Tag Archives: kids

Snapchat, sexting and common sense: What parents need to know

Posted on January 14, 2013 by | Comments Off on Snapchat, sexting and common sense: What parents need to know

www.snapchat.comA big challenge of parenting in a digital age is keeping up to date with the technologies our kids are using. Truth is, it’s time-consuming and constantly changing. Hard to fit that extra learning and guidance into schedules already crammed with carpools, swimming lessons, last-minute dinners and never-ending piles of laundry. And the reality for plenty of moms and dads is that they need their eight-year-old to figure out why the printer isn’t working or set up the PVR, never mind helping them wade through a gazillion levels of Facebook privacy controls.

In many families, kids way outmatch their parents when it comes to technology.

So when the New York Times or your local paper runs an article about teens getting into trouble with some new app or social media tool, parents tend to have one of four reactions:

  1. Denial. Oh god. My kid would NEVER get involved in anything like that. S/he’s way too smart.
  2. Panic. Oh god. My kid is going to get into SO much trouble with that. I have no idea how to even begin making sure s/he is safe. I feel totally overwhelmed by how dangerous our world is. 
  3. Procrastination. Oh god. One more thing to worry about. I should talk to him/ her and see if they know about this. But I’m so busy and they will just roll their eyes and groan, and I haven’t heard anyone I know mention it. I’ll do it soon and hope for the best in the meantime. 
  4. Cursory check-in. Oh god. I better ask them if they know anything about this. No? Really? Great. Nice talking to you. 

None of these are particularly helpful. Even worse, numbers one through three will actually interfere with your relationship with your teen. Number four makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something, but you are setting yourself up to be shut down. Few teens appreciate the lines of direct questioning that will inevitably lead to lectures or more rules. Totally ineffective, but lets you mentally check it off your List of Things to Talk About.

So what does work? Two things: education and communication.

Take Snapchat, for example. This picture-sharing app allows users to send images and control how long the viewer can see it, up to 10 seconds. After that, the picture supposedly disappears and can’t be seen again.

It’s possible to imagine a million fun, silly and totally benign uses of such an app. But it’s also possible to see how the temporary nature of the image would appeal to those who want to share sexually suggestive images (often called sexting). It gives the appearance of being a totally safe way to do it. After all, after a few seconds, there’s no trace of your wild side left to haunt you.

Right?

Maybe not. While the site is set up to notify you if a user tries to screen grab the image, it’s not clear if they can actually prevent someone from trying to do so. And even if they have put in that kind of control, I can practically guarantee there are computer whiz kids out there trying to hack their way through those controls as I type. Furthermore, as the New York Times blogger Nick Bilton notes, there is nothing to prevent a user from snapping a picture of the photo on the screen using a different camera.

How big a problem is sexting for our kids anyway? Hard to tell. Lots of anecdotal evidence but very little good quality research out there. Bilton cites a yet-to-be released  Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project that shows 6% of adult Americans admitting to having sent a sexually suggestive or nude picture of themselves, but only 3% of American teens. Another 15% of adults admitted they had been on the receiving end of that kind of image.

This seems to suggest sexting is not nearly as big a problem as the media make it out to be. However, I do a lot of work with high school principals and teachers who would swear that figure is vastly underreported. Some of them say they deal with sexting in their schools (and the related bullying and behavioural issue) on a regular basis.

I’m not going to wade into this one. It’s not my intention to fan any kind of moral panic or hysteria concerning the hypersexuality of teens. What I am interested in is helping parents keep kids safe and using technology in productive, creative and respectful ways. The guidelines I advise in this case are the same ones I’ve always proposed:

  • Talk to your kids. Often. About everything. In the car on the way to hockey practice. In the kitchen after dinner. Late at night when they are going to bed.
  • Listen when they talk to you. Don’t cut in. Don’t have an answer for everything. Don’t offer unsolicited opinions. 
  • Know all accounts and passwords for your pre-teens and young teens.
  • Make sure they understand that their freedom online (and with cellphones) is a privilege to be earned through consistent, responsible behaviour.
  • With pre-teens and young teens, periodically review their accounts and cellphone materials with them (not behind their backs).
  • Talk about things like sexting, even if it’s embarrassing and they’d rather die. They often don’t understand the many, many ways these images can be humiliating, hurtful and destructive.
  • Tell them never to write or post anything they don’t want their parents to see. 
  • Tell them they must always be respectful to others.
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The friends you’ll never meet: What parents need to know about kids and online communities

Posted on November 7, 2012 by | Comments Off on The friends you’ll never meet: What parents need to know about kids and online communities

drawingA 12-year-old girl befriends a group of people in an online community dedicated to nurturing teen artists. Although she will never meet them face-to-face, speak to them on the telephone or engage with them in any other way, she quickly forms what she feels are meaningful friendships.

