NetSmartz
I was looking at the MySpace profile of a friend’s teenage daughter and I found myself outraged at the pictures some of her friends used. These are 14-16 year old girls posting photos of themselves wearing bikinis and posing like Victoria Secret models. It was more than a little disconcerting. How do these kids’ parents sleep at night? I have trouble sleeping at night worrying about these kids.
My children don’t know much more on the computer than how to decorate the Gingerbread Man on Starfall and help Dora save the mermaids, but the time will come when they will have their own blogs and social network profiles and probably something I haven’t even heard about yet. I guess I better start teaching them now how to exercise caution on the personal details they share, unlike our trips to the grocery store where my daughter introduces us to everyone we encounter (this is my mommy, this is my kitty, this is our shopping cart…).
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children offers a website, NetSmartz.org, to teach children how to be careful on the internet, and recently rolled out NSTeens. NSTeens incorporates graphic art to emphasize the importance of not giving out too much personal info online, and for anyone out there with teen and pre-teen kids, you might check out ths NSTeens website, and maybe, just maybe, get a couple extra worry-free hours of sleep at night (yeah, right).
Websites:
NSTeens
NetSmartz.org
NetSmartz Kids
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
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This has become an issue as some of my daughter’s fellow 5th grade friends are already on MySpace and there have been some problems with inappropriate language in their messages to each other. My daughter isn’t allowed on that but she does have her own e-mail and we gave her some rules. She has to write in grammatically correct French, no slang and none of that abbreviated cell-phone language…
Absolutely an essential issue to broach with the kids! Even when children display what seems to be a bit of common sense, when they get on the computer that illusion flies out the window. We found that my stepson had posted our home phone number on his MySpace page. That came down in a hurry. I also had to talk to him about his language on-line. He was cussing a blue streak (and his blog had his real name on it). I had to remind him that it would all come back to bite him when he applied for a college or later for a job.