NETIQUETTE

As if television wasn’t difficult enough to monitor, parents now have video games, texting, instant messaging, cyberbullying, online gambling, as well as exploitive advertising to worry about! A child’s interest in exploring cyberspace depends in a large part on their age group; eight year-olds are going to be content with fun kid’s sites, while a twelve


year-old will be pushing the cyber limits just as they do in the “real” world.

The good news is that kids respond to positive modeling. In the news recently,

Dr. Meg Moreno, a pediatrian and lead researcher, emailed teen MySpace users and suggested they reconsider posting and boasting about their negative and destructive social habits like drinking and doing drugs. Forty-two percent of those contacted edited their pages to reflect a more healthful lifestyle. Reconsidering how they portray themselves online will lead them to reconsider the behavior itself and cease those habits. Fingers crossed.

But let’s not leave it to luck. These strategies will support your child’s developing capacity to assess the online world.

First of all, use filters to complement, not take the place of, your supervision and guidelines for internet use. And speaking of supervision, allowing computer access only in the family room will further solidify the healthy idea that the internet should be viewed as a tool and a resource.

Get input from the kids to come up with a list of online rules that you can both agree upon. Most schools have internet contracts that parents and students have to sign off on at the beginning of each school year. On our blog, you can find links to some helpful websites, including one that has a simple family internet contract you can download. In addition, learning a few common text message abbreviations like: POS (parent over shoulder), MOS (mother over shoulder), and TOS (teacher over shoulder) will help bring you up to speed. And we have a link to a text message translator for those gossipy phone and instant messages you’re dying to decode!

Get your own TikTok, Snapchat, and Instant Messenger accounts and put your kid’s name on your “buddy list”---you can then read their profiles. And when asking your son about the neighborhood boys he hangs out with, be sure to ask him about his “online friends.” Being watched doesn’t feel good and we walk a fine line between encouraging kids to be independent by trusting them and leaving them vulnerable to influences that undermine the values we are trying to teach.

Lastly, and most importantly, the best remedy is to keep an open line of communication. Talk to your child about being civil, about being a friend, about privacy issues, about ethics and morality, and about sexuality (because if you don’t the internet will). No matter how tech savvy a parent becomes, he or she will never match the intuitive abilities of a generation that grew up in cyberspace. The responsibility lies with us all to give our impressionable youth a firm foundation upon which to make wise and healthy choices and the gift of trust to strengthen their ability to do so.