rules have given you so far is a false sense of security. Your kids are old enough to protect themselves if someone teaches them how. If you’re uncertain about your own knowledge of how to stay safe on the Internet, the computer teacher at their high school will probably be glad to help. In fact, you might even lobby the school to include a mandatory “Staying Safe on the Internet” class. The fact is that your kids are at or near the age where they’re going to do what they want regardless of your rules (what did you think about your parents’ rules when you were 15?), and what they need at this point is education, not structure. Again, JMHO.
I agree with the others. Private profiles are a must.
Also, If you don’t want your kids doing/seeing/reading AS MUCH bad stuff online, don’t let them have internet access in their rooms. I think the amount of questionable content I saw increased by about 200% after I got my own computer in my room.
I don’t think it’s right to snoop through emails, messages or blogs… but I do think it is wise for parents to browse the buddy list and review the info he has on his profile(s).
Somehow, they need a sense of paranoia. Nothing excessive, mind you, but their reaction to anyone asking for personal information should be “why do you need to know that?”. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having some sort of online profile, but there shouldn’t be any publicly available personal information. Even then, merely posting a phone number isn’t going to summon a swarm of pedophiles to your doorstep (though it still invites trouble).
Now, I don’t have a damn clue how you instill this caution into them at their age. They could very well be old and rebellious enough to ignore any warnings you give them as another Parental Scare Story That Could Never Happen To Me.
I agree that kids shouldn’t have Internet access in their rooms, but I am neither a kid nor a parent so I can’t say.
I do think private profiles for MySpace and other places are important. MySpace actually does not allow public profiles for kids under a certain age (I have no idea what that age is). I have no clue on the other ones.
If your kid’s got a private profile, though, you can’t view it unless you’re his friend. If it were me…I think I might make myself a profile (doesn’t have to be real) and tell my kid that he can have a MySpace account but it has to be private and he has to make me his friend (so I can view it).
You won’t be able to read his emails or anything with your account, but you can keep tabs on what he’s posting and what other people are posting to them.
It’ll also keep them from posting MySpace bulletins that are too weird - since everyone on your friends list gets a copy of said bulletin. I think my little cousin forgets that this is the case, because he constantly creeps me out by sending out bulletins with titles like “[school name sluts” and “s-e-x-y” (which actually just contain very silly and trite forwards).
But yeah…you need to get yourself accounts at all these places so you at least know what you are warning them against.
Oh and I forgot to mention safety…I don’t really think that online communities are any less safe than real communities. Really your kid can get stolen from any public place, or decide to run away without the urging of a stranger. I even think it’s safer now because EVERYONE is online, so the kid next door knows what your son is doing even if you don’t. Before all of this stuff was wildly popular, it was easier for kids in dark basements to do such things without ANYONE knowing because no one else they knew IRL was online.
Sounds like you talk with your kid, you both are open, and everyone is as honest as one can expect a teenager to be. And you keep a firm hand, which is huge. Taking away his computer is very huge and I know from experience that this keeps a kid in check.
I think it’s actually kind of decent that your kid’s little girl friend called him on his regular home phone at a time when Mom could pick up. When I was his age these sorts of things were going on COMPLETELY under cover with special tricks to keep Mom and Dad in the dark. I hooked up with and got dumped by a slew of “online boys” before I was 16, and before they even knew (this was when BBSing was the thing and everyone was local).
14 and 15 year old kids can do some stupid things. They can also isolate themselves. It’s this very reason I don’t give my 15 year old daughter a computer in her room hooked to the internet. She spends enough time locked away in there listening to music and talking on the phone.
Our “family” computer is located between the loving room and dining room - open for all to see what you’re doing. She has access to this computer when no one is around as well but she pretty much just emails and plays flash games (nothing can go in and out of the computer without me knowing about it ). I’m pretty lucky that she thinks myspace, and sites like it, are stupid.
I do trust my daughter not get into anything stupid on-line, but she’s also naive. Until I know she’s a bit more web-seasoned, I want her computer use in a public area.
