Take Advantage of Social Networking to Keep Kids Safe Online

A common complaint among parents today is that they are out of touch with their teenagers and just can’t speak their language anymore. No surprise there, because today’s teens live in a world of cell phones, texting, instant messaging, and social networking. Parents also worry because they don’t know who their kids’ friends are. They don’t bring their friends over for dinner and they don’t meet them at the library to study. But they do meet them online.

Because of the growing prevalence of social networking sites online, teenagers often have groups of friends and acquaintances that their parents know nothing about, yet those people know more about the teens than their parents do. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook give teens the chance to create profiles and display any information about themselves for anyone in the world to access. There are countless stories of online predators seeking out and honing in on unsuspecting teenagers through social networking sites, and parents don’t know anything about their kids communicating with those people until it’s too late.

Dr. Megan Moreno, an adolescent medicine specialist, says that instead of parents being wary of social networking sites, they should instead take advantage of them to learn more about who their kids are talking to-and also use them to learn more about their kids. Moreno advocates that parents shouldn’t feel any hesitation at all about going to MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites to see if they can find their child’s profile posted online. Because teenagers post their interests, hobbies, and personal thoughts in their profiles, parents can use the information they read as an icebreaker to learn more about how to communicate with their kids. After all, the information is posted for all the world to see, so it’s not an invasion of their privacy.

Moreno and other researchers conducted a study of lower-income teenagers to show that adult supervision of social networking sites can help to raise awareness about how accessible those sites are, in order to let teens know to be more cautious in posting personal information online. Researchers identified 190 public profiles on MySpace that were located in the same urban zip code. The location was randomly selected from areas with low incomes, so that researchers could target teens who might not have easy access to physicians or treatment centers. All of the profiles used in the study identified the profile owners as being 18 to 20 years old, and the pages all had three or more comments about drinking, sex, drugs, or smoking. Moreno sent an e-mail to half of the subjects cautioning them about how public their public profiles really were. "You seemed to be quite open about sexual issues or other behaviors such as drinking or smoking, "Moreno’s e-mail said, with the signature "Dr. Meg." "Are you sure that’s a good idea? You might consider revising your page to better protect your privacy." The other half of the people in the group did not receive an e-mail from "Dr. Meg."

A few of the people who received the e-mails replied to Moreno, telling her that they didn’t know that just anyone could view their page. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do have privacy settings, but many users either don’t use those settings or don’t know how to use them. As a result, people post very private information that they want to share with their personal network of friends, never realizing that anyone with an Internet connection can find out intimate details about their thoughts, interests, and daily lives.

Three months after sending the e-mails, researchers visited the sites again and found that 42% of the people who had received an e-mail from "Dr. Meg" had either cleaned up their profiles to remove the references Moreno had pointed out, or they had set their profiles to be viewed only by people they had chosen as "friends" on MySpace, thereby making the profile private. As for the group that had not received an e-mail, only 29% of them made similar changes during those three months, and some of them could have done so merely because they heard about the "Dr. Meg" e-mail from their friends.

Moreno says the study’s results show that parents and other adults can access social networking sites to have a positive impact on teens who may not be reachable in other ways, to intervene before their activities get them into trouble.