When she is away on a school trip, her mom picks up her daughter’s iPad, notices the site is open and begins reading through the messages. In between the many messages about various art projects, experiments with watercolours and collage and mostly constructive feedback on each other’s artistic creations, she sees messages with words that alarm her: cutting, drinking, fighting, drugs, suicide attempts. One of the boys claims he is 18 and is virtually “dating” a 14-year-old girl (who told him she was 16).

When her daughter comes home, mom brings it up. Her daughter blows off her concerns, saying it’s all just posing online. These are not her REAL friends, the ones she sees every day. They are just teen artists using funky avatars (images chosen to represent their persona) playing around online.

Mom is mollified but concerned. They talk about the references to drinking, drugs, mentions of suicide attempts. Cutting. She has her daughter’s password to this site and they agree to keep talking.

A week later, daughter comes to her mom in tears. Someone on this young person’s art network just posted a notice saying one of their online friends has died. She is distraught. Mom is freaked out. She doesn’t know what to do – does she ban her daughter from this social network and risk her defiance? How can she intervene in something that seems to be completely out of her control?

So she emails me for advice.

The Internet, for all its wonders of information, access, creativity and connection, also exposes our kids to communities of influence they might not otherwise know. We can move to a good neighbourhood, put them in good schools, get to know the parents of their friends and their soccer coaches. We can try to stack the deck in their favour with good influences and positive role models.

And while the Internet can offer many wonderful things, it is also an open door to stuff that kids will find difficult to handle. Hard core pornography. Violence. Information about sniffing, huffing, car surfing or the “monkey game.” But aside from all of these things, it also offers connections to new people whose real identities can be easily disguised. Most of them really are 14-year old girls interested in art or 16-year old boys with a genuine interest in online role-playing games, as they claim to be. But some of them are pretending to be what they are not, whether for kicks (just because they can) or for more insidious reasons.

When I speak about the deceptive ease with which someone can “pass” as someone else, most people laugh it off. Everyone seems to think they would somehow know if someone is lying. Others may be taken in, but they are too smart. Too savvy.

And you know what? They aren’t. Adults as well as kids tend to take what people say about themselves at face value. It’s super easy to be fooled, especially when our friends believe it too.

What does this have to do with my story? When I spoke with the concerned mom about the details of this supposed online death, a lot of inconsistencies and strange facts threw up red flags. The dead boy had claimed to be working with the federal Drug Enforcement Agency on a drug bust (yeah, right). He had proposed marriage to another 16-year-old girl on this network even though they had never met. The stories of fights and wild parties all had an unreal edge. He regularly let others post notices from his account. He had been banned by the site administrators before, and had registered for a new account.

So while the circle of teen artists invested in this community posted their grief in dark charcoal drawings and angst-ridden poetry, we discussed the very likely possibility that this was all a sham. She was relieved, and her daughter — though she didn’t want to believe it at first — gradually (and grudgingly) admitted the stories may have been exaggerated or made up.

Upset about the whole ordeal, Mom said she wanted to ban her daughter from this site. And although my first instinct as a parent would be to do the exact same thing, I urged her to reconsider.

Here’s why: A 12-year-old banned from a website she finds extremely compelling will be very tempted to sneak on when her mom isn’t watching. On a friend’s computer. At school. It’s extremely difficult to enforce that kind of ban, and extremely tempting to a kid to defy it. If they do, then a parent has to react decisively. You are setting yourself up for a battle that will be hard — or even impossible — to win.

But in this case, the daughter hadn’t done anything wrong. She didn’t need punishing — she needed guidance. The biggest takeaway from this episode is that fact that she came to talk to her mother when she saw something upsetting. Isn’t that ultimately what we all want with our kids? If mom banned the website, her daughter would no longer be able to discuss it with her.

