Internet Safety and Your Child
When you were a kid, you might have spent time on the family telephone talking to your friends. Otherwise you mostly just saw them at school. Teenagers today have lots more social opportunities in gaming sites and Internet chat rooms where they can chat and joke around and share music and images. It must be fun to post images from your phone on the Internet for your friends to see.
Teens aren’t going to share much of this with their parents. Teenagers don’t want adults to pry into their social world. They would be just as disturbed as their parents to know that at any one time there are 50,000 adults trawling their sites, posing as other kids, downloading their pictures, maybe trying to lure them into a trap.
NetAlert is the Australian Government’s internet safety program. I didn’t expect much when I went to their site at www.netalert.net.au/ but I was pleased with the quality of their programs for kids, like www.nettysworld.com.au
Many teens will be confronted with disturbing adult chat or images but are not likely to tell their parents because they fear that they will over-react and shut down their access to the internet, their social world. The Internet is their social world and more. It is good for research. It gives kids an advantage for homework. The Internet is a fantastic educational and social tool but it has some risks.
When girls post flirty photos and using flirty chat they risk being stalked by unsavoury adults posing as teenagers in their quest to entrap them. Boys using gaming sites rooms have been trapped by an adult posing as a friendly teenager.
Fifteen and sixteen year olds may be well aware of what to do when they get an unsolicited image or message that makes them feel uncomfortable. They click the x in the right hand corner of the message box and get rid of it. They don’t open it. They don’t respond to requests from strangers for private chat. They know to delete that sender from their ‘friends’ list. The problem is more for younger teens who don’t know things like how to make their personal information private so that only their known friends can access it.
Parents are best to build trust by inviting kids to tell them what they know and help them find out more ways to keep themselves safe online. Today’s teenagers are really good with technology and sharing information. That includes information to protect themselves from exploitation by unscrupulous adults.
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