Month: November 2011

While Facebook and Twitter are popular sites for making friends, teens have also seen social media’s unfriendly side — 88 percent of them report having witnessed mean or cruel behavior, according to a new study.

About 12 percent of the teenagers said they saw this type of behavior online “frequently,” while 29 percent said they observed it “sometimes,” said the report by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 799 teens between the ages of 12 and 17.

At the same time, 69 percent of the teens said their peers are mostly kind on social-networking sites, the research said. About 95 percent of all American teens between the ages of 12 and 17 use the Internet, with 80 percent of them using social- media sites, the report said.

via www.businessweek.com

This is an amazing study by Pew. 9 in 10 kids have witnessed bullying occur on the major social networks.

Mom and Dads need to get engaged… NOW!

My recommendation is that if you are a parent, you should immediately go to uKnowKids.com and take advantage of their free parental intelligence tools.

If you are a grandparent, aunt, uncle, etc…, share uKnowKids.com with those you love. Again, they have free tools you can start using today!

"At what age should I let my child join Facebook?" This is a question that countless parents have asked my collaborators and me. Often, it's followed by the following: "I know that 13 is the minimum age to join Facebook, but is it really so bad that my 12-year-old is on the site?"

While parents are struggling to determine what social media sites are appropriate for their children, government tries to help parents by regulating what data internet companies can collect about children without parental permission. Yet, as has been the case for the last decade, this often backfires. Many general-purpose communication platforms and social media sites restrict access to only those 13+ in response to a law meant to empower parents: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This forces parents to make a difficult choice: help uphold the minimum age requirements and limit their children's access to services that let kids connect with family and friends OR help their children lie about their age to circumvent the age-based restrictions and eschew the protections that COPPA is meant to provide.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

This is a very interesting article about parents' attitudes towards the federal government's age restrictions on the Web. As we all know, the restrictions turn out to be meaningless, and of little value. We are better off giving parents the tools they need to parent verus somehow convincing ourselves that an unenforceable age restriction is going to be of any assistance to the challenges of keeping kids safe online.