how to restrict/protect teen dd on internet

[evaeoin]

my dd is 15 and ALOT more savvy than me when it comes to the internet.
she is on facebook, twitter, snapcatch(?) askfm and others im sure i know nothing about.
she has a smartphone so its not like i can check the history on the pc. she has refused to give me the password for her phone and facebook - and in way i dont blame her. But i am very unhappy about her complete freedom on this issue.
herself and her friends are always taking photos of themselves ususally just silly poses - pulling faces etc but last week i found one that was a bit more than that - nothing major but a bit suggestive.
also her friend had agreed to meet some lad she met on facebook at the cinema last week and my dd and another girl were going along for moral support. thankfully the girls aunt spotted this on fb and told the girls parents and the 'date' was called off but it freaked me out to think they could be so naieve to arrange to meet strangers without telling anyone.

please help and at a loss... my instinct was to ban her altogher from phone and pc if she wont give me passwords but am worreid that is a bit OTT and not sustainable

I don't think you need your DD's passwords, you just need to get your own accounts on the social networks she uses and then 'friend' or 'follow' her so you can see what her and her mates are up to.

I also think it's sensible to restrict usage of PC/online devices to communal living areas so you can always watch what she's doing. I assume you have allowed her to have a smart phone, so you knew she would be online away from the home and in places where you can't keep an eye on her.

tried making up a fake online profile but she would accept my friend request on fb. mights try again it would be invaluable if she would accept me
thing is there are more and more websites everyday and us parents arent even aware of its not all about facebook as alot of my friends seem to think.

You can't

I don't think it's unreasonable to insist she allows you to be her "friend" o. Social networking sites or you will take the phone away.

The problem, however, can be that you simply won't know all the sites she's on if she doesn't tell you.

she doesn't need mobile internet and I doubt she is paying for it. So take away the smartphone, give her a cheap PAYG job which does calls and texts, and make it clear that internet use is to be done in a room where you can see what is going on.

she's proved she is not competent or sensible enough for unsupervised use (fair enough, she's a kid) so withdraw the privilege.

Why don't you just talk to her? Make sure she knows the dangers and that she can always come to you if she needs help or advice and that you won't judge her or anything.

There's no point insisting on friending her on Facebook (or whatever other site she uses) because she'll either hide her updates from you or make a hidden account with a fake name that you can't access.

If my parents had asked for my passwords at 15 I'd have told them where to go. 15 year olds are entitled to privacy. I wouldn't want my kids going through my stuff so I give them the same level of respect in return.

is there another family member who can be her FB friend? An older cousin - someone who you trust? Don't make up a fake FB...she would never forgive you if she found out.... I think either enforce that you are a friend - if that is just not possible, then there needs to be someone else who you trust....

aren't there software programmes that take occasional screen shots of sites? I am sure that there are programmes which can show you which sites have been visited.....that would help on the sites side, but you still need a friend in FB....

Don't spy on her, it's deceitful and at 15 she should have some privacy.

Get savvy yourself, the genie is out of the bottle and its everywhere. Understand what she is doing you essentially try to read her diary.

I have a friend who spies on everything her daughter does and it's taking over her life, so I wouldn't recommend it! I am friends with my three on Facebook (DD16, DS15, DD12) although that doesn't mean I can see everything they do, as they can just choose not to share posts with me. Also the older two rarely go on FB apart from to use the 'chat' feature. They use Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram a lot though. Anyway friend says you can see everything they put on Twitter unless they have locked their account. Ask.fm you can also see everything, you don't even need an account for this one, just their user name and it takes you directly to their page eg ask.fm/joebloggs. Snapchat you can't see anything they send as it disappears after between 1 and 10 seconds, but I guess you can see who they've been sending stuff to.
But why would you want to see all this stuff? My friend says she finds it reassuring to know what her DD is up to but I just think she knows too much. She knows all the ins and outs of the girls petty arguments, everything her DD gets up to with boys! I think I would only spy as an absolute last resort if I thought there was a serious problem with something and they wouldn't talk to me about it.

i am new to this and am not a mum, or a parent for that matter, i am currently proposing an idea for my dissertation and would like some feedback if my idea has any merit...
i am designing a box that it user friendly which limits the amount of time that anyone in the household can be on the internet - this includes wireless, and am just running a figure count really as to anyone who would be interested, any feedback would be of great help - even as to where i could post this?!

zombie...

Wouldn't help OP whose DD's phone has 3G.

More obvious solutions for OP would have been to deny her DD access to a 3G phone & to limit the WiFi. Or to insist on friending on FB. etc.

I'd like a website with anecdotes of awful messy situations teens have got selves into online. Not the downright criminal the merely cruel & embarrassing. Sending topless photos to your boyfriend only for them to surface 15 yrs later on your Facebook wall. Speaking dirty on a skype call only for your girlfriend to video it & send to all her friends. etc.

I know lots of people will disagree with me but having just dealt with a issue in work, I'd say parents need to monitor their teens internet activity as much as they can. It is great to trust teens but you still need to monitor them.

If this girls parents, monitored her more closely then the following might not have happened;

The actions of one girl has put her 4 friends in danger resulting in a known paedophile arranging to meet her and when she didn't turn up because one of the friends confided in a teacher and we caught her before she bunked off school. We had to call parents in, all of whom were devastated as you can imagine. The following day, he then started to text her friends to see where she was and said that he was stood outside school and to come out to him. We couldn't get students into school quick enough on that day. All teachers on alert etc. They had also agreed to meet up on a school trip where she was going to slope off. Trip is now cancelled for all students. The girl's father is responsible for e-safety were he works so is not a stranger to this. The girl had recently started to detach from her parents by starting arguments etc, all which was encouraged by him. Her parents put this down to normal teenage behaviour.

