Social Networking for Kids and Teens

[theone2]

What a world we are living in? I can't understand the fact that these days the kids and teens wants to twetter away all they can think of, but they want privacy from parents? Is it really privacy they are after or simply to shield what they really after?

Recent comments from Google boss (similar from face book owners) stating that "privacy is dead, unless you want to hide something". But parents can't have any degree of control over what their kids are upto, the law makers are coming along with a big stick. and the money makers (like mobile phone operators and so called social media web sites) are spinning the wheel.

What can a parent do, to prevent their children exposing to harmful and toxic new age media? It is been so exploited even Disney is marketing their social media for 5-9 year olds with 'Club penguin'.

Not sure Club Penguin is harmful & toxic. Parents can have a degree of control. We agreed to our dd joining Facebook on condition that she only allowed in actual friends & absolutely no strangers & that her Dad is one of her friends so he has access to her page.

We've explained the dangers of the internet to her, which I think are actually no different to the dangers of the real world. We now live in the media age & can only ask our children to be sensible. If you shield them from it too much, there's a risk they will be so naive as to actually be more vulnerable IYSWIM.

Other sensible precautions we use are to limit dd's use of the computer & ours is in the "dining room" downstairs so we can keep an eye on what she's doing. How do you know what your kids are doing when they go out? You can't control who they communicate with then. And if you ask, how do you know they aren't just telling you what you want to hear?

When I was young, kids spent hours every day roaming around town, parents had no other source of information as to who we might be meeting or what we were talking about than what we chose to tell them. The reason we survived, of course, was that gradually most of us developed some sense of self-preservation. And I know what kind of a world it was, out there in the sixties and seventies. It was a world in which people took drugs, it was a world in which people got raped, it was a world in which people got mugged. The same old world, in fact, that it's always been. But most of us survived and learned to live in it.