Find out what your teen is doing online

Parenting in the 21st century presents a new set of challenges that require new solutions. Like their parents before them, today's parents have to help their kids navigate school, friends, crushes, extracurricular activities and sexuality. But they also face a bewildering new world, driven by technology and media. In this excerpt from “What Every 21st-Century Parent Needs to Know,” Debra W. Haffner addresses what parents can do to help their kids navigate the Internet.

Teens and the Internet: Navigating the new electronic world
Perhaps more than any other area, Internet access has changed our children’s lives (and our lives as well) and challenged us as parents in different ways than other generations of parents. Access to the Internet in our homes has exploded; today almost three-quarters of homes in the United States have a computer with Internet access, compared with fewer than half just seven years ago.

Sexual solicitation
Parents’ biggest concerns about the Internet seem to be about online sexual solicitations. The good news is that only 1 in 7 young people has been solicited online (including other teens), and that is actually fewer than five years ago. Only 11 percent of young people report that they have formed a relationship with someone they met online, and that is down as well. And rather than the image most of us have of the middle-aged predator, reinforced by Dateline specials, most solicitations come from other teenagers or from adults under the age of twenty-five. In fact, when teenagers say they met someone offline, it is often a same-age friend of a friend.

Cyberbullying
The other concern the media tells us to worry about is online bullying. In 2005, according to the Second Youth Internet Safety Survey, 1 in 11 youth said they had been harassed on the Internet; if we switch that statistic around, 10 in 11 young people have not been. Despite media headlines about Internet bullying, 85 percent of young people have not been harassed. In almost all cases of online harassment, it simply ended on its own or when the person logged off, left the site, or blocked future messages. Most harassment by online acquaintances involves a single interaction, not exactly the image of Internet bullying that the media covers.

Internet harassment, though new to us and thus perhaps more frightening, is far less frequent than harassment of other kinds. Fully 80 percent of high school students say they’ve been subjected to verbal harassment in the preceding year: this includes teasing and rumors and lies being spread about them. Forty percent say that they’ve been pushed, shoved, or tripped in the past year. For teenagers, it‘s probably safer to be online than in school.

Social networking sites
Lately parents’ fears about social networking sites have been garnering a lot of media attention. You have heard of MySpace and Facebook, but there are other, smaller sites such as tribe.net, xanga.com, sconex, bebo, tagged, and livejournal. And by the time you read this, I’m sure there will be other sites as well. People (not just teenagers and college students) use these sites to create their own Web pages, where they post photos, music, blogs, and other personal information.

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These social networking sites actually have benefits, despite our concerns about them. They teach young people the art of networking and some pretty sophisticated computer skills. (Do you know how to add videos to your Web site?) They can be godsends to shy teens and to those, including gay or bisexual teens, who do not fit in at school. These accounts (which cost nothing) allow young people to share pictures, send mail and instant messages, and write blogs and comments.

The intimacy that can build up on the Internet sites can literally take minutes, not months or years. It can be quite eye-opening to go on MySpace. Anyone can browse — try it. You can ask to see profiles of anyone in a certain age range (but not younger than eighteen) and a certain number of miles from a specific zip code. For example, within 5 miles of my zip code, there were 802 teen women between the ages of eighteen and twenty and 1,031 men. Although many of the pages were innocent enough, some of them were pretty sexually suggestive.

Some teenagers are clearly misusing these sites. Almost 4 in 10 say that they have given out personal information on these sites, such as their last name or information about their parents or their schools. One-third of teens in one study said they’d pretended to be older than they actually are to get into a Web site. A recent New York Times article talked about how some teens are now trying to become famous (or is that infamous?) by posting videos of themselves engaging in outrageous behavior, such as fighting and “fence bashing.” YouTube has opened up new possibilities for attention — and for getting into serious trouble. Teenagers have always pulled stupid pranks; but now, they may receive police attention because their deeds are posted online for the entire world to see.

But are these sites dangerous for your child? The answer for the vast majority of users is probably not.

What affirming parents can do

1. Put the computer in a public place.

This is Rule Number One. The most important way we can supervise our children’s and teens’ Internet use is to put the computer they use in a space where we can see it. Although three-quarters of teens say that the computer with Internet access is in a family area, more than one-quarter say that they have Internet access in their bedroom. In general, this is not a good idea. If you want to be able to monitor your child’s use of the Internet, have the computer in the family room, den, living room, or kitchen.

I highly recommend setting your e-mail account to include a spam filter, but even so, I probably receive several e-mails a day for sexual medications and dating services even at my church e-mail account. Your children and teens are receiving these, too, and they need to know that they should always delete any messages from someone they do not know without opening them.

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