With the new technology evolving daily, it is becoming harder and harder as a parent to constantly monitor our kids digital activity. There’s a fine line between what the parents consider as monitoring and what the teen thinks as “NONE of our business”, it’s a delicate conversation in most households.
Let’s face it, teenagers lives are built around what’s going on with their friends and enemies on Facebook, Twitter and all other social outlets. Unfortunately, this is where predators look to infiltrate our kids. In some instances, it’s not just strangers we need to be worried about, it could be a classmate or neighborhood friend that threatens your teen. As we all know, there are entities out there in the world which would love to earn the trust of your teen to bring harm to them. But, there’s also some serious teen on teen attacks going on which are just as dangerous.
With all of the safeguards in place for the internet there is still some pretty scary activity that goes on in the cyber world with our teenagers. You may read about it in the paper or hear about it in the news but, WE DEAL WITH IT EVERYDAY. Parents and their teens have NO idea how pictures got posted all over the internet or how their address, age and information were posted or by whom. “Creepin” on your teen is NOT exactly the worst thing that could happen to them.
Although there are laws in place and procedures that we can use as parents to better protect our kids, it takes a community, as the article below addresses, to monitor our teens and their cyber space.
The more parents know about their teens internet activity the more they can speak to their teens about what to look out for. Same goes for the schools and communities in which our teens are a part of. All in all, the effort to monitor our kids social internet life for their own protection will be a worthwhile plan in the end, even though they won’t understand it until they have kids of their own.