So mom allowed her daughter to keep her account, but with some new conditions: that they go on together to review her messages and postings. She praised her daughter for keeping a cool head and coming to talk to her. She told her that she was giving her the freedom to stay on this site (with guidance) precisely because she showed good judgment in speaking to her mother.

So far, it seems this very upsetting situation evolved into an opportunity to learn some more about managing relationships – both online and off. Some important guidelines about kids and online communities:

  • Parents of kids and young teens need to give their usernames and passwords to parents
  • Kids and young teens have no right to privacy from their parents when online. These accounts are not the same as private diaries.  There is too much need for guidance around potential pitfalls. They can earn this privacy over time by showing consistent good judgment.
  • Kids and young teens don’t think they can be fooled by people pretending to someone else. This needs to be discussed regularly. Point out examples whenever possible.
  • Look into the online communities your kids want to join. Are there moderators? A contact for support if someone acts inappropriately. A way to flag inappropriate posts?
  • Go online with your kids every once in a while to see what kinds of things are being posted. Discuss what you see.
  • Steer kids to some of the excellent online communities for their age and interests. Spend a bit of time on Google checking them out – there are many wonderful, creative and reasonably safe online spaces for kids to interact.
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30 years later: The consequences of NOT eating a marshmallow

Posted on August 16, 2012 by | 2 comments

marshmallowsA little while back, I blogged about the famous Stanford Marshmallow experiment and the astonishing things it has taught us about the value of self-control. A quick description: preschoolers were placed alone in a room with a plate of marshmallows and told they could eat one now, or wait 15 minutes and have two.  (For a more detailed description of the experiment and it’s impact on the participants as they grew up, click here). 

The 30% kids who were able to delay gratification showed higher SAT scores and social competence as high schooler, and handled stress and self-organization better as adults. As a result, the study is frequently cited as an important demonstration of the value of self-control and willpower. This is important, because other studies have shown that self-control is something that can (and clearly should) be taught to young children.

An exciting new wrinkle in this study is additional research published by Tanya Schlam  at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who followed up with the former preschoolers, (now in their 30s). As reported by Slate, Schlam and her colleagues discovered that each minute the subjects had been able to wait before devouring the marshmallow accurately predicted a “0.2 point percent decrease in their current body mass index. Schlam told Slate, “Although the effect was not particularly large, the presence of any effect three decades later is noteworthy,” she argues.

“It involves being more strategic,” Schlam wrote to me. “So a child can use will power to delay gratification, but they have a lot of other techniques at their disposal that they can combine with using will power. For example, from studies with this sample, we know that when the marshmallows are hidden by a tray or when the experimenter tells the kids to think about the marshmallows as ‘fluffy white clouds,’ the kids are able to delay much longer.” Kids who picked up the marshmallow and smelled it, on the other hand, soon gobbled it up. Delayed gratification, then, is about “knowing intuitively or being taught techniques that enable your cool system to kick in (which is reflective and rational) rather than the hot system (which is reflexive and impulsive).”

Schlam points out that the best route to self-control is to avoid having to exercise it: to stay away from trays of marshmallows and cookies. But since we live in a world of too much food, it’s a comfort to know that we can teach kids to hold back on their own. Even kids whose reason for delaying gratification is that they want a second marshmallow.

Self-control is about more than weight loss, of course. And weight loss for many is about more than self-control. But nevertheless, this new finding is exciting for the way it connects childhood behaviors with adult traits, and for the emphasis it places on teaching kids self-control.

So how can we teach our kids that kind of willpower? Some suggestions (feel free to add others):

  • Encouraging them to save up for toys or products they want. Or wait until their birthday/ holiday time to get them.
  • Letting even very young children make challenging choices between desired items on their own. (You can have a snack now, but then there is no dessert after dinner. OR You can buy that t-shirt now but then you won’t have enough money for the dress you’ve been saving for. )
  • Letting them experience the real consequences for their behavior: if you don’t do your homework now, you will have to do it after dinner when everyone else is watching TV/ playing outside/ going to bed.
  • Modelling self-control yourself.

 

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