I’m also the guy who has to clean up and repair computers. I don’t want her downloading a bunch of crap to a computer on my network.
Y’all have given me a lot to think about, especially having their computers in their rooms. I’ll discuss with AdoptaDad moving their computers into our sunroom, where mine is, so that we’ll have ample opportunity to see what’s going on.
I also like the idea of allowing him to keep the profiles, but insisting that I be on his friends list. I’ll add to that by keeping a list of his current passwords as well.
Thanks for bringing this cave woman mom out of the dark ages.
First of all, facebook is a lot more secure than myspace if you do it right. The profiles are locked as a default and you can’t unlock them to the general public. So there’s no way Joe Ephebopbhile can see your interests, pictures, page and a half of “i LuV mAh GiRLYeSS!!1 cAtIe UR LyK mAh SiStEr! StePh I lUv U 4EvEr PARTY LYK THE WORLS IS GNA END 2MOROOWW!!!11” or really anything but your name and school. So if you don’t give it out to online people and you don’t tell them your full name, they can’t find you.
The thing with facebook and myspace is that EVERYONE has one. And everyone uses it all the damn time. All the kids in school will be all, “we’ll start a club on myspace!” “did you see that facebook group I joined?” “he left a message on her facebook saying he likes her!” and people do stuff like send out invitations to parties via facebook. If you don’t have one? you’re SOL.
My parents don’t really keep tabs on my internet usage (that I know of) but if you want to, I’d recommend getting yourself a facebook and adding your kids. that way, you can see that their friend list has only friends they know in real life.
At some point, you just have to trust them not to be stupid. Or realize that if they want to be stupid badly enough, they’ll FIND A WAY.
Also, I’m not sure how much the problem is exaggerated. I suspect it’s a good amount. Like, when I was little, my mom grounded me once for telling someone online my first name (not even my first name. It’s Mary Isadora and I told them my name was Izzy.) And… well, if I were a pedophile, I’d go for a kid who would just agree to meet me. I wouldn’t jump through hoops to piece together all the information I possibly could based on “Izzy.” Giving out a home phone number is obviously a bad idea- perhaps you could show him a reverse lookup site so he knows just how easy it is to get all his info from that particular tidbit. You certainly have to watch your back online, but I think a lot of parents go a little overboard with the paranoia.
Demanding access to their MySpace (et al) pages may seem like a good idea, but in practice, not so much. Now, I know nothing about MySpace, but assuming that it’s possible to maintain multiple profiles, any half-bright, self-respecting teenager would just wind up having *two * pages, the “parent-friendly” one, and the one where he actually “socializes” with his “friends”. **All ** kids are Eddie Haskell, and at 14 and 15, the more you try to control them, the more you inspire them to find ways around you.
Get their computers out of their rooms, and reiterate the safety rules and the reasons for them. Tell them that if you discover any more violations of the safety rules, their internet access goes away entirely, and mean it.
That said, the internet is not a more inherently unsafe place than the world at large, and I don’t think that letting them have their online community thing is a big deal, or at least not worth the fight. Trying to monitor their every online activity is futile and, IMO, needlessly invasive. You don’t demand to go along every time they go out with their friends, right?
Lots of people of a certain generation don’t feel that way (ftr, I agree with you 100%). News shows about online predators feed hysteria, and the anonymity afforded by online interaction makes people nervous.
I think it’s just a generation gap. It’s hard to explain how, in most cases, you can tell if someone is lying to you online (we’ve even seen on this board how it’s harder to lie, because your posts leave a “paper trail” and everything you say can be compared to what you’ve said in the past). People have a hard time believing that you can accurately get a feel for someone you’ve never met face-to-face. IMHO, if you are a language-oriented person, you are less dependent on interacting with people’s bodies; their words tell you what you need to know. This isn’t to say that you should take stupid risks or put yourself in harm’s way out of a false sense of security; it means that you are capable of getting to know someone in a meaningful way through conversation alone.
