Monday, March 15, 2010

Friendship Misdefined

I LOVE the internet. I honestly can't imagine my life without it. I see keeping pace with my kids and technology as an enjoyable pastime, rather than yet another parenting task.  Honestly, my day would not be complete without a good cup of coffee, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Now that I have that established, here's an aside...

My five year old:  "Click on that one!! Click 'add me'!!"

His sister's seven year old friend: "No!!! He's already one of my friends!"

Really?


friend (frend) noun
  1. a person whom one knows well and is fond of; intimate associate; close acquaintance
Why do we call social media contacts (who we've never met in real life) "friends"? Why couldn't we call them "contacts"?  You can still have social on-line interactions with "contacts", and there would be no terminology confusion.

Friend = Janey, known since preschool, taken swimming lessons together, been to all of eachother's birthdays for the past four years, wrote eachother's names a thousand times on "BFF" lists, wore matching clothes to school, swapped hair ties (to name only a few things)

NOT

Friend = strangerwhoyouknownothingabout123


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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Friending Stranger Danger

Here's a link worth reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facebook-fears-after-sex-offender-logged-on-to-murder-1918330.html

To summarize, a 33 year old sex offender pretended to be 19 on Facebook, where he fooled and befriended a 17 year old girl, and eventually got her into his car and raped and murdered her.

Thank goodness this is a rare occurrence. For the most part, social media is harmless and fun ("most strangers are good people"), but every now and then there's a nasty person lurking. How do I explain rape and murder to my seven year old daughter? I walk around the issue carefully, sparing her most of the gruesome details, other than to say that some strangers are bad and can hurt you.

SO...

In this house, you are not allowed to have Moshi Monster friends unless they are people you know in person. I don't care what your seven year old friend's parents say she can do. There are different rules for different houses, and in this house we don't have on-line friends that we didn't already know before logging on.

It stuns and saddens me that someone who is nearly an adult (17) could be victimized this way, especially since she had a profile herself and knew how easy it is to upload a picture and insert any profile details at whim. My heart goes out to her family.

Yes we can maintain a system of monitoring the on-line activity of sex offenders, but what about the ones who haven't been convicted yet? There will always be new creeps out there.

Educating and setting limits for our kids has to be the first step. Being the "mean mom" and making the unpopular rules has to happen when they're young, and age appropriate explanations and education has to be forthcoming.  We can't just assume that the risk is low and they'll know better when they're older. The reason they'll know better is because they've been taught by us, and the sooner that starts, the better.

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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Moshi Monsters

As I write this post (March 2010), my kids are five and seven years old, and have Webkinz accounts.  Yesterday they were introduced, by a seven year old friend, to www.moshimonsters.com

It's free to sign up, and it seemed kid friendly enough, so I helped my kids each adopt a monster and create a profile. I also set up a profile for myself, and while I haven't had much of a chance to browse through the site, I thought I'd share the two internet lessons my kids have already encountered.

1) Personal information: Your new monster welcomes you, with a few questions.  I had no problem with the country and gender questions, but when the cute, endearing creature on the screen asked for a birthday, this prompted our first internet safety lesson. NEVER give out personal information. Even though the monster asks for month and day only, and not year, it's still unacceptable in my opinion. Unfortunately you can't continue unless you enter something, so we made up random dates.

2) Unscripted messaging and stranger friending:  My daughter's seven year old classmate, who showed us the site, turned to me at one point to ask for help spelling a word. I looked at her screen and saw that she was typing a message to someone on her friends list. When I asked her who her friends were, she said they were people she didn't know in person, and told me what countries they were from.

Really? You're SEVEN, typing freely, to people whose identities you know nothing about?

This prompted my immediate further involvement: I created my own account, adopted my own monster, and friend requested my two kids (in my opinion, the best way to learn and protect is to participate). As I am a silver-lining kind of person, I am going to use this as an opportunity to teach my kids more about internet safety. Also, in the defense of Moshi Monsters, (because I try and be fair) their forum is moderated.

Still, this is a site, in my opinion, that requires direct supervision.


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