A parent’s guide to social networking sites
The explosion of new technologies this past decade is placing people of all ages, both individually and in groups of all sizes, into novel situations for which there are no social conventions established, few rules and fewer safety mechanisms in place. As a result they are being lured into a variety of temptations that are proving dangerous to marriages, family life, physical wellbeing and mental stability.
Children are particularly vulnerable. The lack of adult supervision of children in groups is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last generation or so. In earlier times, and in every culture, it was a given that children needed an obvious adult presence if they were to behave properly. Whether it was the parents, aunts and uncles, teachers at dances, or other approved adults from the community, the presence of adults was unquestioned as a necessity that provided social safety for children in groups.
I don’t know when society forgot this basic truth, but it has slowly led to many situations being completely out of control. The parties that have hundreds of brawling people forcing their way into homes uninvited, the reports of bullying and harassing over the mobile phones and laptops that almost all children carry now, the suicides blamed on ridicule from other children via the internet. These technologies and social networking sites have created the settings that have allowed people to ridicule and gang up on others en masse without any negative consequences for the perpetrators.
Setting up social networking sites for children without any adult supervision, monitoring, or presence is asking for the worst behaviour imaginable. Children are not capable of comporting themselves responsibly: they will bully, tease, torment, experiment; they will gang up on the weaker and younger, and the more vulnerable, such as someone with a disability, or with any perceived difference.
Does nobody remember the lessons learned from reading Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where unsupervised English schoolboys who were shipwrecked on a deserted island create a living hell for themselves? Left to themselves they regress to savagery, as do all unsupervised children.
Children should come together into supervised groups to learn from adults who are modelling the expected behaviour: to learn how to socialise, to learn the rules of discourse, to learn the courtesies, to learn how to speak properly, to take turns, to be considerate, to be civilised. Or is expecting our young people to be civilised hopelessly old-fashioned? The alternative is to watch while our children become more and more savage, like stray dogs that will follow the meanest and strongest amongst them; with packs of girls meeting in nearby parks after school to attack some hapless schoolmate they have selected (with the film of the attack posted on YouTube), with riots planned ahead and announced over mobiles, with threatening and ugly messages posted for all to see guaranteeing public humiliation of the victims. This is what happens when responsible adults do not supervise children’s activities.
Facebook and MySpace both have a minimum age requirement of 13 for those who sign up, but there is no way for them to verify the ages claimed. It is very easy for younger children to say they are 13 and proceed to set up accounts. Recent research has shown that most teenagers do have a presence in the social networking sites, and are active on them everyday sending messages to their friends. In general, the people they interact with most online are the very same people they are socialising with in person, so it seems misleadingly benign.
Some scientists are reporting that use of social networking sites by the pre-adolescent brain can lead to internet addiction, damage to cognitive function, and weakened family relationships. There is evidence that many children are spending a great deal of time on these sites, which leads to less time for physical activity, study, and in-person socialising, which is the kind of socialising that teaches mature social and conversational skills.
One Oxford University neuroscientist recently said to the press, “My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment. I often wonder whether ‘real’ conversation in ‘real’ time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier online screen dialogues? ”
If your children have accounts makes sure they are set to provide as little personal information as possible, and that they allow their activity to be seen only by confirmed friends. You should monitor the pages to make sure you know the friends that their children have added.
Parents worry that users of social sites could be targets for online paedophiles because kids are often not mature enough to make good decisions. Make sure your kids are smart enough by their early teens to know who might be interested in them and why, and what type of overtures to recognise and avoid. These are the new survival skills that every child who uses a computer needs to know.
The younger children need more direct parental supervision while on the computer. You can place time limits on use, also, such as 5 minutes for younger ones and 20 minutes for the older ones. Banning it completely will probably not work, as this technology is now ubiquitous.
There are a growing number of social networking sites that are designed especially for younger users, such as WebKinz, and Whyville. Children as young as age 2 can have accounts at KidSwirl, a social-networking site patterned on Facebook and designed to be used by parents, grandparents as well as children under 13. Each of these child-oriented sites has restricted and supervised networking and is a safe place to learn about social networking. http://www.kidswirl.com/