When I was a tender young thing meeting people via ICQ, I kept myself safe through one rule: I never met anyone I met online privately, always in a restaurant or cafe, somewhere crowded and enclosed, with cameras. I don’t think that “stalking” is such a big problem that one should just assume that if they tell someone what city they live in, they’ll end up dragged from their bed in the middle of the night and kidnapped. That’s just paranoia.
Moving the kids’ computers to the sunroom sounds like a fine idea, Adoptamom_II. IMVHO, collecting all their passwords is an invasion of their privacy, and my mom would never have done that, BUT, you know them best. If they are unruly or otherwise deceitful, I might be driven to the same thing if I were in your shoes.
I have 2 kids as well (14 yog 7 yob) – they both have their own computers with internet access. The rules we set forth are very simple: never give out your personal information via the web (personal information includes address, telephone number and full name), and porn is not for you.
I don’t monitor their activities that much, because, well…I trust them. My daughter and I have a very close relationship, and since I also have a MySpace account, if she posts anything to hers, I know about it right away. She knows that at anytime, I can and may access her computer and read anything contained therein. Sometimes I do it just to remind her that I have that ability. She’s a good kid, and honest – it works for us. My son is younger, so far, he only likes to go to sites like cartoonnetwork.com, but he knows the rules and will be treated the same as his sister. I think the fact that they have both always had access to the computer and to the internet makes a difference in how they view the rules.
All that being said, my daughter has several friends who have very strict parents where it concerns the internet – and those are the kids who are surfing porn on other people’s computers and doing things they shouldn’t be doing online. I don’t know if it is cause and consequence or just coincidence, but those kids are the ones that scare me. (Of course, that is not to say that I want her hanging out with the kids who have no parental supervision, either – there can be a happy medium.)
Basically, as has been stated, you give them the rules, you punish them appropriately when they break the rules and you trust them. More than that, you trust yourself that you have taught them the right ways. And it never hurts to have your own accounts on those sites so you can subscribe to their blogs/bulletins and see what’s being said.
I’ve got 3 kids, currently the eldest is in college and the youngest 2 are HS Jr/So. We’ve had internet access for - I dunno, maybe 5 years. For some time, the only computer the kids used for internet was in a nook off our downstairs family room.
In one way we are sorta fortunate that none of our kids are super technogeeks, because I’m sure it wouldn’t take much for a kid to hide stuff from us if they wanted to. We also tend to “discourage” endless hours spent on-line. Our kids AIM, but we told/asked them to stay off of MySpace and Facebook. And set strict rules against disclosing any personal info. They were fine with it. And we told them that we retained the right to check their histories/favorites/etc at any time. Probably did it once or twice, but we trust them and our trust appears to have been borne out so far.
At least a couple of years ago with 3 kids at home, we saw a need for a 2d computer with internet access, and for various reasons the logical place was my youngest’s bedroom. We haven’t had any problems (that I know of) so far. I generally ask her to keep her door at least partially open most of the time whether or not she is on-line, just so she is not giving the appearance of shutting herself off from the rest of the family. I remember instances where she appeared to exit from something when I passed her doorway or came into her room - and I told her that whether she intended to or not, that gave the appearance of being guilty of something.
Like I said, tho - we have been fortunate that our kids have not wanted to push the technology envelope. I’m not sure what advice to offer for folks whose kids are very interested in and active on the net.
Please, let’s not forget the fight against ignorance here. *Adoptamom, your kids are at more risk from people they know than complete strangers. My advice is to quit watching Fox News.
I completely agree with you, e-bow. I’ve been online since I was in the 7th or 8th grade which was about 12 years ago. My full name and address have been available for people to find on the internet since that time. Anything you can put in your local phone book you can put on the internet. Instead of teaching them fear, teach them to be safe. Your regulation sounds overly harsh and draconian. As others have pointed out, the more you try to control, the more they will rebel against you. Forbid them from using myspace/facebook? They will just use it at school. Insist on being their friend and keeping their passwords? They will just make second accounts.
