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Readers' comments on any of these resources are alsways welcome! Do email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.A dad on kids' blogs: How father & daughter worked through the issues
Dan in southern California emailed me recently about his 12-year-old's blogging. "I was shocked to see a picture of her, a profile, a Yahoo email address I did not know about, and profiles of all her friends that are hooked up on this site," Dan wrote. "A simple click on their pictures and you have public email correspondence for all to read." He and his wife weren't sure yet what to do about this - they didn't want to overreact - so for starters he wanted to learn a little about these sites (MySpace, LiveJournal, DeadJournal, Xanga, Blurty, etc.).
I told him he'd stumbled on a pretty big phenomenon of teen life these days....
- 52% of the blogs out there are being developed and maintained by teens 13-19, reports a just-released study of "Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs" at Georgetown University.
- The Pew Internet & American Life Project puts the overall number of US-based blogs at about 8 million late last year.
- A new blog is created somewhere in the world about every 5.8 seconds, The Register reported last summer.
- Sixteen-year-old Rachel recently told the Detroit News that she figured 60% of the students at her high school have blogs.
Dan said there were a lot of pieces to this that concerned him: "the amount of info my daughter and her friends are putting on their blogs - pictures, school names, soccer teams, etc.... The whole secrecy thing is big." Dan and his wife had talked with their children about online issues and expected them to be up front. To create her blog their daughter had to have her own email account, "which she figured out how to get on Yahoo" without their knowing, he wrote.
Justifiable concerns: The Georgetown University study points out that "because teenage bloggers are revealing a considerable amount of personal information, as well as multiple ways to contact them online, the danger of cyberstalking and communicating with strangers online is a serious issue. An awareness of the dangers of revealing personal information online should be cultivated in young bloggers."
Dan added, "We have our work cut out. She is a good kid so we want to handle it right," he wrote.
A few weeks later he kindly told me how he and his daughter (we'll call her Jamie) worked through the issues together. First he and his wife waited to see if Jamie would bring it up with them. When she didn't, Dan put some extra Parental Controls on Jamie's AOL account, including blocking MySpace.com, the site where she was blogging. "I waited to see if she'd come and tell us there was something wrong with the computer," he told me in a phone interview. "It took about three days, and then she went to my wife and told her she needed a new password. My wife told her, 'Dad's concerned about that Web site,' and she didn't say anything.
"The next day," he continued, "when I came home from work, I told her, 'We need to talk about some of these sites.' Her response was, 'Well, you know [Jamie's friend] Cindy [not her real name] set it all up.' I just asked her if she thought other people could get to her personal information and picture, and she said, 'Oh no, you have to have a password.' So we went to the computer. I said, 'Let's pretend I'm Joe Perverted Dirty Old Man and I want to find a 12-year-old girl who I can stalk. Let me go to MySpace.com.' It says, "Do you want to create an account?" 'Wow, I only have to put my email address in and create a password. How 'bout that?' So I created an account, to remind her how easy it was. 'Now I have seven or eight choices. Hmmm. One is "search members." Oh, this is interesting. I love girls named Jamie. I'll type in "Jamie" and see what happens. Oh, look at all these Jamies! I can go take a look and see how old they are [in their profiles]. Hmm, I live in southern California. Let's see if one lives in southern California. Oh, here's one!'" Dan told me they could see together that "every profile in there" had the town where the young person lived.
As so it went, as Dan and Jamie clicked around in MySpace the way a pedophile might. They found pictures of Jamie and her friends, their school name, the name of Jamie's soccer team, the grade she was in. Then they went to Google and easily got the school's address.
"Her mouth was wide open when we did this," Dan told me. "I said, now I'm going to be Jamie's dad" to show her that this could even get embarrassing. "I'm going to find out what I can about Jamie. Oh, there are all her friends. Let's find out what's going on with Cindy, what Cindy says about the boys Jamie likes. 'I can find out anything I want'."
Then he told Jamie, "Here's what my problems are: You did all this without talking to me. There shouldn't be any site you go to that you wouldn't be comfortable taking me to. The rule is: Don't go anywhere you wouldn't be comfortable showing me. 'But Chelsea's mom knows about it,' she told me. 'If you'd like, I can call Chelsea's mom,' I said. 'No, that's ok' was her response."
Wrapping it up, Dan told Jamie, "I don't care if you blog - it's kind of cool you can talk to your friends this way, but all kids need to be aware that people can read anything they post. She asked me, 'How do I get the information off?' So we did it together. We took her picture off the site. I showed her some of her friends' profiles - Susan, we found, had probably talked to her parents because there was a flag in the image spot instead of a picture of Susan. One girl had a picture of Paris Hilton on her blog. Anyway, we just deleted all identifiable information together ... kind of scrubbed down her profile."
You could call this online parenting at its best....
- Not overreacting but establishing clear rules and sticking with them
- Keeping communication lines open and supportive
- Setting Internet policy and configuring profiles, software, and Web site preferences together
- Staying engaged, fully aware that the Internet is a public space, and parents should know what strangers can easily find out.
Links to the latest
- Blog hacks. Hackers are using blogs to infect computers with spyware, ZDNET reports. They use security flaws in the self-publishing tools that allow teenagers and other non-technical Web developers to publish their blogs. Hackers exploit the flaws to cause the sites to deliver spyware automatically to the computers of people who visit the sites. So some bloggers are now spyware distributors! More at Internet News.
- Blogging getting even easier. A new crop of blogging tools and services is turning up, the Associated Press reports. Examples at Jotspot.com and Five Across.
- Teen blog research. "Spinning Yarns Around the Digital Fire: Storytelling and dialogue among youth on the Internet," by David Huffaker, PhD student at Georgetown University, and the study mentioned above: "Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs," by Prof. Sandra Calvert and David Huffaker at Georgetown University's Children's Digital Media Center.
- For online parenting, another important piece of research in "'Don't talk to strangers' doesn't work." The study was by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center and published by the American Psychological Association.
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