Please monitor your DC's internet activity and use whatever programmes you have to use in order to do this. Sometimes parents need to be devious, for want of a better word, to keep your DC safe. Why take the chance?

Honestly you can't do anything except quietly and repeatedly remind them to be sensible and that anything they post both persists for ever and can be copied and passed about.

If they don't have their own smart phone, FB account, they'll go on someone else's.

You shouldn't spy, like you shouldn't read diaries. Imagine if your mum had heard every conversation in the girls loo at school or from the phone box at the bottom of the road.

As for my Dear tea total Dad being party to the conversations/goings on and amount of cider consumed at discos when I was younger than your DD, let's just say I'm jolly glad there wasn't face book.

As for pedophiles, they are nothing new.

I will never know if one of my teachers was grooming me, he was totally inappropriately happy to chat and share his coffee alone with me.

I didn't fancy him and I had a very stable happy home. I do wonder if I hadn't had. His second wife was only a few years older than me (he was way older, his DS was in my year).

Does she have a payg phone or contract? I would change the wifi password at home for a start and assign her phone a static IP address so you can put a restriction on it at certain times.
I would also cut off her access to the internet on her phone, if she's PAYG then it's easy but if she has a contract then you may find it more difficult..
Don't try to befriend her with a fake profile or trick her, just tell her that either you get full access or she gets no internet. She can go elsewhere to access it but it won't be easy.

agree with pnut. She seems to know more about the techy stuff. But the main thing is talk. I did the "talk" with my dd a bit ago. using the news story about photos being on the net. Her reaction was "well they are just idiots aren't they? " she did see how it could happen but said they must have low self esteem. (ok 15 going on 30). If you can't trust them do all the security stuff but don't forget to respect them and their privacy too.

I disagree with the comparison of monitoring your teens online activity to reading their diary/listening to private conversations. Anything online is open to the world.

Other parents will monitor their childrens Twitter feed/FB/Ask.fm to see what their children see.

Would you want to be the last to know?

What I mean above is that other parents etc will see your DD posts while monitoring their DS/DD.

things she can do online that the diaries we kept didn't do:

-share her address, expensive possessions, personal details and that you will be away on holiday

• rack up big bills
• send inappropriate photos of herself that WILL never be deleted from the internet

-and all the other things listed above.

she needs to show you her facebook etc profile
she doesn't need a smartphone.
she gets full privacy when she pays her own bills.

and if you take her internet access off her she is a 10 times more likely to send inappropriate photos of herself to her BF egged on by a mate and a couple of cans of cider at a sleep over.

The more you encourage teens to be devious, the worse messes they risk getting themselves in.

My DDS don't have FB, but I know their friends do and I know DD2 has been on it. If I blew my top ( I don't much like FB) she'd mess for longer and not say a word.

Also FB, Instergram, Utube etc, she can show you one profile, absolutely nothing to stop her having another. Just as we can have multiple personas on here

My DS 14 has FB , Twitter,two email accounts one for the aforementioned to deal with junk etc as do I.

From pre teen years when he asked to join Club Penguin we started to talk about online safety. PS keep an eye on those penguins some can spout some filth! Though there is a reporting button...

This subject is hot subject amongst my friends at the moment.

There are those who choose to not look as they believe it is an invasion of privacy but wouldn't know how to anyway as they do not use the different social media platforms.

Those who use various media are a bit more savvy, tend to have more open discussions of the usage of them and the kids tend to be more educated in what is appropriate and what is not.

In the past two weeks alone I have seen naked selfies (girls &boys), posts regarding self harming and huge amounts of horrific bullying (pics involved). This comes to my DS's Twitter feed as they are from his class mates/friends of whom he follows.

I don't "follow" DS as it is not cool to have your mum on your list but he knows that anyone can see his posts and see his followers etc and see what they post etc

In the past week other parents and myself have seen quite frankly shocking pics and posts circulated amongst our kids peer group by other kids who do treat social media as a private diary/blog.

Would you want others to inform you? As to be honest we don't have a choice now, as we have picked up on how bad the situation has got. Someone has to.

For those who say you can't protect your children, why is nobody using software like Net Nanny? I can - remotely from my own pc - see what search terms my son has been putting into search engines (cue chat with him following a very inappropriate search), restrict content for a vast range of categories I might think are unsuitable (eg violence, gambling, chat rooms, drugs, pornography, swearing), determine how long and what times my son can access the internet, and even block downloading and use of certain apps onto his phone. It's highly customisable and I would have thought pretty necessary protection for children. In fact I didn't even let him have a mobile phone until recently when I learned that Net Nanny works on Android. No way is it safe to give kids free rein to stumble upon most of what's on the internet. I've blocked use of Snapchat though another mum I know of makes sure her daughter is only friends with girls on that one. Either way I think kids need the assurance that you are keeping them safe. It's easy to think as parents that you have no rights but I've told my son upfront, don't text anything you would be ashamed of me reading, I may one day check your phone. Sure enough I've had to pull him up on it recently for sending ridiculous numbers of texts to a girl during school. Cue discovery of several other behaviors and incidents I'd not known about, and I'm in time to intervene. Anyway, OP, it can be done and I'd recommend it.

Pickle - can you please link to net nanny? - having just googled there seem to be a lot of different versions. thanks.

The CEOP site is good - there are some great films on there to show your teens and younger children. Some are quite hard hitting. www.thinkuknow.co.uk/Parentsold/

Because I have no wish to 'nanny' my DDs, I want them to learn to make sensible choices themselves!