What I’d do in your situation is give them back the passwords. Let them have their accounts, but have them list you as their friend. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with giving out phone numbers, names, addresses on the internet. If you are still paranoid about that, you can tell him that if a girl wants to call him, she needs to post her phone number first or you have to check out her page to make sure she is who she says she is. The internet is a great way to meet people, make friends, and even date.
It’s very hard for predators to pass as anything other than predators on myspace and facebook because of the number of kids who can pick them out as fake. What normally happens in those situations is predators admit their age and kids still talk to them anyway. When the girl was killed after meeting a man on myspace it was found that she knew it was an older man she was meeting. The reason she was killed was not because she met someone from the internet but because she met him in his home instead of a public place. When I was your son’s age I was meeting people that I met online in person. I met about 3 or 4 people around that age and I’m still really good friends with 3 of them (one of them was my best friend throughout the rest of high school and beginning of college). I have since continued to meet people off the internet and I have never have problems with any of them. The ones I have had problems with were the ones I met from my waitressing job. I met so many creepy guys from that it wasn’t even funny. With the internet, you can control who you talk to unlike in real life. I can’t block a customer from coming to the restaurant or trying to talk to me in real life unless he does something other than give off a “creep” vibe. I can easily block a person who gives off creepy vibes online.
And, before you think I am out of touch, I have 7 younger siblings currently active online with the youngest being about 13. All of us except the youngest have facebook profiles and a few of us have myspace profiles. My parents don’t know their profile names and let my siblings use the internet unsupervised yet none of them have done anything dangerous or risky. My other siblings and I watch over our younger siblings to help out our parents and keeping track of their myspace/facebooks accounts are a great way to do it. You can know who their friends are and what their friends are like. Before facebook/myspace you only knew about the friends that they chose to talk about and their friend’s hobbies that they were willing to speak about. Now, you can go online and find their crowd and their interests. I know my brother Matt hangs out with fellow geeks and nerds. I know my sister Liz is sporty and enjoys talking to fellow female athletes. I also know my brother Joe has a lot of friends from his high school who enjoy underaged drinking which means it is very likely he drinks as well. (My older brother and I later confirmed this and gave him several talks on responsible drinking since we know if we just tell him to stop he won’t).
This is why I think letting teens have some freedom on the internet is important. Don’t read his email/friending page messages. Would you open and read his snail mail? If you continue to read his email he will just set up a special account. Don’t read his IMs. Would you pick up the phone and listen in on his communications? Teens have developed codes which they use to communicate things they don’t want their parents to know. If they are good enough, they can have cyber sex with you watching and you won’t even know.
Teach your kids responsibility and they will use it. The more you try to control them, the better they are at hiding. What’s more, use myspace/facebook as a way to connect to your teens. That’s how teens communicate with each other. Don’t embarass them but become a little active in their online lives. My brother has a variety of facebook groups including one devoted to Admiral Ackbar. I’ve posted fun photoshops I’ve found of Ackbar on his myspace wall. The more you respect them as a growing adult, the more they will show you about their private lives.
Well, the computers are all set up in the sun room and AdoptaTeens are happy campers with the compromises we’ve reached. AdoptaSon gets to keep his profiles and we have a reinforced understanding about giving personal information out on line.
To clarify things a bit - this was never about “control” as has been said by a few, it’s about my kids personal safety in uncharted territory for this mom. I came to the Straight Dope to be educated, which I have been, so my rules have been modified to satisfy their desires and my personal comfort zone.
Thanks for the helpful & (mostly) supportive input.
Cyber Angels is a great Internet safety resource for parents - I think it would be great if schools would incorporate this sort of information into their technology classes for middle school-aged kids, too. Lately we’ve had a rash of incidents in this area where predators have communicated with young teenagers, trying to recruit them for sex, and sometimes I think kids really don’t realize what kind of information isn’t a good idea to impart to strangers.
You explained to him why he shouldn’t give out personal information, right? He’ll probably be more willing to go along with it if he knows that it isn’t because you want to control him or that you don’t want him meeting girls.
). I’m pretty lucky that she thinks myspace, and sites like it, are stupid.